The Famous and the Dead (13 page)

B
u
ckboard is one of the new ghost towns,” said Bly. “Brand-new six-bedroom homes, half of them with no doors or windows to keep out the squatters and coyotes. Swimming pools full of sand and tumbleweeds. They had just finished the first phase when the market crashed in oh-eight. God knows what kind of shape the clubhouse is in.”

“One of Israel Castro's developments,” said Hood. “Maybe that's where Scully got the gate key.”

“How can we stay out of sight, then get in fast?” asked Yorth. “It's out in the frickin' sand. No traffic, no cars, or people.”

“I used to run past that place when I lived in El Centro,” said Velasquez. “There's a stone wall around it, maybe five feet high. We can use it. We can listen from the street side and they won't see a thing. Then, when it's time to go in, it's up and over.”

“Can Hood's wire penetrate solid rock?” asked Bly.

“It's supposed to,” said Yorth.

“We should set the receivers on top of the wall. The hat trick isn't going to work with us behind a stone wall and him inside the clubhouse.”

“Good,” said Yorth, humming the Stones song thoughtfully. “Mics on the wall for clarity.”

A year ago Hood had driven through Buckboard Estates. It was exactly how Bly and Velasquez had described it. He remembered the houses standing in various degrees of completion, some only framed and others plumbed and drywalled. Some with roofing, others open to the sky. He remembered how the construction crews were still there, pouring and pounding and sawing away, even as the first-phase buyers were jumping ship and the
FORECLOSURE
and
FOR SALE
signs were sprouting up fast as weeds.

“When you jump the wall, one of you close the gate on them,” said Hood.

“Good,” said Yorth. “We'll need time to set up, but we're never going to beat them there now. We have to assume they're watching the area as we speak. So, what's across from Buckboard?”

“Cotton and more cotton,” said Velasquez. “But there's a park-and-ride lot that doesn't get used that much, right across from the Buckboard entrance. There are always a few vehicles in it. We wouldn't stand out.”

“Is there a traffic signal?”

“No. I'd remember that from my runs because I hate stopping for them.”

“Perfect,” said Yorth. “We can stage from there and jaywalk to the wall in the dark.

Hood looked at the L.A. agents. They looked badass enough to be cartel soldiers. What might cartel soldiers feel like doing before a big buy? “Do we still have that borrowed DEA dope in the safe here?”

“I just saw it,” said Yorth. “What are you thinking?”

“Say we get there five minutes late, drive by real obvious, let them make us. We're on a standard paranoid security check, right? We loop back a few minutes later. We park near but not next to each other. All eyes on us. I wait a minute, then walk into the clubhouse, but Marquez and Cepeda stay behind because they're cartel killers and they're suspicious. They don't hurry and they don't walk into traps. They do what they damned well feel like doing, which is smoke some
mota
before the big deal goes down. All that's another ten minutes for you guys to get set. Then I go out and harangue them, try to hurry them along. They argue but finally bring the money inside. They reek of smoke. That's been another five minutes for you guys to get into position. And another reason for Skull and his friends to think they're dealing with real bad guys, not us.”

“Janet, you remember how to roll a joint?” asked Yorth with a smile.

“I never learned,
Dale
,” said Bly.

“I rolled my own cigarettes in college,” said Hood. “I can muddle through.”

This brought knowing laughter, cracks about inhalation, Slick Willie, Slick Charlie.

“Look, there's an earth embankment in front of the stone wall,” said Velasquez. “Originally they had it irrigated and landscaped—boulders, succulents, and a lot of ocotillo and paloverde. But when the development went belly up, thieves took the sprinkler brass and the valves so everything died. They even stole the boulders and the good trees. So now . . . now it's a bunch of live weeds and dead bushes. It looks like hell but it's a good place to squat and hide. Same with the streetlights—the thieves cut down the poles with blowtorches, stripped out the copper wire and the conduit and took the light fixtures. It's good and dark out there now—a quarter moon. Once we're over the wall, it's only two hundred feet or so to the clubhouse parking lot. We can do this.”

Yorth set half a brick of
mota
and a packet of Zig-Zags on the conference room table. The smell was green and junglelike and it reminded Hood of his murderous days in Yucatán just four months ago. “Go get 'em, Charlie.”

