L. A. Outlaws Page 12

  I move as Allison, head up and eyes level as I count my steps from the car to the door. A family comes through it and I turn away from them and put Cañonita to my ear and start blabbing loud like anyone else on a cell phone. When the family passes I get a look inside: a girl and a middle-aged woman working the front, a young Paki and his girlfriend ordering and behind them a couple of brawny dudes who look like longshoremen off shift from the Port of Long Beach.

  I put on my mask, throw open the door and aim my gun straight into the face of the biggest longshoreman.

  “Hi, cutie,” I say.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Come on, smile for me.”

  He does, so I swivel Cañonita to his smaller buddy.

  “You too, Hot Rod. Give me a smile.”

  His buddy just stares at me.

  “Behave yourself,” I say to him.

  The Paki man is already backing away with his hands up and his girl is hiding behind him, so I step right to the front of the line.

  I point Cañonita at the young clerk, then at the woman, then at the security camera behind them up by the ceiling, then safely down at the ground.

  “No bullshit, ladies. I’m in kind of a hurry.”

  The woman has that indignant look that only a good and honest person can get. She’s disgusted that I would take what belongs to someone else. She’s offended. From the right-side periphery of my vision I can see Hot Rod hitching up his shirttail. It’s exactly what an off-duty cop would do to pull his sidearm—an off-duty cop being my worst nightmare except for two off-duty cops—and all I can do is draw down on him.

  “What are you going for, Hot Rod?”

  His hands freeze and he looks at me. “Phone. Picture?”

  My heart is beating so hard in my ears I can barely hear what he says. And I can barely hear what I say next:

  “Just don’t mess with my stickup.”

  “No. Not me.”

  By then the middle-aged manager and the young girl are chattering away in Spanish and the Pakis are wide-eyed and silent, but the register is open and the girl is downloading the cash into a white K FC bag with the Colonel’s face on it. The woman won’t look at me and she’s muttering mainly to herself, but the girl loads the bag in a quick, helpful manner. I tell her not to forget the rolls of quarters. I see over eight hundred dollars go into that sack. I set one of my cards on the counter.

  Less than a minute and I turn to go. Hot Rod has his cell phone camera aimed at me and I brandish the weapon and the bag of money. Cutie steps in front of me then kneels facing the camera. I can’t resist this kind of publicity. So I set a friendly hand on his shoulder—the money hand, not the gun hand—while Hot Rod clicks another two pictures.

  I flick a card to each of them.

  YOU HAVE BEEN ROBBED BY

  ALLISON MURRIETA

  HAVE A NICE DAY

  “For the next ten minutes the first person through that door gets shot,” I say.

  By then I’m heading back to the airport Marriott, the northbound traffic light and the Mustang burning through the fuel which is a feeling I love. But I’m strictly speed limit now. Suzie Jones, citizen, teacher of history. My feet have gone cold and my hands are shaking because all the concentration and calm I force upon myself during a holdup dissolve when I’ve gotten away, body and mind suddenly able to admit what a scary dumb-ass business this is, pointing guns at people you don’t want to shoot while you take someone else’s money. Pulling a job is the best—well, second-best feeling in the world. But the comedown—these jittery minutes when your heart pounds in your eardrums and you can hardly draw a full breath—man, that I can live without. So I do the speed limit and watch the rearview mirror and turn on the news and think about Joaquin because Joaquin makes me calm and proud.

  Lots of legends sprouted up around him. One was that he became an outlaw because a group of Anglos raped his wife and made him watch. Another was that he became an outlaw because his brother was hanged for stealing a horse he didn’t steal at all. Another was that Joaquin became an outlaw because he was whipped. I have his leather-bound journal so I know what’s true and what isn’t. The journal itself is only eighty-one pages long because he died when he was twenty-three. The pages are small, yellow and brittle. The handwriting is neat but fading. The journal won’t last forever, just as Joaquin’s head will not. They rest next to each other in a secret room in my barn in Valley Center.

