The Renegades (6 page)

Orr asked her a few questions, tried to get a contradiction, but couldn’t. He finally thanked her and punched off.

The Bulldogs drove away. Hood watched them. He wanted to be a Bulldog himself someday but he’d had his shot in L.A. and now it was gone.

He drove off, too, then circled back around and parked across the street and down half a block from the entrance of the Oasis. He could see the front door and the foil-covered windows.

Half an hour later Londell bounced down the stairs. He’d put on a clean white T-shirt and a pair of shades. He drove a sun-faded Chevrolet Impala to a 7-Eleven.

Hood followed and parked across the street and watched. Londell came out of the store a minute later with a case of beer and a bag of something, flipped off Hood and got back into his car.

So Hood drove to the Little Caesar’s. The girl behind the counter said she had just talked to two detectives about Londell Dwayne and she’d tell him the same thing she told them: She worked the six-to-midnight last night, she didn’t ever take a break except for the ladies’ room, and she didn’t ever see Londell and his ugly dog and ugly Detroit hoodie and his stuck-up girlfriend, Latrenya, never once, and she paid attention to every person who walked into that place because it was the most boring job in the world and you had to do something to make the time pass. And Londell was gonna make a move on Tawna, she promised Hood that.

5

Draper made himself
a martini and carried it to his tiny Venice backyard and looked up through the bowing telephone lines at the cool, clear sky. The storm had passed and the stars looked polished. Music played from somewhere as it always did.

His shoes were quiet on the concrete as he crossed the old driveway and punched the code for the wooden gate. He walked thirty feet down the Amalfi Street sidewalk then into the parking lot of Prestige German Auto. He let himself into the small building, deactivated the alarm system, then walked through the short dark hallway past his office and into the garage. The familiar smells of gasoline and oil and steel and rubber all greeted him. He turned on the overhead fluorescents and saw the five bays, each with a German car either racked up or straddling a repair pit. He sipped the drink and turned off the lights.

Back in his office he reviewed the last few days of business on the computer. His manager, Heinz, had run a tight, fast ship. Draper liked Germans because they were dogged enough to grapple with the complex cars so proudly overengineered by their countrymen, and intelligent enough to prevail. They were honest with the customers—
und here are ze old Bilsteins veetook off
—and therefore honest with him. He paid them well. Prestige German had grossed almost twenty thousand dollars in the last week, which after payroll, overhead, and insurance would land thirty-five hundred dollars in Draper’s pocket.

He locked up and reset the alarm and called Alexia as he walked home.

“I’m back,” he said.

“Are you all right?”

“Everything is okay.”

“Now I’m happy. I’ve missed you. I only breathe properly when you’re here.”

“I’ll be home in an hour.”

“I’ll be waiting, Coleman. I’ve missed you very much. And Brittany misses you very much, too.”

He packed his clothes—mostly dirty—and stopped at the Mexican market for cut flowers, a bottle of the sweet Riesling that Alexia loved, and a sugary churro for the girl.

Half an hour later Draper pulled into the garage of his Azusa home. Alexia stood in the doorway to the house, backlit by the warm light from the kitchen. She was petite and perfectly proportioned and her black hair shone like that of a groomed racehorse.

Draper stood there with the roses in his hand, just looking at her. She wore a new white dress with red piping, and a red belt and heels, which were beautiful against her young brown skin. He hadn’t seen her in a week and his heart beat hard as she came down the steps into the garage and opened her arms to him. He hugged her and pressed his nose against her luminous, fragrant hair.

“I’ll help you with your luggage,” she said.

“It can wait.”

Alexia brushed his lips with hers then moved away from Draper, and together they looked through the open door into the house, where two-year-old Brittany waddled toward them. She was a pudgy miniature of her mother, sporting a pink satin dress and pink sneakers.

“She has a new dress for you, too.”

“I’m the luckiest man alive.”

Draper had first seen Alexia almost two years ago, exhausted and dirty and sick, carrying her baby daughter across a dusty lot up near Palmdale. She was cutting through the lot on a 109-degree day, Draper had noted, to save a few steps on her way to the bus stop. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. His mind had instantly filled with possibilities, many of which had since been made real.

