Hood looked at the closet, empty except for four metal hangers, the shoulder of one uplifted and caught on the shoulder of another as if a garment had been yanked off in a hurry.
“He walked out of the room to the nurses’ station,” said Beth. “It took them a moment to realize who he was. They ordered him back into his bed, but he politely refused. He thanked them graciously for all they had done, especially all the good books, and as soon as he left ICU, they called security. Security caught up with him in the lobby and he explained that his account was paid in full and that he was feeling very good. He did a little dance that left him with the toe of one shoe pointed up and his hands spread out. He smiled. Security said the smile looked weird. It was probably because his jaw is still wired shut. Outside he got into a black Mercedes convertible possibly driven by his daughter. I have the plate number.”
“You’re telling me he ripped out of that cast on his own?”
“Yes. Nobody could have helped. Nobody can get past the station without being seen.”
“Why the blood?”
“From the cranial rods. The flesh heals over them, but when they’re removed there’s bleeding. You see, there isn’t much blood here. About right. The hat would hide those wounds.”
Hood squatted and picked up a piece of plaster cast. It was slightly concave and roughly the size of a paperback book and ragged on all four sides. White mesh dressing clung to the inside and extended past the torn edges of the plaster. It smelled of unwashed cotton and an unwashed human being. Hood turned it over and saw the sweat-stained gauze and the four crushed indentations where Mike had torn away this section of solid plaster as if it were a piece of bread.
“I wouldn’t believe a single word of what I just said except I saw half of it,” said Beth. “The other half I believe because I know these nurses.”
“It was the strangest thing I ever saw in my life, deputy,” said one.
“When he came through that door all dressed and I realized who he was, this giant cold shudder went through me,” said another.
“He really did manage to smile,” said another.
Hood stood and tossed the piece of plaster onto the bed. “Nurses, doctors, security, cops, deputies, marshals, and two thousand Guardsmen, and he walks right out.”
“We can’t keep him,” said the first nurse. “We can’t hold anyone against his will. That’s what you do.”
Hood parked across from Owens Finnegan’s El Centro home just after three o’clock. The desert lay darkening beneath the stacked thunderheads, and a heavy wind had picked up. Her garage door was open, but the black Mercedes convertible was gone.
He knocked at the front door and waited but she didn’t answer, as he knew she wouldn’t. The door was unlocked. Hood walked in and closed it behind him and stood for a moment in the empty living room, then walked through the empty kitchen and down the hall to the once beautiful bedroom into which he had been invited, and this was vacant now, too. The bathroom was cleaned out, but on the counter was a wedding absinthe goblet, and beneath the goblet were two sheets of paper. Hood moved the goblet and looked down at a drawing. It was done in charcoal, masterfully rendered, sharp true lines and deep smudges of shadow pierced by light. It depicted Bradley Jones inside the Pace Arms manufacturing bay, dressed in his smart Explorer uniform, examining the newly born firearms as he walked along the workstations, his face locked in the exact speculative, lost-in-thought expression that Hood had seen that night through the window.
Exactly as I saw it, thought Hood. Every detail, every mood.
In the bottom right corner, the name Mike was written in a neat, forward-slanting draftsman’s hand.
I can hear what they think and see what they see. Sometimes very clearly. It’s like hearing a radio or looking at a video.
Hood slid the drawing to the side to see the paper under it. It was a note written in the same neat hand:
Charlie:
I took from you. Next time, and there will be a next time, I will give back. Something you desire, something you need.
MF
That evening when Hood finally got to Mike Finnegan’s apartment across from LAX, he pulled up, saw the FOR RENT sign in the window, and kept on going all the way to Bakersfield.
He sat with his mother in his boyhood home and they talked until late and he slept in the same bed he had slept in as a high schooler. He woke up early and left a note for his mother and father, then drove home as the darkness evaporated. As it often had been in his life, the passing of time and miles was a comfort to Hood, a man navigating an iron river, adrift with blunt instruments and crude charts.
42
You haven’t lived until you’ve sat next to Sharon Rose Novak in a Sun King motor home carrying one thousand machine pistols and one iced, four-hundred-pound corpse, being swept away from ATFE agents in the belly of a relic Red Cross Chinook helicopter.
The helo briefly landed way out in the Southern California desert and I backed the motor home down the cargo lift and onto a decent dirt road that Bradley had said would lead us to a Joshua tree with a white ribbon tied to one cluster of spines. No sooner had I driven the motor home outside the rotor diameter than the CH-47 lifted off again. Bradley believed that a Sun King driven by a well-groomed young man and his lovely companion would draw less attention than a Red Cross helicopter thundering through U.S. air space over Norton, Pendleton and Miramar military bases, etc., on its way south. Especially if no one was looking for the motor home to begin with. One of Herredia’s helo crewmen had put on new Arizona plates while Sharon and I sat thousands of feet in the sky, experiencing the hypnotic, otherworldly, and slightly nauseating feeling of being inside a motor home inside a transport chopper doing a hundred fifty knots over God knows where.
Sharon spotted the white ribbon a few minutes later, and I backed the Sun King to it and with some difficulty we managed to push/ drag/drop Uncle Chester’s tarped and dry-iced remains into the waiting hole. Bradley’s men had left one shovel that Sharon and I used to cover Chet. I offered to do the spadework myself, but Sharon insisted on doing half of it, and I watched her during her turns from the meager shade of the Joshua tree. She was grim and silent and determined about it. I could tell that every shovelful of sand she put between herself and Chet was something she needed to do to keep him away from her, literally and symbolically, too. I closed with the Lord’s prayer though I kind of hurried through it. I thought of my mother.
The Love 32s were more or less loose in the Sun King, since the wooden gun crates had been used for the new jeans for charity. The ruse was Bradley’s idea, though how he learned that ATFE agents were surveilling Pace Arms I’ll probably never know. Sharon had found late-summer bargain beach blankets on sale at a supermarket for three ninety-nine each, and in these forty blankets we wrapped and folded and duct-taped our thousand guns. We had guns under the motor home beds, guns in the overhead sleeper, guns in the cupboards and closets, guns in the bathroom and shower, guns in the bench seat storage chests, guns under the dining table and upon it and piled on the padded seating around it, guns in the walkway from cab to bath. The silencers and extra-capacity magazines, being smaller and more conveniently shaped, fit nicely inside the new but inexpensive pillow cases that Sharon found at Big Lots, and these we stashed anyplace that wasn’t already filled with guns.
We crossed into Mexico at Nogales, were stopped briefly for the usual questions by the U.S. ICE agents, and were simply waved through by their Mexican counterparts. Shortly we were intercepted by a small flotilla of Suburbans that escorted us into the middle of Baja California. The flotilla personnel were either Mexican Federal Judicial Police or narcos dressed in the uniforms of the MFJP. Bradley had told me that both were in the employ of Carlos Herredia.