T. Parker: Iron River

“Where do you think he is-Mike.”

“Somewhere in California,” said Hood. “They’ll ditch the stolen plates on the convertible and get others. Or maybe just sell off the car and get a fresh one.”

Of course Hood had gotten LASD to issue an all-units watch for Mike and Owens Finnegan, and a BOLO for Mercedes plates, but he knew these would come up empty.

Unless the little devil gets another flat and a lady runs him down and breaks practically every bone in his body, Hood thought. Yeah, if that happens again, we’ve got him.

“Why California?”

“He seems to like it here.”

Owens had called him earlier in the day.

What are you to him?

An associate. I do what he tells me to do.

How much money does he pay you?

It doesn’t matter.

Where is he?

You don’t know anything.

Since he had seen the drawing that Mike had done, not one waking hour had passed without Hood thinking of him. He propped the drawing up beside the coffeemaker in his kitchen each morning and rested it against the lamp on his bed stand at night. If Mike was a man, then he was certainly the most cunning and intuitive and physically prodigious human being that Hood had ever met. If Mike was a journeyman devil, then almost everything Hood knew and believed was null and void, and he was little more than a blind man trying to read a map. More than once, Hood’s nerves had buzzed with the idea of good and evil walking the earth all around us since the beginning of time, doing their jobs. As the son of only faintly Christian parents, this concept exhilarated him. God and Satan? Angels and devils? Really? Hood felt that he should do something. Talk to a wise man. Read a truthful book. Skydive.

The one thing he had come up with was that whoever and whatever Mike was, he had wanted Hood for something. Something more than having his brain picked and fouling a bust and letting a thousand guns get through, that is.

A partnership? Mike had joked about that. But maybe it wasn’t a joke.

Hood and Beth took their wine and sat side by side on a wooden bench that had been there when Hood moved in. He heard the snapping of brush off to the south and Minnie growled. Beth shushed the dog and together the three of them listened to the slow sporadic advance of something bulky and large through the brush in the darkness before them. It was followed by a swishing sound, as if made by a tail.

A moment later in the moonlight, Hood saw them moving down in the arroyo, a man in the lead and a woman behind him. The man carried a handful of plastic shopping bags with one hand, their necks stretched and thinned by the weight of their cargo. In his free arm he snuggled an infant up close to his chest. A few steps behind her husband, the woman walked backward with a handled plastic water jug cut down to its shoulders, broadcasting sand to cover their tracks, bending to refill the jug and toeing the dirt to cover the marks made by the bottle, then hurriedly backing to catch up to her family and continuing to spread the sand in their wake.

Hood and Beth and the dog watched them traverse the dry gully south to north and when the couple was directly below Hood’s home, they stopped. Briefly they looked up at the candlelight. The woman slowly straightened and placed her hand against the small of her back. Then they continued. Hood listened to the sowing of the sand in the vast desert, and the warrior engines thrumming at the border and the thump of the helos and the thump of his heart, and to him these were one sound, the sound of human beings scratching along the pathways of their own free will.

Not long after the family had vanished into the northern darkness, a sudden wind came up and blew out the candles. It was a southern wind, monsoonal and sweet. Beth put her hand in his and they watched the lights.

A thousand thanks to John Torres and the Los Angeles field division of the ATF.

A thousand more to those who have written about this before me and often better, among them:

W. Dirk Raat and George R. Janecek, Mexico’s Sierra Tarahumara

Richard Grant, God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre

Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil’s Highway

William Langewiesche, Cutting for Sign

Charles Bowden, Down by the River

Frank Latta, Joaquin Murrieta and His Horse Gangs

The terrific reporting team behind the Los Angeles Times series, “Mexico Under Siege”-Josh Meyer, Tony Perry, Ken Ellington, Tracy Wilkinson, Scott Craft, Richard Marosi, Sam Quinones, Christopher Reynolds, Andrew Becker, Patrick J. McDonnell, Evelyn Larrubia, Denise Dresser, Frank James, Paul Pringle, Raoul Ranoa, Richard Serrano, Don Bartletti, Deborah Bonello, Lorena Iñiguez Elebee, Cecilia Sanchez, Miguel Bustillo, and Marla Dickerson.

Norman Mailer, who gave the devils their due in The Castle in the Forest.

Another thousand to Dave Bridgman and Sherry Merryman for answering my endless questions.

T. Jefferson Parker is the author of sixteen previous novels, including the Charlie Hood thrillers L.A. Outlaws and The Renegades , and the Edgar Award winners Silent Joe and California Girl . In 2009 Parker won his third Edgar, his first in the short story category. He lives with his family in Southern California.