The Famous and the Dead Read Free Page A

order wrong, calling the bureau FAT. It was her first time away from her little piece of Missouri.
    The SAC heard her out before handing her down the line to an ATF-led task force working guns along the Mexico border. She told of four men—three of them Russell County deputies—who were stealing confiscated evidence and selling it. Mostly guns and drugs. Of course any cash they just put in their pockets. This had been going on for over a year. Three of them were headed to California to do some business, hoping to find some drug cartel “beaners” with money to spend. The city of El Central was the place to be, they had told her. They wanted to find straw buyers. Cash, cash, and more cash, all that profit from the drugs the cartels sold. Plus one of the deputies had a friend in El Central with a restaurant that had the best burritos in the world. So they could eat there for cheap. You know how cops are. Oops.
    All of this she had overheard, in pieces, during the last months of her senior year of high school. Last week she had been assaulted by one of those men, beaten sharply, and thrown out of his double-wide. His name was Lyle Scully, Skull for short, the leader. Now here in the ATF field office in Buenavista she sat, skinny, fair, and freckled. Mary Kate had an eye swollen up the color of a plum and a deep continuous split in both lips, but still she talked more than a little.
    â€œAnd I don’t think too high of that kind of treatment. Skull says I was born trash and will stay trash and it may be true. That sure didn’t stop him making me pregnant, now, did it? God knows it took him long enough and I thought maybe a ring would come attached. It didn’t. His divorce is long finalized. So I got the procedure. And now I’m here in California and that’s behind me and I’m not going back. Never. Except maybe to get some things. I always wanted to rent one of them U-Haul trucks and just drive away from Russell County. I like the ones with the palm trees and waterskiers on the side. I’m going to be an actor, model, or nurse, whichever happens first. I told all this to your boss up in L.A. and he told me you’re the people who can get things done down here.”
    Hood kept notes but mostly he just listened. He was a Los Angeles County sheriff deputy assigned to the ATF Operation Blowdown task force. The people in this room were part of his Achilles team, Mary Kate notwithstanding. Fourth year now for Hood. He thought of ATF not so much as Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, but as GDT—Guns, Dust and Treachery. ATF was chronically understaffed and the caseload was heavy, but scandal had further lowered the bureau in the public eye and sent its supporters in high places running. Certain ATF supervisors had implemented some bad ideas in an operation dubbed Fast and Furious and gotten bad results. Even before this calamity, ATF had been an easy political target but now it seemed nearly friendless. Hood had always thought that, just for starters, ATF had it rough because most Americans
liked
alcohol, tobacco, and firearms—and disliked regulation. Hence the agency was spooked and defensive. He chuckled when Mary Kate called it FAT. But Hood enjoyed the work because there was action, and he felt it was necessary work. Hood wanted to be necessary. He was a Bakersfield boy and he had served in Iraq, Anbar Province. He was thirty-four, tall and loose, with an open face and strong eyes.
    â€œEl Centro?” asked Janet Bly. Janet had been the senior agent of this Achilles team and still seemed to think of herself as such. Last month ATF had brought in a more senior agent, Dale Yorth, who now sat at the head of the table with an eager look on his face. He’d come in from Miami and the team jury on him was still out.
    â€œYep. Skull said El Central, pretty sure.” Mary Kate dabbed her lips with a tissue.
    Hood saw the still unhealed split and felt bad but he also thought that