The Border Lords Read online

  Hood stopped at the ice cream stand and got two deluxe Popsicles, one coconut and one orange. He turned right and crunched down the wide dirt road. Half a mile later he saw the hubcap with the spray of plastic flowers long blanched of color by the sun. The driveway was not quite wide enough for his Durango so the manzanita branches streaked its flanks. The house was a pale green cinder-block rectangle with a water tank on the roof.

  She stood in the doorway as if she had been expecting him. He climbed down from the vehicle with the drink bottles in one hand and the Popsicles in the other and swung the door shut with an elbow. They spoke in Spanish.

  —Good evening. I’m Deputy Hood.

  She peered at him, face darkly lined, eyes fierce but steady. She was short and wiry and wore a black dress to her ankles and red slip-on sneakers. Her scapular today was made not of rattlesnake parts but of dried peyote buttons interspersed with plastic Telmex calling cards with action pictures of famous soccer players on them.

  Hood held out the Popsicles and she took the orange one and a soda. He explained that he wanted to see what she had shown to Sean Gravas, the man who had filmed her healing of the stung girl, Silvia. She motioned him into her home. The floor was swept recently, broom marks on concrete, and there was a propane oven and a three-burner stove and a sink and a poured concrete counter. She opened her bottle and handed the opener to Hood.

  —He is a white devil.

  —He is a sick man.

  —Silvia is strong.

  —Sean is weak. I want you to take me where you took him.

  —It is ten minutes to drive.

  It was a thirty-minute drive. The dirt road that wound up past the curandera’s house soon narrowed to a twist of ruts. Hood straddled them in the big SUV. The sun was lowering now and there was a pink tint to the mesquite and madrone, backlit by the sun. They cast blue shadows on the tan desert sand. The curandera threw her Popsicle stick and wrapper out the window and a minute later the soda can.

  Finally the road ended in a fan of uphill paths that looked more traveled by flash floods than by humans or animals. The curandera put her hand on the door pull and Hood parked and shut off the engine. He came around to her side and she started up a trail through the dry brown brush. Hood got his Glock from the toolbox in the back and clipped the holster to his belt, then locked up the vehicle and caught up with her.

  She led the way, walking briskly. Lizards hugged the rocks for the last warmth of sunlight. They climbed for a few minutes, then walked downhill into a stand of scrub oak and greasewood. Hood smelled the spring and saw the foundation of a small house that had been destroyed, now just a black smudge upon the earth. There was a rock chimney. Beyond the foundation scattered sticks and rusted swatches of chicken wire lay half-buried in sand.

  She led him past the house and coop and a well and along the copse of greasewood trees. The ground around them was piled high with the dead needles into which spiders had tunneled. Their webs caught the sunlight, and just inside the mouths of the tunnels the spiders waited pale and still. She ducked under a branch and brushed between two trees, and Hood followed. The greasewood grew close together and Hood smelled the mint smell of them and felt their oil on his hands as he pushed aside the branches to follow her. A trail opened and after a minute they came to a clearing. Here the trees had not grown or were removed long ago.

  In the middle of the clearing was a rude rock pyramid four feet high, made of desert stones held together with cement. It looked to have been hastily made—thick seams of cement and an erratic shape. There were two staunch iron rings set into the concrete, one low and one high. A length of heavy chain ran from each ring to the ground and ended in a manacle drilled for a lock. Hood looked down at one, the large, rusted iron bracelet an exaggerated and seemingly ancient version of modern-day handcuffs. There was another pile of stones thirty feet away, at the edge of the greasewoods, and these were piled loose and dusted with dead brown needles.

  —Juan Batista lived here, she said. Crazy. Eyes like the devil. Eyes like Sean Gravas. That is how I know.

  The curandera walked to the manacles and placed the longer one over her small hand. Her dark fist moved easily in and out so she raised it, and the huge rusted cuff slid to the crook of her elbow. The short lower manacle she placed around her ankle, and over each one she made a locking motion with an invisible key. Then she threw the key into the greasewood and sat down in the dirt and looked at Hood.

