The Famous and the Dead (33 page)

L
ate that afternoon Bradley drove from Buenavista to Valley Center. With March here the days were longer and the orange trees were in bloom and the air was filled with their sweet, clean aroma. With the birth of Thomas and all of the subsequent activity, Bradley had been away for five days. He'd burned up most of his personal time and traded out two shifts. Whenever he was away from Valley Center, Clayton the forger or Stone the car thief, old friends, would stay in the ranch house, tend the dogs, keep an eye on the property.

Clayton was here now but as Bradley pulled his Cayenne up to the gate he got that something-wrong feeling in his gut. There were tire tracks in the dirt just past the gate. Several sets. So rather than punching in the code, he pushed the intercom button used by visitors. Clayton answered and Bradley could tell by the tone of his voice something was wrong.

The gate rolled open but Bradley reversed away and continued down the dirt road along the creek and past the Little Chief's property, then climbed into the oak savannah hills to the east of his home. The road became narrow and overgrown and rutted from the winter rains, but the Cayenne was nimble and strong. Bradley drove down into a meadow where the road meandered through sage and wild buckwheat and Spanish saber and he saw a small covey of quail running ahead on the dirt road. Suddenly they burst together into the air, a percussive blast of wings. He dropped the Porsche back into low, then climbed up a hillock on the far side of the meadow. Near the crest he parked and got out, leaving the engine running. He climbed the last few yards to the top and squeezed between two large boulders and looked down on his property.

Clayton's old Stingray was there, parked up by the house, shining as always. So were two LASD prowl cars and a prisoner transport van and a slick-back black Police Interceptor that was parked up near the house. Jim Warren and Miranda Dez stood near the unmarked car, Dez in her uniform. Four uniformed deputies waited on the front porch, apparently satisfied that the front door was not going to open. Clayton sat at the picnic table bench, back and head leaning against the house, hands folded on the table before him in his Zen I-don't-hear-you posture. The dogs howled from the kennel in the barn. Two more uniforms walked from the direction of the barn. Bradley's phone buzzed and Cleary's number came up.

“Jack.”

“They're on their way to Valley Center, Bradley. Search and arrest warrants signed by the judge and ready to serve.”

“I'm looking at them right now.”

“What do you need?”

“I'm okay.” Bradley called Clayton and watched him pick up and put the call on speaker. The deputies came closer, and Dez and Warren cocked their heads toward the porch.

“Brad.”

“Clay. I'm heading up to L.A. for the night. Little business to do. Can you hang another day?”

“Yeah. Everything's fine here.”

Bradley rang off and watched and waited. Dez made a call on her cell phone. Warren looked bored, toeing the gravel with his boot. The uniforms broke into pairs and circumnavigated the house, then the barn, then the casitas up by the oak glen. The beauty of warrants was that they have to serve them to your person, Bradley thought. He crept back and turned off his Cayenne and got a jacket from the back and returned to his perch between the boulders. He watched. The deputies lingered patiently through a spectacular late-winter sunset and the beginning of another cold night. They put on jackets. Finally Dez and Warren got into the Interceptor and rolled down the road. The prowl cars and van followed, and as soon as they were out of sight Clayton picked up his phone.

“Clay, I'll be going away for a while but I need some things. Power down the north gate sensors, pronto.”

•   •   •

An hour later, when he thought it was safe, Bradley backtracked through hills then picked up a good dirt road that looped around to the north perimeter of his land. There he unlocked the decommissioned gate and entered his property, then locked the gate behind him and drove slowly toward the house. In the distance he saw the lights of the barnyard, and his ranch house and Clayton's Stingray parked out front.

Upstairs in his bedroom he kept looking out the windows and checking his security monitors as he packed a suitcase and got the briefcase of cash he'd secreted away under his bed, deducted from the far greater fortune he'd sacrificed that night for Erin and Thomas. He packed a Love 32 and two full magazines between the T-shirts and the jeans, and made sure his LASD badge holder was in the pocket of his jacket. He took his letter to Erin and slid it in next to the badge holder.

In the barn he let the dogs out of their run. They yapped and leapt about and Bradley touched and said something to each one. He knelt and rubbed big Call's throat the way he liked, then stood and waved them back into the run. “Later, brutes,” he said. “I'll miss you.” He felt a thickness in his throat as he walked away and they bayed after him.

Back in the ranch house he told Clayton to stay there until he called—it would be less than one week—and to keep his cell phone on and play dumb with the Sheriff's Department. Out in the barnyard he used his satellite phone to call Herredia.

He stopped in Escondido and mailed the letter. He was nearly to the border at Tijuana when he called Erin and told her he would be gone for a while, but not long, just a few days hopefully, maybe a little longer.

“What's going on?” she asked.

“Sheriffs were all over Valley Center trying to arrest me. They'll come to you and they'll do what it takes to find me. Don't tell them anything without a lawyer in the room. Call that one down in San Diego—he's good. They can't make you testify against me. And try not to worry.”

