The Renegades (12 page)

No answer. He knew these idiots wouldn’t find anything; even the dogs of secondary inspection would have a tough time with the vacuum-packed bills.

Then the hatchback slammed and the man to his left waved him through.

“Proceed, Deputy Draper.”

He drove the speed limit north on Interstate 5, but his mind was filled with Herredia’s proposal, its details and possibilities, its potential consequences.

When he hit Solana Beach he called Alexia. She answered on the first ring.

“I’ve been called,” he said. “I’m very sorry.”

He heard the breath catch in her throat. Then she whispered, “Coleman, I love you.”

“I’ll come back to you and Brittany, alive and soon. You have my solemn promise.”

“I will pray and wait. And when you come back I will be alive again.”

“I’ll be alive again, too, Alexia.”

He clicked off and dialed Juliet in Laguna. He got her machine, said her name and waited.

“Coleman?”

“I’m home.”

“I don’t know why I do this.”

“Yes, you do. I’ll be there in less than an hour.”

She didn’t bother to get out of bed. He showered in the darkness and slipped in beside her. She pretended to be asleep, then vaguely receptive, then she greedily took Draper and fled to that place he couldn’t see or name, a place all hers, located somewhere behind or beyond her tightly closed eyes.

12

Hood’s phone rang early
the next morning, not long after he’d let himself into the Hole.

“Latrenya changed her story,” said Bentley. “Now she says Londell was gone all night—business down in South Central. She didn’t see him until morning. She said she lied to us because Londell threatened to kill her if she told the truth. She got Tawna and Anton in on the plot, too. But Londell beat up Latrenya on an unrelated matter—something about her gaining weight. ER called us. Latrenya wouldn’t press charges but we sent two uniforms over to arrest Londell. He maced them. Now he’s in the wind and he looks a little better for Terry’s murder. We’re searching Londell’s Oasis pad in ten minutes. You are cordially invited.”

Hood, Bentley and Orr crammed into the small outer office of the Oasis manager, Sanjay. Sanjay was a young Indian man who smoked eagerly and said he wanted no trouble. He said Londell Dwayne was rude but always paid his rent, though never on time. And he played his music loud.

The men climbed the wobbly stairs and walked single file to the front door of Dwayne’s apartment. It was quiet now—no Londell and no Latrenya and no music. Orr knocked. Hood noted that the foil on the window had been tattered by the last storm.

Sanjay stomped out his cigarette, then unlocked the front door. When the lock disengaged, Bentley gently but firmly moved the manager back and away and told him to stay outside for now.

With his sport coat open and one hand on the butt of his automatic, Bentley turned the knob and pushed open the door. “Sheriffs,” he called out. “We’re coming in.”

The place was small and smelled of reefer and bacon. The carpet was dirty and there were yellow stains on the popcorn ceiling. The kitchen sink was piled with dishes and the refrigerator hummed loudly. There was a counter between the kitchen and the living room and on it were dinner plates with old food on them, and plenty of King Cobra empties.

Orr slipped down the hallway with his weapon drawn and went into a bedroom. Hood walked past him, gun at his side, went into the next room and flicked on the light.

It was a small room, with small windows up high. It was cold and it reminded Hood of the Hole. There was a mattress on the floor in one corner, with some sheets and blankets wadded up on top. There were dirty clothes in another corner. Hood spotted a Detroit Tigers hoodie. Down deeper in the pile were two red bandanas. Hood saw that one of them had been worn pirate-style, rolled on one edge and knotted, with a loose flap on top. He set them on the floor next to the black sweatshirt.

There was a chest slouching against one wall, drawers hanging open. On top of it were two empty cigarette hardpacks, four gun magazines and a blackened hash pipe. The closet doors hung askew but Hood got one open enough to see in: a few wire hangers, a few shirts, some beaten sneakers on the floor.

Hood went through the dresser looking for black gloves but didn’t find any. There was nothing under the bed. He stood looking down at the Detroit sweatshirt and the bandanas.

Then he heard Orr’s voice from the other bedroom.
“Gentlemen, we have something here.”

The room was close and crowded by a king bed. The mattress had been swiveled out from the springs. Bentley and Orr stood in the cramped space between the bed and the closet. Hood joined them and looked down on the M249 SAW set into a crude cutout in the box spring. The mesh material had been cut open and a yard-long section of one of the slats had been broken out. The gun was jammed into the space. Orr replaced the flap that was cut in the cover material, hiding the weapon, then lifted it open again.

