The Border Lords (32 page)

Hood hit the lights and gunned the Interceptor up tight onto the SUV ahead of him, whose driver quickly signaled and pulled over to let him pass.

In the paltry light
of an underground security entrance usually reserved for shackled prisoners, five specially trained orderlies in bulky protective suits and visored helmets extracted Seliah from the slickback with long-handled nooses and a large padded blanket. Another stood by with a stun gun. A small gathering of curious doctors and nurses watched. Seliah thrashed and growled, saliva swinging from her chin as she bit at the noose and cursed Hood and her circle of trained tormentors.

It took them almost ten minutes to get her strapped onto a gurney. Not much of her was visible outside the blanket, only one pale arm, the red canvas sneakers at one end, and a flowing platinum cascade of hair at the other. She continued to struggle and spit out muffled curses from inside. A nurse stepped forward with a syringe and two of the orderlies pinned down Seliah’s arm. Into the crook of her elbow drove the needle.

Hood watched in shame. A clean-shaven young man in a white coat and athletic shoes hurried over and offered his hand. “I’m Dr. Witt. Did she bite or scratch or injure you in any way?”

Hood identified himself and said no.

“Any transference of body fluids from her to you? Blood, saliva . . .”

“None.”

“Make sure to clean out your car with a strong bleach and water solution. I’ll have the custodial staff make up a bucket for you. If you have any wounds or open sores, I can get them to clean the car for you.”

“I’ll do that.”

“We’ll do everything in our power to save her life. We’re ready.”

 

 

Hood sat in the waiting area
of the security floor for half an hour. He checked messages and e-mail but couldn’t concentrate. Half an hour after that, Dr. Witt came out and told him they’d stabilized Seliah and were prepping her for the first stage of the protocol, the inducement of therapeutic coma.

“Can I see her?”

The room was spacious and had a freeway view through Plexiglas windows. Three doctors talked quietly in one corner as a nurse injected something into the drip system. Seliah was elaborately strapped to the bed frame but Hood saw that she was sedated and her fight was gone. Her knuckles were bandaged. He stood by the bed and touched the fingers of the hand without the IV needle taped into it. “Hey.”

She smiled slightly. “Hey, Charlie.”

“Quite the tantrum.”

“I was always an extrovert.”

“I’ll bet you were. You’ve got even more to show them, Seliah. Go blow their minds.”

“You bet I will.”

“I hope we can bring Sean in, set him up right here beside you.”

“You know he won’t let you.”

“I know he loves you more than anything in the world.”

She looked at him and sighed softly. “Yes. That’s a splendid notion. You are such a good man.”

“Thank you.”

Dr. Wong, the anesthesiologist, was short and pleasant-faced. He came to the other side of the bed and said he was going to administer the first dose of ketamine. Later would come infusions of ketamine, midazolam and “propofol
not
titrated to burst-suppression pattern on the electroencephalogram.” Ribavirin, a rabies antiviral drug, would not be administered, because of delayed and depressed immunological responses noted in previous protocol patients. Dr. Willoughby himself had strongly advised against the ribavirin. Seliah would be intubated for metabolic supplementation as well. She would go into a deep sleep almost immediately. It would be a peaceful sleep. She would not dream and she would not worry. While she slept her immune system would fight the virus with all its strength. The doctor squeezed the powerful drug into the IV feed.

“Mrs. Ozburn,” he said. “Can you count backward for me, from one hundred? Start at a hundred, Mrs. Ozburn.”

“Later, Charlie.”

“We’ll all be here waiting for you.”

Seliah tapped Hood’s hand with a finger and started counting at one hundred. She stopped at eighty-one and Hood watched her eyelids close.

Dr. Wong glanced at his watch, then at the vitals monitor. “No one makes it past ninety-two. Not three-hundred-pound men or professional athletes.”

“She’s an amazing woman.”

He looked at Hood askance. “There’s nothing more you can do now, Mr. Ozburn. Go home. Try to rest. She’ll be here a long time.”

Hood stopped at the nurses’ station and introduced himself to the three on-duty nurses. He told them that Seliah’s husband, Sean Ozburn, might surprise them with a visit. He described him. Hood told them he could be intimidating but not to be afraid of him. Do as he asked. Hood told them to call nine-one-one immediately if he showed up here, and to call him as soon as they reasonably could. He gave each one a card with his cell number on it, and left two more to be taped up on the station message board.

