Two days after the Buenavista shoot-out and one day after the disappearance of Jimmy Holdstock, Hood and his Blowdown team let themselves into Victor Davis’s townhome in Yuma, Arizona.
They were looking for guns. They searched the living room, kitchen, and small dining room without success. The master bedroom entertainment center yielded pornographic DVDs but no firearms. Hood noted that the framed picture of a lovely woman on Davis ’s nightstand was actually the sample photo sold with the frame. The Frame Shop sticker was still on the back. The dream girl had cost Victor $9.99. In the master closet hung two dozen dark suits, at least a dozen white shirts, and maybe thirty ties.
But the guest bedroom held pay dirt: four plastic bins under the bed, containing forty-eight used small-caliber handguns. Many were in poor shape, Hood saw. Six more bins stacked neatly up on a closet shelf held the big stuff: six.357 Magnum Smith & Wesson revolvers, four.44 Magnum autoloaders, ten.38 Detective Special revolvers, twelve Pace Arms nine-millimeter automatics, and two FN 5.57s. They were used but in fine condition.
Bly pointed to the FNs. “They penetrate body armor. The cartel gunmen call them asesino de policía-cop killers.”
Hood immediately thought of Holdstock again. He looked at Ozburn and Bly and knew that they were thinking of him, too. Hood feared the worst. Holdstock had vanished somewhere between San Diego and El Centro the day before. His car was missing, too, suggesting willful flight. But Holdstock had a family. Holdstock was stand-up. Hood thought he’d been murdered or abducted in retaliation for the shooting of Gustavo Armenta. Zetas. Abducted was worse.
“Okay,” said Ozburn. “We’re having another Jimmy moment. I’m gonna think a prayer for him right now where we stand. You two can join me or not.”
Hood bowed his head and closed his eyes. He sensed Bly doing the same. He asked for Holdstock’s safe return. He pictured Jimmy flipping the burgers at the barbecue he’d hosted for Hood before Hood had moved to Buenavista. It was a nice afternoon, and those few hours between them made Jimmy the best friend Hood had in this vast desert. His wife and daughters were a delight. Help him, help him.
“Amen,” said Ozburn. “You didn’t think that ATF could be so much fun, did you, Charlie?”
“It never stops.” Hood smiled to himself. He liked these people. He liked the way they refused to call themselves ATFE, just the old ATF was what they said. Ozburn had quipped once that it was ATFE but the E was silent.
There were four shotguns stacked in one corner of the closet and long rifles stacked in the other. The closet floor was lined with green military surplus ammo boxes, and when Hood toed them, he could tell they were full. He squatted and opened one and looked at the neat boxes of.44 Magnum loads, factory made.
Hood had quickly learned that Arizona was the widest and deepest part of the Iron River. It was legal to buy guns in Arizona with minimal ID, a cursory background check, and no wait. Then a gun owner could sell, trade, carry, and conceal with almost no paperwork. Many dealers both licensed and unlicensed worked out of their homes, just like Victor. Hood had seen handguns for sale in scores of gun shops in Arizona towns, in liquor stores, even in the convenience stores of gas stations along the scenic state highways.
“We yanked Victor’s license a year ago,” said Ozburn. “He sold to some straw buyers plugged into the Tijuana Cartel. He sold to young mothers in east L.A. We couldn’t build a case, so we closed him down. But Victor didn’t miss a beat. Gun heaven, man, pistol paradise. Most of this iron would have hit the streets in the next three months if Victor hadn’t run up against his own product. He’d sell the beat-up shit guns to the inner-city bangers. The heavy stuff he’d sell to the cartels. The badder the bad guys, the better their guns are.”
Bly ran a metal detector through the house in search of more. Ozburn safed and photographed and logged the guns and put them into ATFE lockboxes for transport.
Hood found a briefcase stuffed with ATFE Firearm Transaction Records and appointment books under the living room sofa. He’d seen such forms before-each dealer was required to complete and sign one for each sale, then keep it in his possession. If the dealer went out of business, he was supposed to send the forms back to ATFE for storage, but Victor Davis was noncompliant. Hood wondered at a system that trusted the crooks to follow the procedures.
He set the briefcase on the kitchen counter and rifled through the forms. They’d been thrown in loose. He found dates ranging from 2004 through June of 2009, when ATFE had pulled Victor Davis’s federal firearms license. Hood knew that 2004 was when the Iron River began to swell-cartel competition, another surge of Mexican law enforcement, another hike in the prices of street drugs across the United States. Now it was a flood and he was part of the levee.
He ran one hand through the piles of forms. Hundreds of them. All makes of guns, all calibers, from.22-short derringers to 10-gauge riot guns. The buyers were mostly men, but not all. The prices ranged from fifty dollars for a used Lorcin.25 to seven hundred and fifty dollars for a new Colt.45 ACP. The names were Dalrymple and Johnson and Gutierrez and Hoades and Valenzuela and Milliken and Djorik and on and on and on. Hundreds and hundreds more.
