The Famous and the Dead

18



Buckboard is one of the new ghost towns,” said Bly. “Brand-new six-bedroom homes, half of them with no doors or windows to keep out the squatters and coyotes. Swimming pools full of sand and tumbleweeds. They had just finished the first phase when the market crashed in oh-eight. God knows what kind of shape the clubhouse is in.”

“One of Israel Castro’s developments,” said Hood. “Maybe that’s where Scully got the gate key.”

“How can we stay out of sight, then get in fast?” asked Yorth. “It’s out in the frickin’ sand. No traffic, no cars, or people.”

“I used to run past that place when I lived in El Centro,” said Velasquez. “There’s a stone wall around it, maybe five feet high. We can use it. We can listen from the street side and they won’t see a thing. Then, when it’s time to go in, it’s up and over.”

“Can Hood’s wire penetrate solid rock?” asked Bly.

“It’s supposed to,” said Yorth.

“We should set the receivers on top of the wall. The hat trick isn’t going to work with us behind a stone wall and him inside the clubhouse.”

“Good,” said Yorth, humming the Stones song thoughtfully. “Mics on the wall for clarity.”

A year ago Hood had driven through Buckboard Estates. It was exactly how Bly and Velasquez had described it. He remembered the houses standing in various degrees of completion, some only framed and others plumbed and drywalled. Some with roofing, others open to the sky. He remembered how the construction crews were still there, pouring and pounding and sawing away, even as the first-phase buyers were jumping ship and the FORECLOSURE and FOR SALE signs were sprouting up fast as weeds.

“When you jump the wall, one of you close the gate on them,” said Hood.

“Good,” said Yorth. “We’ll need time to set up, but we’re never going to beat them there now. We have to assume they’re watching the area as we speak. So, what’s across from Buckboard?”

“Cotton and more cotton,” said Velasquez. “But there’s a park-and-ride lot that doesn’t get used that much, right across from the Buckboard entrance. There are always a few vehicles in it. We wouldn’t stand out.”

“Is there a traffic signal?”

“No. I’d remember that from my runs because I hate stopping for them.”

“Perfect,” said Yorth. “We can stage from there and jaywalk to the wall in the dark.

Hood looked at the L.A. agents. They looked badass enough to be cartel soldiers. What might cartel soldiers feel like doing before a big buy? “Do we still have that borrowed DEA dope in the safe here?”

“I just saw it,” said Yorth. “What are you thinking?”

“Say we get there five minutes late, drive by real obvious, let them make us. We’re on a standard paranoid security check, right? We loop back a few minutes later. We park near but not next to each other. All eyes on us. I wait a minute, then walk into the clubhouse, but Marquez and Cepeda stay behind because they’re cartel killers and they’re suspicious. They don’t hurry and they don’t walk into traps. They do what they damned well feel like doing, which is smoke some mota before the big deal goes down. All that’s another ten minutes for you guys to get set. Then I go out and harangue them, try to hurry them along. They argue but finally bring the money inside. They reek of smoke. That’s been another five minutes for you guys to get into position. And another reason for Skull and his friends to think they’re dealing with real bad guys, not us.”

“Janet, you remember how to roll a joint?” asked Yorth with a smile.

“I never learned, Dale,” said Bly.

“I rolled my own cigarettes in college,” said Hood. “I can muddle through.”

This brought knowing laughter, cracks about inhalation, Slick Willie, Slick Charlie.

“Look, there’s an earth embankment in front of the stone wall,” said Velasquez. “Originally they had it irrigated and landscaped—boulders, succulents, and a lot of ocotillo and paloverde. But when the development went belly up, thieves took the sprinkler brass and the valves so everything died. They even stole the boulders and the good trees. So now . . . now it’s a bunch of live weeds and dead bushes. It looks like hell but it’s a good place to squat and hide. Same with the streetlights—the thieves cut down the poles with blowtorches, stripped out the copper wire and the conduit and took the light fixtures. It’s good and dark out there now—a quarter moon. Once we’re over the wall, it’s only two hundred feet or so to the clubhouse parking lot. We can do this.”

Yorth set half a brick of mota and a packet of Zig-Zags on the conference room table. The smell was green and junglelike and it reminded Hood of his murderous days in Yucatán just four months ago. “Go get ’em, Charlie.”

• • •

Hood rolled down Imperial Avenue in his Charger. It was brawny and rigid of ride, like the IROC Camaro he’d had to sell in order to finance the wine cellar. He’d loved that car but the wine cellar was a necessity. Just this morning he’d run the Charger through the car wash, so now the black hood gleamed in the streetlights, and the reflections of the street signs rippled across it in yellow and red and blue. The engine growled. Adams to Fourth, then south again. In his rearview he saw the silver Magnum. He checked his diamonds in the mirror. The straw gambler waited on the seat beside him. He had a newly issued Glock .40 on his belt in back, an eight-shot .22 AirLite on his ankle, and a .40-caliber two-shot derringer that once belonged to Suzanne Jones in the side pocket of the seersucker coat, where it rested heavy as a railroad spike. He was hugely in the mood to purchase two shoulder-held Stinger missiles from crooked, crafty, girl-beating creeps.