Nurse Marliss Sharer took the card and looked through the glass at Seliah, then back to Hood. She was young and pretty and Hood wondered how Marliss would stack up against the mad power replicating in Seliah’s body.

“We’ll take good care of her, Mr. Hood. We’re the best around when it comes to therapeutic comas.”

 

 

Hood drove the Interceptor up
the ramp from the half-light of the underground entrance into the bright October afternoon. He took the freeway south for Buenavista. He thought about Seliah and how advanced the virus in her was, and he figured if Sean had given it to her, then he must be worse off. Would Sean be more resistant because he outweighed her by more than a hundred pounds? He couldn’t get the image of noosed and thrashing Seliah out of his mind. What could possibly lead someone to give one of humankind’s most horrific diseases to another human, knowing that he would in turn give it to his wife? Who was the real target? What black motive could underwrite such an act?

The traffic was light and he was through El Centro by early evening. It was cool and clear and the barley and milo and cotton rolled out for miles around him. Then he climbed a few feet in elevation, all it took to bring him into the unforgiving and beautiful desert that would lead him to Buenavista.

A call came through on his cell and he touched the earpiece control.

“Marshal Hood, this is Don August. I’m one of the Desert Flyers. We talked a few days back.”

“You’ve got the strip outside Yuma.” Hood’s heart jumped. If this went where he thought it might go, then his luck was changing.

“Good memory. Out in Ogilby, right next door to Yuma. Look, I won’t take up much of your time but you asked about Ozburn and he, well, he called about a minute ago and asked if he could use the landing strip. I said okay. He said he’d be coming in soon. I said what’s soon and he said he wasn’t sure. I don’t know if there’s any problem, but I know you work with him.”

Hood wondered if Ozburn was headed to the Yuma ATF safe house to complete a hat trick. With two of three houses already hit, Hood thought the chances were good. But the North Baja Cartel had moved its young stars out of the Yuma safe house shortly after Ozburn had hit San Ysidro. Hood had watched them pack up and leave on a live feed to the Buenavista field station. Ozburn couldn’t know this for certain, but he’d certainly suspect it. And he’d certainly suspect a Blowdown trap.

“Tell me exactly where the strip is.”

“Before I do, I want you to know that the Ozburn I know is a good man.”

“You’re right about that, Don. Now, tell me where the airstrip is.”

Hood scribbled notes on one of Seliah’s canvas book bags. He checked his watch—forty minutes from Ogilby if he drove fast. He voice-dialed Janet Bly. She was in the Buenavista field office, half an hour from the Yuma safe house, on her way, over and out. Now feeling solidly in luck, Hood caught Dyman Morris and Robert Velasquez en route to a Quartz gun store, which meant they were about twenty minutes from the Ogilby landing strip. Morris said they’d be there in more like fifteen minutes; then Hood heard the whine of their engine and Velasquez calling
Who let the dogs out.
Frank Soriana in the San Diego field office ordered Hood to join Bly at the Yuma safe house
as fast as humanly possible
. If Ozburn was there, detain him. If he wasn’t, park their cars at Smucker Park, two blocks south, then walk back, let themselves into the house, and wait for him. Janet had a key.

Hood figured he was thirty-five minutes from the safe house if he drove hard. He hit his lights and brights and launched the Interceptor south.

Velasquez called him twenty minutes later: no aircraft on or around the Ogilby landing strip. He and Morris had their vehicle tucked out of sight under a stand of greasewood and would hold tight.

Janet called as soon as Hood rang off: She’d cruised the safe house once and it looked unoccupied. She was parked across the street and three houses down, with a good view of it. “There are cars parked all up and down the street,” she said. “Any one of them could be Sean’s. But I’ve been here two minutes and he hasn’t come out. How long would it take him to see that no one’s home—half of that?”

Eleven minutes later Hood exited the interstate, turned off his lights and headed for the Magnolia Street safe house. He drove slowly, irrationally looking into the western sky across which Ozburn would come from Ogilby, as if Ozburn might descend and land
Betty
right on the street.

Hood passed the safe house and saw nothing unusual and no signs of life inside. He remembered the last time he had been there. He was with Sean, helping Velasquez and Bly wire in the surveillence system—three long, hot days of running cable, placing relays, arguing over the best places to hide the cameras and the mikes, building a fake circuit breaker panel to house the controls. Soriana had directed mainly by loitering. Mars had brooded and never lifted a tool.
The good old days
, thought Hood.