  —He locked himself up and threw away the key?

  —Yes. Seven days in the sun and he died. Many weeks later they pulled his hand and foot from the manacles and buried him where those stones are.

  —Why did he do this?

  —He lived with his young wife and gathered firewood. He got a fever. He began to tremble and scream. He panted but could not drink. He drooled all down his shirt and pants. He growled like a wolf. He became strong as a chupacabra. He bit and raped his wife for four days. He repented and locked himself here to die. To save her life.

  —What made him go crazy?

  —He was not crazy. He went with the devil.

  —Was he an evil man?

  —No. He always loved God.

  —If he loved God, why did he go to the devil?

  —The devil came to him.

  —How?

  —In the caves of his blood.

  —I don’t understand.

  —You cannot understand. You cannot see. You cannot hear. This is his power over us. But when he comes into you, when it happens, then it cannot be hidden. All see and all know. This is our power over him. This is why he leaves us quickly.

  She squinted at Hood. The sun was low and in her face, burnishing it copper around the sharp teeth and the wise but feral eyes.

  —When did you know that Sean had the devil inside him?

  —The smell. The eyes. He would not look at his own reflection. He would not allow Silvia to drink water. These are signs.

  Hood looked at the crude stanchion, then at the loose pile of stones that marked Juan Batista’s grave. The sky was orange and black now in the west and Hood suddenly felt alone and afraid. Like Oz must feel, he thought. He felt uncertain, too, as he knew Sean must. And Hood also felt compelled to finish his mission and find his friend. Just as Ozburn, he thought, must feel the need to complete this journey of murder and attempted miracle that he had conceived.

  Hood thought again of Mike Finnegan, the man who had claimed to be a minor devil, and Mike’s insistence that no devil could possess a human, that a devil’s work was to influence, to direct, to cajole. Finnegan had said that men were free to choose. Finnegan had said that devils wanted men to be free to choose, to make their own laws, define good and evil for themselves.

  —What did he say when he saw this? he asked.

  —He said nothing as I told him about Juan Batista. Then he touched the manacles. He put them on and stared at them. He prayed. He became furious and the prayer became a scream and the scream became a howl. I walked home a hidden way.

  They drove back toward the village in darkness. Hood couldn’t shake the fear and the aloneness. He felt that he was connected to Sean. Felt that he owed Sean for enduring this terrible curse so that he wouldn’t have to. The least I owe him is respect, Hood thought, and some attempt to understand what he’s going through.

  —Did Gravas drive into Agua Blanca?

  —There was no vehicle at Silvia’s house.

  —Where is your nearest airport?

  —Tecate.

  —There must be something closer.

  —There is a strip outside of Agua Blanca. Follow the main road back to Tecate and turn where you see the sign to the gringo resort. When you see the large white boulders turn right.

  Hood saw the boulders ahead in his brights. He slowed and made the turn and bounced onto a rough dirt road. The wind had come up and the dust swirled in his headlights. A few hundred yards in, he followed an arrow spray-painted on a big rock, and this road ended at an old lake
bed that stretched as far as Hood could see in his high beams. It was flat and cracked, with wisps of tan, dry grass waving between the tiles of dried mud.

  He drove the Durango out onto the bed until he found the tire marks left by a small plane. He followed them until they ended in a semicircle. He stopped and got out and looked where someone had tied down the airplane. There were old stakes with lengths of bailing wire for securing the tires. There were footprints lightly stamped into the hardened mud. Dog prints, too, or possibly coyote, but Hood suspected otherwise.

  “Hello, Daisy.”

  Hood got the flashlight from the SUV console and walked an enlarging circle around the tie-down stakes. The wind sent little puffs of sand from along the edges of the mud segments and the dry grass went flat, then rose again, bent. Hood heard the crunch of his boots and the urgent hiss of the wind in his ears; then the wind would stop as if it had gone forever. He found a damp spot and a pile of dog turds.

