Hood considered Finnegan. The patient in the next bed lay intubated and unconscious. The other bed in the three-bed pod was empty. Hood used the remote and turned up the volume on the news a little.
“Why would you shudder?”
“In anticipation of vengeance.”
“Gustavo was his son.”
“Amazing how little we know of the Zetas.”
“What do you know of them?”
“Only what I read. Paramilitary. Magnificently armed. Lavishly cruel. Heads over here, bodies over there. I wonder what they dream about. I’d sure keep a weather eye for myself and my task force brethren, too. Benjamin’s honor will demand vengeance for his son. Blowdown. I like the name.”
Hood listened to Finnegan’s clear and sometimes animated voice. He liked pronouncing words. Hood studied the bedside cart. On the top shelf were three good stacks of hardcover books-history, biography, current events, science and technology, Dog Cartoons, and a novel that Hood was pretty sure had won a big literary prize last year. The second shelf of the cart and the bottom were filled with neat piles of newspapers. One pile was the New York Times, the other the Los Angeles Times, the third stack the Imperial Valley Press.
“Do you know how tiring it is to hold a hardcover book in one hand, up high enough to read because you can’t raise or lower your head? Then move the book back and forth to read the lines because you can’t move your head back and forth? Then set it down and struggle just to turn a page, then lift it back up? I do not recommend it, deputy.”
“What are you doing down here in the desert if Owens went missing in Los Angeles?”
“She called me five nights ago. She was sobbing. She said she was sorry for putting me through this. I only demanded one thing-an address. It’s just inside the Secret Wars of the CIA volume on top there. Get it.”
Hood moved around the bed to the cart and lifted the cover of the book. The address was written on a Hamburger Hamlet bar napkin: 181 Skylar Road, El Centro.
“And you were on your way there from L.A. when the tire on your pickup truck blew?”
“Exactly. Go to that address. Tell her what happened to me. Tell her she is loved beyond her wildest dreams. Beyond them. Don’t try to get her to come here. She will not do anything unless she wants to. She’s always had a mind one hundred percent her own.”
Hood took the napkin and slid it into his coat pocket. “Why do you care what the Zetas dream about?”
“In dreams, men are uncontested. They’re free. A man alone with his soul is pure man. Oh, very revealing what he dreams. Human nature on display. Did you dream last night?”
“Not that I remember.”
Finnegan chuckled softly. “They say that both God and the devil can place dreams within a sleeping human. They say it is done less often than you would think. It’s risky because they don’t know how a man will react to it. A dream can be rejected, like an organ. Somewhat prosaically, they call a dream placed within a sleeping human, well, a placement.”
“Who calls it that?”
Finnegan lifted his right hand, indicating the book cart. “Oh, some writer in some book in some century in some language. It’s impossible to keep everything straight anymore. It’s all just conjecture, isn’t it? No man has seen God. No man has seen Lucifer. No man that I’ve ever talked to! It’s just a useful way of looking at the world. And seeing into it.”
Hood wondered if this was Finnegan’s brain damage showing through. It was surprising how lucid and even humorous the little man was, given the severity of his injuries. Hood’s sister had suffered a brain tumor as a teenager, and the first hint that she was afflicted were meandering, dislocated, illogical ruminations on her faith and religion. They happened with growing regularity. Then she had a seizure and they scanned her brain, and the surgery was done, and his sister never warbled on about God and his angels after that.
“How did you get my name and address?” he asked.
“I told you. Coleman Draper.”
“When? How did you know him?”
“Last winter. He worked on my car.”
Hood had investigated Draper, a reserve sheriff’s deputy, for Internal Affairs, and discovered that the man had done some remarkably terrible things using his reservist’s uniform, gun, and shield. Draper had owned a thriving German auto repair shop in Venice Beach.
“He told me of his association with the sheriffs. I told him that my daughter had disappeared. This was the first time Owens had done this, and I had reason to believe she was in Antelope Valley. He gave me your name as a contact at the LASD substation in Lancaster. He spoke highly of you.”
“But Draper died sixteen months ago. He couldn’t have given you my new address.”
“No. I cajoled it out of a friend at the USPS. I have my contacts, deputy, just like you have yours.”
“What do you do for a living, Finnegan?”
“Bathroom products, wholesale. It’s not as exciting as it sounds.”
“Which manufacturer?”
“Most of them. I’m a broker.”
“What’s the name of your company?”
“Just Mike Finnegan Bath. I’m known. Bathroom products is a small world once you’ve been in it for a while. I’m in several Los Angeles Yellow Pages if that impresses you. So, has Benjamin Armenta demonstrated his displeasure with the Blowdown team?”
“Do you know Armenta?”
“We’ve never met.”
“That’s not your business, what happens with Blowdown.”
“No. My business is Mike Finnegan Bath.”
“And that’s how you earned the ninety grand in the toolbox in your truck?”
“That’s how.”
Hood said nothing for a long moment. He saw a momentary blackness within the gauze before the reappearance of the twin glimmers.
“Much can happen in a blink, can’t it, deputy?”
“So, Owens vanishes with regularity?”
“This is the second time.”
Hood looked at motionless Finnegan, listened to the TV news and the hum of the ICU and the voices coming from the nurses’ station just outside the pod. He felt someone behind him and turned.
“Dr. Petty,” said Finnegan. “You melt my plaster in that trim white doctor’s coat.”
“You have too many broken bones to be flirting with me. Good morning, deputy.”
“Doctor.” Hood watched Beth Petty scan the bedside chart.
“I’ve managed to offend you again, Dr. Petty,” said Finnegan. “I apologize.”
“No offense taken, Mike. I enjoy flattery, even if it’s from a bandaged-up little man whose face I can’t see. Okay, as of one hour ago, you’ve got the resting pulse of a Golden Gloves boxer and the blood pressure of a healthy twenty-year-old. How do you do it?”
“Now who’s flattering?”
Petty looked from the chart to Hood. She was almost his height and her dirty-blond hair was clipped back and her eyes were brown. “Deputy, I’ll be two minutes here. Can you wait for me in the hallway outside the unit?”
“I’ll wait.”
Finnegan cleared his throat. “Thank you for talking to Owens, Deputy Hood. I think you know how important it is.” Hood waited in the hall. Two uniformed U.S. marshals stood outside a room and gave him a hard look.
In the cafeteria, Hood and Petty got coffee and sat across from each other in plastic chairs at a small table by a window. The window was covered with sunscreen peeling at the edges. Two more marshals and two other men wearing suits and ear sets with speaker wires came in behind them and went straight to the coffee dispensers.
“So you don’t know Finnegan?” she asked.
Hood shook his head. “He claims to have known a man I used to work with.”
She looked at him, and Hood wondered what Finnegan had told her about Draper and Draper’s death.
“He claims to have known Wyatt Earp, too,” she said. “Claims to have had drinks with him in San Diego. Earp ran a saloon with a prostitute named Ida Bailey, says Mike. I checked it out and it’s true. At least according to Wikipedia, it’s true. Anyway, I talked to Gabe Reyes and he’s found out not much at all about Mike Finnegan. Gabe ran his name and numbers through Tucson, Sacramento, and the FBI and they don’t have anything criminal on him. He’s never been fingerprinted. No social security number. No birth record or education records. All he really had was a California driver’s license and a home address in L.A. Sacramento told Gabe that the license was genuine and current. And I’m sure you know that Mike had ninety thousand dollars in a toolbox in his pickup truck.”