  Interestingly, all three of those legends are true, and they all took place on the same day outside of Coloma, California, in 1849. Gold had been found at Sutter’s Mill. In the Sierra foothills you could pick it right off the ground, pan it right out of the rivers and streams. Talk about a rush.

  Joaquin had a claim and a camp with his wife, Rosa, and his brother, Jesús. Joaquin was nineteen years old. My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was a beautiful woman—a girl, really, just seventeen—and like Joaquin she was educated at a Jesuit school down in Ala mos, Mexico. She was three months pregnant on that day outside Coloma.

  They were panning the creek, doing well. Their claim was legitimate, too, because the foreign miner’s tax—which pretty much made it legal to shoot non-Anglos mining for gold—wasn’t enacted until 1850.

  It was July and I know it was hot because I spent a July up near Coloma camping with Bradley a few years ago, just to pay my respects to Joaquin, and to get the feel of the place where his life was shaped. I told Bradley a little about Joaquin, but not too much. The sky was a beautiful turquoise blue and most afternoons we saw wispy cirrus clouds blowing toward the mountains.

  This is how it went down: six young Anglos rode into Joaquin’s camp with their guns drawn, yelling that Jesús’s horse belonged to them. They were drunk. Joaquin writes in simple, clear Spanish about being held at rifle point and tied to a tree, then watching Jesús “struggle and strangle” (my translation) at the end of a rope slung over an oak branch and pulled taut by all six of the men. They lowered his boot toes to the ground then yanked him up, lowered him to the ground again then yanked him up again. They laughed. Finally they hoisted him up and watched him die. Joaquin wrote about the horsewhip that “drove fire” into his back—six powerful lashes that would bleed and fester for weeks—and how the men “obliterated” the camp and found their tiny bags of gold flakes taken from the stream. And he wrote finally of the sounds of Rosa’s screams against the bandana she was gagged with, the grunting of the men, and the bucking and whinnying of his tethered horse, Jorge, “as if he could understand.”

  I’ve stood on that ground. I’ve slept there. It’s a quiet place, mostly pine trees. But the oak tree where they hanged Jesús is easy to find—it’s the only oak tree by that stretch of the stream—and it’s got plenty of good stout horizontal branches. You don’t hear much but jays during the day and crickets at night. You might see a squirrel or a lizard, maybe a deer flitting between the trees. It’s like nothing ever happened. Nature forgets history just like we do—something I often tell my students. Bradley and I panned the stream and got some trace, but that was all.

  By the time I get to the Hapkido Federation studio in L.A. my nerves have settled and I feel focused. I’m in time for sparring with Quinn and some other black belts. Quinn was the one who taught me this method way back in Bakersfield before he moved south to the city.

  In case you don’t know, hapkido is a deeply vicious martial art—you break bones and dislocate joints and gouge eyes and crush windpipes and smash testicles in about the time it takes to unlock a car with a key fob.

  Of course for sparring at the black-belt level you have to control yourself, and your whole body is padded to the max—head protector, mouthpiece, cups for the guys, even pads for your feet and hands.

  You can’t believe the adrenaline-driven clarity that settles over you as a six-foot, 190-pound hapkido warrior bows to you, then flows into his fighting position and waits for you to attack. You see every shift in his balance, every tiny feint, every flicker in his
eye. You know when his breathing changes. Then all hell breaks loose. A two-minute round never seems to end. And the second you get tired is the second that someone lands a fist to your solar plexus or a foot to your head.

  I go six rounds. At the end of the session I’m bent over and breathing hard and I can hardly hold myself upright to bow to Quinn before I head for the locker room.

  18

  An hour later I’m standing in Angel’s shop up in Phelan. Phelan is in the desert north of L.A., not far from Interstate 15. Angel is the man who taught me how to steal cars and what to do with them once they’re mine.

  Here in Phelan they’ve got black sky and nice stars but not much else. The shop is made of metal and has no windows, which defeats the popular LoJack device. I can hear the wind knocking against the panels. Angel is doing a walk-around on the Mustang, nodding, clicking and sending pictures and text messages with his phone. Demand is high. Angel is always selling. He might have sold the thing already for all I know.

