A Bryco for Stevens of Alpine.

More likely the Zetas had grabbed him and used his own car to take him across. If that was true, Hood thought, then he was probably beheaded by now and someone would find his body in one place and his head in another, and the Iron River would have swept away another life. The cartels had never come north to grab a U.S. lawman. Now they had accomplished what before they had never dared. The old rules were gone. The word unraveling came to Hood’s mind. He saw the ends of fresh-cut ropes twisting in a bitter wind.

A Winchester for Lopez of L.A.

A Lorcin for Barret of… who cares?

A Charter Arms for…

A.40-caliber derringer for Allison Murrieta of Norwalk, California.

Hood looked away and took a deep breath and let it out and looked back at the FTR.

Allison Murrieta/Suzanne Jones. Take your pick. He recognized her bold handwriting. It conjured her voice and the shape of her face and the feel of her body and the taste of her breath. She had been shot with that derringer in her hand, not quite ready to use it against a boy. It was ivory-handled and beautifully tooled. Now it was Hood’s gun, bequeathed wordlessly to Hood by Allison’s son.

Hood held the form and looked at her signature and in spite of everything he felt at this moment, he smiled.

As he put the FTRs in chronological order, Hood looked for patterns. His ATFE task force trainers in Los Angeles had been pattern crazy. Most of Victor Davis’s customers were male, though there was a group of females aged twenty-two to thirty-five, all with east L.A. addresses. This pattern was common: Inner-city moms afraid for their children were often targeted by gun pushers. But an opposing pattern existed, too: Inner-city moms were also often straw buyers purchasing weapons for homies and husbands and boy-friends. Hood had learned that once a buyer purchased two or more handguns in five or fewer days, the dealer was supposed to file an ATFE Multiple Sales Form. These were kept on file in regional ATFE offices, and a pattern of heavy MSF filings suggested organized trafficking. Of course straw buyers knew this, so they would change to the “lie and buy” method, which was to use a counterfeit ID. These IDs not only disguised the true identity of the buyer but easily passed the brief Arizona state background check because fictitious people aren’t listed in databases. If a licensed firearms dealer was scrupulous, he would report any suspicious sales to ATFE. If not, or if the bogus driver’s licenses were convincing, then dealers could sell deadly weapons to criminals with records of violence, underage buyers, the insane, the undocumented, the drunk, the high, or the furious-or to anyone wanting to make money as a middleman for the cartels. A dealer with a pattern of sales to such people always sent up red flags in the ATFE computers, but by the time the flags waved, it was often too late.

Hood saw that Victor Davis’s source lay along the Arizona-Mexico border. And most of his sales were there, too, with some customers to the north in Orange and Los Angeles counties. He pictured the U.S.-Mexico border between San Diego and Corpus Christi, all two thousand rugged miles of it, and he wondered that some 6,700 gun dealers were licensed to do business along it. That’s more than three gun dealers for every mile of cactus and rattlesnakes, one of Hood’s instructors pointed out. What’s that a pattern for? Fucking death and destruction is what.

Patterns upon patterns, dollars upon dollars, guns upon guns.

And that was the legal end of it all, not counting the hundreds of unlicensed profiteers who bought and sold on the blackest of markets.

Hood examined the appointment books. They were nearly identical, plastic-covered, with calendars and space for notes, differing only by the dates. There was one for each of the past five years. The entries were cryptic and heavily abbreviated but neatly written. Davis had been prone to doodling tight, crosshatched designs that sometimes grew to encompass entire days.

Hood flipped through, reading the entries with one track of his mind and worrying about Jimmy Holdstock with the other. Using the Firearm Transaction Record date on the derringer sale to Allison Murrieta, Hood found the corresponding appointment book and looked up the day. It was August 2, 2006. In the date box was scribbled in black ink, “Allison M./x-small 2-shot/.40 cal & ammo/6pm IHOP in Escondido.” The entry had been circled in blue ink, and Hood followed a blue line across the page and into the “Notes” section. Here he read, “Chick brought son & when she used head he said he needed six pieces/light & short/no #s/has buyers!/will call.”

Hood did the math: Bradley Jones, studying Outlaw 101 at the age of fifteen. He scanned through the remaining months of 2006 but found no sale. He figured even bold Victor Davis wouldn’t record an illegal sale to a minor anyway.

He found the appointment book for 2009. This was the last year that Davis had sold firearms legally. ATFE had revoked his license in March. Hood saw that his sales activity actually increased, beginning in April. Working harder, thought Hood, getting lower prices for the same iron, spending longer hours getting to know his customers enough to determine they weren’t undercover cops. The handwriting had degenerated with the extra work. It was cramped and sometimes illegible.

On April 4, Davis had written “R. Pace/noon/El Torito N.B.” The entry caught Hood’s eye because it was circled in bold black ink and had a bold red X through it. He wondered if R. Pace was of the Pace Arms company in Orange County. They’d been bankrupted by then, hadn’t they? One of their guns had gone off unexpectedly and killed a boy-a design flaw. Was Davis trying to buy inventory at Chapter 11 prices? Hood flipped forward and saw another “R. Pace” date in May. Another in June. And a final date for 2009, November 4. All of them were circled, as if in hope of great things, and all but the last had been dramatically Xed out. In the space below the last date, Davis had written “F.U.”

Hood was surprised to get a Pace Arms listing from the operator and a woman’s voice at the other end after he dialed.

“Pace Arms.”

“Chuck Reynolds for Mr. Pace, please.”

Hood was put on hold and a few moments later a young-sounding man spoke.

“Ron.”

“I’m calling about Victor Davis.”

A pause, then, “We’re out of that business.”

“ Davis was killed two days ago during an illegal firearms sale down in Buenavista.”

“I’m sorry. Are you a cop or ATF?”

“Neither.”

“We’re out of that business.”

“You made four appointments with him last year.”

“I rescheduled three times and honored the last as a professional courtesy. I never did business with Victor Davis. He was not a friend or an acquaintance. He wanted to buy inventory, but we didn’t have any inventory. We were broke by then, Mr. Reynolds. We’re still broke now. We haven’t made a gun in over a year. We still owe the family of Miles Packard eleven point two million dollars. Good-bye.”

They were loading the lockboxes and the FTRs into the task force van when two El Centro PD cruisers barreled down the street and double-parked beside them.

A plainclothes cop hopped from the second car, brandishing his shield holder, introducing himself as he trotted to the van. His name was Atkins.

“Let’s go inside,” he said.

They stood in the good light of the kitchen, and Atkins brought a freezer bag from his coat pocket. Inside the bag was a standard-size letter envelope.

“The desk got a call at ten a.m. from a woman saying where an important letter could be found. It wasn’t on PD property but it was close by. An officer found it five minutes later and I received it five minutes after that.”