T. Parker - Iron River

Hood described the house and yard and asked about Owens’s acting career.

“Well, not much of a career because she’s still in school. But she’s gifted in that way. It took us some years to discover those gifts… I just had the thought that, Dr. Petty, you also remind me of a prostitute who worked for Ida down in the old San Diego red-light district. They called it the Stingaree. Ida ran the ladies around town in horse-drawn buggies, and the johns would come to Wyatt’s saloon on Sixth and go upstairs. Nice place. Fantastic sin zone then, the cat’s pajamas. San Diego was really the place to be if you had a wicked streak. A busy port means horny sailors. Still true today. I don’t know what it is about you, Beth, maybe that nice round forehead and cute little nose, or maybe something in your eyes, just makes me think of women I’ve met before. I guess if you get old enough, everyone reminds you of someone else.”

“I’m so happy to remind you of a whore.”

“Please don’t take offense. The canvas is limitless and impersonal. It is a meeting of time and space, and your place on it is not much larger than a dot and not much longer than a moment. The prostitute’s name was Marie. She carried someone’s beauty and you carry hers and someone will someday carry yours.”

“Oh.”

“How old are you, Mike?” asked Hood.

“Fifty-one. Did Owens appear to be well fed? She’s prone to letting her nutrition go and simply living on energy drinks.”

“She looked healthy.”

“Eyes like the moon, eh?”

“Somewhat.”

“I’d like a full report on Holdstock, but I’m too tired right now to remember anything. Later, Charlie? This evening or tonight, maybe?”

Hood now felt something that he had felt only one time before. It was like surprise and like recognition and like dread, but he didn’t know a word for it or if there was a word. Once when he was a boy in Bakersfield, walking to school, he watched a tiger cross the street in front of him and trot off toward the park. It glanced back at him. Its size and coloring and movement were not within his experience of the world. Later he learned it had escaped from a private collection. He felt now as he felt then, and it was indescribable.

“You can’t know about Holdstock,” Hood said.

“I can’t know or you can’t tell?”

“I’ve never said his name to you,” said Hood. “Nothing has been written about him recently and he hasn’t been mentioned in any news media. How do you even know his name?”

“Sources.”

Hood racked his brain. He wondered if Finnegan’s source who had supplied Hood’s new home address was a USPS employee and had gotten his hands on Hood’s recent letter home. Had he been lax enough to use Jimmy’s last name in that letter? The nurses could tell him if Finnegan had had a visitor.

“When you tell me your sources, I’ll tell you about Holdstock.”

“Don’t be boorish, Charlie. Butting heads is never good policy. When you come back to see me we can discuss Holdstock as he deserves to be discussed. My number one concern, if I were you, would be that the Zetas will simply storm the hospital and take him again. Now, you come back and bring a good zinfandel, something peppery. It will cut right through the hoof-and-mouth disease I feel developing. I like the Bonterra organic. Of course I’ll need a straw.”

“You know nothing about Jimmy but his name.”

“A Badger tight end. Lapsed student of divinity. Married the waitress. Took the Blowdown gig for a shot at better weather. El Centro. My. It’s all available.”

Hood considered. “Then you can tell me about the bullet, too.”

“I was wondering when that would come up. You did not have my permission to remove it, Dr. Petty.”

“We judged it best,” said Petty.

“I wonder what caused the swelling in my brain to increase. My enormous intellect? The removal of the bullet? Really, I don’t feel right. Where do these false memories come from? They’re obviously only fantasy and hallucination. Dr. Petty, maybe you can discover in me a new mental illness. Can you name it after me? Finnegan by proxy? Mike’s syndrome? Well-it’s exhausting to see Tiburcio dangling again. Doctor, it’s not your fault you look like a whore from another century. There is no expiration date on the kind of beauty you possess. This has been an exciting day, but I’m very tired now.”

Hood looked at Petty, who swung back the privacy curtain and followed Hood out.

“Don’t forget my straw,” called Finnegan.

Hood took the elevator up to the sixth floor but one of the uniformed deputies outside Holdstock’s room said that Jimmy was sleeping. The deputy said Jimmy was doing okay-his wife and kids were in earlier. He looked okay. Right now Holdstock was in dreamland.

Hood asked to just peek in and when he did, he saw Jimmy on his back with his hands bundled into gigantic white appendages that lay beside him. His face twitched and it was a color between white and blue and covered with sweat. Hood got the nurse to look and she said it was good, always good when they can sleep through pain like that.

Hood took the stairs down, and on the third level he saw two U.S. marshals standing guard at the landing door. The stairwell air was hot and still, and Hood’s footsteps echoed flatly. The marshals recognized Hood and stood in deference as he came down the steps.

“Deputy Hood,” said one.

“What’s this?”

“A Gulf Cartel heavy who got himself shot up last night. We have to give the creeps top-notch medical care and protect them from their enemies, right?”

“When did he come in?”

“Early this morning. Hey, terrific work down there. I heard your guy had it pretty hard.”

“Yeah. They tell me he’s doing better.”

“When they start letting marshals join the war parties, I’m signing up. Take some scalps. What are you guys going to do next-Blowdown, I mean?”

“Just our jobs.”

“Keep up the good work.”

Hood nodded and headed down the stairs. He called his mother and they talked for a few minutes, then Hood asked her to get the two letters he had written and read them out loud to him.

Standing in the shade of the Imperial Mercy entryway, Hood listened to his mother’s voice as she read. He remembered that same voice reading stories to him when he was young, remembered the Bakersfield living room in which they sat, remembered his mother as the young woman she no longer was.

The name Holdstock was not in the letters.

Then Hood talked briefly with his father, who sounded clear and rational and before hanging up said, “I love you, Anderson,” Anderson being his father’s friend shot down over Khe Sanh in 1968 and never heard from again.

Holdstock in fact was dreaming he was in Imperial Mercy Hospital. In his dream the deputies outside his door talked quietly, Hood looked in on him, a nurse spoke to Hood just outside his door. He was aware of everything in his room. It was exactly like the one he occupied when not dreaming except that lying back-flat against the ceiling was a blue-faced werewolf that looked down on him, affixed to that surface by the logic of terror. He couldn’t open his eyes and look at it. Even from within this dream, Jimmy was sure he was dreaming and he knew the blue-faced werewolf wasn’t really there, but he couldn’t bring himself to open his eyes and look because he might be wrong. He knew the cost of being wrong. He tried to muster a dream-shattering scream, one that would explode him and the monster out of it-his body shook and his mouth gaped and his lungs heaved from their very depths, but not even a whisper of sound came out.

Earlier in the dream, Jenny and the girls were standing above him and he looked up into their faces. Gustavo Armenta stood between the girls, holding their hands, pale as death. Their expressions were searching, as if he were a river and they were looking for something on its bottom. Jenny. Patricia. Matilda. Gustavo. They were talking about him as if he weren’t there. The blue-faced werewolf was stuck up on the ceiling, and Jimmy had to face his family and smile while the beast stared down at all of them from just a few feet away.