  He traced the circle, larger and larger. The wind came up stronger. All his thoughts turned black and ugly and very clear: his father gone crazy with Alzheimer’s; the heartbreaking slaughter he’d tried to investigate in Anbar as a hated Naval Criminal Investigator; a woman he loved, bleeding to death in his arms because of things he did and did not do; the hero Luna he’d seen murdered by his own countryman; the young soldiers decapitated by cartel killers near Batopilas. Hood knew this could be the life of any grown son, cop, lover, soldier, and he had signed on for these things willingly and knowingly, but there was no consolation in this, not with the darkness and the wind and the crude altar where Juan Batista had offered himself and Sean Ozburn’s terrible madness flashing through all this blackness like a tracer round.

  Hood continued. When he looked he could see his footprints just touching the dried earth, one after another, circle within circle within circle growing smaller until they began where cute yellow Betty had sat. The wind tried to take him off course but Hood was a dogged man and simple in his stubbornness.

  He put one foot in front of the other and looked at nothing else, as he had often done in his life, a practical code of behavior, just him and his feet and where they were taking him.

  He advanced outward onto the lake bed and the dirt became softer. He saw another set of human footprints, not a circle but a faint straight line leading into the darkness. There were dog prints also.

  Hood followed these to the edge of the lake bed. Here they stopped or were lost in the creosote bushes that were eking out their livings. There was sagebrush and prickly pear, too. He turned his light before him and saw something unusual on the ground. He nearly stepped on it. He picked it up and shone the light on it. Paper. Hundreds of pages crushed into a rough ball. He recognized from boyhood the sheerness of it, and the small biblical typeface. Genesis. Exodus. Leviticus. Numbers. Deuteronomy. He pushed them into the pocket of his windbreaker.

  Hood scanned the brush with his light. Pages everywhere, some wadded tightly, others flapping alone, some still bound and fanned by the wind. Hood could hear the soft hiss of sand blowing against the paper. He went from one to the next, collecting and examining each in his light. One blew loose in the wind but he snatched it back. Chronicles, Ezra, Proverbs, Jeremiah. He stuffed all of them into the pocket, too. Samuel, Kings. Some were torn down, and some across, and some had been ripped into small pieces that flickered against the bushes in his light beam and blew from his hands when he tried to gather them.

  In the midst of these torn and scattered books Hood found a white leather binding. In his flashlight beam he saw the words HOLY BIBLE embossed in gold. Below that, in smaller letters, was written, “Sean William Ozburn.” There were no pages left in it, just glue and tattered edges along the inside spine. Hood recognized it as the cover of the book that Ozburn had held in his hands while he preached to the strange congregation in the grasslands of a country he couldn’t identify. In his video to Seliah, he had never opened it.

  Hood held the emptied cover and looked around him at the pages shivering in the wind. He pictured Ozburn standing out here at the end of the world, just him and his crumbling faith and his dog. Hood could see him well and he understood what Oz was feeling: He has healed Silvia and seen the curandera and heard the story of Batista. He has seen Batista’s end and in this he has seen his own end. He is afraid. He doesn’t know what is happening. He walks out here to the edge of the lake bed with his Bible. He tries to read from the truth that has always sustained him. But he can’t read, Hood knows: Sean can’t read because he can’t believe, and he can’t believe because he feels only pain and madness. He tries to pray but he can’t even do that. He became furious and the prayer became a scream and the scream became a howl. So, starting logically, in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, Sean yanks out the foundation of his belief and throws it into the desert for the wind.

  19

  The next day Hood drove up to the Valley Center ranch where three years ago he had interviewed Bradley Jones’s mother, Suzanne. It was Hood’s first assignment as a prospective LASD homicide detective and he’d made a fool of himself that morning with her.

  Now Bradley’s voice came over the intercom as Hood waited at the gate. A moment later it slid open and a pack of dogs boiled around Hood’s old IROC Camaro as he drove in. The meadow grasses had gone to tawny brown that shimmered in the crisp October light. He looked out to the ranch house and the big barn and the casitas up on the hillside.