“Not worry?” she asked quietly.

“I'm trying to do the right thing for you and Thomas.”

“Was burning everything just a show?”

“It was to show you what you mean to me.”

“What do you want?”

“Clayton's at home keeping an eye on things. You and Thomas can go there as soon as you're ready. You're safe from Mike now. Valley Center is your home and your property, Erin. Yours. Take it. Continue your life there. Make your music and love your son and give me a chance. Please give me a chance.”

“When will we see you again?”

“You'll get a letter in a day or two. Please believe what it says.”

She clicked off.

H
ood watched Mike through the one of the grates. The grates were made of welded wrought iron, with heavy lids that slid open and locked shut with a penitential clang. There was one in a spare bedroom and one in the living room under an end table and one outside, flush with the concrete slab of the carport. The Mexican ironmonger who built the grates had the blood of Spanish and Moorish craftsmen in him, so his work was not only profoundly strong, but had an exotic Arabesque flourish. The grates were roughly the size and shape of the large, old-fashioned heater vents and because of this—and the vault soundproofing that Hood had installed months ago—he hoped they would not draw undue attention.

They had carried the still-unmoving Mike Finnegan down the stairs and placed him on the floor faceup in the largest room of the wine cellar, alongside the coffee table that sat in front of the sofa. Not willing to chance a surprise escape, they had left him bound in the angel hair, weed cloth, duct tape, and chain link, with the heavy-duty fasteners still in place. Mike did not appear to be breathing, and Hood detected no warmth at all when he placed the palm of his hand over Mike's forehead. Beatrice assured everyone that Mike was in the pink. Forty-eight hours later he had still not moved and Hood had no visual proof that he was breathing or even alive.

Hood looked down into the vault: one secondhand floral-print sofa, two mismatched upholstered thrift-store chairs, a colonial-looking coffee table. There were shelves with a TV and DVD player that would play music CDs as well. No computer, of course. A few books and movies, some music. A wine rack with several bottles. There was a kitchen off to one side but no oven or stove, though it was plumbed for hot and cold water. Just a microwave and a small refrigerator, a set of plastic plates, bowls, flatware, and cups, one roll of paper towels. He could not see them from here but there was a good-size bedroom and a bathroom adjacent to the living area below, both visible from inside his house. There was central heat and AC.

By the middle of the third day nothing had visibly changed with Mike. He had not moved. Hood's dreams since Mike's arrival were vividly terrifying. He'd wake up throwing punches, shouting, sweating. Skinned knuckles, a broken bed-stand lamp, a shattered picture.

Now Hood dozed on a patio chair in the shade of the carport. The day was warm. Daisy napped fitfully beside him. She had been subdued and pining for Minnie, which reminded Hood of Beth, with whom he talked daily. Erin spent most of her hours with Thomas and her guitar and a portable keyboard, locked away in her bedroom writing. Hood could hear her from almost anywhere in the house, faint snippets of melody and lyrics. She came out with Thomas and sat with Hood a few times each day, then headed back for naps. Reyes, less needed now that Hood was here full-time, dropped by and spent most of his time talking with Beatrice. Beatrice cooked and ate and watched TV and borrowed Erin's car for increasingly long trips to unspecified places. She had gained nineteen pounds in less than a week and her skin was no longer alabaster white but a subtle rosy color. She bought larger clothes, and personal items and cheap jewelry. On the third day of Mike's incarceration she was picked up by a woman she introduced only as “Joan,” and they set out for El Centro. She returned alone around two o'clock in a white Cube with Castro Ford plate holders and the pink slip that went with it. The large back cargo area was stuffed floor-to-ceiling with groceries.

Late on the third day, just before sunset, Hood was still sitting under the carport when he saw Mike's chest rising and falling. Hood heard a faint wheezing and noted that Mike's mouth hung slightly open now. An hour later Mike's head lolled to one side.

After dark, Hood put on a knit watch cap and a down jacket and got his one-million-candlepower floodlight and an extension cord. He aimed the ferocious beam through the grate at Mike's face. His head had lolled the other way. By midnight his eyes were cracked open. Soon his shoulders began to roll in a strange and rhythmic way and this went on for almost two hours. It looked to Hood like Mike was trying to scratch and itch or get his circulation going.

Around two o'clock Hood heard two startling wet cracks and Mike stopped moving. Then Mike craned his head hard to the right and over the next twenty minutes his left shoulder rotated one direction, then the other, rolling and rolling in ever larger circles. Finally it rose out of the encasement to rest flush against his cheek. Then the elbow popped out from the mesh, and the rest of his left arm flopped free. Mike was breathing hard. He craned his neck to the left and brought up his disjointed right shoulder and labored to free it, too. He wriggled and grunted and yelped. The shoulder and arm finally escaped. He wriggled more. When his body was free to the waist, Mike lay still and within a minute or two his breathing slowed to almost normal.