“Are you okay, Cole?”

“Now I am.”

He handed Alexia the roses then lifted Brittany by the waist and shifted her to the crook of his arm and they all went into the house.

After dinner Draper’s cell phone rang and he checked the caller ID before answering. He walked into the spare bedroom and closed the door. It was Hood, asking more questions about Londell Dwayne and his dog and Terry Laws.

Draper told him what he knew, then returned to the neat little dining room.

He looked at Alexia. Brittany smiled and drooled and banged her pacifier on the table.

“What happened, Cole?”

“A man I work with was shot and killed last night. The shooter got away. That was someone official, with questions.”

She stood behind him and kneaded his shoulders and neck with her small strong hands. Coleman hung his head and wiped a small tear from his eye. He kept wondering what Terry had told Laurel. Nothing? Everything?

“I’m sorry, Cole. I am so sorry for you.”

“I’m all right now.”

“When will you have to go away again? No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ask that. I know. I’m very sorry.”

Alexia’s small knowledge of him bordered the vast, willed expanse of her ignorance of him. To Draper it was better than trust.

“A little to the left. Yes. There.”

6

Prosecutor Ariel Reed
met Hood in the lobby of the downtown District Attorney building. They had talked on the phone several times but had never met. She was petite and fair-skinned, with dark hair squared off just above the eyes and just below her chin. Her shoulders were straight. She was about Hood’s age and she walked fast. She led him down a hallway and into her office and began talking as she closed the door.

“We don’t go easy on bad cops,” she said. “The jury’s been impaneled and we’re ready to rock. We’re on the trial docket for week after next, Superior Courtroom Eight—the honorable William Mabry. I’m going to call you as a witness, which means you’ll need to be available.”

“I’ll be available.”

The defendant was a Sheriff’s Department deputy that Hood had helped bust last year in L.A. He had been running a stolen goods racket out of a Long Beach warehouse. The DA had charged him with ten felony counts of grand theft, and buying and selling stolen property. He was looking at eight to ten years.

Ariel gave Hood a level gaze. Her eyes were hazel. She tapped something onto her computer keyboard.

“I forgot to offer you coffee,” she said.

“No, thank you.”

“I go too fast sometimes.”

“I forget to tie my shoes sometimes,” he said.

“Our caseload is heavy. To think about it directly is to court insanity. But you detectives know all about that.”

“Insanity.”

Her smile was thrifty and brief. “Caseload.”

“Okay, then.”

She gave him another flat gaze. “Deputy Hood, what I want from you in court is two things. One is the straight story of what you saw in the Long Beach warehouse. I’ve got your reports here and they’re very clear and detailed. I’ll let you describe the stolen property. I’ll also want a little emotion to show through. Sometimes it’s hard to get a jury to care about merchandise. This L.A. sheriff’s deputy had eight hundred
thousand
dollars’ worth of stolen goods. I want our jury to know what that looked like. What it felt like to see it.”

Hood remembered exactly what it felt like to see it and he described it to her. He remembered standing in the warehouse the day IA made the arrest. It was a large, high-ceilinged room full of shelves of pallets containing new electronics, computers and peripherals, building materials, liquor, soft drinks, furniture, tools, toys, clothing—just about anything Hood could imagine. It was all new stuff, most still in the shrink-wrap, and it was stacked almost to the ceiling. It was barely organized. There were rolling platforms and electric forklifts to move it all.

“It looked like a madman’s fantasy Christmas,” Hood said. “It was impressive, the sheer volume.”

She was nodding. “Good.”

She looked at her monitor, then back at Hood. “Now, the defense will introduce into evidence the letter written to you by Allison Murrieta, telling you where to find the warehouse. I need to know why she wrote you that letter.”

“We knew each other from a related case,” said Hood. “She thought she was doing me a favor by handing me a dirty cop.”

“The defense will try to link you to her.”

“That won’t be hard.”

“In order to impugn your character, suggest that you were a dirty cop, too—consorting with a criminal.”

“I’ll tell the truth.”

