Iron River Read online

  At the far side of the cove, Bradley saw that pallets had been leaned up against the rocks, each one with a paper human silhouette target affixed. A hundred feet offshore bobbed a sleek sportfisher manned by two men who were now sitting on the fighting chairs and smoking. Down at the waterline was a small dock beside which five men squatted on their haunches. As Bradley and Pace and the four gunmen walked out onto the sand, the squatting men stood up and studied them.

  Bradley introduced Herredia to Ron Pace as Señor Mendez, deputy chief of worldwide operations for Favier & Winling Security. Herredia offered his hand and considered him with a black stare. Pace swung his hand in a big arc like a rube and told Señor Mendez he’d heard a lot about him.

  Bradley flinched inwardly as he shook Herredia’s hand and received a brief, formal hug.

  Old Felipe gave Bradley a partially toothed smile and thoroughly ignored Ron Pace.

  One of the pistoleros set the wooden gun box on the spool table, and Pace unlocked it and opened it.

  He took out the Love 32 and presented it to Herredia. Herredia was a big man with big hands, but his index finger fit through the trigger guard with room to spare.

  “It’s heavy.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Pace. “I’ll show you why.”

  Herredia’s eyebrows were bushy and when they rose upward in the middle he looked soulful, and when they lowered into a glower he looked capable of anything. Now they were level as he looked to the men at the shoreline.

  Bradley watched them shift their weight uneasily, as if they wanted to walk away but also wanted to stay together, their attention divided between the men in the boat offshore and what was going on around the big cable spool. He could not hear the words but their voices were anxious and speculative.

  “What is this?” asked Herredia. He stabbed a finger at the widened cooling comb atop the barrel of the automatic.

  “Let me explain,” said Pace. “It’s called the Love 32.”

  “A gun named Love?”

  Bradley listened as Pace launched into the same presentation he’d given a few days ago at Pace Arms. He stated the gun specs, then explained the name of the Love 32. Herredia looked at Bradley blankly at the mention of Murrieta.

  “The thirty-two-caliber bullet is weak,” said Herredia.

  “You can say that one thirty-two-caliber bullet is weak,” said Pace.

  “I did just say it.”

  “Watch, Señor Mendez.”

  Pace set the pistol on the spool and tapped out the frame pins with his pocketknife punch. He opened the frame and made the small adjustments with the needle-nose pliers. He reassembled it, then ejected the regular clip and replaced it with the big fifty-round magazine.

  Bradley noticed the sharp twinkle in Herredia’s eyes as it dawned on him what he was seeing.

  Herredia was nodding as Pace released the telescoping graphite butt from the back side of the frame. Bradley saw that Pace was ignoring his audience now, having drawn them so completely into his drama. Pace pulled out the butt and it clicked into place with authority and he held the gun as anyone would hold a pistol, but the graphite brace fit firmly into the crook of his elbow. Pace raised and lowered the weapon to make sure the brace was the right length. The fifty-shot magazine protruded from the handle with an artful, lethal curve.

  “Fifty thirty-two-caliber bullets are never weak,” said Pace. “Señor Felipe, do you know about muzzle-rise in a full automatic weapon?”

  “He knows everything about all weapons,” said Herredia.

  “I doubt that, but keep your hand on the top of the barrel, old man, or you’ll blow yourself into eternity. Which I suspect will feel a lot shorter than most of us like to believe it will.”

  Bradley winced inwardly again, but Felipe was smiling. Pace handed the weapon to him. He grasped the pistol grip and worked the retractable brace into his elbow, and he lifted and lowered the gun as Pace had done.

  Then he led them across the sand and stood fifty feet or so away from the pallets. The old man spread his feet and swung the gun up and braced his left hand on the barrel comb.

  Bradley listened to the five-second volley and saw the chips of wood and paper flying and the middle of one of the targets grow a hole outward. Through the hole he could see the sunlight hitting the black rock behind. The smoke rose quickly into the breeze. The men down by the dock watched unmoving. Bradley saw that they wore ankle irons linked to a chain fastened around a dock stanchion. The boatmen waved their baseball caps, and their laughter rode the breeze to shore.

