The Famous and the Dead

19



Clint Wampler was not at his station. Hood’s heart sped up. As they approached he peered hard into the darkness on either side of the clubhouse doors but saw no movement or glimmer of gun or flash of bandage. “The lookout’s gone,” he said. “The young guy.” They climbed the stone steps to the covered landing and still Hood couldn’t see Wampler. There was still the weak light coming from between the big double doors. He looked at each of the men and they nodded and Marquez unbuttoned his sport coat. Hood rapped hard on the door. “Money talks.”

“Bring her in!” Skull called.

“Where’s the kid?”

“What do you care?”

“I want to know why he’s not out here.”

“Because I’m in here, you dumb turd! Show us the money!”

“I like the kid where I can see him,” said Hood.

“Then we’ll sell these babies to someone else,” said Skull.

“We’re coming in.” Hood took a deep breath and pushed through the heavy doors. In the brittle light of the lantern he saw that the crates were no longer open on the cable spool but leaning up against it, closed. Then all he saw was wrong movement: Skull and Peltz raising their weapons as their shadows mimed them from the ceiling, Clint Wampler springing in from the darkness beyond the lantern light, racking his shotgun.

“Police!” yelled Skull. “You are under arrest! Police! Put your hands up! Good! Up! And keep them there, you cartel beaners!”

Hood’s hands were high. “I’m Charlie Hooper, ATF. We’re all federal agents, Dirk. Put the guns down. You’re cops? Then we have a big misunderstanding.”

“Yeah, and the cavalry is coming.”

“Don’t turn it into a Steven Spielberg movie,” said Hood.

“The f*ck are you talking about?” said Wampler. “How come you said that?”

Skull squinted at Hood. Then, pistol still in hand, he gathered up two of the crates with his free arm. Peltz let go of the shotgun, which swung on its sling as he took up the second launcher and missile.

“Dirk Sculler,” said Hood. “Be cool now. We’re ATF. We’ve got our badges out in the cars. We’re stinging you and you’re stinging us. Guns down. Guns down. None of us wants to get shot over something like this.”

“For nothing like this!” said Wampler. “Don’t move or even dream about it.” He scuttled in and squatted to snatch up the money, smiling up the barrel of his shotgun at Hood.

“I’m Marquez, ATF L.A.”

“Cepeda, ATF L.A.”

“I’m Jesse James,” said Skull, sweeping by them with his gun still pointed at Hood’s chest. “See you later, you wetback greasers.”

Peltz and Wampler covered the agents as Skull put his pistol hand to the doorknob and pulled, keeping an eye on Hood. In the newly opened rectangle of night, Hood saw Yorth charging toward them with his sidearm drawn, Bly wide to the left and Velasquez to the right. Behind him, Marquez launched into Brock Peltz, who crashed hard into the door. Skull dropped his crates and was gone. Hood swept the pistol from under his coattail and went after him. From inside the clubhouse Hood heard a shotgun roar twice.

Skull was heavy but strong and he muscled through the darkness step for step ahead of Hood. Near the wall he stopped and fired three rounds that whirred past Hood’s head. Hood went down, rolled over his hat, then popped upright again without ever stopping. Skull climbed the wall, turned and fired off two more rounds, then scrambled over. Hood made the wall and ran along it for fifty feet before he jumped it. He landed flat and hard and he could see that Skull had lost sight of him. The cop started across the street. A car swerved and the driver cursed furiously as Skull lumbered into the park-and-ride lot. Hood sprinted with all he had. His two-toned brogans were poor running shoes but his legs were long and he could see that Skull was slowing. He crossed the street without traffic and sprinted past Yorth’s and Bly’s cars. Skull ran to the edge of the dimly lighted parking lot and charged off into the darkness of a cotton field.

Now only the quarter moon showed Hood his way, but Skull’s heavy breathing drew him closer. Hood could see him out ahead, plodding heavily between the rows. The cotton pods were just dabs of light in the broader darkness. Hood stayed a hundred feet back and a few rows over, keeping Skull’s pace while the man tired. “Hey, Dirk—you can’t outrun me and you’ve got no friends out here. Why not just drop the gun and we’ll rest up a minute and head back? See what all the commotion was about.”

He dropped to one knee behind a cotton plant just as Skull’s pistol burped orange and a round whistled well to Hood’s left and overhead. Then another round badly off to his right.

“We really are ATF, Dirk.”

“I really wish you weren’t.” He had stopped and bent over, resting his hands on his knees, breathing hard. Sirens whined. “Me and the boys had a good thing going. Now I’m either going to get shot or arrested.”

“Go with arrested, man!”

“Naw.” Skull huffed upright and cupped his pistol in two hands and fired two more wild rounds, then he turned and barreled off down the crop row. Hood pushed off and followed. He saw two vehicles, light bars flashing, screaming down the street toward Buckboard Estates. Out ahead of him, Skull began to weave in and out of the cotton plants and Hood could hear the brittle snaps of the branches breaking. He couldn’t get much closer without high risk of getting himself shot. Skull crashed through another plant and got himself realigned with a row and he pointed his gun behind him without stopping or turning and sent a bullet that cracked not inches from Hood’s left ear. Hood pulled up and drew down. Skull’s big body lurched in and out of his sights. “Drop the gun! Drop the gun, Dirk! I am going to shoot you!” Skull fired again without looking, then ran a brief, steady course and Hood heard him braying for air as he crashed through the cotton. Hood closed the distance easily, too easily, he thought, when Skull stopped and turned. Hood dropped into a shooter’s crouch and held steady on Skull’s big trunk. “Drop the gun, Dirk. Be smart for once in your life.”

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 f*ckers, 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.