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.
20
Rovanna holed up in the mountains where he didn’t think the cops would look for him, a little village not far from San Diego called Wynola. Rovanna, meet Wynola, he thought. He got a weekly rate on a motel cabin because it was off-season and cold. The owner was in no way curious about him and she accepted his cash and his story of stolen ID. He signed in as Donnie Archibald. That first night he saw the eleven o’clock news story with the Reverend Steve Bagley. Rovanna saw now that it was careless to use his real name inside the church.
His cabin was small and mostly clean. He took in his suitcase, prepacked before the Neighborhood Congregational visit just in case of trouble. He waited until nightfall to bring in the radios, six of them, various shapes and sizes-two powered by nine-volt batteries, three by AC, and the other a hand-crank unit meant for emergencies. All of which he found amusing because they didn’t need external power to be heard.
Now he sat in the darkness with the radios deployed around him and the Love 32 loaded with a full magazine and hidden under a bed pillow. His motel was built up close to the busy road, and there must be some kind of biker rally, he thought, because the Harleys growled and grumbled and roared at all hours, singles and pairs and big convoys of them twenty and thirty at a time. So the voices coming from the radios picked their moments to be heard. They were all soft, reasoning voices, two men and four women today, the opposite of yesterday. Though he only understood the English, the radios spoke several other languages that Rovanna recognized, and others not necessarily of this planet.