Iron River

2

Charlie Hood lay on the roof of Guns a Million and aimed the video recorder down into the back parking lot. Behind him the bright yellow letters of the store sign flashed on and off in the close desert night. Hood could hear the lights buzzing and the electrical switches clicking and see the air around him pulsing yellow. He figured the roof would be hot so he had bought a bright Mexican blanket with the shape of an Aztec warrior woven into it and folded it twice for padding against the infernally hot gravel.

Sean Ozburn drove up right on time and pulled his white panel van into a space in the back lot. There were other cars but most of the Guns a Million customers had parked out front, a shorter walk in the heat. Hours were ten A.M. to midnight, six days a week, and Hood, in his two days so far here in Buenavista, had never seen fewer than six cars out front.

The van lights went off and Ozburn stepped out. Hood zoomed in. Ozburn was a big ATFE buck with blond hair to his shoulders and blue, hateful eyes. He wore jeans and a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off to show his arms and tatts. His supremacist’s air was a solid act, Hood thought. Hood was on loan to Operation Blowdown from the L.A. Sheriff’s Department, and he’d been immediately impressed by the ATFE’s courage and black humor in the face of bad odds. The border here was awash in guns, the Iron River, they called it, and ATFE and their task force brethren like Hood were just rafts bobbing upon the great current of firearms headed south. Hood saw that the ATFE agents worked their muscles strong and got good with their weapons. They lived on adrenaline and heat, and they prayed for luck. Hood was glad to be a part of them.

Ozburn leaned against the van and lit a cheroot. He was wired for sound and set to buy six weapons from an unlicensed dealer named Joe Tilley. Tilley was a part-time employee of Guns a Million and he said guns and money were two things not unusual in the back parking lot of his store. Ozburn had complained about the public setting, but Tilley prevailed. Tilley said the Buenavista PD was nothing and the feds were concentrating on Arizona and besides, Guns a Million was on a quiet outskirt of town. Tilley had promised two Mossberg combat 12-gauges, two Smith.357 Magnum autoloaders, a Phoenix Arms.22, and a Raven Arms.25. All were used and in good condition.

Hood had learned that six weapons weren’t enough to justify the arrest of a low-level crook like Tilley, even though most guns entered Mexico just a few at a time, contrabando hormigas, the Mexicans called it: contraband of the ants. For now, the task force team would focus on the video and audio evidence. Ozburn and his superiors had set a magic number, and Tilley’s was twenty. If the six went down right, they’d contract for twenty, then pinch him and try to trade him upline to his suppliers. Hopefully, his suppliers were his employers at the store. The big prize was the licensed dealers who bought and sold legally, then got greedy or made a mistake. These guys were capable of quantity: thirty, fifty, even a hundred guns at a time.

Hood rested on his elbows and felt the gravel trying to get him through the blanket. Ozburn had told him that gun buys could go from boring to violent in the blink of an eye, so Hood wanted an edge but not too much of one. Weapons freebooters like Tilley were generally considered higher risk than drug runners-unpredictable, amply armed, often skilled in the use of their products. This was their first buy from him.

Hood panned the camcorder from the peak of the Guns a Million roof. He saw the tow truck with the blackout windows that housed Agent Bly, parked on a diagonal across three spaces in the far corner of the back lot, closer to a Dairy Queen than to the gun store. It had the look of an operator on a dinner run.

Then he saw the Dumpster that was temporary home to the unlucky Jimmy Holdstock. It stood behind the store near the two real trash bins. Known as Hell on Wheels, it was clean and outfitted with holes for ventilation, vision, and taping, and with padding to dampen sound. But the holes were no match for the border heat. Young Holdstock had gotten the Hell on Wheels gig by losing a game of butts ’n barrels to Janet Bly. The game was like spin the bottle but played with a handgun. A small parabolic mike fed into a recorder that sat on the padded floor, and the concave receiver dish just barely cleared the top through a cutaway. The plastic lid had been drilled with a three-quarter-inch bit and had padding at the contact points to muffle the exit if Holdstock threw open the lid and charged. These modifications had been done over beers and a boom box in Holdstock’s El Centro garage while Jimmy’s daughters splashed in the yard pool and his wife, Jenny, kept an eye on both activities. For transport, the Dumpster fit nicely onto Bly’s tow truck.