•   •   •

Hood rolled down Imperial Avenue in his Charger. It was brawny and rigid of ride, like the IROC Camaro he'd had to sell in order to finance the wine cellar. He'd loved that car but the wine cellar was a necessity. Just this morning he'd run the Charger through the car wash, so now the black hood gleamed in the streetlights, and the reflections of the street signs rippled across it in yellow and red and blue. The engine growled. Adams to Fourth, then south again. In his rearview he saw the silver Magnum. He checked his diamonds in the mirror. The straw gambler waited on the seat beside him. He had a newly issued Glock .40 on his belt in back, an eight-shot .22 AirLite on his ankle, and a .40-caliber two-shot derringer that once belonged to Suzanne Jones in the side pocket of the seersucker coat, where it rested heavy as a railroad spike. He was hugely in the mood to purchase two shoulder-held Stinger missiles from crooked, crafty, girl-beating creeps.

One minute before seven he passed Buckboard Estates. The wall was rock and the gate was open. He came up a winding drive, past the parking lot, and stopped in front of the clubhouse. The red Commander and the raised F-150 were both there, backed up to the curb as if to stare at intruders. In the darkness the clubhouse looked large and had a spacious roofed patio out front. Faint light came from the building.

Hood watched the Magnum pull up behind him, then he continued right, past the clubhouse, following the drive. The streetlights had been blowtorched off near the ground and their gutted trunks lay about like fallen trees. The lawns were sand. The houses stood around him but they were little more than shapes. The windows with panes shone pale, and those without panes yawned blackly. Hood continued. He saw tennis courts thick with sand drifts, lines invisible, no nets. He thought of the Baghdad Tennis Club. There was a large, flat expanse of concrete with a huge black pit in the middle, and he realized it should have been filled with clean, cool water and lighted and surrounded by chaise longues and barbecues and umbrellas.

He stopped and turned on his radio transmitter and slid it back onto his belt. Looking down on it he could see the faint green LED that indicated power. Don't fail. His heart was thumping hard and steady. He pulled into a driveway with a
NO TRESPASSING
sign nailed to the garage door, reversed the car, and slowly drove back to the clubhouse parking lot. It was eight minutes past seven. Hood stopped and glanced back at the Magnum. He looked toward the wall and the open gate and saw nothing of the takedown team. The darkness is a friend tonight, he thought. He swung into a space and shut off the engine, then climbed out. He set the gambler on his head and checked his look in the window, then slammed the door with his foot. The Magnum parked five spaces down and the windows lowered.

“Vámos,
amigos.”

“We'll wait. You check it out,
pinche gringo
.”

“I'll do that. I won't be long.”

Hood ambled toward the clubhouse like a man with time on his hands. When he came to the bottom of the steps, he saw Clint Wampler standing off to the side of the building in his peacoat with a combat shotgun cradled in his arms. He had a hand on the grip and the white tape on his middle finger was luminous in the near-dark. “Good evening,” said Hood. “How's the finger?”

“It's fine.”

“Just bad timing. No hard feelings, I hope.”

“You can call it an accident but that's like the kettle and the black pot. What are your greaseball buyers doing out there?”

“They don't trust you. Or me, for that matter.”

“They brung the money?”

“Every cent.”

“Go on in, Glitter Gums. If you come out before me getting a prearranged signal from Lyle, I get to blow your head off.”

“Then I hope you have your signals straight.”

“I'm praying for some kind of mix-up. A timing thing, maybe, like my finger. They happen all the time.”

Hood pushed through a heavy wood-and-iron door and stepped into the clubhouse. The room was large and the ceiling high and there were double doors in the back. Near the center of it was an empty cable spool and on the spool stood two camping lanterns that gave off a whispering hiss and clean white light. Skull and Brock Peltz stood behind the spool, their faces beveled into light and shadow as if by stage lights. Skull had a pistol stuck behind his belt buckle and Peltz wore a shotgun strapped to his shoulder. Four open crates rested on the spool between the lanterns. Hood saw the wooden nests of packing material and the glimmer of the hardware within.

“Where's the greasers and money?” asked Skull.

“The
amigos
are nervous.”

“So, what, they sit out there and jack each other off?”

“I suppose.”

