T Parker: The border Lords

He made West Hollywood in less than an hour. On a darkened side street near the Troubadour he stepped from the Cayenne and stripped off his suede vest and shirt, then painfully wriggled out of a heavy steel mesh vest concealed beneath his shirt. The vest had been a wedding gift. The accompanying card was signed, "Your Mother." Bradley had found the joke infuriating but intriguing, given that she was a year dead on his wedding day. According to the jokester, the vest had been custom-forged by a Bakersfield blacksmith of French descent for Joaquin Murrieta, his great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, in 1851.

He opened the hatchback and heaved the vest in. In the vehicle's interior light he could see the buttons that ran down one side of the vest-silver 1851 eight-reales coins, drilled on-center and attached to the mail with leather ties. And he could see the old marks and dings and dimples that the vest and someone-El Famoso? — had endured. Bradley looked at the newer dings and divots that had just been added by Sean Gravas and his Love 32. These had a different patina-smoother, cleaner and deeper than those that his great ancestor had survived-and Bradley knew that his luck was holding, that if he'd been shot with a high-caliber handgun or a magnum load, he would be lying back in that car wash with the rest of the luckless dead.

He lifted his undershirt and looked down at his chest. The welts were raised and red with white tops and painful as burns but the skin was unbroken. It looked like he'd been stung by hornets. He got back into the bullet-shredded shirt, then found the old denim jacket he always carried in his vehicle and bundled up against the sudden cold.

He walked around the block, stopped at a liquor store and bought a pack of smokes and a bouquet of flowers. He stood outside the Troubadour and lit up and waited for his body to stop trembling and his breathing to slow. It took a while. When he was ready he stepped inside, where the doorman recognized him and gave him a brief nod of acceptance.

Ozburn dropped the last of the nine wooden gun boxes into the trunk of the Corolla, then set his duffel over them, grabbed both Love 32s and closed the lid.

He got into the passenger seat and set the guns on the floor and Daisy licked the back of his neck as he cinched up the restraints. Father Joe signaled and looked over his shoulder before slowly pulling onto Floral Street.

"Pick up the pace a little, Padre," said Ozburn. "You don't want to get pulled over for going too slow."

Leftwich smiled and goosed the accelerator and the little four-cylinder hummed obligingly.

"I take it there was a problem," said the priest. He was dressed in his clerical uniform again-black shirt with a stiff white collar, black pants.

"Five men and a woman down and probably dead. I think I killed three of the men and maybe a fourth on the way out. There were so many people and so much shooting, I could hardly tell what was going on."

"But there was no killing in the plan, was there?" Leftwich handed Ozburn his ancient flask and Ozburn took a big drink.

"Just a straight-up, money-for-guns buy. I don't know what happened. Four of Herredia's errand boys had the guns. The others screamed they were deputies but by then they were shooting at me. Anybody can yell cop. Gulf Cartel gunmen came to mind. But two were women so I'm thinking LASD. Seven in all. Fuckin' chaos, Father. When I saw them coming at me from both ends of that tunnel I just did what I had to do. Thanks for being here."

"I told you I'd be here."

Ozburn hit the flask again and gave it back. Leftwich signaled and turned onto Avenue L and accelerated slowly down the wide street. "We'll take the back roads for a while. Stay off the interstate. Maybe use the Pearblossom Highway. Love that drive. Have you seen Hockney's painting of it?"

"Move it, Joe."

"It's only a four-banger."

"Here we go!" said Ozburn.

He released the lap harness and jackknifed his body and scrunched into the leg space as far as he could, his back buckling and his legs aching while the LASD cruisers whined past them with their lights flashing.

"Looks like two more coming up," said Leftwich. "And one has a headlight out. That's amusing."

Ozburn felt the top of his head pressing against the glove box and his back rippling with pain and he stared down at the floor mat. Balled tightly as he was, his sunglasses steamed up as two more sirens shrieked and two more sets of lights flashed by overhead. He growled. He felt Father Joe's small hand on his back, rocking him gently, and heard his soothing voice: Be still, my son. You have performed good acts and defeated evil.

"I feel like my body is being eaten," said Ozburn.

"You are overtired. Delia was like that as a child. You need rest. They're gone, Sean. You can come up."

Ozburn flung himself upright against the seat and again fumbled for the lap harness and again Daisy licked the back of his neck with great enthusiasm.

"Delia?"

"My sister. The woman you saw that night in the restaurant."

"She's pretty."

"She's a very bright person, too. Troubled, at times. Now, tonight you should stay at my place. I've got a very nice little double-wide right up here in Phelan. On half an acre and neat as a pin. And I'll be busy elsewhere for the next few days, so you'll have the run of the place. I'll be gettable by phone. Oh, and there's a rather old Chevy Malibu in the carport but it runs well and you're welcome to it."

Ozburn groaned and leaned his head against the rest and squinted through his sunglasses at the oncoming headlights, bright and merciless.

They rode in silence for a long while, looping around the regional airport in Palmdale and picking up the Pearblossom Highway toward Phelan.

"Sean, you've done some very fine work these last few weeks. There have been some unexpected setbacks, but a man's character is revealed when he's challenged more than when he's triumphant. I'm honored to have helped you in my own small way. You know what I'd like? I'd like to for you to tell me what you're planning to do with those guns in the trunk."

Ozburn rolled his head to the left and took a long look at the priest. "My job."

"Your job? Oh, you're going to sell them to bad men and let ATF swoop in?"

"Roger."

"You are a delight to know and a delight to work with."

"Step on it, Padre."

"We're almost there." Later that night after Leftwich had driven off, Ozburn sat on the couch in the trailer with Daisy at his feet and listened to the wind skid across the high desert and nudge the trailer. He thought it was like a lion nosing a mouse. He drank Father Joe's Irish whiskey. For a long while he sat with his head back looking up at the ceiling and he could feel nothing at all in his body. Not one sensation, not the awareness of a limb or a pulse or the taking of a breath. He willed his feet to move and they did not. He willed his head to lift off the couch back but it did not lift. In this state, emptied of the physical, he thought of Seliah, imprisoned by sleep like a butterfly in amber. Where did her mind go? Somewhere pleasant? Surely she dreamed. He thought of the first time he'd seen her in the winter quarter freshman comp class at the U of A in Tucson, walking in with one of her swim team friends, both of them tall, pretty girls wrapped up against the desert cold in Wildcats Swimming sweatshirts, their hair greened by the hours of chlorine, faces tan and lovely. The friend had caught his eye first, but then he looked at Seliah and she smiled back and he elbowed the dive-team buddy beside him and said: Look! He thought of the swimmer-diver parties they'd had and a long hike they took up Sabino Canyon in the spring where he'd plucked her a handful of wildflowers and this had moved her far more than he'd thought it would, and later, when he took her arm and stopped her as a big Western diamondback inched across the trail in front of them he had felt her shiver; then she pulled him back down the trail and clamped her body onto his and kissed him hungrily for what seemed like an hour. Ozburn thought of watching Seliah get third in the women's freestyle at the Pan Am Games, of the wild grad party, and of meeting her folks in Boulder, their wedding day and honeymoon and the day he got his acceptance notification from ATF. He thought of the good years, then the undercover assignment, his disillusionment, his rebirth near the volcano, his acceptance of the mission that he himself never really understood. The terrible good acts. Defeating evil. Monstrous desire. The loss of faith in everything he had ever been faithful to. The sickness and the madness and the killing. What happened, he wondered. What?