  Herredia looked at Bradley, nodding.

  “There’s one more feature I think you will like, sir,” Bradley said.

  Pace took the Love 32 and screwed the sound suppressor into the end of the barrel. He popped out the big magazine and clicked home a full one.

  “Now you can mow down your enemies without waking the baby,” said Pace.

  Bradley saw the quick menace in Herredia’s face, but Felipe cackled.

  Pace presented the newly loaded and silenced weapon to Felipe, and Felipe presented it to El Tigre.

  Herredia looked out toward the dock and waved. Bradley’s heart fluttered and he took a deep breath and felt intensely present and bad. The men in the boat weighed anchor and the engine started with a gentle cough and a puff of smoke. Some of the five men near the dock turned to watch the boat.

  Then the muffled groan of a helicopter became a full roar as an old Vietnam-era CH-47 transport chopper slowly lifted over the rise from the desert behind them. Its markings and numbers were Red Cross. It passed by above them, and Bradley could see the scars on its belly left by Herredia’s welder. Then it was far out over the sea, banking to the south.

  “A gift to me from my Colombians,” said Herredia. “They stole it but wanted faster ones. It can carry more money and weapons than any vehicle.”

  Herredia smiled at Bradley, then he cradled the Love 32 against his elbow and motioned for Ron Pace to follow him. Pace gave Bradley a proud grin, then he followed Herredia until they were sixty feet from the dock. The boat had swung north, and Bradley saw both boatmen watching intently.

  He watched as Herredia asked something of Pace but the words were lost in wind and distance. Herredia appeared to press his case, offering the gun. Pace stepped back, shaking his head, and he raised his hands as if trying to keep something away. Herredia nodded at the five men and continued speaking and Pace continued shaking his head. Herredia spat out a final statement, then swung the machine gun on the men. Bradley saw the vibration of Herredia’s big forearm as he pressed down on the gun, and he heard the metallic clatter of the gun as the prisoners struck out with their fists or tried to shield themselves with their hands, and the air shimmered with their blood and Bradley heard screams while the bullets cut through them, some bullets stitching the placid cove water behind them, and he heard more screams as they twisted and buckled and fell gracelessly, then he heard no screams at all and it was over.

  Ron Pace collapsed to the sand and Herredia stepped over him and came up the beach. Bradley watched the smoke rise and vanish, heard a groan, saw the boat heading toward the dock fast, the men with their hat bills low and serious.

  “Zetas,” said Felipe.

  “Not anymore,” said Bradley. He walked back to the spool table and took a red plastic bucket and carried it down to the water and let it fill halfway. Then he came back over and poured the cold seawater over Pace’s face. Bradley dropped the inverted bucket to the sand and sat on it and lit a cigarette and waited for Ron to come to. He took out his cell phone and checked it, then heaved it out into the ocean. He watched the boatmen load the bodies into the boat, swinging the dead by ankles and wrists high until their own weight carried them over the gunwales and they hit the deck with thumps that became less hollow as their numbers mounted.

  “Holy shit,” said Pace.

  “Little holiness here,” said Bradley.

  “Five men.”

  “A hundred a week. Two hundred
. Heads on stakes. Mendez against the Zetas. We don’t know how many are dying.”

  “I may vomit.”

  “No one cares about your vomit. Stand up and shake it off, Ron. It’s time to negotiate with Mendez.”

  “He’s Herredia.”

  “Herredia, then. Stand up. Clear your brain. We’ve got a deal to make.”

  Late that night they sat on a tile veranda overlooking the Pacific. Bradley watched the moonlight shiver on the water and heard the palm fronds rattle in the breeze. He felt culpably brutal but he was not a man given to self-doubt.

  Pace proposed to manufacture one thousand guns, two large-capacity magazines for each firearm and one sound suppressor each, for one million cash dollars. He pointed out that this was roughly one-half the cost of used Chinese- and Indian-made submachine guns in God-knew-what condition, and only one-third the cost of new ones—few of them concealable and none of them silenced. They would be warranted free of defects for one year. The guns would bear no serial numbers or manufacturer’s marks except for Love 32 on the right side of each barrel.