  He drove past the barnyard where Bradley and Erin had gotten married last year. There had been a stage for musicians and an absinthe bar and a dance floor and the bullring in which Bradley had nearly gotten himself killed. Hood remembered how lovely his companion, Beth, had been that day, and he remembered the musicians who played, and the tents set up in the meadow for the guests, and Beth taking him into their tent that night. Oh, what a night that was.

  Hood parked up by the ranch house, in the same spot he’d parked four years ago. Instead of Suzanne watching him from the porch deck, it was her son. Hood got out.

  “That car is still your best quality,” said Bradley.

  “It’s not for sale.”

  “I could steal it.”

  “How’s the wounded hero? I saw you faint on TV.”

  “That was my sensitive side showing through.”

  “Musta hurt,” said Hood.

  “The thought crossed my mind that I’d die of that damned little thing and never get to see Erin again.”

  “That would be a high price to pay, Bradley. Though it’s a hard fact that you don’t deserve her.”

  “I’ve told her a million times but it doesn’t change her mind. Come on up. We can sit in the breakfast room where you tried to seduce my mother.”

  “That’s not exactly what happened.” Hood pictured Suzanne in her wrinkled periwinkle nightshirt, the sun on her hair and her eyes on him.

  “I was there, don’t forget.”

  “Let’s walk,” said Hood. “I like this day.”

  Bradley went inside and came out with two bottles of beer. He launched one down at Hood, who made a good catch. They walked out into the barnyard and stood in the shade of the oak tree. Hood watched a pair of young red-shouldered hawks wheel above in the pale blue sky, keening sharply.

  “Congratulations on freeing the boy,” said Hood.

  “We stumbled into him. Pure luck.”

  “You’ve got a lot of that.”

  “The kid had the brains to set off a silent alarm wired to us.”

  “I hear they’re having trouble finding a record of it.”

  “Yeah, well, lots of things get lost at HQ. Or maybe the media got it wrong and there never was an alarm.”

  “Well, then, how did you choose that house?”

  “Dispatch chose it, Charlie.” Bradley moved away from Hood and faced him. “Now what?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “You’re like a prying old woman sometimes, Charlie. Tell me something interesting about Bl
owdown.”

  Hood told him they were sticking it to the gunrunners—they’d recovered sixty-two firearms in a buy last week. And ATF had spent a lot of time and money getting Spanish versions of their computer gun tracing programs into the hands of law enforcement officers and prosecutors all over Mexico.

  “I saw the gold-plated Uzis that DEA and the Mexican army found in the La Familia bust,” said Bradley. “Saw the pictures, I mean. What, ten or twenty of them? And fifty gold-plated pistols?”

  Hood absorbed the insult with a nod and a smile. “They need them to do battle with the thousand Love Thirty-twos some enterprising gringos sold to the North Baja Cartel.”

  Bradley laughed derisively and shook his head. “You’re incorrigible. I can’t wait to be your boss someday.”

  “I saw you and Pace, and I saw the guns.”

  “What you thought were guns turned out to be new jeans we’d bought for poor kids south of the border. The reporters even got that right. That was egg on ATF’s face, Charlie. And not even you can hold me accountable for Ron Pace.”

  “The Pace Arms building in Costa Mesa is empty now. Ron still owns it but the penthouse is abandoned. Where did he go?”

  “I don’t know. I’d tell you if I did, because we’re on the same side, Hood. I’m a deputy sheriff now, remember?”

  For the next few minutes they traded deputy gossip—the union negotiations, the new LASD pursuit policies, county health care cuts, who’d get the current sheriff’s backing when he decided to step down. Hood enjoyed this. It was like having a younger brother. He was the youngest of the five by a lot, always looking up at the rest—last to arrive, last to know, last to be included—his boyhood a series of good-byes as his siblings grew and left. He was closer to them now as adults than they’d been as children. Slightly.

  Back in the house they barged in on Erin in her studio. She was putting new strings on a Gibson Hummingbird and when she saw Hood she smiled and rose and kissed him on the cheek.