I find her in the kitchen, wiping out two martini glasses. Her eyes are wide and her hands tremble and she doesn’t look at me. I come up behind her to put my hands on her shoulders.
“Do not approach me.”
“Okay. I won’t. Sharon, he didn’t-”
“No, he did not.”
“I’m thankful for that, Sharon. I’m going downstairs to talk to Marcos while you make those drinks. We’ll need to make some adjustments.”
“The ice cream is melting.”
“I’ll get it.”
“What if he’s not dead.”
“He is dead.”
“But what if he’s not.”
I read the old inscription on the Hawk, then set it on the counter.
For Sharon, safe forever in the arms of Pace.
“I didn’t know you kept this.”
“It’s been in my purse since the day you gave it to me.”
“If he’s not dead, shoot him again.”
She looks up toward me, but I don’t think she sees me. She smiles vacantly. “Terrific, Ron. Don’t be long.”
I look in on Chester to make sure no miracle cures have occurred. He’s still as a boulder, and the hardwood floor around him is a dark slick. I feel regret that he’s dead and an odd sense of loss, but very small amounts of each. I never understood how he could have been the brother of my reasonably sized, generous, sensitive, good-natured father. I still don’t. The wood floor is a modern laminate and will clean up well.
As I walk toward the front door, I see Sharon in the kitchen, scooping ice into the martini shaker. Her hair washes over her face, and tears run down her cheeks, but her hands are steadier now. She has tucked the torn shoulder of her green dress up under her bra strap. I am so proud of her, and that she chooses to spend her time with me. She looks back at me with an expression that says: Don’t say one word.
I don’t dare.
I ride the elevator down into manufacturing. I’m trying to figure out how to tell Marcos what I now need from him, but my phone rings and I see that it’s Bradley.
“Bra-”
“Don’t talk,” he says. “Only listen.”
I listen and do not talk. Bradley tells me that ATFE knows what I’m making, that the Pace building is probably under surveillance right now. I can’t understand how they would know. Chester? At Bradley’s orders I write down an address and a time, and I make a list of the things he wants me to buy and in what quantities. Some of these things make sense to me and others do not. I see that what I’m going to need from Marcos is small potatoes compared to what Bradley needs from me.
“You got it, Bradley. Done.”
I punch off and stab the phone back into the belt holder. I take a deep breath and straighten my back.
Rounding the corner into the intensified smells of solvents and lubricants and blued steel and loud Mexican music, I raise my hand and hail Marcos. It’s just dawning on me how to pull this all together.
39
Hood watched the Pace Arms entrance through slitted eyes, his head back on the rest, radio turned to a music station. It was nine P.M. At ten thirty, Sharon came down and drove her Z-car from the parking structure. At eleven o’clock he saw Chester Pace’s black Town Car roll into the same structure and a moment later the big man lumber from the darkness to the building. Just as Chester reached the entryway, the door opened and one of the gunmakers looked up at Chester and nodded and held open the door for him.
A minute later, Hood saw a slight change of light in the penthouse, then movement behind the blinds. Fifteen minutes later, Sharon parked and walked out of the structure with plastic bags in both hands. She was dressed in a green dress and looked tanned and casually lovely.
Hood turned down the radio and watched. A few minutes later, the fog settled over the building tops and descended over the street-lights, muting the world. Hood rolled the windows up against the chill. The next time he checked his watch, it was after one A.M. No Chester. No nothing. Four hours to go to end of their shift.
Just after seven o’clock, the men emerged from the building into the foggy morning light. They shuffled to their cars wordlessly and began to drive away. Hood watched them go and counted them. Twelve had gone in. Only ten left. He felt addled from lack of sleep, and he was sore from the sitting. He felt like he had worked the shift alongside them.
His phone vibrated and he saw a new text message waiting:
my journeyman skills are exhausted
you are on your own maybe this
is how it should be i wish i could
have tempted you with bigger things
what you did for me and owens i
will not forget even to the close
of the age
mike
Hood called Beth Petty and asked her to have the ICU nurses concoct a reason to wheel Mike out of his room for a few minutes around eight A.M. When she asked why, he said it had to do with guns, cash, and human life. She agreed to do it. Then he called Gabe Reyes and told him to be at Imperial Mercy ICU at eight o’clock to retrieve Mike Finnegan’s cell phone and check it for calls or messages left or sent.
Forty minutes later, Hood was stuck in traffic in Corona. He slowed to a crawl and cursed and answered a call. Reyes gave him both of the numbers he found on Finnegan’s phone, both outgoing and both made within the last nine hours. One went to a number that Hood recognized as belonging to Owens, placed not long after Hood had left the ICU at Imperial Mercy. The most recent was a text message to Hood.
40
Late the next night a small army surrounded Pace Arms under the cover of fog and darkness. The air was cool and still and it misted the windshield of Hood’s Yukon, but this was not a time for wipers.
Behind the building, Hood watched from his Yukon as a big raised Dodge Ram pickup truck backed up through the bright shipping yard lights. It finally came to rest against the Pace loading dock, beside a battered white Ford F-250. Hood had figured two vehicles for two thousand pounds of iron, plus the weight of the crates. Two vehicles wouldn’t betray the weight, and would either cut the risk in half or double it, depending on how you looked at it. The big motor home sat parked against a far wall, its awning now extended for shade over two white plastic chairs. It was as dirty as it had been before, all its windows opaque with dust except for the big black windshield. Hood wondered if someone lived there, a watchman perhaps. There was a clean black panel van parked across from it.
Ron Pace came trotting down the loading ramp. Bradley and Clayton got out of the truck and shook hands with the gunmaker. Bradley wore white shorts and red canvas sneakers and a Bush-Cheney T-shirt, with his holster and sidearm bobbing unashamedly on his right hip. Clayton wore a light blue seersucker suit and what looked like white Hush Puppies. Pace was dressed for safari in cargo shorts, suede work boots, and a shirt plastered with pockets and epaulets.