The Jaguar: A Charlie Hood Novel Part 30

"What do you want?"

"Let's walk. The dogs looked bored."

They climbed the escarpment. The boulders had sheared off ages ago but the face of the wall was still sharp and steep. Sage and dudleya and p.r.i.c.kly pear grew between the rocks. Here the fence stopped and Mike examined the end post, kicking away the dirt at its bottom to reveal the impressive cylinder of concrete in which it was set.

"Carlos wants you back," said Mike.

"I can't. I told him that. Look what happened to Erin. Never again. I'm going to be a father soon. Hood suspects what I was doing for Carlos. He won't let go of it because Hood doesn't let go. And IA is still breathing down my neck about last year. I'm done. I'm straight. I'm out."

"But Carlos is heartbroken."

"He's got Vega and Cleary."

"He's insulted too."

"Is this a threat?"

"He's made an offer. He'll let you out of your commitments with no hard feelings. All you have to do is get a horse for him."

"A horse."

"Xtravagan."

"Xtravagan is a million-dollar-a-pop stud. Worth ten times that on the hoof."

"That happens to be pastured less than twenty miles from here."

"Funny."

"But true. For Carlos's fledgling racing program. And don't worry. I know the stable."

"Christ, not again."

"I suggested that your loyalty through the years might have earned you the freedom to raise your family in peace. But he gave me that certain expression. You know the look."

"Where his eyebrows point down instead of up."

"Precisely. They pointed down."

"It's easy to make fun of Carlos until he kills you. I don't take this lightly, Mike."

"I'm urging you not to."

Mike tossed Bradley a flash drive. "Think about it. In the meantime enjoy the show. It's off my security cameras in Veracruz. Motion activated. No way Charlie could have seen those beady little lenses watching him from up in that dark ceiling. And if he gets a little too righteous on you, you've caught him in action-trespa.s.sing, theft, a.s.sault and battery, attempted wrongful imprisonment. Maybe it's something your Commander Dez should see. Or maybe it would just make an amusing Internet posting. Who knows?"

Bradley finished his beer and looked at Mike for a long moment. For the first time he saw Mike Finnegan as not only cryptic and ridiculous, but genuinely dangerous. Erin and Hood had seen it. How had he not?

Mike spoke with a satisfactory tone: "Well, whatever you do with the video, our poor Charlie now has but a few tenuous holds on the world as we know it. He has his self-interested federal and county employers. His ailing father and aging mother. And of course the lovely, no doubt frustrated Dr. Beth Petty, who helped put me back together all those years ago."

Suddenly Bradley considered Charlie Hood in a sympathetic light. Another first. A day for firsts, he thought. He snapped the beer bottle high into the rocks and listened to the sharp burst and patter of the shards. "I've got work to do."

Mike kicked the end pole with the toe of his red racing boot. "n.o.body's going to get through this thing when you're done with it, Bradley. No devils coming for you and your family!"

That evening he and Erin sat on the deck and watched the sunset and ate dinner. Bradley grilled tuna caught by a friend, and vegetables and red potatoes wrapped in foil, and poured a good Sauvignon Blanc. The dogs sprawled and fidgeted on the drive and in the barnyard gra.s.s, only Call allowed on the deck proper.

Erin sipped her one gla.s.s of wine and watched the hills while Bradley cleared the dishes and sat down. He firmly believed that she was to be pampered in every possible way until delivery day, still some four months out.

"You have that look again tonight, Erin."

"Sorry."

"You okay?"

"Just thinking is all."

"About what?"

"The little one. Us. You know. All the wonderful things to come."

"You're not making them sound wonderful."

"Some songs write themselves."

"I didn't mean it as a criticism."

"I didn't take it as that."

He watched the red ball of sun melt into the western hills. Erin had become impossible but he could hardly blame her. He knew she was at the end of all tethers and anything might happen. She could take no more. He could not clearly imagine a life without her but he could sense it out there, like a storm still below the horizon, sending up an eerie light.