“Dead man,” he said.

13

By late morning
Hood was standing on the Avenue M off-ramp of Highway 14, where Johnny Vasquez and Angel Lopes had been shot to death. The day was cool and the breeze came and went like a doubt.

He balanced Freeman’s murder book on his left arm and used the crime scene drawings and photographs to find where the van had been parked. Now there was nothing but sand and gravel.

According to Laws’s report, the van engine and lights had been off when they got there.

Detective Freeman had guessed the temperature at eighty degrees, and he wrote that the night was clear and windy. The moon was new on the twelfth of August, four days earlier, so there wasn’t much moonlight.

Hood flipped forward: in the impound yard the next day the van started up and idled without a problem. The tires were good. The gas tank was full. There was a second mention of the flats of strawberries found in the back of the van and the basket of them spilled up front.

Deeper in the book Hood found that Vasquez and Lopes both lived in Lancaster.

So, he thought: two men, midlevel bangers with an
Eme
blessing, thought to be working for the North Baja Cartel, heading south around two in the morning, seventy-two hundred in pressed five-dollar bills stashed in two suitcases.

He talked into his recorder: “Why two big suitcases for only seventy-two hundred dollars? Why such a small amount pressed and stacked?”

He found the crime scene photographs of the two pieces of luggage thrown into the desert. The clothes were strewn across the road. A lot of clothes. It looked like a table at a rummage sale. Hood wondered how those clothes could fit back into the two bags, large as they were.

Again to the recorder: “How so much clothing into two suitcases?”

Then he walked a slow circle around the place where the van had stopped.

Another question for the recorder: “Why did they pull over and stop on the off-ramp? Illegal, plain sight, no car trouble.”

He set the murder book on the hood of his car and found the ballistics pages, which established the shooter’s positions through angles-of-entry drawings and victim body positions. All four shots had been fired through the passenger-side window. Eichrodt had used a Taurus nine-millimeter automatic—a budget gun, unregistered. He’d shot Angel Lopes, the man closest to him, first. Lopes had crumpled and turned partially away when the second shot struck him in the right temple. Meanwhile, Vasquez was apparently trying to get out. The first shot hit the back of his head, the second entered through the right ear.

Hood compared the line-of-fire sketches with the crime scene photographs. It all made sense. Through all the gore and ugliness emerged a clear picture.

“But these were
Eme
runners,” he told the voice recorder. “Where were their weapons? Why didn’t they use them? Were they surprised? Did they know Eichrodt? Were they expecting him?”

He found photographs of the guns that had been recovered from the van. There were two, both within easy reach. But neither man had so much as gotten a hand on a weapon, in spite of the shooter at their window.

Hood carried the book back to where the van had been parked.

It was hard for him to imagine that these guys had been surprised, unless they were both very drunk or exhausted. He found their autopsy reports and checked blood alcohol. None at all. They had both ingested amphetamines in moderate amounts. A long night ahead, he thought. A long drive? They were chemically enhanced. Were they surprised by a six-foot-eight, three-hundred-pound gunman as they sat exposed on an off-ramp, windows down in the heat? There was no place at all for Eichrodt to hide. The night was dark, but a jackrabbit couldn’t have hidden where Hood now stood.

No. They weren’t surprised, he thought. They just didn’t react. Why?

Freeman had concluded that Eichrodt and the two couriers did not know each other. Freeman had asked that same question that Hood was asking: why hadn’t they reacted? And he never answered it.

Hood leafed through the murder book, prospecting. He looked at the graphics and read the words and let his mind wander as his hands turned the pages.

A few minutes later he was struck by another anomaly. It was looking back at him from an evidence photograph of the brass casings that had been found in Eichrodt’s truck. It took Hood a long quiet minute of staring to find it. The casings had been tossed into the same locking toolbox where the gun and money had been found. There were four of them. They were heavily smeared with blood. He pictured the scene, the order of shooting, the distances to the targets. He pictured Eichrodt collecting his casings. And it made no sense that the brass would be heavily smeared. Touched with blood? Sure, he thought. Dotted with blowback from Lopes, the closer victim, to Eichrodt’s fingers? Possibly. But all four casings, smeared heavily? No.

