The Famous and the Dead

53



Six days later, Bradley called Hood and told him he was back home at Valley Center. He said they needed to talk—now—use the gate code from the other night, Charlie. Hood heard a rare doubtful waver in Bradley’s voice, then he heard the clatter of the phone hitting something hard, and an explosion so loud it turned to static, then another. Gunning his Charger down the dirt road, Hood called the Valley Center Sheriff Substation.

When he got there, three San Diego County fire companies and a half dozen sheriff’s cruisers littered the barnyard and two helos hovered low over the hills. The barn was a smoking, blackened husk. Bradley lay sprawled faceup on the floor near the quad runners, most of his face and head gone and his entire body badly burnt. A semiautomatic pistol lay close by. And a cell phone. And a steel military-style fuel can lay scorched in the rubble. Hood recognized Bradley’s roasted leather duster and the remnants of the same fancy shirt and boots he’d worn the night he’d renounced his life of crime. Now he was a scorched corpse with a face that had collapsed into the violently emptied space behind it. Hood figured two shotgun blasts. At least. Armenta’s soldiers, catching up with him? Herredia’s enemies here in California, finding him out? Or something Hood might know nothing about—an old score now settled?

Back outside he leaned against his car in the good sun and looked out at the oak tree and the house and the pond. He wondered at the journey that had begun here and pulled him and others through their lives and had now brought him back to this death. A cool breeze hit him and he understood that it would blow through here for centuries unending and he hoped this bloody smudge of history and the people who lived it would not be erased and forgotten. Bradley Jones had been twenty-two years old.