39

Hood watched the Pace Arms entrance through slitted eyes, his head back on the rest, radio turned to a music station. It was nine P.M. At ten thirty, Sharon came down and drove her Z-car from the parking structure. At eleven o’clock he saw Chester Pace’s black Town Car roll into the same structure and a moment later the big man lumber from the darkness to the building. Just as Chester reached the entryway, the door opened and one of the gunmakers looked up at Chester and nodded and held open the door for him.

A minute later, Hood saw a slight change of light in the penthouse, then movement behind the blinds. Fifteen minutes later, Sharon parked and walked out of the structure with plastic bags in both hands. She was dressed in a green dress and looked tanned and casually lovely.

Hood turned down the radio and watched. A few minutes later, the fog settled over the building tops and descended over the street-lights, muting the world. Hood rolled the windows up against the chill. The next time he checked his watch, it was after one A.M. No Chester. No nothing. Four hours to go to end of their shift.

Just after seven o’clock, the men emerged from the building into the foggy morning light. They shuffled to their cars wordlessly and began to drive away. Hood watched them go and counted them. Twelve had gone in. Only ten left. He felt addled from lack of sleep, and he was sore from the sitting. He felt like he had worked the shift alongside them.

His phone vibrated and he saw a new text message waiting:

my journeyman skills are exhausted

you are on your own maybe this

is how it should be i wish i could

have tempted you with bigger things

what you did for me and owens i

will not forget even to the close

of the age

mike

Hood called Beth Petty and asked her to have the ICU nurses concoct a reason to wheel Mike out of his room for a few minutes around eight A.M. When she asked why, he said it had to do with guns, cash, and human life. She agreed to do it. Then he called Gabe Reyes and told him to be at Imperial Mercy ICU at eight o’clock to retrieve Mike Finnegan’s cell phone and check it for calls or messages left or sent.

Forty minutes later, Hood was stuck in traffic in Corona. He slowed to a crawl and cursed and answered a call. Reyes gave him both of the numbers he found on Finnegan’s phone, both outgoing and both made within the last nine hours. One went to a number that Hood recognized as belonging to Owens, placed not long after Hood had left the ICU at Imperial Mercy. The most recent was a text message to Hood.

40

Late the next night a small army surrounded Pace Arms under the cover of fog and darkness. The air was cool and still and it misted the windshield of Hood’s Yukon, but this was not a time for wipers.

Behind the building, Hood watched from his Yukon as a big raised Dodge Ram pickup truck backed up through the bright shipping yard lights. It finally came to rest against the Pace loading dock, beside a battered white Ford F-250. Hood had figured two vehicles for two thousand pounds of iron, plus the weight of the crates. Two vehicles wouldn’t betray the weight, and would either cut the risk in half or double it, depending on how you looked at it. The big motor home sat parked against a far wall, its awning now extended for shade over two white plastic chairs. It was as dirty as it had been before, all its windows opaque with dust except for the big black windshield. Hood wondered if someone lived there, a watchman perhaps. There was a clean black panel van parked across from it.

Ron Pace came trotting down the loading ramp. Bradley and Clayton got out of the truck and shook hands with the gunmaker. Bradley wore white shorts and red canvas sneakers and a Bush-Cheney T-shirt, with his holster and sidearm bobbing unashamedly on his right hip. Clayton wore a light blue seersucker suit and what looked like white Hush Puppies. Pace was dressed for safari in cargo shorts, suede work boots, and a shirt plastered with pockets and epaulets.

Hood looked into his rearview at Janet Bly. He could barely make her out behind the wheel of her SUV with a San Diego office ATFE agent beside her.

“Charlie, Janet here-look at those dorks,” she said over the radio. The headsets were made for hands-free contact between the teams, and sound was excellent. “I can’t believe this Jones kid. You know him?”

“Long story.”

“I can’t wait to see his cute little face when we cuff him and shove him in a car. His buddies, too.”

“All units,” Hood said. “We’ve got Bradley Jones and Clayton Farrar on scene. Pace is here, too.”

Hood knew that Ozburn was parked around front of Pace Arms with an agent on loan from Glendale. There were four other vehicles involved: an undercover sedan parked down the street from Hood with two more agents inside, another two-agent sedan near the Pace Arms entrance, two more ATFE agents in an unmarked SUV watching the on-ramp to the 405 freeway, and one roving unit. All drivers were radio-wired, all agents armed with.40-caliber autoloaders, one shotgun and one tear gas launcher per vehicle. The ATFE Bell would track high and loose until the ground agents made their move.

Bradley and Clayton and Pace laid out tie ropes in the bed of the Ram, then walked up the ramp and into the warehouse. A few minutes later they emerged one-two-three with hand trucks, and the hand trucks each held four wooden gun crates. In turn each man went down the ramp, arms extended, leaning back against the weight. Pace and Clayton lifted the boxes into the truck bed, and Bradley hopped into the bed and arranged them.

The crates seemed lighter in Bradley’s hands, and Hood wondered at the strength of his body and the audacity of his mind. He had to hand it to Bradley for sheer boldness. In this young descendent of Joaquin Murrieta, Hood saw outlaws dead and outlaws not yet born, and he also saw Suzanne, and he even glimpsed something dark and tempting that he had long ago banished from himself. In its place he had installed the straight and the narrow, the pledge of allegiance, the call of duty, to protect and serve. All of this he had done willingly and with his eyes open. He could have chosen differently. But a man could not be both things, both the law and outside the law, no matter how valiantly Bradley Jones was trying to be. And if Bradley succeeded at being both, then Hood and his choices were superfluous.

He watched the young men push the hand trucks back up the ramp and bring down another load. They finally stopped when the Dodge held five rows of ten crates. Then Bradley spread a large blue tarp over them and brought the ropes up and tied it all down with a flourish of exotic knots. Another fifty cases went into the worn Ford. The words ALL SAINTS CHARITY and an El Monte address appeared in fading paint on the door.

Hood yearned to make the pinch here and now, but without the money it wasn’t a sale, and without a sale, arrests would net little. The money was everything-the money and who supplied it and where it came from.

“Charlie, this is Sean. Whazzup back there?”

“They’re ready to leave. The black Ram and the All Saints Ford.”

“Let Bly take the lead. They’ve never seen her.”

“Fine.”

“You cool with that?”

“I said fine.”

“Something wrong, Charlie?”

“I don’t like the look of the gun crates or the motor home. And there are three more men inside that building, not counting Ron and his girl.”

“Talk to me, Hood.”

“The crates are heavy to Pace and Clayton and lighter to Bradley. The motor home is dirty and the awning is out and there are chairs set up outside it, but the windshield is clean. Yesterday it was filthy. I’m talking the whole windshield, not just where the wiper blades would go-clean like somebody’s going to drive it soon. Ron’s uncle is still inside, and two of the workers. It’s just not adding up.”