Skull pulled a cell phone and said something, then clipped it back to his belt. “Get back out there and bring the money. Your men can stay where they are for all I care. You were the one who needed friendship.”

“Well, the kid didn't shoot me so I guess I'm good.”

“You're only as good as your money.”

“Can I have a look?”

“Step up but don't touch until I'm counting my cash.”

Hood looked down on the missile launchers. He could smell them, metal and gun oil and solvent. The missiles themselves were in long narrow crates, one beside each launcher, all of them nestled into the wooden packing nest. “They look like puppies,” he said.

“You're fuckin' weird. Get the money.”

“Roger. You've got the chimp in the loop?”

“He's expecting you.”

Hood went back through the heavy doors and saluted Wampler on his way to the parking lot. He stopped near the driver's side door and spoke through the open window. “It's time.”

“We're going to burn one.”

“Suit yourself.” Hood watched as Marquez held the joint up and lit it. He blew onto the lit end to get the stuff going and soon the smoke lilted into the air and began to drift out the windows. “The Stingers look new, just like they said.”

Marquez passed the dope to Reggie Cepeda, who blew on it again and Hood saw the cherry glow. He looked back to the clubhouse for Wampler but saw only darkness. He glanced at the wall. “Let's do this,” he said.

They walked back toward the clubhouse loosely abreast, Hood in the middle with the duffel. The last time he'd carried a bag full of money it was quite a bit heavier: one million dollars ransom for the life of Erin McKenna, Bradley's wife, to be delivered by Hood to drug lord Benjamin Armenta at his castle in Yucatán. Not much about that quest had turned out as Hood planned, though he and Erin and Bradley had lived to be haunted by those days. He remembered Mike Finnegan's Veracruz apartment, and the wet hiss of the knife across his scalp, and now here four months later in El Centro he felt his hat rubbing against the scar along his hairline. He pulled lightly on the brim to break the contact and felt a shiver climb his back. He glanced down at his transmitter and saw the green LED. Give me luck this time. Cepeda carried the joint and faked a big inhale, then flicked it ahead of him and ground it out on the way by.

C
lint Wampler was not at his station. Hood's heart sped up. As they approached he peered hard into the darkness on either side of the clubhouse doors but saw no movement or glimmer of gun or flash of bandage. “The lookout's gone,” he said. “The young guy.” They climbed the stone steps to the covered landing and still Hood couldn't see Wampler. There was still the weak light coming from between the big double doors. He looked at each of the men and they nodded and Marquez unbuttoned his sport coat. Hood rapped hard on the door. “Money talks.”

“Bring her in!” Skull called.

“Where's the kid?”

“What do you care?”

“I want to know why he's not out here.”

“Because I'm in here, you dumb turd! Show us the money!”

“I like the kid where I can see him,” said Hood.

“Then we'll sell these babies to someone else,” said Skull.

“We're coming in.” Hood took a deep breath and pushed through the heavy doors. In the brittle light of the lantern he saw that the crates were no longer open on the cable spool but leaning up against it, closed. Then all he saw was wrong movement: Skull and Peltz raising their weapons as their shadows mimed them from the ceiling, Clint Wampler springing in from the darkness beyond the lantern light, racking his shotgun.

“Police!” yelled Skull. “You are under arrest!
Police! Put your hands up! Good! Up!
And keep them there, you cartel beaners!”

Hood's hands were high. “I'm Charlie Hooper, ATF. We're all federal agents, Dirk. Put the guns down. You're
cops
? Then we have a big misunderstanding.”

“Yeah, and the cavalry is coming.”

“Don't turn it into a Steven Spielberg movie,” said Hood.

“The fuck are you talking about?” said Wampler. “How come you said that?”

Skull squinted at Hood. Then, pistol still in hand, he gathered up two of the crates with his free arm. Peltz let go of the shotgun, which swung on its sling as he took up the second launcher and missile.

“Dirk Sculler,” said Hood. “Be cool now. We're ATF. We've got our badges out in the cars. We're stinging you and you're stinging us. Guns down.
Guns down.
None of us wants to get shot over something like this.”

“For nothing like this!” said Wampler. “Don't move or even dream about it.” He scuttled in and squatted to snatch up the money, smiling up the barrel of his shotgun at Hood.