Bly stepped from her Jeep as Hood pulled up beside her. She shrugged, shook her head, threw out her hands in frustration before he could even get out of the car. When she stepped back he swung open the door.

“Seliah okay?” she asked.

“She’s in a world of hurt, Janet.”

“But is she in the coma?”

“She’s in the coma.”

“What do the doctors say?”

“They’re not saying much.”

Hood checked the caller and hit the “receive” button.

“Charlie, Dyman here. Sean just buzzed the strip. Yellow Piper Cub, writing under the fuselage, no doubt it’s him. He’s not in our sight now.”

“Ozburn,” Hood said to Bly, pushing the speaker icon so she could hear. “How good is your cover?” he asked Morris.

“It’s good. We got the black Ford tucked up behind the trees on the east side of the strip. But I don’t know what he sees from up there. I can’t know that.”

“If he’s not back in five minutes, he’s seen you,” said Hood.

“Then he must not have seen us.”

“Dyman?”

“Coming back the other way now! There he is, Charlie, yellow as a school bus.”

“From the east?”

“Yeah. East. East this time. And what do I got? I got the ass end of the Ford shining in the sun. Here he comes, Charlie, right at us. Man, he’s low. Wings are steady. I can hear him now. Coming at us. Coming right directly at us. Sonofa
bitch
ass Ford hanging out of the trees. Oh, man, he’s barely a hundred feet up now. Less! Here he comes. He’s tilting his wings, Charlie. He’s tilting his wings at
us
! Can you hear him? Can you hear that?”

Hood listened to the wail of the Piper as it shot over Morris and Velasquez and roared west.

Hood stared out at the western sky. He opened the door of the Interceptor and let Janet in, then got behind the wheel and shut the door. They sat for a few minutes, eyes up like stargazers.

Hood saw a small aircraft coming in from the west. It was a speck at first, a bird or a child’s glider. He tapped the window with his finger and Bly nodded. The speck grew into a plane. It was still too far out for Hood to register color but the flat, one-story city around them gave him all the distance his eyes could handle. He had twenty-ten uncorrected vision as a twelve-year-old and still had it. Then the plane was yellow and it was coming on a line for the safe house, and for Hood and Bly.

“It’s him,” said Bly. “Is he going to strafe it or something?”

Betty
came in at a steady clip and Hood thought of the World War Two movies his father loved. Ozburn buzzed across the sky not much higher than the power poles. Hood pushed his head back against the rest and looked up through the windshield as
Betty
zoomed over them in one roaring pass. The noise of her engine halved when she went over Hood’s car, and he heard it diminishing as he looked through his window and saw
Betty
growing smaller in the blue Arizona sky.

“Think he saw us?” asked Bly.

“No. Plenty of other cars in this lot. But he saw Dyman—that was enough.”

Betty
shrunk, then vanished. Hood swung open his door and stood looking into the sky. Bly talked with Velasquez on her cell. A few minutes later Morris guided the Explorer into the parking lot.

“The guy who called in this tip wanted me to know that Ozburn is a good man,” Hood said softly.

“He was, Charlie; then he cracked.”

“I feel like we should have seen it coming. Should have done something. We just let him wander off.”

“Hey, we didn’t put him up to killing five men in six days. Or make him sick. Or make him do crazy stuff.”

“But we built the stage and put him on it. We thought we could write the story our way.”

“That’s too philosophical. You overcomplicate. We’re just law enforcers. It’s all we are.”

Hood had figured on this from Bly but he was already wondering what he would be doing right now if he were Ozburn, if, like Sean, he had worked himself half-crazy during fifteen months undercover among some of the most dangerous people in the world, been purposely infected with a fatal disease, but still felt, truly and deeply in his heart, that there was good he could do on earth and evil he could defeat. And Hood wondered what he’d do if he had a plane and a dog and some guns and a wife to whom he’d innocently given his deadly virus during an act of love, a wife who’d gone into a deep sleep because of it and might not wake up again. If life was a fairy tale, he could just slay a few more dragons and kiss her. That would be enough to bring her out of sleep and they could live happily ever after. Hood wondered when people started telling themselves such stories, and why. The people must have been desperate. The stories were the opposite of helpful. Instead they were flagrantly immaterial and misleading and finally false.