Then, one at a time, he shrugged the balls of his shoulders back into their sockets, drew the reconstituted joints up against his scapulars, and jackknifed himself into a sitting position. He was panting again by then but he unfastened the straps around his waist and legs and struggled out of the fencing material. He stripped off the duct tape and weed guard. By then he seemed weakened and Hood wondered if it was because of the newly exposed ropes of Beatrice's hair. Mike untied the ropes one at a time, deliberately, fumbling like a drunk to complete the simple task. But he stuck with it and had the strength left to coil and throw the hairy bonds to the other side of the room. Just after four o'clock he lay back in his red swim trunks and turned his face into the beam of Hood's light. He opened his eyes. “Owens,” he whispered.

“Yes,” said Hood.

“I was a fool. Our greatest weakness. Becoming sentimentally attached.” Mike wiped his eyes with both hands, then let them drop back to the concrete floor. He sighed deeply and lay still for a long while. “Can you take the light off my eyes, please?”

Hood turned away the spotlight.

“First, Charlie, I'll need newspapers and periodicals and plenty of books. History, science, philosophy, social commentary, biography, poetry, and top-flight fiction.”

“Nothing until you stop the dreams.”

“Grim, aren't they? Agreed for now. Actually, an electronic reader would be cost-effective.”

“No. You'd find a way to exploit it.”

“I trust there are lights down here.”

“Everything you need is down there.”

When the cellar lights came on, Mike was standing by the wall with his hand still on the switch. “How long are you planning to keep up this nonsense?”

“Forever. I'll have a younger replacement lined up before I die. And so on.”

“This won't look good on your résumé.”

“Nothing much does.”

“But you rounded up that simpleton with the missiles, now, didn't you?”

“He pretty much captured himself.”

“I'm open to negotiation, Charlie.”

“I'm not.”

“Just you and me?”

“Looks that way.”

“Beth?”

“Back home.”

“Bradley?”

“In the wind. Warrants issued, posse formed.”

“Erin and my beloved Thomas?”

“Temporarily here. He's not yours, Mike. And he never will be.”

“Going to move in on Erin while she's vulnerable?”

“She's tied to Bradley whether she wants to be or not.”

“Charlie. Charlie. You are a good and honest and staggeringly disappointing man. I know full well what you feel for her. Whatever happened to the
take, take, take
that marks your human race? What happened to
you
, Charlie Hood?”

“I'll get what I want, Mike.”

“But the odds are good that our beautiful Dr. Petty has already broken it off with you. Correct? She can't sit back and allow a fellow human being to be kept in a dungeon by her boyfriend. A violation of her Hippocratic Oath, just for starters. No. That won't play in her hot little movie house.”

“I've got you, Mike. Right now, you're what I want.”

“We'll see how long that lasts! Is that Beatrice's hair you bound me with? It certainly has her stunning aroma.”

“Yes.”

“She's long gone by now, knowing her.”

“I think she's about to be.”

Mike took a deep breath and dragged the ropes of hair over to the media hutch. He held his breath as he stuffed them into the bottom and slammed it shut. “You know we had a quake storm here just last month. Have you given any thought to seismic activity?”

“Some.”

“Then you know the Yuma/Alvarado Fault runs right through here, between us and Buenavista. It's larger than they think, and very, very overdue.”

“In geologic time. It could hold for hundreds of years. Thousands. And when it goes, it might free you and it might not.”

“I guarantee you that Imperial County building codes are no match for the Yuma/Alvarado.”

“Then we're both taking our chances.”

Mike walked over and stood directly below the grate. With his foot he pushed away the roll of chain link, then looked up at Hood. He looked tiny and far away in his red swim trunks, a man easily contained by the walls around him and by the world beyond the walls and by the night beyond the world.

Then he squatted and sprang straight up and latched himself upside down and flylike to the grate. His white hands clenched the filigree and his feet clung to the ceiling, and he pressed his face hard against the iron. Hood hopped back a step. Mike's blue eyes peered at him from behind the thick iron. Hood saw the red stubble on his cheek. Mike was smiling rigidly and his breath was short and sharp. “Your walls cannot contain me, Charlie! And neither can the world or the night beyond the world. I will haunt your life and the life of your children and their children, and so on and so forth, forever and always, to the close of the age.”

Mike hissed something in a language Hood didn't recognize, then let go. Hood stepped forward and watched him fall with his arms out and his knees flexed—ending the fifteen-foot fall lightly as a gymnast. Mike glanced up with pride, then brushed his hands together and went to the media center where he patiently studied the selections before putting a DVD into the player. Then he got the remote off the coffee table and lowered himself onto the couch. “
Manhunter
,” he said. “I love this movie. That scene in the grocery store. The pictures in Will's head are much like your dreams, Charlie.”