Hood pulled up a barstool and flipped through, arranging the sales by year.
A Beretta nine for Wilson of Oceanside.
A Taurus.38 for Foxx of Commerce.
He thought about Holdstock and his car. The car gave Hood hope, but not much hope. Holdstock had had enough? Run out on his wife and daughters? Run away to Mexico in order to stretch a modest federal paycheck? What quality of hope was this?
A Savage Arms 12-gauge for Mendoza of Yuma.
A Ruger.22 for Pfleuger of Santa Ana.
A Colt.45 for Lochte of Tempe.
Mendoza of Yuma, the Ruger for Pfleuger, Lochte of Tempe. Like poetry, thought Hood: bad fucking poetry. Maybe Holdstock ran his car off the highway and CHP hadn’t found it yet. Was this hope at all?
A Pace Arms for Gowdy of Phoenix.
A Bryco for Stevens of Alpine.
More likely the Zetas had grabbed him and used his own car to take him across. If that was true, Hood thought, then he was probably beheaded by now and someone would find his body in one place and his head in another, and the Iron River would have swept away another life. The cartels had never come north to grab a U.S. lawman. Now they had accomplished what before they had never dared. The old rules were gone. The word unraveling came to Hood’s mind. He saw the ends of fresh-cut ropes twisting in a bitter wind.
A Winchester for Lopez of L.A.
A Lorcin for Barret of… who cares?
A Charter Arms for…
A.40-caliber derringer for Allison Murrieta of Norwalk, California.
Hood looked away and took a deep breath and let it out and looked back at the FTR.
Allison Murrieta/Suzanne Jones. Take your pick. He recognized her bold handwriting. It conjured her voice and the shape of her face and the feel of her body and the taste of her breath. She had been shot with that derringer in her hand, not quite ready to use it against a boy. It was ivory-handled and beautifully tooled. Now it was Hood’s gun, bequeathed wordlessly to Hood by Allison’s son.
Hood held the form and looked at her signature and in spite of everything he felt at this moment, he smiled.
As he put the FTRs in chronological order, Hood looked for patterns. His ATFE task force trainers in Los Angeles had been pattern crazy. Most of Victor Davis’s customers were male, though there was a group of females aged twenty-two to thirty-five, all with east L.A. addresses. This pattern was common: Inner-city moms afraid for their children were often targeted by gun pushers. But an opposing pattern existed, too: Inner-city moms were also often straw buyers purchasing weapons for homies and husbands and boy-friends. Hood had learned that once a buyer purchased two or more handguns in five or fewer days, the dealer was supposed to file an ATFE Multiple Sales Form. These were kept on file in regional ATFE offices, and a pattern of heavy MSF filings suggested organized trafficking. Of course straw buyers knew this, so they would change to the “lie and buy” method, which was to use a counterfeit ID. These IDs not only disguised the true identity of the buyer but easily passed the brief Arizona state background check because fictitious people aren’t listed in databases. If a licensed firearms dealer was scrupulous, he would report any suspicious sales to ATFE. If not, or if the bogus driver’s licenses were convincing, then dealers could sell deadly weapons to criminals with records of violence, underage buyers, the insane, the undocumented, the drunk, the high, or the furious-or to anyone wanting to make money as a middleman for the cartels. A dealer with a pattern of sales to such people always sent up red flags in the ATFE computers, but by the time the flags waved, it was often too late.
Hood saw that Victor Davis’s source lay along the Arizona-Mexico border. And most of his sales were there, too, with some customers to the north in Orange and Los Angeles counties. He pictured the U.S.-Mexico border between San Diego and Corpus Christi, all two thousand rugged miles of it, and he wondered that some 6,700 gun dealers were licensed to do business along it. That’s more than three gun dealers for every mile of cactus and rattlesnakes, one of Hood’s instructors pointed out. What’s that a pattern for? Fucking death and destruction is what.
Patterns upon patterns, dollars upon dollars, guns upon guns.
And that was the legal end of it all, not counting the hundreds of unlicensed profiteers who bought and sold on the blackest of markets.
Hood examined the appointment books. They were nearly identical, plastic-covered, with calendars and space for notes, differing only by the dates. There was one for each of the past five years. The entries were cryptic and heavily abbreviated but neatly written. Davis had been prone to doodling tight, crosshatched designs that sometimes grew to encompass entire days.
Hood flipped through, reading the entries with one track of his mind and worrying about Jimmy Holdstock with the other. Using the Firearm Transaction Record date on the derringer sale to Allison Murrieta, Hood found the corresponding appointment book and looked up the day. It was August 2, 2006. In the date box was scribbled in black ink, “Allison M./x-small 2-shot/.40 cal & ammo/6pm IHOP in Escondido.” The entry had been circled in blue ink, and Hood followed a blue line across the page and into the “Notes” section. Here he read, “Chick brought son & when she used head he said he needed six pieces/light & short/no #s/has buyers!/will call.”
