“Listen-my man called yesterday, halfway through the lunch. If we can get that kind of notice, we could take him on his way out. I know some Eighteenth Streeters who’d love to make their bones on Rocky Carrasco. Would they ever.”
“No.”
“And what’s your better idea?”
“I’ll come up with one.”
35
Mary Kate Boyle watched Hood come into the Buenavista ATF field office lobby on Monday morning. He looked haunted and sucked of life, real diamonds in a fake smile. She looked at Oscar and even the big guard had an expression of brooding concern as he watched Hood. He led her back to his work cubicle and she handed him the voice recorder with her and Clint’s last conversation. That conversation now seemed ages ago, but it wasn’t her fault Charlie had been out of state and out of touch. He set up another recorder to make a copy, checking the available recording time and the battery like he always did with those steady, unhurried hands.
“Where you been?”
“Washington.”
“I heard it snowed a lot.”
“Lots.”
She smiled and looked away, but he wouldn’t look back at her. At least she could smile, slightly, without bleeding. She looked out the window to the waning light. It was winter but she could sense the season starting to lose hold. People out here had no idea what a real winter was. She liked weather. She thought of the long Missouri summer days, the sun on her body on that flimsy deck out behind Skull’s double-wide.
Hood listened to the conversation, staring at the little recorder and occasionally looking at her with an approving glint in his eyes. He tapped on his computer keyboard and glanced at the monitor. He made notes on a yellow pad. She listened to herself explain to Clint what all the noise on her phone was as she was trying to get the recorder set up fast, then leading Clint on with the whole coming-to-California idea, and also doing a fair job of getting info for Hood on his car and the missiles and where he might be. She really was a good actor. She’d fooled Clint, and Clint was smart. Not book smart but crafty and alert, like a weasel. They played the tape again, then once more.
“I didn’t want to press him for a phone number,” she said.
“No.”
“How’d it go in D.C.? You look like they shot your dog.”
“It went okay, Mary Kate.” Hood tapped on the keyboard again and again looked at the screen.
“You don’t tell me much more about what you’re doing than Clint does.”
Hood looked down at his notes. “My father died after a long illness. It wasn’t a surprise but it was still a shock.”
“Oh, Charlie-I’m so very sorry for him and you.”
“He had a good life. He was loved. Don’t feel bad.”
“I’ve never lost someone close. I know it’s going to change everything about me. Ma says it’s death that gives your life a shape.”
“Good words.”
“Did they send you back to D.C. because of that political murder in San Diego?”
“Yes. Someone needs to draw some fire. It’s going to be me.”
“You mean get blamed?”
He looked at her and nodded.
“I read the headlines on the newsstand paper this morning and it said that ATF-see, I didn’t say FAT, now, did I? — had something to do with the gun that killed the congressman. They showed a picture of the gun. And of course the congressman. Agent Bly said some things. And then at the San Diego bus station there was one of those TV news loops on and they had a story about the assassination, too. They showed the same gun. And they showed just a second or two of you talking into a microphone in a big room full of important people. And later, Bly. But the sound was off so I couldn’t hear anything.”
Hood felt his stomach tighten. He pictured Representative Grossly’s florid mask of outrage and heard his offended voice. “That gun got away from us during an undercover op four years ago.”
“So you get blamed?”
“I get to be the face of blame.”
“Like put you all over TV and magazines?”
“That’s possible.”
“I’m trying to get on TV and magazines.”
He smiled and for the first time today it seemed authentic. “I remember you saying that you wanted to be a model or star. Or a nurse.”
“I read for a part in a play last week. And I got it, Charlie. I got it! I’m still pinching myself. The director’s a chick and she said she was going to work my black eye and the split lips into the character. ’Cause Curley’s wife is a sexualized object and is punished for it. And since my face’ll heal up before opening night, she’s going to have makeup do me up like it just happened. So I can thank Skull for getting me the part.”
Hood managed his second authentic smile in a row. “I’m happy for you, Mary Kate.”
“Maybe you’ll come see me.”
“Maybe I will.”
“I don’t make any money. It’s not an Equity play.”
“Maybe it will lead to something better.”
“Enough about me. How we gonna trap Clint?”
Hood turned the monitor her way. “Here’s the Trailways schedule. We want him to pick you up in daylight hours so we can see what we’re doing. We’re in luck. There are arrivals through Las Vegas Monday through Saturday, ten thirty every morning.”
“Maybe I could actually take a bus into San Diego. Make it more real and convincing?”
“I don’t want you anywhere near the Greyhound station or Clint Wampler.”
“You’re a good boss, Charlie.”
“Tell him Saturday, ten thirty. Five days from today. Less people downtown.’’ Hood copied the Greyhound schedule on a noisy old printer and circled the Saturday ten thirty arriving from Las Vegas, like she was too dumb to remember it. He pulled a San Diego Thomas Guide from a desk drawer. “Let’s go to the conference room. I want to bring Dale and Janet and Robert in on this-we can get your lines right and figure how this should work.”
“I don’t stay in any room with Dale. It’s him or me and you can choose.”
“He’s not a bad guy. You embarrassed him.”
“I embarrassed him? And he’s not a bad guy? Don’t you tell me how to interpret character, Charlie Hood.”
“How about this? We’ll leave him out but he’s still not a bad guy.”
“You just gotta win, don’t you? Even if it’s just a little something, you still have to win it. I understand that. I’m the same damned annoying way!”
• • •
It was dark by the time the meeting was over. Her shoes echoed faintly with Hood’s on the marble of the ATF hallway. On his way past the security station, Hood rapped his knuckles lightly on Oscar’s desk, so Mary Kate did, too. The big man offered her a withering look, then a smile. Under a deep purple sky they walked from the lobby to the intersection near the bus stop and she said good-bye and could tell by his expression that he felt bad leaving her there alone.
She buttoned up her coat and headed toward the old part of Buenavista because she’d heard the Mexican food at Club Fandango was the best. Of course she’d invited Hood and the two agents to go with her and of course they’d turned her down. There was a line with these people, she had concluded: They could help you if you could help them but that didn’t establish anything at all personal. And Charlie Hood maybe didn’t have a woman in his life but that didn’t mean he had one flicker of interest in her. An SUV came up behind her going kind of fast and she moved over and turned her back to it and watched the thing whiz past, brand-new, beautiful blue paint job, looked like it was right off the showroom floor.
She climbed a gradual rise and the streets turned from asphalt to cobblestone and became narrow. The buildings grew older and somehow more interesting, and although many were simple flat-roofed rectangles, many were built with ornate arched doorways and cool-looking mud-brick adobe walls. One building had a plaque outside about it being in the National Historic Register because a man born there had distinguished himself in the War of 1812 and later become the vice president of the United States. There were iron streetlamps on curved stanchions that looked a hundred years old but she was pretty sure there wasn’t electricity in Buenavista in 1913, so maybe these were added. Their light had a nice glow that showed off the crooked stone street. Above, the sky was the same dark desert blue as that swanko SUV, with small stars just peeking out then ducking back behind the darkness again like they were shy.