T. Parker - The Famous and the Dead

“I worry,” said Bradley. He could not remember ever having to choose his words so carefully, except perhaps when he was trying to deceive Mike Finnegan.

“That’s what every new father does.”

“Erin distrusts me.”

“Maybe she is too beautiful for trust.”

“I don’t think it’s that. I put her in danger. She no longer believes in me.”

“But so long as she obeys you, then the belief and trust can come back.”

“She’s never obeyed me. I’ve never expected her to.”

“America was ruined in the sixties.”

“I want her back.”

“Then you keep on trying, man. You get her back with good words and good actions. And if that doesn’t work, you get a girlfriend.”

Bradley nodded and looked out at the horseshoe court and the hoop and the brightly colored pots of flowers. “The watchdogs are all over me at work. They know I was down there when Armenta got it, but they can’t prove anything. Yet. They’re pretty sure I’m tied in with Herredia, but they can’t prove that either. Yet. They know I rescued Stevie from the Salvadorans, so therefore you and I must have something going. Suspicion creates its own truth. You know what I’m saying?”

“How’s it going with the Fords?”

“Fine right now. But I worry who’s talking about me.” Bradley watched Rocky’s face for a reaction but he just stroked his drooping mustache and waited. “Warren knows things he shouldn’t know. Is Cleary singing? Vega? I hope not. Rocky, let me be honest. I hope it’s not someone close to you.”

Rocky leaned forward. “He came to me. Warren. He wants to nail you, man. He wants to nail me. He keeps Octavio because Octavio talks. And talks. So what can I do? I say words. He knows about you and me and my son. So I say more words. He knows things, just like you say he does. More words. All words that say nothing. Even after years in Pelican Bay I never named.”

Bradley sat back and looked up at the white spearlike blooms of the giant bird of paradise, so tall they cleared the vine-choked wall to catch the sunlight. “Thanks, Rocky. I want to raise my son.”

“I get you.”

“I know you do. I want to be like you someday. Sitting in a place I love with family and friends all around.”

“Sixteen grandchildren, four great ones!”

“Well, maybe not quite that much like you.”

Rocky smiled.

“But I can’t go to prison like you did. I don’t have the courage.”

“Prison takes patience, not courage.”

“Rocky, if you have to trade me for your freedom, or the freedom of someone in your family, all I ask is a warning. Give me that one small thing.”

Rocky looked at him steadily and without blinking. His eyes shone with life and vigor, but Bradley saw the flat, blunt force in them. The man who wouldn’t name, even in Pelican Bay, he thought. Rocky sat back, the big Kobe jersey hanging loosely on him. He crossed his muscular arms with the full-sleeve tatts. “I believe in Los Angeles. I was born in an apartment on Aviation. Eight kids. My padre, he worked as a janitor. My mama, she did other people’s washing and made tamales. Thousands and thousands of tamales. They take time to make. She’s ninety-three this month. She don’t make tamales anymore. She lives upstairs in that house, right there. Papa wanted to live to be a hundred and he did. He died right there on the basketball court. Look at all this.” Rocky unlocked his arms and held them out in a gesture of presentation, then let his hands drop to his knees.

“You’ve built a good life, Rocky. It’s perfect here and you have everyone and everything you need. I believe in Los Angeles, too. And I’ve worked very hard, like you. But I think I’m about to get crushed, along with my wife and son. So, like I said-I worry. How much should I worry, Rocky? That’s why I came here. Because you’re wise and you know when to fight and when to get out of town.”

Rocky nodded and stroked his mustache again. “You have the warning you asked for.”

“Thank you. You’re a true friend.”

“I’m sorry, but I have my worries, too.”

“I understand.”

“Good luck.”

Two mornings later Hood, burrowed like a dog into the cold mud bank of Piru Creek beneath the overhang of a willow, shivered in the darkness. He could see the roofline of Mike’s cottage a hundred yards away, and the pale smoke rising steadily from the river-rock chimney. A rooster crowed to the north and Hood checked his watch: thirty-five minutes to sunrise.

Upstream where it ran behind the cottage, the creek gurgled and splashed through a rocky riffle. But then the water widened and deepened into a quiet pool nearly thirty feet long and fifteen wide. At the far downstream end of the pool stood several large boulders that formed a spillway through which the creek tumbled impatiently into a lower, narrower channel. Across from the boulders Hood was buried in the bank near the end of the pool, under the willow. Owens had said this pool was where Mike lingered longest-submerged, weighted, and masked-observing and sometimes taking pictures of the fish and insects. The boulders at the end of the pool were where he usually climbed out. One of the rocks was large and flat enough for Mike to sun himself on, in hot months. He never wore a wetsuit. Hood could see this pale rock in the darkness and he guessed it was no more than twenty feet away.

He looked out at the surface of the water, broad shifting concavities of black and silver. He felt unfamiliar to himself. He had a gun but no authority to use it, no badge. He still felt as if he were in law enforcement but he knew that he was nothing now but a mud-caked creature with a grievance.

He listened to the rooster and let his thoughts and memories roll past unexamined. More and more these days Hood enjoyed engaging the world as if he were not in it. He wondered if a light sink-tip fly-line would be a good way to catch the fish in this deeper pool. Maybe cast cross-stream from above the pool head and give it a mend and let it swing with the current, sinking. This was the kind of thing his father never tired of talking about, and in fact Douglas had been a very good angler in his day. Going through some of his father’s things out in their Bakersfield garage after the memorial service, Hood and one of his sisters had found a heavy magazine-shaped journal with forty years of Douglas’s fishing notes and sketches. The cover of the journal was leather and carved with a jumping trout. The notes were written in Douglas’s unmistakable half-printed, half-cursive hand, developed in his early years as a drafting student. The drawings were clear and simple-water flow, structure, location of fish, cast direction and drift, etc. He remembered the look on Julie’s face: You should hang on to this, Charlie.

Gradually the light coalesced and Hood could see the far bank and the willows and the upstream riffle. Smoke continued to waft out of the chimney. Apparently Mike had either gotten up during the night, or stayed up for most of it to tend the fire. Birds called, still deep in the trees and bushes, their songs meek and tentative on this cold winter morning. He looked at his watch again. Owens said that Mike was in the water just after sunrise during summer and early fall, but not until around eight A.M. during cold weather. Two hours , Hood thought.

He unbuttoned his coat and checked the Taser gun, body warm and dry in its holster. It was an X26c, modeled after the police-grade weapon, with fifteen-foot conductive wires and eighteen watts of what Taser called “Electro-Muscular Disruption” (EMD) technology. Hood learned that bare wet skin would provide enhanced “Neuromuscular Incapacitation” (NMI) according to the Taser tech adviser, who also suggested sharpening the probes with carbide #8 sandpaper for increased penetration and hold.