'Seliah okay?' she asked.
'She's in a world of hurt, Janet.'
'But is she in the coma?'
'She's in the coma.'
'What do the doctors say?'
'They're not saying much.'
Hood checked the caller and hit the 'receive' button.
'Charlie, Dyman here. Sean just buzzed the strip. Yellow Piper Cub, writing under the fuselage, no doubt it's him. He's not in our sight now.'
'Ozburn,' Hood said to Bly, pushing the speaker icon so she could hear. 'How good is your cover?' he asked Morris.
'It's good. We got the black Ford tucked up behind the trees on the east side of the strip. But I don't know what he sees from up there. I can't know that.'
'If he's not back in five minutes, he's seen you,' said Hood.
'Then he must not have seen us.'
'Dyman?'
'Coming back the other way now! There he is, Charlie, yellow as a school bus.'
'From the east?'
'Yeah. East. East this time. And what do I got? I got the ass end of the Ford shining in the sun. Here he comes, Charlie, right at us. Man, he's low. Wings are steady. I can hear him now. Coming at us. Coming right directly at us. Sonofabitchass Ford hanging out of the trees. Oh, man, he's barely a hundred feet up now. Less! Here he comes. He's tilting his wings, Charlie. He's tilting his wings at us! Can you hear him? Can you hear that?'
Hood listened to the wail of the Piper as it shot over Morris and Velasquez and roared west.
Hood stared out at the western sky. He opened the door of the Interceptor and let Janet in, then got behind the wheel and shut the door. They sat for a few minutes, eyes up like stargazers.
Hood saw a small aircraft coming in from the west. It was a speck at first, a bird or a child's glider. He tapped the window with his finger and Bly nodded. The speck grew into a plane. It was still too far out for Hood to register color but the flat, one-story city around them gave him all the distance his eyes could handle. He had twenty-ten uncorrected vision as a twelve-year-old and still had it. Then the plane was yellow and it was coming on a line for the safe house, and for Hood and Bly.
'It's him,' said Bly. 'Is he going to strafe it or something?'
Betty came in at a steady clip and Hood thought of the World War Two movies his father loved. Ozburn buzzed across the sky not much higher than the power poles. Hood pushed his head back against the rest and looked up through the windshield as Betty zoomed over them in one roaring pass. The noise of her engine halved when she went over Hood's car, and he heard it diminishing as he looked through his window and saw Betty growing smaller in the blue Arizona sky.
'Think he saw us?' asked Bly.
'No. Plenty of other cars in this lot. But he saw Dyman-that was enough.'
Betty shrunk, then vanished. Hood swung open his door and stood looking into the sky. Bly talked with Velasquez on her cell. A few minutes later Morris guided the Explorer into the parking lot.
'The guy who called in this tip wanted me to know that Ozburn is a good man,' Hood said softly.
'He was, Charlie; then he cracked.'
'I feel like we should have seen it coming. Should have done something. We just let him wander off.'
'Hey, we didn't put him up to killing five men in six days. Or make him sick. Or make him do crazy stuff.'
'But we built the stage and put him on it. We thought we could write the story our way.'
'That's too philosophical. You overcomplicate. We're just law enforcers. It's all we are.'
Hood had figured on this from Bly but he was already wondering what he would be doing right now if he were Ozburn, if, like Sean, he had worked himself half-crazy during fifteen months undercover among some of the most dangerous people in the world, been purposely infected with a fatal disease, but still felt, truly and deeply in his heart, that there was good he could do on earth and evil he could defeat. And Hood wondered what he'd do if he had a plane and a dog and some guns and a wife to whom he'd innocently given his deadly virus during an act of love, a wife who'd gone into a deep sleep because of it and might not wake up again. If life was a fairy tale, he could just slay a few more dragons and kiss her. That would be enough to bring her out of sleep and they could live happily ever after. Hood wondered when people started telling themselves such stories, and why. The people must have been desperate. The stories were the opposite of helpful. Instead they were flagrantly immaterial and misleading and finally false.
'I want to write a new story,' he said.
'You want a happy ending.'
'It doesn't have to be happy. Just one where the characters get what they deserve.'
'We don't live in fairy tales, Charlie.'
31
Ozburn watched the safe house blur and disappear under Betty's nose. His eyes had started doing funny things to him-bright green tracers and extreme perspectives-but he could still make out the red-tile roof of the safe house and the red gravel yard in front. Later, little amigos, he thought, if you haven't all run away yet.
He eased the aircraft into a gentle climb as he pictured the black Ford ATF Explorer parked under the row of greasewood trees back behind him, shiny as a mirror. He thought bitterly of their foolishness and the treachery of Don August. There was probably more ATF near the house itself, he guessed, waiting to intercept the mad-man Ozburn. A curse on them all.
An hour later he was circling the strip near Jacumba for the third time, seeing nothing but the red pickup truck he'd been told to look for. A few minutes after that Ozburn was touching down Betty to the flat, hard runway.
It was an old smuggler's strip, not a hundred yards from the un-fenced border, and he remembered the night, just a couple of years ago, when he and his Blowdown brethren had nailed two gringos with a Beechcraft filled with cash and thirty guns with the serial numbers gouged roughly from their frames. The smugglers were sitting around a small fire on a freezing windy night, smoking dope and waiting for their partners to cross the border with the shipment. Armed with a tip from a good informant, Ozburn and his team had run their vehicles hard through the darkness and rough desert like beings launched from hell, toward the flames of that little fire. The smugglers had simply stood and raised their hands like bad guys in a Western, plumes of breath hanging on their faces. And later Ozburn had entered the strip coordinates on his GPS, for the day when he or one of the Desert Flyers might want to visit Jacumba without paying airport fees or suffering FAA supervision. Good days, thought Ozburn. Days when I believed and acted well. Will there be any more like that?
He taxied in a wide circle that brought Betty to a stop downwind near the red Dodge Ram king cab. He shut down the engine and climbed out and stood unsteadily. It was like his feet were only half there, like the toes had frozen and fallen off. He marshalled his strength and lifted Daisy from her seat to the ground.
She ran to Father Joe Leftwich, who sat on the lowered tailgate of the pickup truck, his priest's clothes traded out for Wranglers and a red yoked cowboy shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps. His cowboy hat was black and broad. He sat with one boot up on the gate while the other dangled well short of the ground, and he leaned an arm on the upraised knee. He had a toothpick in his mouth. He reached into his pocket and tossed Daisy a small biscuit shaped like a bone.
'You just see Brokeback Mountain?' asked Ozburn.
'You try wearing the same clothes every day for thirty years.'
Leftwich helped Ozburn tie down Betty and he stowed Ozburn's heavy duffel across the backseats of the extended truck cab. Ozburn squeezed into the driver's seat and found the control and slid it back. He remembered one of the hundreds of ways in and out of Jacumba, a onetime smuggler's Mecca. DEA pressure had slowed it down for now, but Ozburn knew Jacumba would get hot again just as soon as law enforcement focused on someplace