One minute before seven he passed Buckboard Estates. The wall was rock and the gate was open. He came up a winding drive, past the parking lot, and stopped in front of the clubhouse. The red Commander and the raised F-150 were both there, backed up to the curb as if to stare at intruders. In the darkness the clubhouse looked large and had a spacious roofed patio out front. Faint light came from the building.

Hood watched the Magnum pull up behind him, then he continued right, past the clubhouse, following the drive. The streetlights had been blowtorched off near the ground and their gutted trunks lay about like fallen trees. The lawns were sand. The houses stood around him but they were little more than shapes. The windows with panes shone pale, and those without panes yawned blackly. Hood continued. He saw tennis courts thick with sand drifts, lines invisible, no nets. He thought of the Baghdad Tennis Club. There was a large, flat expanse of concrete with a huge black pit in the middle, and he realized it should have been filled with clean, cool water and lighted and surrounded by chaise longues and barbecues and umbrellas.

He stopped and turned on his radio transmitter and slid it back onto his belt. Looking down on it he could see the faint green LED that indicated power. Don’t fail. His heart was thumping hard and steady. He pulled into a driveway with a NO TRESPASSING sign nailed to the garage door, reversed the car, and slowly drove back to the clubhouse parking lot. It was eight minutes past seven. Hood stopped and glanced back at the Magnum. He looked toward the wall and the open gate and saw nothing of the takedown team. The darkness is a friend tonight, he thought. He swung into a space and shut off the engine, then climbed out. He set the gambler on his head and checked his look in the window, then slammed the door with his foot. The Magnum parked five spaces down and the windows lowered.

“Vámos, amigos.”

“We’ll wait. You check it out, pinche gringo.”

“I’ll do that. I won’t be long.”

Hood ambled toward the clubhouse like a man with time on his hands. When he came to the bottom of the steps, he saw Clint Wampler standing off to the side of the building in his peacoat with a combat shotgun cradled in his arms. He had a hand on the grip and the white tape on his middle finger was luminous in the near-dark. “Good evening,” said Hood. “How’s the finger?”

“It’s fine.”

“Just bad timing. No hard feelings, I hope.”

“You can call it an accident but that’s like the kettle and the black pot. What are your greaseball buyers doing out there?”

“They don’t trust you. Or me, for that matter.”

“They brung the money?”

“Every cent.”

“Go on in, Glitter Gums. If you come out before me getting a prearranged signal from Lyle, I get to blow your head off.”

“Then I hope you have your signals straight.”

“I’m praying for some kind of mix-up. A timing thing, maybe, like my finger. They happen all the time.”

Hood pushed through a heavy wood-and-iron door and stepped into the clubhouse. The room was large and the ceiling high and there were double doors in the back. Near the center of it was an empty cable spool and on the spool stood two camping lanterns that gave off a whispering hiss and clean white light. Skull and Brock Peltz stood behind the spool, their faces beveled into light and shadow as if by stage lights. Skull had a pistol stuck behind his belt buckle and Peltz wore a shotgun strapped to his shoulder. Four open crates rested on the spool between the lanterns. Hood saw the wooden nests of packing material and the glimmer of the hardware within.

“Where’s the greasers and money?” asked Skull.

“The amigos are nervous.”

“So, what, they sit out there and jack each other off?”

“I suppose.”

Skull pulled a cell phone and said something, then clipped it back to his belt. “Get back out there and bring the money. Your men can stay where they are for all I care. You were the one who needed friendship.”

“Well, the kid didn’t shoot me so I guess I’m good.”

“You’re only as good as your money.”

“Can I have a look?”

“Step up but don’t touch until I’m counting my cash.”

Hood looked down on the missile launchers. He could smell them, metal and gun oil and solvent. The missiles themselves were in long narrow crates, one beside each launcher, all of them nestled into the wooden packing nest. “They look like puppies,” he said.

“You’re f*ckin’ weird. Get the money.”

“Roger. You’ve got the chimp in the loop?”

“He’s expecting you.”

Hood went back through the heavy doors and saluted Wampler on his way to the parking lot. He stopped near the driver’s side door and spoke through the open window. “It’s time.”

“We’re going to burn one.”

“Suit yourself.” Hood watched as Marquez held the joint up and lit it. He blew onto the lit end to get the stuff going and soon the smoke lilted into the air and began to drift out the windows. “The Stingers look new, just like they said.”

Marquez passed the dope to Reggie Cepeda, who blew on it again and Hood saw the cherry glow. He looked back to the clubhouse for Wampler but saw only darkness. He glanced at the wall. “Let’s do this,” he said.

They walked back toward the clubhouse loosely abreast, Hood in the middle with the duffel. The last time he’d carried a bag full of money it was quite a bit heavier: one million dollars ransom for the life of Erin McKenna, Bradley’s wife, to be delivered by Hood to drug lord Benjamin Armenta at his castle in Yucatán. Not much about that quest had turned out as Hood planned, though he and Erin and Bradley had lived to be haunted by those days. He remembered Mike Finnegan’s Veracruz apartment, and the wet hiss of the knife across his scalp, and now here four months later in El Centro he felt his hat rubbing against the scar along his hairline. He pulled lightly on the brim to break the contact and felt a shiver climb his back. He glanced down at his transmitter and saw the green LED. Give me luck this time. Cepeda carried the joint and faked a big inhale, then flicked it ahead of him and ground it out on the way by.