Exactly as I saw it, thought Hood. Every detail, every mood.

In the bottom right corner, the name Mike was written in a neat, forward-slanting draftsman’s hand.

I can hear what they think and see what they see. Sometimes very clearly. It’s like hearing a radio or looking at a video.

Hood slid the drawing to the side to see the paper under it. It was a note written in the same neat hand:

Charlie:

I took from you. Next time, and there will be a next time, I will give back. Something you desire, something you need.

MF

That evening when Hood finally got to Mike Finnegan’s apartment across from LAX, he pulled up, saw the FOR RENT sign in the window, and kept on going all the way to Bakersfield.

He sat with his mother in his boyhood home and they talked until late and he slept in the same bed he had slept in as a high schooler. He woke up early and left a note for his mother and father, then drove home as the darkness evaporated. As it often had been in his life, the passing of time and miles was a comfort to Hood, a man navigating an iron river, adrift with blunt instruments and crude charts.

42

You haven’t lived until you’ve sat next to Sharon Rose Novak in a Sun King motor home carrying one thousand machine pistols and one iced, four-hundred-pound corpse, being swept away from ATFE agents in the belly of a relic Red Cross Chinook helicopter.

The helo briefly landed way out in the Southern California desert and I backed the motor home down the cargo lift and onto a decent dirt road that Bradley had said would lead us to a Joshua tree with a white ribbon tied to one cluster of spines. No sooner had I driven the motor home outside the rotor diameter than the CH-47 lifted off again. Bradley believed that a Sun King driven by a well-groomed young man and his lovely companion would draw less attention than a Red Cross helicopter thundering through U.S. air space over Norton, Pendleton and Miramar military bases, etc., on its way south. Especially if no one was looking for the motor home to begin with. One of Herredia’s helo crewmen had put on new Arizona plates while Sharon and I sat thousands of feet in the sky, experiencing the hypnotic, otherworldly, and slightly nauseating feeling of being inside a motor home inside a transport chopper doing a hundred fifty knots over God knows where.

Sharon spotted the white ribbon a few minutes later, and I backed the Sun King to it and with some difficulty we managed to push/ drag/drop Uncle Chester’s tarped and dry-iced remains into the waiting hole. Bradley’s men had left one shovel that Sharon and I used to cover Chet. I offered to do the spadework myself, but Sharon insisted on doing half of it, and I watched her during her turns from the meager shade of the Joshua tree. She was grim and silent and determined about it. I could tell that every shovelful of sand she put between herself and Chet was something she needed to do to keep him away from her, literally and symbolically, too. I closed with the Lord’s prayer though I kind of hurried through it. I thought of my mother.

The Love 32s were more or less loose in the Sun King, since the wooden gun crates had been used for the new jeans for charity. The ruse was Bradley’s idea, though how he learned that ATFE agents were surveilling Pace Arms I’ll probably never know. Sharon had found late-summer bargain beach blankets on sale at a supermarket for three ninety-nine each, and in these forty blankets we wrapped and folded and duct-taped our thousand guns. We had guns under the motor home beds, guns in the overhead sleeper, guns in the cupboards and closets, guns in the bathroom and shower, guns in the bench seat storage chests, guns under the dining table and upon it and piled on the padded seating around it, guns in the walkway from cab to bath. The silencers and extra-capacity magazines, being smaller and more conveniently shaped, fit nicely inside the new but inexpensive pillow cases that Sharon found at Big Lots, and these we stashed anyplace that wasn’t already filled with guns.

We crossed into Mexico at Nogales, were stopped briefly for the usual questions by the U.S. ICE agents, and were simply waved through by their Mexican counterparts. Shortly we were intercepted by a small flotilla of Suburbans that escorted us into the middle of Baja California. The flotilla personnel were either Mexican Federal Judicial Police or narcos dressed in the uniforms of the MFJP. Bradley had told me that both were in the employ of Carlos Herredia.

After two hours of driving, we were suddenly run onto the very narrow shoulder of the road by several of the Suburbans. We were boarded, and at gunpoint we were herded back into the vehicle, where the policemen blindfolded us. I held hands with Sharon as they did this, wondering if we were about to be shot. I honestly couldn’t figure what we had done to deserve that. But we were then politely helped out of the Sun King and into one of the Suburbans, and a short hour later we were unblindfolded within Herredia’s compound, known as El Dorado.

I got out of the Suburban and helped Sharon down, then I looked out at the beautiful hacienda and the adobe outbuildings and the casitas and the glimmering pool beneath the palapas, and beyond that the airstrip with its sock luffing in the breeze, and all of this surrounded by green ranchland dabbed with cattle, and I wondered how a country with such a rich pastoral soul could have descended into such brutality. You don’t have to be a student of history to realize that it has more than a little to do with people like me.

Late that first night when Sharon and I went back to our casita with the six hundred thousand dollars, I sat for a long while looking at the four rolling suitcases that contained it and I felt briefly discontent. I love the Love 32. I know it will become a part of history. I loved designing it. I loved procuring its elements and recruiting its builders. I loved making it. I love shooting it. I even loved smuggling it down here. I know that lives will be taken with my creations-the lives of the bad and the good. The destruction is only just beginning. It will grow. But I am an American and I believe we choose our actions and I believe that the business of America is business. We are free. I’ve made my fortune and I’ve made myself and for this I will not apologize. We all need a break in these tough economic times.

Right now I’m sitting by the El Dorado swimming pool. It’s late morning and warm but not hot. Herredia is doing laps. He doesn’t really swim, he pounds. He’s terrifically strong and he’s been at this for forty minutes.

Bradley left last night to reunite with Erin in Valley Center. He was particularly moony and distracted yesterday, a newlywed pining for his bride. And he was richer.

Sharon is in our casita, soon to arrive. She slept late, as usual, and it will take her a while to get ready to face the world. Her ruined wedding and Chester weigh heavily on her.

When she gets here, I’m going to ask her to take a short walk with me, just down the road a bit. I’m going to tell her what it was like the first time I saw her sitting there at her new workstation at Pace Arms, a seventeen-year-old girl who said she was eighteen because she needed the money. I’m going to tell her how it felt when we hardly talked for a year after I told her I loved her. I’m going to tell her what it was like seeing her sitting there at her old workstation at defunct Pace Arms, a twenty-one-year-old woman who had just had her heart broken. I’ve got the ring, a carat and a half, near colorless, SI1, brilliant cut, set in platinum, in a box in the pocket of my cargo shorts. I’m no genius, but I’m not going to make the same mistake that idiot Daryl made.