Iron River Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY T. JEFFERSON PARKER

  Laguna Heat

  Little Saigon

  Pacific Beat

  Summer of Fear

  The Triggerman’s Dance

  Where Serpents Lie

  The Blue Hour

  Red Light

  Silent Joe

  Black Water

  Cold Pursuit

  California Girl

  The Fallen

  Storm Runners

  L.A. Outlaws

  The Renegades

  DUTTON

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.);

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, January 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by T. Jefferson Parker

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Parker, T. Jefferson.

  Iron river: a novel / by T. Jefferson Parker.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15974-3

  1. Police—California—Los Angeles County—Fiction.

  2. Firearms industry and trade—Fiction. I. Title

  PS3566.A6863I76 2010

  813’.54—dc22 2009029307

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the

  product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual

  persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be

  reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by

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  For Robert Ford Parker

  There, then, he sat, holding that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness.

  Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  1

  The car hurtled west towing a swirl of black exhaust into the first light of day. It was old and low, with Baja plates and a loose muffler that dangled and sparked on the dips. The woman drove. She was silver-haired and flat-faced and though her eyes were open wide to gather the light, her face was still slack from sleep. Her husband sat heavily beside her, boots spread and hat low, nodding slowly through the rises and falls of the highway, a coffee cup riding on his thigh.

  “Cansada,” she said. Tired. Then told him about a dream she had had the night before: an enormous wave made of white lilies, a blue sun, and a nice talk with Benito, thirty years dead, who told her to say hello to his father.

  Cansado, he thought.

  He looked out. It was desert as far as he could see or remember seeing. He worked on cars at the gas station in Bond’s Corner. She had motel rooms to clean in Buenavista.

  She told him about another dream she had had, and her husband lifted the cup and sipped and set it back on his thigh and closed his eyes.

  The sun rose behind them. The woman checked its progress in the rearview mirror. Something registered ahead and she dropped her gaze back through the windshield to a young coyote sitting just off the shoulder next to a paloverde. She had never seen a coyote sitting down. She wondered if all her maids would show up today or she would have to clean a block of rooms herself. The sore neck. The weak arm. She steered the car down a steep dip and lifted her eyes to the mirror again. What did a wave of white lilies mean? In her dream, Benito looked young and sweet, exactly as he had in life. Benito the Beautiful. She was crossing herself as she neared the rise and still looking back at the sun while thinking of him and when she looked ahead again, she saw that she had drifted far into the oncoming lane. When she topped the rise, the truck was barreling down on her, the grille shiny and looming and the windshield a sun-forged plate of armor. Her husband cursed and reached for the wheel, but she was still in her genuflection and his hand closed not on the wheel but on her wrist so that she could use only her half-crippled left hand to correct the course of the big heavy Mercury.

  She swung the wheel to the right with all her strength. She felt the back end come around and the front end slide away and she clutched the wheel with both hands now, and her husband was thrown against her, and orbs of his coffee wobbled in space but he held the wheel, too, and the truck thundered by with a sucking howl. The sedan broke loose from the pull and spun twice quickly and she was so utterly dazed by the force that when she saw the man crouching on the right shoulder by his pickup, she had no idea which way to turn the wheel in order to miss him. Then it was too late anyway. She saw the long hood of the car sweep across him and she felt the sharp impact, but the Mercury kept spinning and when it finally ground sideways through the gravel to a stop, she had no idea how she had missed the pickup, or where the dead m
an had landed.

  She threw the shift into park. They sat for a moment, breathing hard, hearts pounding, dust rising around them in the sudden silence. She looked west down the highway and saw nothing but road, and when she looked behind them she saw the pickup truck and the rise far behind it.

  “Dios,” she whispered.

  The man looked hard at his wife then pulled the keys from the ignition and tried to brush the coffee from his new jeans. He pushed open the door and stepped into the morning.

  It took them a few minutes to find the dead man sprawled back in the desert on the white sand between clumps of yucca. He was a gringo. He was small. His face was covered in blood and his body was misshapen. He wore the same kind of clothes she saw at Wal-Mart. He had a watch but no rings.