  Pace handed Herredia some Polaroids of the Pace Arms building, the mold and dye bays, the assembly lines, the firing lines, the offices. Herredia looked at them patiently in the light from a tiki torch.

  “I think the thirty-two ACP is a weak load,” he said.

  “Tell the five dead men that,” said Pace.

  “I want to rename the gun,” said Herredia. “Something about death or the devil.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Mendez, but it’s the Love 32. This is nonnegotiable. History . . . ,” he added absently, staring out at the water. Herredia brooded and glowered and tried to ply Pace with fine tequila and wine and fishing stories but Pace responded with a series of knock-knock jokes until Bradley finally butt in and suggested that he shut the fuck up and make a deal.

  Pace came off his price a hundred grand, while making clear that all transportation and shipping was one-hundred-percent Mr. Mendez’s responsibility.

  “Shipping is not an interest of mine,” Herredia said, with a look at Bradley. “Mr. Jones here is very good at moving things from one place to another. Between us, the transport will go smoothly.” At first, Bradley hadn’t liked El Tigre’s quip about the stolen Red Cross helo carrying more cash and guns than any vehicle. Bradley had no patience with men who didn’t value a good ally when they were lucky enough to have one. If Herredia wanted to move his own dollars and guns, then let him. But now it sounded like Herredia was offering to share the machine. A helo. Interesting.

  “And I’ll need one-third of the nine hundred thousand dollars up front so I can order materials, hire my crew back, retool the lines for a totally new product, and make enough molds and dyes to crank out the units fast,” Ron said.

  Pace had told Bradley this a few days ago when he’d made his proposal over martinis, so Herredia was prepared for it. Herredia told Pace that there would be three hundred thousand cash in small bills waiting for them in a Compton warehouse just as soon as they could get there to pick it up.

  Pace told Herredia that, once operational, he would run one assembly crew—his finest—on seven twelve-hour shifts per week, with two hundred and fifty units ready for pickup in ten days. The full one thousand would take until midsummer, three weeks out.

  “Your enemies will never know what hit them,” he said.

  Bradley was prepared for Herredia to pitch smug Ron Pace off the balcony and be done with the pendejo. Ever since the death of Gustavo Armenta, El Tigre had expected vengeance on Americans from Benjamin, which meant American retaliation, which would be very, very bad for business. Herredia was irritable enough without being cajoled by a wiseass gunmaker. He just wanted his thousand machine pistols, value priced, and he wanted them soon.

  “Tonight I will say a long prayer that I am not in business with a fool,” said Herredia. “Ándale. You have work to do.”

  He stood and shook hands with the gunmaker. Felipe watched from a corner. Two pistoleros left the darkness and escorted Pace and Bradley to the car.

  7

  Two days after the Buenavista shoot-out and one day after the disappearance of Jimmy Holdstock, Hood and his Blowdown team let themselves into Victor Davis’s townhome in Yuma, Arizona.

  They were looking for guns. They searched the living room, kitchen, and small dining room without success. The master bedroom entertainment center yielded pornographic DVDs but no firearms. Hood noted that the framed picture of a lovely woman on Davis’s nightstand was actually the sample photo sold with the frame. The Frame Shop sticker was still on the back. The dream girl had cost Victor $9.99. In the master closet hung two dozen dark suits, at least a dozen white shirts, and maybe thirty ties.

  But the guest bedroom held pay dirt: four plastic bins under the bed, containing forty-eight used small-caliber handguns. Many were in poor shape, Hood saw. Six more bins stacked neatly up on a closet shelf held the big stuff: six .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson revolvers, four .44 Magnum autoloaders, ten .38 Detective Special revolvers, twelve Pace Arms nine-millimeter automatics, and two FN 5.57s. They were used but in fine condition.

  Bly pointed to the FNs. “They penetrate body armor. The cartel gunmen call them asesino de policía—cop killers.”