It was exhausting to think about so he let his mind wander. It landed on the men he'd killed in Campeche and later at Armenta's Castle. These weren't the first in his life but they were the least personal, like enemy soldiers almost, and his memories of them had been sneaking up on him lately, as soldiers would. One unhappy thought led to another: Carlos Herredia. El Tigre. Steal a racehorse? Well, he thought, sleep with a f.u.c.king drug lord and what do you expect? As if surrendering the twelve grand a week he no longer earned from Herredia wasn't bad enough. It was hard to say good-bye to that a year ago, but as he saw now, the loss of income was just the beginning of his troubles. Which led him to think about the terriers of LASD Internal Affairs, still biting at his ankles about last year's disaster. He wondered if he would have twice as many problems when he was twice as old, at say, forty-two. Or half the problems. Maybe that's how it worked. Who knew?

"Those twenty st.i.tches got me," said Bradley. "Mike doing that to Charlie."

"Me too. I tried not to let him see how awful that cut looked to me. And I believe what he said about Mike helping it all happen-all of it-not just the cut. Everything. I think Mike's evil. I know you disagree."

"I think Charlie's blown Mike out of proportion in order to justify his own madness."

"He put his life on the line for us. Is that what you mean by mad?"

Bradley shrugged and drank. "Charlie needs a quest. Human nature. Why not make it Mike? Mike isn't innocent. He's dangerous. I know that now."

Erin sipped the wine and set one hand over her middle. "Well, when Charlie's hair grows back, the scar won't even show."

"In his mind it will show."

After a long moment Bradley put his hand on hers. It was another of the many acts of tenderness that he had offered since returning home. She had offered him not one. Still just the idea of her affection arced brightly across a dark gap inside him.

"We're all carrying new things now," Erin said.

That night they slept in separate beds again, and in the morning when Bradley came in from his early trenching Erin was gone.

Her note was brief: Dear Bradley, I cannot find enough love for you to take us through the coming days. I have searched and waited and searched and waited. When I think back on our joy and pa.s.sion I see that they were based on lies, but they remain the standards of my heart. I used to have a dream of us, a belief. I will try to find that belief again. Whatever happens to us, your son will always be yours; I will see to that. Nothing can take him away from us.

Erin.

39.

HOOD WATCHED THE OPERATOR SWING the heavy bucket back over the hole, then lower it in. The excavator shuddered and roared. The rams hissed and the bucket rose, Buenavista rock and sand pouring through its teeth. Dwayne backed and swiveled the Cat, then rolled down the road. He dumped the load on the opposite side of Hood's big lot, where there was already quite a hill forming. Dust rose.

Hood sat in the morning shade on his patio with a sweating pitcher of iced tea on the table. Also there were some notebooks and his laptop and Mike Finnegan's laptop, recently configured by ATF tech wizards to accept the pa.s.sword of Hood's choosing. So far Hood had found many interesting things on the heavy, battered little machine: voluminous files in Mandarin Chinese, Greek, and Spanish. Much of this material seemed travel-oriented-air schedules and fares, hotels and restaurants, tips from pros, blogs by tourists. The scarcer English-language files were mostly natural history articles focusing on a wide range of subjects, from the "earth star," a North American fungus commonly found in damp areas near conifers and sometimes eucalyptus, to incomprehensible astronomical predictions stretching from the present into future centuries.

He looked down at his sleeping dog and touched his fingertip to the scar that ran just above his hairline. It was raised and relatively neat, with the plastic st.i.tches taken from inside. Now, sixteen days after the cutting, it itched incessantly.

The Veracruz doctors had shaved and st.i.tched him and dripped him full of antibiotics and turned him over to a U.S. consulate staffer named Bonnie. Josie had visited him often. Soriana flew down from San Diego, and later came Beth, who had to have an immediate look at the wound-"hmmm," and the Mexican needlework-"excellent." Veracruz Police interviewed him twice. Hood had invented a story about a crazed M. Doblado mugger, believed by neither of the detectives, but he stuck to it and never contradicted himself and that was that. He understood that the Veracruz Munic.i.p.al Police were eager to be rid of him. Five days after the knifing he was home.

"Charlie, I officially give up," said Beth. "I can't think about it anymore. But I'll do it. I'll try to make the arrangement work."

"I think the arrangement can work, Beth. I don't see a better way."

"All righty then." She looked at Hood doubtfully, then out toward the excavator. "Think Dwayne will get mad if I look in the hole again?"

"I think he'd like it."