  “Don’t touch him, he’s alive,” said her husband.

  The man’s breath whistled in and out, and a tooth moved in his broken mouth. Then for a long time nothing. Then he breathed again.

  She crossed herself and knelt beside him. Her husband looked around them, then back at the sun just above the horizon now.

  She asked God and Ignacio what to do with such a broken body. She said there was the hospital in Buenavista, famous doctors who treated important people.

  “Go away,” whispered the dead man. He opened his eyes. They were blue beneath the blood. “Please.”

  “You will die,” she said.

  The man was silent for a long moment during which he did not breathe. Then another breath, this one deeper, followed by another. The tooth moved and the air whistled in and out.

  The husband said they would be arrested and deported, so if this man wanted them to go away, then they would.

  She looked up at him. “No. We drive to the hospital. We tell them where he is.”

  “Tell them. Nothing,” whispered the gringo. His eyes looked malevolent, but the woman thought that any eyes would look that way in a face so ruined and bloody.

  “We have a duty to God,” she said.

  The gringo drew a long breath, then he raised his hand very slightly from the sand, and he pointed his index finger at her, then curled it toward himself.

  She shuddered.

  He curled the finger again, then lowered his hand back to the ground. He was watching her.

  Maria Consalvo Reina Villalobos stared into the blue eyes. She looked at the broken, doll-like body. And she knew that if they were to leave the gringo here and drive away and not say one thing, then he would die and his blood would be on her hands twice—once for thinking of waves of lilies and her beloved son Benito, and once for not telling anyone that there was a man dying in the desert not ten miles from town.

  She leaned in closer. She saw him watching her through the blood. His broken tooth whistled again. She sensed Ignacio hovering behind her. The little man said something that she couldn’t hear, so she leaned even closer.

  “Señora y señor,” the gringo whispered. “In the name of Benito the Beautiful, tell them nothing.”

  Maria Consalvo scrambled to her feet, hitting at herself as if she were being attacked by hornets. Ignacio stood tall and glared down at the gringo who called his dead son by name. He saw a boulder of quartz lying just beyond the yucca, a single boulder, as if dropped there for a purpose.

  He took his wife by the arm and led her away. Ignacio knew that the man would probably be dead before the heat of afternoon, and certainly dead after it. He brought his wife to the passenger side of the Mercury and he opened the door for her and steadied her as she spilled into the cracked vinyl seat.

  They were silent until Buenavista. As they entered the little border town, they agreed to say nothing to the authorities. They passed the zocalo and St. Cecilia’s church and the Rite Aid and the Denny’s. At the Ocotillo Lodge, Ignacio left the Mercury idling while he opened his wife’s door and kissed her formally before he drove off for Bond’s Corner. He had not opened her door or kissed her before work in twenty-four years.

  Within five minutes Maria’s conscience prevailed and she called the Buenavista police station and told them about the man in the desert. She gave a good location based on the gringo’s pickup truck. She hung up when the deep-voiced policeman asked her name. She knew that voice: Gabriel Reyes, chief of Buenavista’s police force. Reyes ate breakfast alone at the Ocotillo on Thursdays, his uniform crisp, his face sad.

  Ignacio called no one. When he got to work, his gringo boss walked him to the far part of the lot and lifted the tarp from a GM Yukon peppered with bullet holes. He told Ignacio it was muy importante, número uno. Fine, thought Ignacio. He preferred narcotraficantes to tiny devils any day.

  Not long after Maria and Ignacio had left the man, the tractor-trailer that had nearly obliterated them arrived back on the scene of the near disaster. It had taken the driver two miles to still his nerves and face down his fears and make the laborious two-lane turnaround. He pulled off the road just behind the pickup truck. From his elevated position in the cab, he could see the big skid marks. He surveyed the desert around him and saw nothing unusual. There had been a man working on a flat tire. Then the Mercury coming at him in his own lane.