So he turned to the lab reports and found what he expected: the fingerprints lifted from all four casings were Eichrodt’s. But he couldn’t find anything about the blood itself. Whose was it? And, more important, why was there so
much
of it?

He sat in his car with the windows down in the cool desert breeze. It took him a while to get through to the crime lab technician who had lifted the prints from the casings. Keith Franks spoke in a soft, high-pitched voice that sounded young. He told Hood that the prints had come off the brass clearly and cleanly. They were Eichrodt’s. He said he hadn’t run the blood on the casings because his superior said there was no reason to—Eichrodt’s prints and Lopes’s blood were on the Taurus nine-millimeter and that was all the DA needed. It was beyond reasonable doubt that Eichrodt had fired the gun. And of course, the lab was overloaded with work.

Hood flipped to the photographs of the Taurus and saw that it, too, was heavily marked by blood. There was a misting on the muzzle, as you’d expect—Mr. Lopes again. But down on the handle and the trigger and the trigger guard the smears were heavier. There was no positive identification on the lower, heavier traces.

“I want you to type the blood on the casings,” he said. “And on the handle, trigger, and guard of the Taurus.”

“Detective, the case is closed.”

“I’ll get the DA to reopen it.”

“You know they won’t. It was an open-and-shut case.”

“Then how come Vasquez and Lopes used two big pieces of luggage for only seven grand plus change? How did they get all those clothes and the money into two bags? Why did they pull over in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night, then park in plain sight? Why didn’t they defend themselves? How come Eichrodt’s brass was thick with blood? And his gun? There’s too much. The blood is wrong and you know it.”

For a moment Hood thought Franks had hung up on him. The cool breeze hissed against the phone and he turned his back to it.

“What’s your name, again?” Franks asked.

“Charlie Hood. I’m young, like you, and we need to help each other because we’re the future. At least that’s what they say.”

Franks went quiet for a long moment. “I’m sixty-four years old. Give me your numbers.”

14

A
few minutes later
Hood parked off the Pearblossom Highway where Laws and Draper had battled Shay Eichrodt beside the ruins of the Llano del Rio utopia. The stone columns of the old assembly hall rose from the hard ground. The highway was bleached pale gray by the sun and there was a raven blown by the wind onto the nearest Joshua tree, outstretched wings and body crucified on the long spines.

He walked the area where Eichrodt’s truck had been pulled over. Big rigs thundered down the highway and he could feel their vibrations in his chest. Hood sat on an old river-rock wall and read Laws’s arrest report. Laws wrote in the plodding, jargon-heavy style of most cops:

…
at approx. 4:20 a.m. we observed a pickup truck, red, with plate numbers partially matching…the apparently unconscious suspect then suddenly extended one leg, which caused me to lose balance and fall…the suspect appeared to be under the influence of a stimulant…the suspect was eventually subdued…

Hood imagined the bloody fight between two strong men with batons, and one huge and very strong man who had just taken two lives, jacked up on crystal meth and fighting for his own.

After reading the report, he wondered if that brutal fight had taken something out of Terry Laws, the thing that Carla Vise said had vanished and never returned, even after the stitches were removed and the bruises healed.

Hood left the murder book on the wall and walked among the Llano del Rio ruins. He’d read about this socialist utopia in school. He had always liked stories that began with good intentions, then became complicated. The utopia was founded in 1914 and it survived three years. There were pear orchards and alfalfa fields and a modern dairy—all made possible by a clever irrigation system that distributed water from the snow-fed Llano del Rio. The utopians grew 90 percent of the food they needed. There were workshops for canning fruit, cobbling shoes, cleaning clothes and cutting hair. A Montessori school sprouted up, Southern California’s first. All this was done by cooperation—no one made money. Detailed drawings for the Llano of the future depicted a city of ten thousand people living in craftsman-style apartments with shared laundry and kitchen facilities, surrounded by a road that would double as a drag strip for car races. There would even be grandstands for viewing. Being a car guy, Hood had always liked the racing idea. He wondered what Ariel Reed would think of it. But Llano lost its credit and water rights, and its leaders began to fight. They got no help from powerful Angelenos made uneasy by Llano’s goofy success. Hood looked at it now: no sign or historical marker, just a ruin that the desert bums and migrant workers sometimes used for a temporary shelter in this relentlessly hostile desert.