Hood did the math: Bradley Jones, studying Outlaw 101 at the age of fifteen. He scanned through the remaining months of 2006 but found no sale. He figured even bold Victor Davis wouldn’t record an illegal sale to a minor anyway.
He found the appointment book for 2009. This was the last year that Davis had sold firearms legally. ATFE had revoked his license in March. Hood saw that his sales activity actually increased, beginning in April. Working harder, thought Hood, getting lower prices for the same iron, spending longer hours getting to know his customers enough to determine they weren’t undercover cops. The handwriting had degenerated with the extra work. It was cramped and sometimes illegible.
On April 4, Davis had written “R. Pace/noon/El Torito N.B.” The entry caught Hood’s eye because it was circled in bold black ink and had a bold red X through it. He wondered if R. Pace was of the Pace Arms company in Orange County. They’d been bankrupted by then, hadn’t they? One of their guns had gone off unexpectedly and killed a boy-a design flaw. Was Davis trying to buy inventory at Chapter 11 prices? Hood flipped forward and saw another “R. Pace” date in May. Another in June. And a final date for 2009, November 4. All of them were circled, as if in hope of great things, and all but the last had been dramatically Xed out. In the space below the last date, Davis had written “F.U.”
Hood was surprised to get a Pace Arms listing from the operator and a woman’s voice at the other end after he dialed.
“Pace Arms.”
“Chuck Reynolds for Mr. Pace, please.”
Hood was put on hold and a few moments later a young-sounding man spoke.
“Ron.”
“I’m calling about Victor Davis.”
A pause, then, “We’re out of that business.”
“ Davis was killed two days ago during an illegal firearms sale down in Buenavista.”
“I’m sorry. Are you a cop or ATF?”
“Neither.”
“We’re out of that business.”
“You made four appointments with him last year.”
“I rescheduled three times and honored the last as a professional courtesy. I never did business with Victor Davis. He was not a friend or an acquaintance. He wanted to buy inventory, but we didn’t have any inventory. We were broke by then, Mr. Reynolds. We’re still broke now. We haven’t made a gun in over a year. We still owe the family of Miles Packard eleven point two million dollars. Good-bye.”
They were loading the lockboxes and the FTRs into the task force van when two El Centro PD cruisers barreled down the street and double-parked beside them.
A plainclothes cop hopped from the second car, brandishing his shield holder, introducing himself as he trotted to the van. His name was Atkins.
“Let’s go inside,” he said.
They stood in the good light of the kitchen, and Atkins brought a freezer bag from his coat pocket. Inside the bag was a standard-size letter envelope.
“The desk got a call at ten a.m. from a woman saying where an important letter could be found. It wasn’t on PD property but it was close by. An officer found it five minutes later and I received it five minutes after that.”
Atkins spilled the envelope onto the granite countertop.
Hood read the handwritten print on the front: BLOWDOWN, all capitals, confidently rendered in red marking pen.
“It wasn’t sealed,” said Atkins. “The officer opened it and the desk sergeant opened it and I opened it. So…”
He took the envelope by a corner and held it up and shook loose two Polaroids.
One showed Jimmy Holdstock’s face. It was puffy and pale, but his eyes were open and focused on the camera. He looked hungover.
The other was a picture of three items resting side by side in a dirty blue plastic tub: a pair of pliers, an electric circular saw, and a long-nozzled barbecue lighter.
Janet Bly raised a hand to her mouth, and Hood heard her breath catch but she said nothing. They all stared down at the pictures.
Ozburn whispered something that Hood couldn’t make out.
“Yeah,” said Atkins.
“Have you seen the PD security videos?” asked Hood.
“Nothing. The envelope was placed inside a newspaper that was set on a bus bench a hundred feet from us. Our cameras don’t go there. I’m really damned sorry they don’t.”
“A bus bench,” said Hood. “What about transit security?”
“They don’t have cameras at that location.”
“Greyhound might.”
“Greyhound is around the corner.”
“A witness?”
“We’re working on that. That whole area is dead at night. Especially when it’s up above ninety degrees.”
“We can get some information from the Polaroids,” said Ozburn. “Did you guys touch them?”
“None of us touched them. They’re yours.”
Atkins slid the envelope and pictures into the plastic freezer bag and gave the bag to Ozburn.
“You haven’t called any reporters, have you?”
“No reporters.”
“Because the people who have Jimmy will play for attention. That’s the whole idea. It’s a form of terrorism.”
“Nobody knows but us and his wife. I haven’t told her about the pictures. It’s up to you now.”
Janet Bly walked outside and slammed the door.
Ozburn was already on the phone to the regional director by the time Atkins followed her out.
“They’ve got Jimmy,” he said. “They took him right off American soil.”