The Famous and the Dead

50



Two mornings later Hood, burrowed like a dog into the cold mud bank of Piru Creek beneath the overhang of a willow, shivered in the darkness. He could see the roofline of Mike’s cottage a hundred yards away, and the pale smoke rising steadily from the river-rock chimney. A rooster crowed to the north and Hood checked his watch: thirty-five minutes to sunrise.

Upstream where it ran behind the cottage, the creek gurgled and splashed through a rocky riffle. But then the water widened and deepened into a quiet pool nearly thirty feet long and fifteen wide. At the far downstream end of the pool stood several large boulders that formed a spillway through which the creek tumbled impatiently into a lower, narrower channel. Across from the boulders Hood was buried in the bank near the end of the pool, under the willow. Owens had said this pool was where Mike lingered longest—submerged, weighted, and masked—observing and sometimes taking pictures of the fish and insects. The boulders at the end of the pool were where he usually climbed out. One of the rocks was large and flat enough for Mike to sun himself on, in hot months. He never wore a wetsuit. Hood could see this pale rock in the darkness and he guessed it was no more than twenty feet away.

He looked out at the surface of the water, broad shifting concavities of black and silver. He felt unfamiliar to himself. He had a gun but no authority to use it, no badge. He still felt as if he were in law enforcement but he knew that he was nothing now but a mud-caked creature with a grievance.

He listened to the rooster and let his thoughts and memories roll past unexamined. More and more these days Hood enjoyed engaging the world as if he were not in it. He wondered if a light sink-tip fly-line would be a good way to catch the fish in this deeper pool. Maybe cast cross-stream from above the pool head and give it a mend and let it swing with the current, sinking. This was the kind of thing his father never tired of talking about, and in fact Douglas had been a very good angler in his day. Going through some of his father’s things out in their Bakersfield garage after the memorial service, Hood and one of his sisters had found a heavy magazine-shaped journal with forty years of Douglas’s fishing notes and sketches. The cover of the journal was leather and carved with a jumping trout. The notes were written in Douglas’s unmistakable half-printed, half-cursive hand, developed in his early years as a drafting student. The drawings were clear and simple—water flow, structure, location of fish, cast direction and drift, etc. He remembered the look on Julie’s face: You should hang on to this, Charlie.

Gradually the light coalesced and Hood could see the far bank and the willows and the upstream riffle. Smoke continued to waft out of the chimney. Apparently Mike had either gotten up during the night, or stayed up for most of it to tend the fire. Birds called, still deep in the trees and bushes, their songs meek and tentative on this cold winter morning. He looked at his watch again. Owens said that Mike was in the water just after sunrise during summer and early fall, but not until around eight A.M. during cold weather. Two hours, Hood thought.

He unbuttoned his coat and checked the Taser gun, body warm and dry in its holster. It was an X26c, modeled after the police-grade weapon, with fifteen-foot conductive wires and eighteen watts of what Taser called “Electro-Muscular Disruption” (EMD) technology. Hood learned that bare wet skin would provide enhanced “Neuromuscular Incapacitation” (NMI) according to the Taser tech adviser, who also suggested sharpening the probes with carbide #8 sandpaper for increased penetration and hold.

Hood shifted within his half burrow, hoping to get the circulation back in his right foot. He’d worn full-length thermal underwear and wool socks and a good down jacket and his waterproof Red Wings, but his feet felt colder than in the snowstorm in Washington, D.C. He sipped the still-hot coffee from his insulated container, and dug some granola bars and an apple and string cheese from one of his coat pockets. He watched the house.

Just after eight, Hood heard a screen door rap shut and he saw Mike walk onto the back deck of his cottage. He wore red shorts and red rubber spa sandals, a short blue jacket with the collar turned up. He brought a mug of coffee to his mouth and looked out toward the Hopper Mountains. He took a call on his cell phone and listened for more than a minute, before speaking briefly and punching off. Hood shivered but hardly moved until Mike had gone back inside.

A moment later the screen door tapped shut again; Mike was back, barefoot and without the jacket. A diving mask with a snorkel rested just above his forehead, a pair of blue swim fins dangled from one hand, and what looked like a camera swung by a lanyard on his other wrist. He placed an orange-and-yellow beach towel over the railing. Strapped around his stout pale middle was a wide belt with weights spaced evenly around it, several inches apart.

He came down the steps and looked out again at the mountains, then turned downstream and stared directly at Hood. Hood remained motionless and watched through the dense willow branches that enclosed him. He wondered if Mike would be able to read his thoughts from underwater when he got closer. It didn’t seem likely, given the reflective qualities of the surface water, and unless Mike was expecting someone during his morning swim in the remote solitude of Piru Creek. And even if he sensed someone nearby, maybe it would be too late by then—maybe the current would have already delivered him to within Hood’s take-down range of fifteen feet.

Mike came down the wooden steps and stepped into the grass. His legs were stubby and muscular and tinted with red hair. His torso was powerful and compact. His head, which always seemed large, was now exaggerated by the mask and snorkel. He walked down to the waterline and stood on one leg while pulling on one swim fin, then the other. When the fins were on, he lifted the mask off and spit onto the glass and knelt while he dipped the mask in the river and worked his fingers over the surface. Again he looked downstream to Hood. Then he settled the mask over his face and took the snorkel in his mouth and waded in. He shivered and squealed like a little boy as he lowered himself into the river. By the time he reached midstream his body had sunk beneath Hood’s vision. Hood watched the white snorkel with its orange tip slowly coming downstream.