Beth moved through the adamant fall suns.h.i.+ne to the excavation site, Daisy trotting at her side. Hood watched her walk. She was wearing cargo shorts and a tank and sandals and a big straw hat against the sun. When she got to the edge of the cavern she turned and squinted back at him, a smile on her face. She squatted on her haunches and looked down. She had already asked Dwayne twice to stop the job, slid down into the growing cavern and retrieved one very nice slab of petrified wood and several rough rocks studded with ancient sh.e.l.lfish. Beth was an enthused collector of rocks, sh.e.l.ls, bones, fossils, and bird nests, though she was in Hood's opinion a bit of a pack rat. Dwayne backed up the big Cat 245 and swung the bucket safely away, lit a smoke.

A while later she climbed back out with a heavy bounty stowed in her upturned blouse. She set the treasures on the picnic table one at a time. Hood examined a piece of petrified wood that would clean up nicely with some water and a brush. Beth looked skeptically at the other rocks, nothing truly wonderful, then moved her gaze to Hood.

"It's funny that you're calling this add-on a wine cellar."

Hood nodded. "It says so, right on the drawings."

"An underground wine cellar with three rooms, big enough for ten thousand bottles."

"That's right."

"Plumbing and electric, bath and kitchen."

"By all means."

"And heating and air-conditioning with back-up generators, and six-foot concrete walls and double reinforcement bar."

"The walls are only three feet thick, Beth."

"But there are two of them smack up against each other and iron plates in between. And the seismic stuff. And the catwalk over it. And the grates, so you can see into every room without having to even leave your house. Do you plan to watch the wine age?"

"It will be secure."

She sighed and smiled slightly, letting him off her hook. "Well, I am surprised and happy that you bought a home in Buenavista. I wish the reasons were somewhat simpler. But we've been over it and that's the last I'll say."

"It's best."

She took his chin and turned his head slightly so she could look at the cut. "Well, you might be half crazy but you're healing up good and clean."

"I don't believe I'm half crazy."

"I really don't either. But I think you could become that way."

He nodded. They sat and watched Dwayne carve away the earth. Hood felt the sun on his legs and it was good.

He had almost nodded off when Beth put both her hands on his face. He opened his eyes to see her up close, studying him. Her fingers were cool.

"I worry about you, Charlie. Don't let Mike take you over. He isn't your superior. My training won't let me believe he's what you think he is, but I've been wrong before. Maybe what we call him doesn't matter. Don't let what he did to you and your friends determine your whole life, just part of it. Charlie Hood is the biggest and most important part of you. So take care of you. I'll help within reason. But I have my limits, and I've got me to consider too. I listen to my heart, not the other way around."

"I know. That's good and true and as it should be. I love and treasure you, Beth."

Her fingers trailed off his face as Hood looked out to the east where the dirt road climbed from the flat desert into the hills. A vehicle came forward dragging a cloud of dust behind it and there was no leisure as it barreled toward them.

A moment later Erin climbed from the SUV and Hood and Beth walked into the shade of the carport to greet her.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

A million true thanks to Tom Bagley, Joseph Gauthier, and Kevin Kimmel, who told me how things work in that magical place known as a recording studio. They use words like "slapback," "aural nodes," "tuned rooms," and "critical listening." Music is at the heart of this book and without these guys, there would be none in it. All musical miscues are purely my own.

The lyrics to "City of Gold" were written by Tom Bagley and Nelson Soler, based upon a few lines of my own and a character of my invention. Peter Dobson and Sue Cross helped Tom with the musical grid. I thank you all for a beautiful song-you brought it to life.

On a different note, many thanks again to John Torres, Special Agent in Charge of ATF, Los Angeles, for his continuing support, high energy, and good humor.

Also sincere grat.i.tude to Dave Bridgman for his advice on guns and ammo and how they work, and for pointing out a host of other things in early drafts of this novel. If I've made still another firearm blunder in this book, all the blame is mine and none is his.

Again I thank D. P. Lyle, MD, who was kind enough to explain modern medical suturing, complete with a video showing how it's done.

Thanks once again to Mike Dee, this time for the crocodiles.

Thanks once more to the Los Angeles Times "Mexico Under Siege" team for their excellent reporting of the many travails south of the border, and what they mean to that fine country and to us in the United States.

And once again I'd like to thank Robert Gottlieb and all of Trident Media Group for their expertise, good judgment, and unflagging enthusiasm. You are my allies, and I value you.