“Don’t blame yourself for Jimmy,” said Ozburn. “It’s untrue and destructive. Jimmy isn’t about you.”

“I know.”

“Then do know it, Janet,” said Ozburn. “We’ll get him back. Somehow we’ll get him back. Find that tour bus, Hood. You’re the one with the eagle eyes.”

Hood continued to stare out the window and said nothing. Something broke into the cloudless western sky and he saw the ATFE helo swooping in on the wind, tipping wildly. It rose and dipped and sped up and slowed down as the gusts had their way with it. Then the helo was hovering above them, nose to the wind, rotors digging for purchase in the treacherous currents, searchlights blinking their greeting and their devotion. In this precarious thing, Hood saw everything good and hopeful and hopeless about the work that he had chosen.

When they got back to Buenavista and into cell range, Ozburn called Raydel Luna, but the Mexican policeman didn’t answer his phone.

Two hours later they still not been able to raise Luna.

The tour bus had long vanished and there was no word from Jimmy’s captors.

Neither Soriana nor Mars was available by phone: Both had been ordered to ATFE field divisional headquarters in L.A.

Sitting together in a Buenavista lounge for a late and bitter lunch, the Blowdown team watched in mute defeat as the Humvees and trucks filled with National Guardsmen rolled through the narrow streets on their way to secure the border, and the news network helicopters came drifting in from all of the four directions.

They’d been told that there would be one thousand Guardsmen in Buenavista by evening, and another three thousand deployed along the border from San Diego to Corpus Christi. Army and Marine units were standing by, but the president had yet to take this large step. The border had already been closed in both directions. Blowdown also knew that the coming public uproar and media tumult over Jimmy would leave any covert rescue operation without sponsors at the higher levels. So now almost worthless were their own secrecy and ability to surprise.

“Whole new fucking game now,” said Ozburn.

“We’re bit players,” said Bly.

Hood knew that they were right.

Jenny Holdstock appeared on the TV that hung over the bar and pleaded through tears for the return of her husband. He was the best man she had ever known, the best father. She looked truly hopeless. The girls sat on either side of her, nervous and bewildered.

25

That night Hood walked up the Imperial Mercy driveway with a bottle of the peppery organic zinfandel that Mike Finnegan had requested, and a straw. The broad semicircular drive was now a parking lot of media uplink vans and portable lights and camera crews and generators and miles of cable. He saw vehicles from all the big news networks and from stations he’d never heard of and affiliates from all over the American Southwest. Network helicopters crisscrossed the sky above. Reporters and videographers roamed and gave Hood the curious eye. He recognized two New York network anchors he’d been watching for years and several reporters, amazed that tiny Buenavista had spawned a tragedy of such interest.

He dodged the reporters and showed his badge to a deputy at the lobby entrance, then showed it again to another deputy when he got off the elevator on the ninth floor.

He walked toward Finnegan’s room, stunned by the day. Hood had seen the TV evening news, already bristling with angry citizens wanting to go get Jimmy back from people who were supposedly our friends. The American president had just finished a televised news conference reassuring the American people that they were safe from criminals from all nations, urging patience, and pledging to secure the border “decisively and by any means necessary.” The Mexican president had warned the United States that any form of “retaliation” across the border would, under international law, constitute the invasion of a sovereign state.

Finnegan held the lidded blue plastic hospital cup with his good left hand and raised the straw to his mouth to drink.

“Oh, that is good,” he said. “I haven’t had a glass of wine in months. What did you think of the president’s words?”

“How do you know so much about Jimmy?”

“Oh, straight to the point tonight. You’ve had a dismal day, I know. Web searches mostly. I once purchased access to law-enforcement-only sites but realized I didn’t need to. I’m pretty handy with a computer, Charlie.”

“So you hack in?”

“It’s easier than that. Passwords and protocols are not created by geniuses. They’re just people. I’ve never used my information for anything but good. I really have no one to discuss my findings with. I’ve never compromised an operation or an investigation or an undercover agent. Nor will I. Ever.”

“You haven’t been around a computer since you came here. But you’ve discovered things about Jimmy that have occurred lately.”

“Discovered or imagined?”

“True things, Mike.”

“Imagination is often truthful. Truth can even come from those who were not there-Homer and Matthew and Hawkings.”

“How did you know the Zetas would come for him again?”

“How could you not know it?”

“What will they do with him?”

“Bring him great pain.”

Hood studied the little man’s face. He had round cheeks and a pink tone of skin and his whiskers were red and getting longer, and with his cheerful blue eyes, he looked like an aging cherub.

Finnegan raised the blue cup, and the straw found his mouth. He sipped and swallowed. “I know who you are, Charlie. I closely followed the exploits of Allison Murrieta as did so many Angelenos. Video of the funeral was all over the Web, of course, so imagine my surprise when her arresting officer-shown so very briefly on a late news clip-turned up as a mourner, too. Turned out to be you. Certain law enforcement and courthouse blogs were revealing. You were much talked about. How is Bradley, her son?”

“Fine.”

“Getting married, I hear.”

“This is what I mean, Finnegan-just exactly how did you hear it?”

“You’re getting exasperated. The same as Reyes.”

“How did you hear it?”

“He told me weeks ago, Charlie!”

“Where? Why?”

“I was right there in the Viper Room. Owens was with me. It was the night the band changed its name to Erin and the Inmates. I was very much minding my own business. But Bradley Jones is immensely vain and immensely proud of Erin McKenna. He told me everything-the date, the location, the early Californio fiesta theme. I couldn’t shut the boy up.”

Hood drank some of the wine.

“Charlie, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I can’t hold my liquor. Nor can I resist it. May I?”

Mike slowly extended the cup, and Hood refilled it and handed it back. Finnegan took a long sip, then let go of the straw and sighed. “In Napa we grew a grape called carignane. It was a filler grape, like merlot, and we mixed it with the big cabs and petite syrah and some zinfandels. A very strong, very opinionated varietal. Personally I loved it better than all of them. I wanted to bottle and sell it. But commercial wine making is driven by marketing, and the marketers could never even pronounce carignane, let alone sell a bottle of it to a blockhead in a supermarket. So merlot won out. Merlot got to be the new star. Largely because the name is easy to pronounce and fun to say. It’s got that subversive little t at the end, silent and suggestive and a little French. But as a grape, it’s gutless next to my beloved carignane.”

“You never lived on a vineyard in Napa, Mike. You made it all up. Even Owens stopped believing that story years ago.”

Mike stared at Hood for a long beat. In his eyes Hood saw broad contemplation but of past or future or of this moment he couldn’t guess.