  “Thirteen,” he says.

  “Fifteen.”

  “Thirteen seven fifty, and no higher, Suzie.”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Fine, fine, fine.”

  “Where will you send her?” I ask.

  “Mexico. I have a buyer waiting. Someone who prefers American. You’ve always had good instincts for the right car.”

  A loaded Mustang GT is a thirty-two-thousand-dollar car new—drops to twenty-five if you sell it low-mileage to a private party. Angel will take it from here: pay me, replace the VIN with a clean one, forge counterfeit title and registration, remove LoJack or any other antitheft devices and transport it by truck to a Tijuana leather shop for custom upgrades, where it will change trucks and be taken south to Mexico City, maybe Sinaloa, maybe Puerto Vallarta or Cartagena or Bogotá. Angel will be paid in dollars. Since the airlines got tough after 9/11, roughly one million American drug dollars a day journey by car through Tijuana to points south. A day.

  So the narcotraficantes have plenty of cash on hand. For the Mustang Angel will get about twenty-two grand. The cartel guys who buy them aren’t getting a steal, but they’re getting something they can’t buy legally in the United States. One reason that Angel’s stolen cars are so popular in Mexico is that suspected drug heavies are banned from spending money here in the States, a law originally passed to keep them from financing “dream teams” of lawyers for their defense in U.S. courts. What narcotraficantes get now is a court-appointed defender. But they can always get a VIN-switched Beemer, Benz, Porsche, Jag, Ford, Chevy or Chrysler from Angel. In most corners of the world, money talks.

  Angel pours us each a shot of reposado tequila, offers it to me on a varnished wooden tray. It’s a ritual of ours.

  We sip and I stare at the Ford. It’s a bitchin’ ride—honestly aggressive, capable, fun just to look at.

  “Angel, I might want to move some diamonds.”

  “Oh.” He frowns. He studies the car, then me. “There’s Jason.”

  “I won’t deal with him.”

  Angel nods. One of the many things I like about Latin men is that they understand that many things in life are fated and final and beyond discussion.

  “They’re beautiful, Angel. Gem quality—the best. One is two carats and close to perfect. They’re unbelievable. Retail is four hundred and fifty. I’ll take forty and there’s five in it for you.”

  “Ten percent is top dollar. But let me see.”

  I thank Angel but I don’t like the look on his face. He’s a strong man with broad shoulders and chest, a lion’s gut and a high, back-sloping head blessed with thick silver hair. He dresses beautifully. His face is all crags and he’s got a smile like a sunrise. We were us for a while, but we both knew that wouldn’t last long. Mostly we were business. Angel charged me five hundred dollars to show me how to steal my first car. Later, when I’d learned the craft, he had a custom slide-hammer made just for me, a little shorter than the usual ones and the handle a little thinner for hands my size. I rarely sell a car to anyone else.

  But I see no sunrise in Angel’s face right now.

  “Does this relate to the diamond broker in the body shop?”

  “Directly.”

  “A terrible thing.”

  “I wasn’t involved. I was lucky.”

  “I’ve never had good luck with diamonds,” he says. “They seem to have minds of their own. But an automobile, it always goes where you steer it. Speaking of this, come with me.”

  We walk past some very choice American cars—two loaded Escalades with twenty-inch shoes and big meat, two Suburbans with more of the same, a Mustang GT, a black-on-black GM Yukon and a genuinely beautiful custom cobalt blue Denali XL that actually makes certain parts of me tingle. The paint and chrome gleam in the fluorescent lights and each one seems smug with its own secret behind the heavily tinted glass. Customers love heavily tinted glass.

  This is the domestic part of Angel’s operation, which is different from the high-end German stuff that Angel processes in a warehouse down in San Ysidro.