“I'm Marquez, ATF L.A.”

“Cepeda, ATF L.A.”

“I'm Jesse James,” said Skull, sweeping by them with his gun still pointed at Hood's chest. “See you later, you wetback greasers.”

Peltz and Wampler covered the agents as Skull put his pistol hand to the doorknob and pulled, keeping an eye on Hood. In the newly opened rectangle of night, Hood saw Yorth charging toward them with his sidearm drawn, Bly wide to the left and Velasquez to the right. Behind him, Marquez launched into Brock Peltz, who crashed hard into the door. Skull dropped his crates and was gone. Hood swept the pistol from under his coattail and went after him. From inside the clubhouse Hood heard a shotgun roar twice.

Skull was heavy but strong and he muscled through the darkness step for step ahead of Hood. Near the wall he stopped and fired three rounds that whirred past Hood's head. Hood went down, rolled over his hat, then popped upright again without ever stopping. Skull climbed the wall, turned and fired off two more rounds, then scrambled over. Hood made the wall and ran along it for fifty feet before he jumped it. He landed flat and hard and he could see that Skull had lost sight of him. The cop started across the street. A car swerved and the driver cursed furiously as Skull lumbered into the park-and-ride lot. Hood sprinted with all he had. His two-toned brogans were poor running shoes but his legs were long and he could see that Skull was slowing. He crossed the street without traffic and sprinted past Yorth's and Bly's cars. Skull ran to the edge of the dimly lighted parking lot and charged off into the darkness of a cotton field.

Now only the quarter moon showed Hood his way, but Skull's heavy breathing drew him closer. Hood could see him out ahead, plodding heavily between the rows. The cotton pods were just dabs of light in the broader darkness. Hood stayed a hundred feet back and a few rows over, keeping Skull's pace while the man tired. “Hey, Dirk—you can't outrun me and you've got no friends out here. Why not just drop the gun and we'll rest up a minute and head back? See what all the commotion was about.”

He dropped to one knee behind a cotton plant just as Skull's pistol burped orange and a round whistled well to Hood's left and overhead. Then another round badly off to his right.

“We really are ATF, Dirk.”

“I really wish you weren't.” He had stopped and bent over, resting his hands on his knees, breathing hard. Sirens whined. “Me and the boys had a good thing going. Now I'm either going to get shot or arrested.”

“Go with arrested, man!”

“Naw.” Skull huffed upright and cupped his pistol in two hands and fired two more wild rounds, then he turned and barreled off down the crop row. Hood pushed off and followed. He saw two vehicles, light bars flashing, screaming down the street toward Buckboard Estates. Out ahead of him, Skull began to weave in and out of the cotton plants and Hood could hear the brittle snaps of the branches breaking. He couldn't get much closer without high risk of getting himself shot. Skull crashed through another plant and got himself realigned with a row and he pointed his gun behind him without stopping or turning and sent a bullet that cracked not inches from Hood's left ear. Hood pulled up and drew down. Skull's big body lurched in and out of his sights. “Drop the gun!
Drop the gun, Dirk!
I
am
going to shoot you!” Skull fired again without looking, then ran a brief, steady course and Hood heard him braying for air as he crashed through the cotton. Hood closed the distance easily, too easily, he thought, when Skull stopped and turned. Hood dropped into a shooter's crouch and held steady on Skull's big trunk. “Drop the gun, Dirk. Be smart for once in your life.”

The big man took his air in big noisy gulps. The gun was at his side and he looked at it, then flung it toward Hood. Over Skull's exertions Hood didn't hear it hit. He stood and kept both hands on his pistol, taking long balanced strides right down the center of the row. Skull went to one knee, head bowed, his back and shoulders heaving. Hood was near upon him in an instant. “Don't touch the throw-down.”

“There is no. Throw-down.”

“Don't move either hand. Not one inch.”

“Not gonna.” Sucking wind, Skull looked up at Hood as he hiked his right pant cuff, and Hood saw the ankle rig and he took two long steps and kicked Skull in the chin so hard he fell over backward and dazed. By the time Hood had rolled him over and cuffed him with plastic and removed the skinning knife from the scabbard on his belt and the switchblade from a pocket in his pants, Skull was snorting heavily, nostrils pressed into the fertile soil of Imperial County.