  Hood immediately thought of Holdstock again. He looked at Ozburn and Bly and knew that they were thinking of him, too. Hood feared the worst. Holdstock had vanished somewhere between San Diego and El Centro the day before. His car was missing, too, suggesting willful flight. But Holdstock had a family. Holdstock was stand-up. Hood thought he’d been murdered or abducted in retaliation for the shooting of Gustavo Armenta. Zetas. Abducted was worse.

  “Okay,” said Ozburn. “We’re having another Jimmy moment. I’m gonna think a prayer for him right now where we stand. You two can join me or not.”

  Hood bowed his head and closed his eyes. He sensed Bly doing the same. He asked for Holdstock’s safe return. He pictured Jimmy flipping the burgers at the barbecue he’d hosted for Hood before Hood had moved to Buenavista. It was a nice afternoon, and those few hours between them made Jimmy the best friend Hood had in this vast desert. His wife and daughters were a delight. Help him, help him.

  “Amen,” said Ozburn. “You didn’t think that ATF could be so much fun, did you, Charlie?”

  “It never stops.” Hood smiled to himself. He liked these people. He liked the way they refused to call themselves ATFE, just the old ATF was what they said. Ozburn had quipped once that it was ATFE but the E was silent.

  There were four shotguns stacked in one corner of the closet and long rifles stacked in the other. The closet floor was lined with green military surplus ammo boxes, and when Hood toed them, he could tell they were full. He squatted and opened one and looked at the neat boxes of .44 Magnum loads, factory made.

  Hood had quickly learned that Arizona was the widest and deepest part of the Iron River. It was legal to buy guns in Arizona with minimal ID, a cursory background check, and no wait. Then a gun owner could sell, trade, carry, and conceal with almost no paperwork. Many dealers both licensed and unlicensed worked out of their homes, just like Victor. Hood had seen handguns for sale in scores of gun shops in Arizona towns, in liquor stores, even in the convenience stores of gas stations along the scenic state highways.

  “We yanked Victor’s license a year ago,” said Ozburn. “He sold to some straw buyers plugged into the Tijuana Cartel. He sold to young mothers in east L.A. We couldn’t build a case, so we closed him down. But Victor didn’t miss a beat. Gun heaven, man, pistol paradise. Most of this iron would have hit the streets in the next three months if Victor hadn’t run up against his own product. He’d sell the beat-up shit guns to the inner-city bangers. The heavy stuff he’d sell to the cartels. The badder the bad guys, the better their guns are.”

  Bly ran a metal detector through the house in search of more. Ozburn safed and photographed and logged the guns and put them into ATFE lockboxes for transport.

  Hood found a brie
fcase stuffed with ATFE Firearm Transaction Records and appointment books under the living room sofa. He’d seen such forms before—each dealer was required to complete and sign one for each sale, then keep it in his possession. If the dealer went out of business, he was supposed to send the forms back to ATFE for storage, but Victor Davis was noncompliant. Hood wondered at a system that trusted the crooks to follow the procedures.

  He set the briefcase on the kitchen counter and rifled through the forms. They’d been thrown in loose. He found dates ranging from 2004 through June of 2009, when ATFE had pulled Victor Davis’s federal firearms license. Hood knew that 2004 was when the Iron River began to swell—cartel competition, another surge of Mexican law enforcement, another hike in the prices of street drugs across the United States. Now it was a flood and he was part of the levee.

  He ran one hand through the piles of forms. Hundreds of them. All makes of guns, all calibers, from .22-short derringers to 10-gauge riot guns. The buyers were mostly men, but not all. The prices ranged from fifty dollars for a used Lorcin .25 to seven hundred and fifty dollars for a new Colt .45 ACP. The names were Dalrymple and Johnson and Gutierrez and Hoades and Valenzuela and Milliken and Djorik and on and on and on. Hundreds and hundreds more.

  Hood pulled up a barstool and flipped through, arranging the sales by year.

  A Beretta nine for Wilson of Oceanside.

  A Taurus .38 for Foxx of Commerce.

  He thought about Holdstock and his car. The car gave Hood hope, but not much hope. Holdstock had had enough? Run out on his wife and daughters? Run away to Mexico in order to stretch a modest federal paycheck? What quality of hope was this?

  A Savage Arms 12-gauge for Mendoza of Yuma.