Tilley came in ten minutes later, cruised the lot in his blue Trooper, stopped beside the tow truck and hit it with a mounted handheld searchlight. Hood tracked the bright circle as it moved across the cab window, then stopped on the windshield. Then the beam raked the back end of the DQ, turned to the Guns a Million, and came up the roof at Hood. He flattened and wriggled down a couple of feet, almost dropping the camcorder. His sidearm dug into his ribs, but the blanket saved his cheek from the gravel. When he crept to the peak again, the Trooper was pulling in slowly beside Sean Ozburn’s van and he zoomed in to get a good shot of Tilley as he stepped out.

Tilley was squat and muscular, with a black T-shirt and an Orioles baseball cap. Hood guessed late thirties. He had a wallet chain and a knife on his belt, and biker’s boots with brass rings on the sides.

Hood could hear his voice as he approached Ozburn, but the words weren’t clear. Tilley looked pissed off. Ozburn was looking around like a hunted man. His eyes looked weirdly blue and murderous. Hood admired the acting.

The two men made their way to the back of the Trooper, and Tilley swung open the back doors. The back of the vehicle had been outfitted with sliding wooden drawers. Tilley pulled one out and Hood saw the shotguns gleaming dully in the lot lights.

Hood’s heart caught when a second man hopped out of the Trooper. He was slender and young and he wore a trim black suit, a white shirt, and a tie. Hood guessed the guy’s age at twenty-five. A damned suit in this heat, he thought. Buttoned.

Ozburn got loud, lumbered over and gave him a shove. The young man backed up lightly and his suit coat fell open and his hand went inside. Hood heard Ozburn’s curses. Tilley stepped between them with his hands placating, and Ozburn pushed him, too. Then he turned and went back to the drawers of shotguns. He looked down at the guns, then up at the men, and he shook his head. Hood tried to read his lips through the camcorder. It looked like: Let’s do business, assholes.

Enough, thought Hood. Close the deal. We’ve got audio and video, and Tilley is good for a bigger payday.

Tilley slid the sawed-offs into an old duffel bag and carried them to the van. Ozburn stood by the open back door with the cigar in his mouth, watching the guns go in. While they worked, Tilley seemed to be telling Ozburn something long and detailed, a joke or a story maybe. Ozburn handed him a wad of money. Black Suit stood a few feet away, scanning the lot.

Tilley went back to the Trooper and bagged up more product. Hood couldn’t make them out, but they were handguns. Tilley was still jabbering away, like the deal had suddenly become minor and what was really important was what he had to say. Hood guessed he was talking about the next deal. Good.

Ozburn gave Tilley another wad of bills, then slammed the van doors shut. Tilley worked the money into his jeans pocket and walked back to the Trooper. The young man in the black suit closed the doors, and the three men stood facing each other in the poor light of the parking lot.

Hood saw that all three men were more relaxed now. There was a postgame feel in their postures, and Ozburn seemed to be telling some tale of his own. He reached out and straightened the young man’s necktie.

Then Black Suit stepped forward and pulled at something on the chest of Ozburn’s flannel shirt. Tit for tat, thought Hood. It looked like a button string unraveling.

Then it caught the light and Hood realized what it was.

Black Suit gave it a yank and the wire lengthened.

Hood knew that this was where they either killed Ozburn or ran for it. They ran for it: Tilley barging through the hedge of spindly oleander and off into the darkness, and Black Suit right past the tow truck and into the DQ lot. Ozburn spat out his cigar and went after Tilley, and Hood slid down the back side of the Guns a Million rooftop, dangled from the service ladder, and dropped hard to the pavement.

He followed Ozburn and Tilley. From the corner of his eye he saw Bly jump from the tow truck with her weapon drawn and Holdstock pinwheel over the top of the bin like a gymnast and run toward Bly.