It looked to Hood that Mike was taking his time, probably bracing his hands on the rocks to slow his speed. Must be cold, he thought. He remembered his father saying that most fish would wait until the sun was on the water to feed when the days were short and the weather was cold. So maybe Mike was photographing the still lethargic trout before they became too skittish. An Internet search had told him that Piru Creek was running at fifty-one degrees. He wondered how Mike could stand the cold with no wetsuit, but Hood had experienced Mike’s physical strength and it was remarkable.

Hood gradually worked his feet and legs free of the mud and rose to his knees and brought the Taser from under his coat. He checked the probes, which were clear of debris and shiny-rough where he had sanded the sharp points sharper. Crouching within the curtain of willow branches he released the safety and tested the laser sight along the mud bank beside him. He looked to the middle of the pool and saw the snorkel tilting left, then right, then back again, lazily making its way toward him.

He rose and climbed the low embankment behind him, then came back to the shore ten yards farther downstream, near the big boulders that framed the tail out of the pool. He crouched behind one and waited. The orange tip of the snorkel wobbled casually in its slow progress. Soon he could hear the faint sound of breathing over the rush of the water—long, hollow intakes followed by wet exhalations as Mike inched along. Then the snorkel stopped and it was still, and Hood saw a muted silver flash beneath the water. The camera, he thought. Then slowly again the snorkel came his way. Another flash. Another few feet. When the snorkel came near the boulders it grew in length from two inches to nearly a foot, and Hood saw the white bulk of Mike’s body rising through the dark water, then the back of his head and the strap of the mask, and then Mike was standing thigh deep in the creek looking through the glass at Hood. He spit out the snorkel. “Oh. Charlie.”

Hood shot him in the middle of his chest. There was a fizzing electrical crack as the probes delivered the electricity. Bradley burst from behind another boulder with two hands extended and discharged both of his Taser guns into Mike’s back and Hood saw the wires flashing in the young sunlight. Mike arched and grimaced but he was still upright, bleeding and sparking where the darts hooked his wet flesh. He growled viciously and his body spasmed. Behind the mask his eyes were wide and fixed on Hood. But with the clumsy swim fins still strapped to his feet, he could neither attack nor retreat, which left him rocking precariously on the slick boulders. Reyes barged out from behind a large black cottonwood and was practically on top of Mike before sending another set of electrical spikes into his thigh, the barbs sparking in the wet nylon of the swimsuit and the wires jumping crazily with current.

Mike quaked and slipped and crashed onto the boulders, hitting his head hard and knocking off the mask. The electrodes shorted out. The three men jumped in and held him under. His strength was great, but in the weakening seizures Hood could feel that Mike was not equal to them and the weights he wore and the numbing cold of the creek and the powerful volts of muscle-stunning electricity he had just endured. Five minutes after his struggling ceased they dragged him to the bank where Beatrice had already laid out, like fence railings, the five ropes that Bradley had made of her hair. They lifted and set him crosswise upon the ropes while Reyes reloaded his Taser gun and sent a fresh charge into Mike’s unconscious body. Beatrice had to stumble away, weakened by Mike’s proximity. “But he feels me, too,” she said. “And he’ll continue to feel me as long as my hair is his prison!”

Bradley wrestled Mike’s shoulders off the ground and Hood very tightly looped one of the ropes around his chest and arms, three times, then knotted it. Hood could tell its strength. Then they wrapped and tied Mike’s belly and waist, trapping his arms and hands against his sides. Then his knees and ankles. The angel-hair ropes were nearly twelve feet long, providing enough wraps to nearly mummify Mike. Still he had not opened his eyes or made a sound. Hood pulled off the swim fins and threw them up on the bank. Reyes slid a needle into Mike’s blue-cold forearm and slowly injected the sedative that one of his doctor friends had recommended, though at ten times the usual dose. Beatrice came sliding down the muddy embankment with a roll of weed-guard fabric, which was light and strong and was sold in a four-by-ten-feet rectangle ideal for this application. They packaged Mike in it, using his weight and the slight downward slope of the embankment to roll him tight, and duct tape to seal him in.

Bradley braked down the bank dragging a roll of rubber-coated chain link. They were all panting by now and their breaths made vapor in the morning air, but they managed to flatten the chain link and work Mike onto it. They grunted and heaved and used their numbers to roll him back up the embankment three times, cinching the chain link as tight as they could with each rotation. Then they affixed the heavy-duty rubber fasteners, seven in all, with shiny stainless-steel hooks at each end. Hood braced his feet and pulled with both hands to stretch them as far as he could before setting the hooks in the mesh.

A moment later the men bore Mike lengthwise on their shoulders like a canoe and Beatrice led the way along a trail in the brush to Reyes’s brother’s Denali. It was nearly a mile walk, uphill. Beatrice talked to herself for several minutes while devouring energy bars, and Hood realized she was praying. Then she started humming. Mike was surprisingly heavy, even considering all of the material that enclosed him.

Hood was puzzled to hear himself laughing quietly as they walked, and he blamed it on the danger and stress. But then Bradley and Reyes began laughing, too, the same low-down, satisfied laugh, containing not only relief but wonder and fear. They loaded Mike into the back of the SUV and covered him with a heavy green tarp.

“May I sit up front?” asked Beatrice.