Reed paused and looked at Hood. “Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

He could feel her gaze as he looked around her office. Her workstation was more than unusual. The walls were painted a pale gold. She had a very handsome desk of bird’s-eye maple, not county-issue. The file cabinets behind her were finished in flame red enamel. On a sidewall were three framed photographs, staggered on a diagonal from high to low. They weren’t easy to see from where Hood sat, but he could make out the general images. The top one was of a dragster doing a wheel stand off the start line. Below it was a photograph of a dragster with flames blasting from the exhaust pipes. Below that was another photograph of a red-and-gold dragster waiting at the Christmas tree. The top photo was in black-and-white. Three generations of dragsters, he thought. But he couldn’t keep his mind on dragsters.

“I wish you could get him on murder-for-hire.”

Reed looked at him sharply. “I can’t prove murder-for-hire. Allison is dead. The guy who was supposed to kill her is dead. It’s Shakespearean. What can I do with a cast like that, Deputy?”

“Okay.”

She smiled. “I’m going to throw him in the slammer for a decade. Is that good enough for you?”

“I’ll help.”

“Tell me about the letter from Murrieta. I need to understand why she wrote it, and why she gave it to you.”

Hood steered through the rough seas of memory, but he told her.

A FEW MINUTES LATER Ariel walked him outside. The day was cool and bright and the palm fronds shimmered in the sunlight. She put on dark glasses.

At First Street they stopped and faced each other. “A Blood with a machine gun on full auto? Close range?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a walking miracle.”

“I’m not sure what I am.”

“What do you mean?”

“The gun either jammed or the shooter let me live. Either option makes me kind of nervous.”

“Do you miss the city?” she asked.

“I still live here.”

“Thanks for making the long drive down.”

She offered her hand. It was smooth and cool in Hood’s own.

“If I can ever return the favor, let me know,” she said. “I helped on Shay Eichrodt’s preliminary hearing, so I got to know Terry Laws a little. Maybe there’s something I can contribute. Anyway, I’ve got the Eichrodt file if you think it might help.”

“It would.”

“I know you’re working it for IA. Jim Warren is a good and trusted friend of mine. Don’t worry. He has me under an oath of secrecy.”

She took off her sunglasses and gave Hood the same forthright hazel stare she’d given him in her office. At twenty-nine, Hood was inexpert at reading the unspoken language of women. Ariel put the shades back on and joined the flow of humanity on First Street.

7

“So we pull up
to the U.S. Customs booth in TJ. It’s the Friday after we arrested Eichrodt. Laws and I look out the window to where U.S. soil ends and the concept of guilty until proven innocent begins. We’re making the leap. We’ve got 347 grand
packed
into two suitcases in the trunk and Laws is scared shitless. I tell him to relax, exhale dude, we’re going to be okay.

“Homeland Security stops us, little black guy, looks like Sammy Davis, Jr. He looks at our LASD ID cards and our badges, wants to know why we’re going to Mexico and I tell him to fish in Baja. A two-day trip, I say. He looks at our beat-up faces, wants to know where we’re staying, and I tell them the Rosarito Beach Hotel. We’ve got three clear plastic tubs of fishing gear in the backseat, and six short, thick big-game rods in the storage space the Beemer has for golf clubs or skis. One of the tubs has some very expensive new saltwater reels. Sammy pokes at it and moves it around but he doesn’t open it. Then he wishes us good luck.

“Next, the Mexicans ask us the same lame questions. I answer them in Spanish. There are three young Federales leaning against the booth, guys not much older than you, and they stare through us like we’re not there—”

“Did you badge them, too?”

“One hundred percent not, my man. Cops mean guns and nothing terrifies Mexican officials more than guns. Guns can end up in the hands of unhappy citizens, and Mexico has plenty of those. Guns are the
only
thing that scares Mexican officials. Illegal drugs? Hell, bring them in, move them north. Drug cash? Sure, everyone wants American dollars. But guns in Mexico are another story.

“They wave us through. TJ’s a pit but I love that toll road and all the little cities on the coast—Rosarito, Puerto Nuevo, Cantamar, El Descanso, La Fonda, Bajamar. Burning trash and tires, smells like heaven to me. At El Sauzal we turn east on Highway 3. Three miles from the turnoff we spot the dirt road with the pipe-rail gate across it. It’s exactly where Herredia’s L.A. lieutenant told us it would be—”