The opened crates were strewn about the roadside, scores of them, all apparently filled with new jeans, all folded neatly, the manufacturer’s labels still stapled to the back pockets, some with their sizes on clear plastic strips taped to the thighs. Hood saw that many of them were children’s. There were pink ones and black ones and yellow ones and a hundred shades of blue.

Hood stood and watched Bly use a pry bar to open another gun crate. More denim. A man in a passing car asked if they had a pair of thirty-six/thirty-fours. Hood told him to move his fat ass along. Bly looked up at Hood with dampened fury in her eyes, then shoved away the case, toppling its contents into the shoulder dirt. She cursed and used the crook end of the pry bar to yank the next crate toward her.

Hood gazed down at the bounty of new pants. Bradley and Clayton and Ron faked the weight of the boxes, Hood thought. They had known they were being watched. They had acted their parts. And he had watched them do it but not understood what he was seeing.

Hood found Ozburn in his SUV, tapping on his laptop. Ozburn was getting ready for an undercover assignment and trying to make his face scarce. He rolled down the darkened window. “The Econoline had a blowout in Temecula, so Frank made his move. It was loaded with bags of ready-mix concrete. Ninety pounders and lots of them. Charlie, these dolts had some help. They could never have pulled this off on their own. Pace just drove that motor home right into a transport helo?”

“It had a cargo lift.”

“Then a thousand guns just crossed the border by air while we got a hundred crates of jeans. Who are these guys?”

“Bradley is Allison Murrieta’s son.”

“The teacher? The armed robber?”

Hood nodded. “Clayton is a forger.”

“They say they’re volunteers with All Saints. They say they’ve been doing this for two years and they’ve got priests and social workers and towns full of poor people who will tell us so.”

“They probably do.”

Bradley sat handcuffed in the back of one government SUV and Clayton in another, each watched by an ATFE agent. Bradley shook his head as Hood walked up and swung open the front door and looked in.

“Charlie. Tell these guys who I am.”

A videographer had escaped the media area and came crunching along the shoulder toward Hood and Bradley, camera up, shooting as he walked. “Gentlemen-let’s have a shot of the good Samaritan here.”

Hood wrenched away the recorder and popped the video card out before tossing the camera back at the stunned man. “Get back where you belong or I’ll arrest you, too.”

Hood was watching the man retreat when his phone rang. It was Beth Petty. “Charlie, something’s happened to Mike.”

“What?”

“He, um… he walked out.”

41

The nurses trailed along wordlessly as Hood and the doctor hurried through the ICU. Beth opened Mike’s room door and pulled back the privacy curtain. Hood looked at the chunks of plaster, some on the bed and some on the floor, some in the wastebasket, some pieces separate and some still attached by gauze. The girdle stood whole on the floor where Mike had apparently stepped out of it. Hood saw the dressing gauze ripped and wadded and strewn about the room. The collar and blood-smeared cranial rods were set in a corner. There were a few drops of blood on the floor. The catheter tube was tied around the bedrail uphill of the bag so it wouldn’t leak. The room smelled bad.

“Who was with him?”

“No one. He tore out of his cast and walked out alone.”

“Wearing what, a hospital gown?”

“Owens came yesterday. She brought him some new clothes, though I told her he was far from ready for discharge. She said she knew that, but maybe the clothes would inspire him. I thought that was fine. She had a Hawaiian shirt, a navy windbreaker, a pair of chinos, a pair of Vans slip-ons, underwear and socks, and a Padres hat. She put them all in the closet there. She used hangers for the shirt and jacket and pants. Later in the day, Mike asked me to show them to him and he said he hoped they weren’t too big, that Owens always bought a size too big. I thought it was endearing, a guy in a full-body cast worrying about the fit of clothes he wouldn’t be able to even put on for weeks.”

Hood looked at the closet, empty except for four metal hangers, the shoulder of one uplifted and caught on the shoulder of another as if a garment had been yanked off in a hurry.

“He walked out of the room to the nurses’ station,” said Beth. “It took them a moment to realize who he was. They ordered him back into his bed, but he politely refused. He thanked them graciously for all they had done, especially all the good books, and as soon as he left ICU, they called security. Security caught up with him in the lobby and he explained that his account was paid in full and that he was feeling very good. He did a little dance that left him with the toe of one shoe pointed up and his hands spread out. He smiled. Security said the smile looked weird. It was probably because his jaw is still wired shut. Outside he got into a black Mercedes convertible possibly driven by his daughter. I have the plate number.”

“You’re telling me he ripped out of that cast on his own?”

“Yes. Nobody could have helped. Nobody can get past the station without being seen.”

“Why the blood?”

“From the cranial rods. The flesh heals over them, but when they’re removed there’s bleeding. You see, there isn’t much blood here. About right. The hat would hide those wounds.”

Hood squatted and picked up a piece of plaster cast. It was slightly concave and roughly the size of a paperback book and ragged on all four sides. White mesh dressing clung to the inside and extended past the torn edges of the plaster. It smelled of unwashed cotton and an unwashed human being. Hood turned it over and saw the sweat-stained gauze and the four crushed indentations where Mike had torn away this section of solid plaster as if it were a piece of bread.

“I wouldn’t believe a single word of what I just said except I saw half of it,” said Beth. “The other half I believe because I know these nurses.”

“It was the strangest thing I ever saw in my life, deputy,” said one.

“When he came through that door all dressed and I realized who he was, this giant cold shudder went through me,” said another.

“He really did manage to smile,” said another.

Hood stood and tossed the piece of plaster onto the bed. “Nurses, doctors, security, cops, deputies, marshals, and two thousand Guardsmen, and he walks right out.”

“We can’t keep him,” said the first nurse. “We can’t hold anyone against his will. That’s what you do.”

Hood parked across from Owens Finnegan’s El Centro home just after three o’clock. The desert lay darkening beneath the stacked thunderheads, and a heavy wind had picked up. Her garage door was open, but the black Mercedes convertible was gone.

He knocked at the front door and waited but she didn’t answer, as he knew she wouldn’t. The door was unlocked. Hood walked in and closed it behind him and stood for a moment in the empty living room, then walked through the empty kitchen and down the hall to the once beautiful bedroom into which he had been invited, and this was vacant now, too. The bathroom was cleaned out, but on the counter was a wedding absinthe goblet, and beneath the goblet were two sheets of paper. Hood moved the goblet and looked down at a drawing. It was done in charcoal, masterfully rendered, sharp true lines and deep smudges of shadow pierced by light. It depicted Bradley Jones inside the Pace Arms manufacturing bay, dressed in his smart Explorer uniform, examining the newly born firearms as he walked along the workstations, his face locked in the exact speculative, lost-in-thought expression that Hood had seen that night through the window.