Hood held a blue box with a white ribbon under one arm and Beth held his other. He wore a new navy suit and a white shirt and a tie and new shoes that had cost him dearly. Beth wore a beige knit dress with cut mother-of-pearl worked into the fabric, and their surfaces shimmered in the sun. Her hair was up and she had sapphires in her ears and around her neck. When Hood had picked her up and first seen her lovely face and chocolate eyes and the joyous blue jewelry, he was speechless. Suddenly he felt alive, when all he’d felt since Mexico was numb. He had smiled for the first time since Batopilas.
Now as the ranch came into view, Suzanne Jones surrounded him, the memory of her or the ghost of her, but Hood saw no reason to resist it and he didn’t try to. She barged right in. He remembered the light in her eyes and the volume of her body and the taste of her and he had a strong feeling that there was something special she wanted to tell him on this, the wedding day of her oldest son.
In the barnyard an oval ring had been made of pipe rail, complete with heavy wooden walls and bleachers all around. It looked like a rodeo ring. White bunting hung from the rails and the grandstand and the rain gutters of the barn and from the ranch house itself and from the arms of the floodlights surrounding the arena and from the generators that would power them. The tremendous old oak tree was hung with hundreds of tiny lights that even in the midday sun twinkled like fireflies.
They walked into the shade of a huge white tent and onto the gleaming wood of a great dance floor. The stage was big and raised, and Hood recognized two of the Inmates, the bass player and the lead guitarist, arguing over monitor placement. There was a long table already heaped with gifts, and Hood added his. It was a heavy lead crystal vase etched near the base with the date and the words Bradley & Erin, Long May You Run. He had ventured into Tiffany’s in all innocence, and the vase had chosen him.
Beyond the gift table was the bar. The bar itself was forty feet long and backed by a wall of mirrored shelves six feet high and filled with booze, and the barstools were cowhide, many of them taken. Four very beautiful barkeeps were tending and talking with the drinkers. They were done up like saloon dancers. There was a huge punch bowl on a table near the bar, and the pale pink liquid poured from a pitcher held by a glass maiden and spilled down tiers of scalloped ponds to the final basin.
“I think I’ll start with the punch and work up to the bar,” said Beth.
“Good call.”
Hood dipped gold-trimmed goblets into the stream and handed Beth the glass and touched it with the rim of his. “It’s good to be here with you,” he said.
They drank and she studied him. “You look better than you did a week ago, Charlie. There’s a little something coming back into your eyes.”
“ Mexico took it out of me.”
“Maybe this day will put something back.”
“I’d like that.”
Another large tent was set up near the ranch house. At seven o’clock, with the sun lowering and the heat of the day broken by a distant onshore breeze, Erin came up the aisle through the neck-craning crowd, in a dazzling white satin dress with sequins and lace and a veil through which Hood saw her half-smiling face framed in the red ringlets of her hair and her eyes bright and composed and aware. Her maids were lovely.
Bradley wore a black notch-lapelled tuxedo with a black tie and cummerbund and he bore it as only a slender but well-proportioned man can do, making it casual and unimportant. He glanced at selected faces including Hood, his expression amused and alert. Hood studied Bradley’s retinue: little brother Jordan, Clayton the forger, Stone the thief, and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s sergeant Frank Cleary.
The service was Catholic due to the McKennas. The priest was round and big-toothed and smiled greatly. Hood found the ceremony overlong but moving. In his heart was happiness for Erin and sadness and some anger, too, because he believed that Bradley had already come to no good and that his foolishness would eventually harm her. Before he knew it, Bradley and Erin Jones were striding back down the aisle and the crowd was hollering with reckless abandon.
The warm-up band was Los Straitjackets, who played surf music and wore Mexican wrestling costumes. Hood was a guitar lover and he had played unpromisingly as a boy and always liked the reverbdrenched, double-lead twang of the Ventures and the Surfaris. When Los Straitjackets found a groove, Hood felt a giant metallic wave had broken over him, and notes of music were shearing off the walls to splash him.
He saw Bradley’s half brother, Kenny, just three years old now, race onto the dance floor and begin flailing about. His father, Ernest, watched him from the crowd, his big Hawaiian face stoic as an Easter Island statue’s. Hood had met them right here at this ranch two years ago. He could see that day. It had been his first assignment as an LASD homicide team trainee. He had driven way down here from L.A. to interview Suzanne Jones, whom he suspected of having witnessed a crime, and by the time he drove off forty minutes later, the path of his life had changed.
The dance floor filled, and Hood and Beth worked their way to the bar, where the dance hall girls were making drinks. The drinkers were two thick the length of the bar. Hood watched one of the bar-tenders take an ornate faceted goblet and pour an ounce of pale green liquid into it. Then she balanced a flat perforated spoon across the opening and set a sugar cube on it. Next she moved the drink to a small but elaborate stainless steel fountain. It looked something like a hookah. There were six of these bright contraptions set up down the bar. But instead of drawing smoke through the tube, the bartender set the drink under it and began dispensing drops of clear liquid over the sugar cube and into the green fluid.
“What’s the green stuff?” asked Beth.
“Absinthe. It was banned a few years ago. Now they’re selling it again.”
“Why the ban?”
“It was supposed to make you hallucinate, then go crazy.”
“Permanently?”
“Temporarily.”
“What’s in the dispenser?”
“Ice water,” said the bartender. She was blond and bustiered and pretty. “The sugar melts slowly and makes the absinthe taste better. It was a popular drink with European artists and writers.”
“What’s it taste like?” asked Beth.
“Licorice. From the anise.”
“I love licorice.”
Hood watched Beth talk to the bartender and wondered if she was perhaps fascinated by the science behind the ritual. Beth was curious about the way things worked. She loved learning new facts. Maybe this took her back to med school. Hood watched as the dripping ice water slowly turned the pale green drink a milky white.
“This is called the louche effect,” said the bartender. “It’s the precipitation of herbal essential oils used in distillation. This is what gives absinthe its color. There.”
“What proof is it?” asked Beth.
“This is one forty-eight, or seventy-four percent.”
“I could prep a kid for a tetanus shot with it.”
“The unique ingredient in absinthe isn’t alcohol but a toxin called thujone. This is derived from the bitter wormwood the liquor is made from. Oscar Wilde said of absinthe: ‘After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.’”
“Can we have one?” asked Beth.
Hood held up two fingers, and the woman looked at Beth and smiled wickedly as she pushed forward the first drink. “Slowly. Let the thujone do its magic before the alcohol charges in.”