Hood heard the squeal of sirens leaving the clubhouse.

•   •   •

He aimed Skull through the open gate. Prowl car floodlights lit the clubhouse, and the colored flashers of the paramedics and fire-and-rescue units raked the walls. Hood heard a generator. In the parking lot he snatched up his hat and put it on and delivered Skull to two El Centro cops, who roughly deposited him into the back of a car. One side of his face had swollen prodigiously and hate was in his eyes. Brock Peltz glared at him from the back of another police car.

The Blowdown team and six cops stood outside. Yorth looked stricken and Bly argued with a plainclothes detective. Hood could see Marquez inside, talking with a uniformed sergeant. Velasquez stepped away and Hood saw that he was breathing hard and his shirt was untucked.

“Wampler shotgunned Reggie. Paramedics made it here fast but it looked bad. No word.”

“Where is that sonofabitch?”

“He lost us in the dark.”

“Let me guess, with one of the Stingers. Out the back door.”

“Yeah. I don't think he'll get far in this desert with two yard-long crates.”

“He'll hijack the first motorist he finds.”

“The cops have called up every available unit. There's a helo on the way from San Diego. There's no way that kid can get out of here.”

“Did he get the money, too?”

“Not enough hands, apparently. It took Marquez a minute to take down Peltz and that's when Wampler got away. By the time we got there and saw he was gone, he was way in the dark somewhere. With a launcher and a missile. But Marquez got the money.”

“Cepeda's that bad?”

“Shot twice and pretty close up, man. If it was buckshot . . .”

Hood stood at the entrance and looked into the clubhouse. The fire-and-rescue team had set up floodlights. There were more uniforms trying to figure out where to string the crime-scene tape, and a woman shooting video. Hood saw the launcher and missile crates on the floor where Skull had dropped them. He saw the blood-smeared floor were Cepeda had fallen, and the holes in the wall plaster where some of the shot had gone through. Big holes, he saw. Made for a man, not a pheasant. He saw that if he had waited a second or two to go after Skull, he would have been hit. Suddenly Hood's adrenaline was gone and he felt ugly and tired and luckless.

For the next ten minutes Hood and Velasquez cruised southeast El Centro in the Charger, hoping for new luck. Just after nine o'clock, the police issued an all-units watch for Clint Wampler and a stolen white Sequoia. At the intersection of Imperial and Ross, he'd pistol-whipped the vehicle's driver, who confirmed that the carjacker was in possession of a pistol and two wooden crates.

Velasquez called Yorth at the hospital and Cepeda was critical and in surgery. Hood worked his way outward from the Imperial-Ross intersection in a series of right-hand turns. The wind stiffened and the night went cold.

They were quiet for a long while. Hood worked his way back toward the place where Wampler had carjacked the SUV, willing the white Sequoia into his field of vision. His heart sped up as a white Yukon sped across the intersection of Adams and Brucherie. Damn. “What if Wampler decides to use it for something spectacular?” asked Velasquez. “Because that's what guys like him want. To do something unforgettable. Because they themselves are so utterly and totally forgettable.”

Hood nodded. He hadn't forgotten the Murrah Building catastrophe. He'd always remember the date because he was sixteen years old, learning to drive his father's pickup truck on a lightly traveled farm road outside of Bakersfield, when the news came over the radio. His dad had told him to pull over so he could listen. Hood had watched the anger building on his father's face and that anger Hood would never forget because his father was an otherwise gentle and generous man.
I hope they hang those fuckers
, he had said. Years later Hood's mother told him that his father had flown an American flag on the day they put the bomber to death.

“There used to be something in me like there is in Clint,” said Hood. “When I was young, I wanted to make a statement and be a hero. But I had no statement to make and I had no idea what a hero was. There's nothing in the world scarier than a young man with bad ideas.”

“Yeah. I get that.” Velasquez answered his phone, listened silently, and punched off. “Reggie didn't make it.”

Hood drove for a while in silence, doubling his willpower to conjure the white Sequoia with the murderous young man inside.

Velasquez asked him to pull over, so Hood steered the Charger onto the white, broad shoulder of the avenue. Velasquez set his head back against the rest and closed his eyes. Hood looked out at the stars and the cotton field and the windblown sand inching across the asphalt.