T. Parker: Iron River

Ignacio called no one. When he got to work, his gringo boss walked him to the far part of the lot and lifted the tarp from a GM Yukon peppered with bullet holes. He told Ignacio it was muy importante, número uno. Fine, thought Ignacio. He preferred narcotraficantes to tiny devils any day.

Not long after Maria and Ignacio had left the man, the tractor-trailer that had nearly obliterated them arrived back on the scene of the near disaster. It had taken the driver two miles to still his nerves and face down his fears and make the laborious two-lane turnaround. He pulled off the road just behind the pickup truck. From his elevated position in the cab, he could see the big skid marks. He surveyed the desert around him and saw nothing unusual. There had been a man working on a flat tire. Then the Mercury coming at him in his own lane.

He got out and walked over to the pickup and saw the blown tire and the jack resting in the sand. The keys were still in the ignition and the driver’s window was down. He reached in and honked the horn and waited. A moment later he walked out into the desert beyond the pickup, but not far. Rattlesnakes liked the cool mornings this time of year. He’d run over one last spring not far from here that reached almost all the way across his lane, then he’d taken the time to turn around on the narrow highway and run over it again. He called out, and a jackrabbit bolted and his heart raced. A minute later he climbed back into the Freightliner and continued on toward Yuma. No good came in this desert.

Reyes looked at the skid marks, then up at the sun, then he followed the footprints that led into the desert. There were two sets. One was made by cowboy boots that left deep heel marks in the sand. The other was smaller and lighter and could have been pretty much any kind of shoe. The woman, he thought.

The tracks ended and Reyes found blood and a slight indentation where someone had rested. Apparently rested. The two tracks turned back toward the highway. But a third set of footprints, smaller than the boots but heavier than the shoes, continued away from this bloody lie into the desert beyond.

Reyes had no trouble following them. Half a mile to the north in the foothills that would later offer shade, he found a bloody little man half dug into an old den beneath a honey mesquite, legs protruding. Reyes knelt and saw the glint of an eye back in the darkness, and he reached down and lightly touched the man’s leg and told him he would be okay. Then he stood and on his third try was able to place a cell call to Imperial Mercy for an ambulance. Procedure was to call county first, but Reyes figured this guy would be dead if he had to wait for paramedics out of El Centro.

“They’re on the way,” he said.

The man groaned.

Charlie Hood lay on the roof of Guns a Million and aimed the video recorder down into the back parking lot. Behind him the bright yellow letters of the store sign flashed on and off in the close desert night. Hood could hear the lights buzzing and the electrical switches clicking and see the air around him pulsing yellow. He figured the roof would be hot so he had bought a bright Mexican blanket with the shape of an Aztec warrior woven into it and folded it twice for padding against the infernally hot gravel.

Sean Ozburn drove up right on time and pulled his white panel van into a space in the back lot. There were other cars but most of the Guns a Million customers had parked out front, a shorter walk in the heat. Hours were ten A.M. to midnight, six days a week, and Hood, in his two days so far here in Buenavista, had never seen fewer than six cars out front.

The van lights went off and Ozburn stepped out. Hood zoomed in. Ozburn was a big ATFE buck with blond hair to his shoulders and blue, hateful eyes. He wore jeans and a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off to show his arms and tatts. His supremacist’s air was a solid act, Hood thought. Hood was on loan to Operation Blowdown from the L.A. Sheriff’s Department, and he’d been immediately impressed by the ATFE’s courage and black humor in the face of bad odds. The border here was awash in guns, the Iron River, they called it, and ATFE and their task force brethren like Hood were just rafts bobbing upon the great current of firearms headed south. Hood saw that the ATFE agents worked their muscles strong and got good with their weapons. They lived on adrenaline and heat, and they prayed for luck. Hood was glad to be a part of them.

Ozburn leaned against the van and lit a cheroot. He was wired for sound and set to buy six weapons from an unlicensed dealer named Joe Tilley. Tilley was a part-time employee of Guns a Million and he said guns and money were two things not unusual in the back parking lot of his store. Ozburn had complained about the public setting, but Tilley prevailed. Tilley said the Buenavista PD was nothing and the feds were concentrating on Arizona and besides, Guns a Million was on a quiet outskirt of town. Tilley had promised two Mossberg combat 12-gauges, two Smith.357 Magnum autoloaders, a Phoenix Arms.22, and a Raven Arms.25. All were used and in good condition.

Hood had learned that six weapons weren’t enough to justify the arrest of a low-level crook like Tilley, even though most guns entered Mexico just a few at a time, contrabando hormigas, the Mexicans called it: contraband of the ants. For now, the task force team would focus on the video and audio evidence. Ozburn and his superiors had set a magic number, and Tilley’s was twenty. If the six went down right, they’d contract for twenty, then pinch him and try to trade him upline to his suppliers. Hopefully, his suppliers were his employers at the store. The big prize was the licensed dealers who bought and sold legally, then got greedy or made a mistake. These guys were capable of quantity: thirty, fifty, even a hundred guns at a time.

Hood rested on his elbows and felt the gravel trying to get him through the blanket. Ozburn had told him that gun buys could go from boring to violent in the blink of an eye, so Hood wanted an edge but not too much of one. Weapons freebooters like Tilley were generally considered higher risk than drug runners-unpredictable, amply armed, often skilled in the use of their products. This was their first buy from him.

Hood panned the camcorder from the peak of the Guns a Million roof. He saw the tow truck with the blackout windows that housed Agent Bly, parked on a diagonal across three spaces in the far corner of the back lot, closer to a Dairy Queen than to the gun store. It had the look of an operator on a dinner run.

Then he saw the Dumpster that was temporary home to the unlucky Jimmy Holdstock. It stood behind the store near the two real trash bins. Known as Hell on Wheels, it was clean and outfitted with holes for ventilation, vision, and taping, and with padding to dampen sound. But the holes were no match for the border heat. Young Holdstock had gotten the Hell on Wheels gig by losing a game of butts ’n barrels to Janet Bly. The game was like spin the bottle but played with a handgun. A small parabolic mike fed into a recorder that sat on the padded floor, and the concave receiver dish just barely cleared the top through a cutaway. The plastic lid had been drilled with a three-quarter-inch bit and had padding at the contact points to muffle the exit if Holdstock threw open the lid and charged. These modifications had been done over beers and a boom box in Holdstock’s El Centro garage while Jimmy’s daughters splashed in the yard pool and his wife, Jenny, kept an eye on both activities. For transport, the Dumpster fit nicely onto Bly’s tow truck.

Tilley came in ten minutes later, cruised the lot in his blue Trooper, stopped beside the tow truck and hit it with a mounted handheld searchlight. Hood tracked the bright circle as it moved across the cab window, then stopped on the windshield. Then the beam raked the back end of the DQ, turned to the Guns a Million, and came up the roof at Hood. He flattened and wriggled down a couple of feet, almost dropping the camcorder. His sidearm dug into his ribs, but the blanket saved his cheek from the gravel. When he crept to the peak again, the Trooper was pulling in slowly beside Sean Ozburn’s van and he zoomed in to get a good shot of Tilley as he stepped out.