  He got out and walked over to the pickup and saw the blown tire and the jack resting in the sand. The keys were still in the ignition and the driver’s window was down. He reached in and honked the horn and waited. A moment later he walked out into the desert beyond the pickup, but not far. Rattlesnakes liked the cool mornings this time of year. He’d run over one last spring not far from here that reached almost all the way across his lane, then he’d taken the time to turn around on the narrow highway and run over it again. He called out, and a jackrabbit bolted and his heart raced. A minute later he climbed back into the Freightliner and continued on toward Yuma. No good came in this desert.

  Reyes looked at the skid marks, then up at the sun, then he followed the footprints that led into the desert. There were two sets. One was made by cowboy boots that left deep heel marks in the sand. The other was smaller and lighter and could have been pretty much any kind of shoe. The woman, he thought.

  The tracks ended and Reyes found blood and a slight indentation where someone had rested. Apparently rested. The two tracks turned back toward the highway. But a third set of footprints, smaller than the boots but heavier than the shoes, continued away from this bloody lie into the desert beyond.

  Reyes had no trouble following them. Half a mile to the north in the foothills that would later offer shade, he found a bloody little man half dug into an old den beneath a honey mesquite, legs protruding. Reyes knelt and saw the glint of an eye back in the darkness, and he reached down and lightly touched the man’s leg and told him he would be okay. Then he stood and on his third try was able to place a cell call to Imperial Mercy for an ambulance. Procedure was to call county first, but Reyes figured this guy would be dead if he had to wait for paramedics out of El Centro.

  “They’re on the way,” he said.

  The man groaned.

  2

  Charlie Hood lay on the roof of Guns a Million and aimed the video recorder down into the back parking lot. Behind him the bright yellow letters of the store sign flashed on and off in the close desert night. Hood could hear the lights buzzing and the electrical switches clicking and see the air around him pulsing yellow. He figured the roof would be hot so he had bought a bright Mexican blanket with the shape of an Aztec warrior woven into it and folded it twice for padding against the infernally hot gravel.

  Sean Ozburn drove up right on time and pulled his white panel van into a space in the back lot. There were other cars but most of the Guns a Million customers had parked out front, a shorter walk in the heat. Hours were ten A.M. to midnight, six days a week, and Hood, in his two days so far here in Buenavista, had never seen fewer than six cars out front.

  The van lights went off and Ozburn stepped out. Hood zoomed in. Ozburn was a big ATFE buck with blond hair to his shoulders and blue, hateful eyes. He wore jeans and a plaid flannel shirt with the slee
ves cut off to show his arms and tatts. His supremacist’s air was a solid act, Hood thought. Hood was on loan to Operation Blowdown from the L.A. Sheriff’s Department, and he’d been immediately impressed by the ATFE’s courage and black humor in the face of bad odds. The border here was awash in guns, the Iron River, they called it, and ATFE and their task force brethren like Hood were just rafts bobbing upon the great current of firearms headed south. Hood saw that the ATFE agents worked their muscles strong and got good with their weapons. They lived on adrenaline and heat, and they prayed for luck. Hood was glad to be a part of them.

  Ozburn leaned against the van and lit a cheroot. He was wired for sound and set to buy six weapons from an unlicensed dealer named Joe Tilley. Tilley was a part-time employee of Guns a Million and he said guns and money were two things not unusual in the back parking lot of his store. Ozburn had complained about the public setting, but Tilley prevailed. Tilley said the Buenavista PD was nothing and the feds were concentrating on Arizona and besides, Guns a Million was on a quiet outskirt of town. Tilley had promised two Mossberg combat 12-gauges, two Smith .357 Magnum autoloaders, a Phoenix Arms .22, and a Raven Arms .25. All were used and in good condition.

  Hood had learned that six weapons weren’t enough to justify the arrest of a low-level crook like Tilley, even though most guns entered Mexico just a few at a time, contrabando hormigas, the Mexicans called it: contraband of the ants. For now, the task force team would focus on the video and audio evidence. Ozburn and his superiors had set a magic number, and Tilley’s was twenty. If the six went down right, they’d contract for twenty, then pinch him and try to trade him upline to his suppliers. Hopefully, his suppliers were his employers at the store. The big prize was the licensed dealers who bought and sold legally, then got greedy or made a mistake. These guys were capable of quantity: thirty, fifty, even a hundred guns at a time.