Hood left his weapon holstered, tucked his elbows in tight and made time. Past the oleander was one of the large vacant lots common to desert towns, vast, for sale, lumped with sage and cholla in the slight moonlight. Beyond the lot was a stout adobe wall and within the wall was old Buenavista-the town square, the bars and restaurants and the hotel. And beyond the heart of the city was the border fence.

Big Ozburn plodded along a hundred yards ahead of Hood. Hood couldn’t see Tilley. When he pulled up even, Ozburn pointed and Hood saw Tilley another hundred yards ahead, coming up on the wall.

A few seconds later Hood scrambled gracelessly over the rough adobe and plopped down into the town square. There were lanterns in the trees and a fountain gurgling and lovers walking and sitting on the benches, the women sleek and the white shirts of the men faintly luminescent. Through them barged Tilley, then he rounded the statue of Buenavista’s founder and turned up the street toward the restaurants.

Hood gained. The street was narrow and steep and the desert cobblestones were uneven. He heard Ozburn huffing along behind him and he felt the sweat burning into his eyes. He saw the crowd breaking up ahead of him, parted by stout Tilley. Hood ran past an ice cream shop and a festively lit bar and a leather shop and a jewelry store, though he was barely aware of them.

At the first intersection, Black Suit appeared from a side street and fell in next to Tilley. Both men looked back at Hood, and when he saw Black Suit reach inside his coat, Hood dove behind a decorative clay planter filled with succulents and yelled back at Ozburn to get down. A little bullet grazed the planter and ricocheted, buzzing like a fat hornet. A twenty-two, thought Hood. He heard a sharp crack, and another bullet took a chip off a paver and whined off into the darkness.

Then there was silence, and Hood looked through the succulents and saw the empty street ahead. He drew his sidearm and came up running.

Bly and Holdstock merged from the side street. Ozburn caught up with the other three, muttering curses, a big automatic in his hand. They followed the gunrunners through an outdoor marketplace that was shutting down, dodging stalls of Coachella Valley dates and Imperial Valley grapefruit. The shoppers were gone by now, but the vendors ducked quickly and efficiently because they had seen this kind of thing before. Up ahead, one of the bad guys upturned a table of cantaloupe, which rolled toward Hood, but he long-jumped them and saw that he was catching up. The gunrunners took to the sidewalk that ran behind a colonnade of rounded arches facing the street. Hood heard music. Near the top of the gentle hill that Buenavista was built upon, the road ended in a large open square ringed by restaurants and bars. There were tables with white linen set up in the patios of the restaurants and there were horses tethered to hitching posts amidst the gleaming sports cars and SUVs and luxury sedans.

As Hood entered the square the music was louder, a disco tune throbbing from Club Fandango at the far end. Ahead of him he watched Tilley and Black Suit shove through the small crowd waiting to get into the club. The revelers hustled away under the protective archway columns of the colonnade and the gunrunners disappeared inside.

Hood figured they were headed out the back into an alley, so he ran left around the building. He saw Ozburn split off the other way, and Bly and Holdstock heading straight in.

Behind the building was another dining patio, quieter here, tables lit by candlelight, and a fountain gurgling. Hood leaped the short adobe wall and waved his hand for the young couple to get up and out. They scrambled over the wall and headed off into the darkness.

Then Hood was aware of two new things at once: Black Suit and Tilley heaving toward him through the open back doors of the building, and a young teenaged couple rising from their table in the private far corner of the patio. The boy held the girl’s hand in an elevated, courtly way. The girl looked frightened, but the boy looked cool. Hood waved them to his left and the boy nodded to him, steadying his date toward the short wall.

Ozburn rounded the building just as Black Suit and Tilley burst onto the patio from inside, and Ozburn yelled, Drop the guns! Tilley dropped his weapon. Hood set Black Suit’s chest atop his front sight and waited for him to drop his pistol. Black Suit was deciding when three shots roared from inside and the young dealer collapsed in a dark heap.

Tilley was jumping up and down, hands up: Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!

Bly and Holdstock stumbled through the open doors and fell into shooter stances.

In the abrupt silence, a girl screamed from the darkness beyond the wall.