T. Parker - The Famous and the Dead

“Enough,” said Owens.

“Would either of you like these last few crackers? No? Who is this Hood and why do you believe he can handle Mike? ‘Taking him down,’ as you apparently like to say now, is not going to be easy. He’s as strong as ten men, and you cannot kill him. Just for starters.”

“We can deceive him,” said Bradley. “That’s how we do it.”

“Difficult at best,” said Beatrice. Then she squinted again at Owens and nodded impatiently. Bradley was impressed by the limber velocity of her mind. “But you can deceive him, can’t you, Owens? Because he loves you, too, as you love him. And he trusts you.”

Owens fixed Bradley with another strange stare. “I don’t know. I need time to think.”

Beatrice noisily bit into an apple. “This project could be very, very satisfying. I am so tired right now. This is more activity than I’ve had in nearly a century. All I’ve really been able to do is pray and learn how to sleep. And talk to myself to keep my vocal chords from fusing together. Keeping up my appearance took some time, but it’s amazing how long twenty-four hours are. I’m really tired of all those Psalms.”

“We’ve got a long walk,” said Bradley.

“My feet will be tender and I’ll have to carry my hair in my arms. But I’m sure I can manage.”

“I brought you a pair of athletic shoes and a dress. But you already have a dress.” He dug deep into the backpack and held up a new pair of shoes, white with pink trim, still linked by a plastic tie. He had come that close to shoplifting them from a busy sporting goods store the day before, then caught himself and paid full retail, in cash, with money he’d earned as an LASD deputy.

“Bradley Jones-you angel, you.”

• • •

They headed for a Target in San Bernardino for basics. Beatrice was impressed by the speed and comfort of modern cars, and their numbers, and the staggering human population. “This was mostly cows and crops in nineteen-seventeen,” she said. “Now it’s so much more interesting.” The wide aisles and bright lights and abundant merchandise of the Target amazed her. She lifted and piled her hair into one of the red plastic shopping carts and aimed it straight for the television screens flickering away back in Electronics. A security guard approached and asked her for ID and Bradley badged the older man and told him to get lost. Then off to women’s clothing.

Beatrice drew more than a little attention in the store so they bought shears and pulled over in Norco, found a park, and Owens cut off her hair well above her shoulders. Bradley placed a length of the shorn hair on the ground and paced it off: twelve feet, approximately. He couldn’t quite see leaving it behind so he collected and laid it all out lengthwise, then took one big handful at a time and coiled it, hand around elbow, twisting it tightly, just as he had coiled the rescue rope, then tightly knotting the ends. The hair made five thick cables, which he lay in the back of the Cayenne. Beatrice bathed in the park restroom with a new bar of soap and a new towel and came out a few minutes later in new clothes of her choosing: Dickie’s work pants and a blue fleece vest over a tie-dyed T-shirt. She reeked of Heaven Sent. She slept in back all the way to Buenavista.

Outside the hospital room Bradley introduced Reyes to Beatrice. The old snake-bit cop studied her skeptically, then limped off to get coffee. In the room Bradley introduced Erin to Beatrice, who touched Thomas’s cheek lovingly and gave Erin a long hug, then asked where the cafeteria was. Owens went into Erin’s room and closed the door behind her. Bradley and Beatrice went to the cafeteria and took their food trays out in the hospital courtyard so she could get some of the mild desert sun. They sat with Reyes. “Hospitals haven’t really changed that much,” she said. “I don’t recognize much of the medical equipment, but the atmosphere is the same, and the smells and the general sense of gravity and efficiency. More buzzers. More female doctors, thank heaven. The food’s better, too. Why do you limp, former Chief Reyes?”

“Rattlesnake.”

“Oh? One fell into my mineshaft a few years ago. Crotalus mitchelli. ”

“Sounds like that movie,” said Reyes. “Did it bite you?”

“No, the poor thing was stunned. I grabbed it behind the head and ate it.”

Reyes laughed, then suddenly stopped. Nearly an hour later Owens came outside with a tray of her own. She sat down without a word and ate while Beatrice examined Bradley’s cell phone. At first she thought he was teasing her about its alleged powers. Bradley dialed and Owens’s phone buzzed and when Beatrice answered it, it was indeed Bradley, simultaneously speaking from the phone and from three feet away. “Electricity has come a long way. I’ve got so much to understand.”

“That’s nothing,” said Bradley. He shot video of her and played it back and she was speechless.

“I’ll do it,” said Owens, interrupting. “I can’t let anyone ruin Thomas. Not even Mike.”

“You chose the right thing,” said Reyes.

On that chill evening they brought Erin and Thomas back to Hood’s home in Buenavista. On the radio news Bradley heard that the suspect in the slaying of an ATF agent in El Centro and the bombing of the ATF field office in Buenavista was expected to survive his gunshot wounds, apparently self-inflicted.

Two days later Bradley and Owens walked along the lily pond at Balboa Park in San Diego, surrounded by the old buildings, stately and ornate. The day was brisk. Bradley pushed the stroller and Owens held his arm and a picnic basket. Thomas’s head, barely visible within the blankets, rocked gently with the motion of his ride. They passed a mime and a juggler and a young man with no arms, playing a guitar with his feet. He was very good. They stopped and watched and Owens tipped him two hundred dollars when the song was over.

Mike rose from the bench and waved when he saw them. Bradley steered the stroller his way. Bradley felt his pulse speed up and he tried to talk it down. Owens had briefed him on the Method, where an actor recalls something from her personal past to help make her acting more convincing in the present. Looking at Finnegan from fifty feet away, Bradley’s first impulse was to draw the sidearm from the crook of his back and riddle the man with bullets. But his purpose now-perhaps the most important in his young life-was not to injure Mike but to deceive him, to convince him of Bradley’s happiness here in this moment. So he pictured the first time he’d seen Erin, onstage and in the lights. .

Mike was dressed in sporty black warm-ups and bright yellow-and-green soccer shoes. He wore gold chains around his neck and a monstrous gold Rolex encrusted with diamonds. Ridiculous, as always , thought Bradley, but he knew by now it was a ruse. Mike swept up Thomas, blankets and all, and smiled down into the newborn’s pink, doubtful face. “Beautiful is not the word,” he said. “The word, to my knowledge, has not yet been invented. My goodness. ”

Owens let go of Bradley’s arm and hugged Mike rather stiffly, then returned to Bradley’s side. He gently gathered her against him, smiling at Mike and picturing the first time he’d introduced Erin to his mother. Mike gave him an inquisitive look. “It’s heartening to see two of my favorite people, together. Bradley-it must be nice to be loved for who you are, rather than resented for who you are not.” Then he returned his attention to the baby in his arms.

Bradley said nothing. He absently stroked Owens’s arm, calling up another pleasant memory, this time of fishing with his little brother in the Valley Center pond. Jordan. He was way over in Hawaii now, living with Ernest, the father of Suzanne’s last child. Bradley had been texting both of his brothers lately. Jordan was so smart he was kind of scary. Kenny was growing up.