  See, the German cars are more valuable per unit but they’re also a lot harder to steal. If you physically move a Beamer or a Porsche more than a few feet, the systems all lock down—the antilock brakes take hold, the steering fails, the ignition and injectors and electric all go spastic and all you’ve got is a three-thousand-pound paperweight. The only practical way to steal the German cars is with a key or a tow truck. Both work. But keys are difficult to get—although some people leave the valet keys in their glove boxes, which is the first place a thief looks. And a tow truck usually means a broad-daylight lift, which takes time and a partner.

  So, for business I steal American. They’ve got lousy security systems that are easy to override and there are more of them to choose from. Angel sometimes has a customer interested only in a specific color or option package, and that’s almost never a problem because when Detroit does something they do it in a big way. Great selection!

  But the best part of stealing American is the huge market in Europe and in the Middle East. Those guys know a deal when they see one. Especially in the Middle East. They hate us, but they love paying oil cartel cash for our SUVs and trucks. The Mexicans have the drug cartels and the Arabs have the oil cartels. I have a friend who did a tour in Iraq and another in Kuwait, and he saw American cars with California plates still on them being driven all over the place. The American cars hold up well over there and they’re functional. You try driving a Mercedes SL or a BMW M5 on dirt roads across the Yemeni desert and tell me how far you get. You know how much German air filters cost? But get yourself a Ford Explorer, man, and you’ll make it on time with a decent sound system, the air conditioner still blowing ice, and you’ll get decent mileage, maybe seventeen miles per gallon with the six cylinder. Then you just hose it off and vacuum it out and head to Dubai for a round of golf or some indoor skiing or some gambling at the casinos. Plus, if you show up in an Escalade or a trick Denali XL with the big chrome shoes and the subwoofer pounding like the bass drum in a marching band, it says you kick ass.

  So all these American cars will go overseas, and to get them there Angel will load them into containers and truck the containers to the Port of Long Beach. Angel has his system and his people in place. I’ve seen the operation. The port is one gigantic buzzing hive of cargo containers, cranes, trucks and thousands of workers and drivers and longshoremen and hundreds of millions of tons of cargo coming and going every hour. It’s a full-blast throbbing city out there, everything timed out to the minute. In the apparent confusion, which is actually not confusion at all, Angel’s containers get handled by the right longshoremen and they get on the right vessels inspected by the right people. They’re not on the ground for more than a few hours. This is the meat and potatoes of his business because Angel sells twenty American workhorses for every one high-end German stallion.

  “I love that blue Denali, Angel.”

  He smiles with pride. “It’s better not to lo
ok.”

  Outside the wind whips and the stars glimmer. And we come to something that’s included in the price for the Mustang. It’s something to get me home, in this case a nondescript white Nissan Sentra. Angel has done a strip-and-run on this car. Here’s how it works: one of Angel’s guys stole it six months ago, stripped it for parts, then ditched what was left of it. The cops recovered the frame, canceled the theft record, and sold it at an auction. Of course the guy who originally stole it is the one who buys it. Back here at Angel’s they put the parts back on the “clean” frame and now they have a car no longer listed as stolen. That’s low-end, pay-the-rent car theft, but everybody needs a simple clean ride that won’t draw attention and won’t come up hot on the DMV check.

  “Think about those diamonds,” I say.

  “I am thinking about them already.”

  “I love you, Angel.”

  “As I love you, Suzanne.”

  I kiss him on the cheek, and Angel gives me the keys and sends me home safe and secure in my little Sentra, which has a full tank of gas, gets twenty-six miles per gallon and has a paper grocery bag containing fourteen thousand dollars in hundreds and fifties in the trunk.

  The eight hundred in the KFC bag is right next to it, weighted down with two rolls of quarters.

  It’s payday, man, and I’m still on summer vacation.

  I leave my booty and work tools in the room safe at the Marriott, except for Cañonita, of course, which I put in my satchel. I shower and trade the loose work clothes for tight jeans and a blue silk tank, and the boots for heels, just in case handsome Hood has ditched his night patrol shift and is waiting around to make sure I’m okay.