The Renegades ch-2 Page 2

  2

  Hood tried to talk to the homicide detectives at the scene, but two men emerged from the darkness, badged the dicks and said they were part of the Internal Affairs “shoot unit” and this was theirs.

  The detectives cursed and the IA men cursed back. But the bald black IA man in a sharp suit guided Hood away from the detectives, and the other, a white man in a beaten bomber jacket, fell in behind them. Half a block down the street, in a dark patch midway between two street lamps, a black plainwrap Mercury waited by the curb.

  Sharp Suit got into the driver’s seat and Bomber held open the rear driver’s-side door. In the faint dome light Hood saw a big craggy-faced man with a graying buzz cut and round, wire-rimmed glasses. Late fifties, high mileage, thought Hood. He wore cowboy boots and jeans and a white shirt with a leather vest.

  “I’m Warren,” he said. “Get in.”

  Hood sat and Bomber shut the door then went around and got in the front passenger seat.

  No one spoke until they were out on Twentieth Street, headed toward Edwards Air Force Base. The air conditioner was turned up high and Hood felt his muscles shuddering against the cold. He thought of his duty jacket, soon to be riding away in the coroner’s van with Terry.

  “Talk to me,” said Warren. His voice was rough and low. He set a small recorder on the seat and turned it on.

  It took Hood twenty minutes. By then they were north of the city limits, paralleling the base on Avenue E. Through the cold air Hood could still smell the faint sweet odor of coming snow. The Joshua trees flickered in the wind.

  “Describe the shooter again. Carefully. Everything about him.”

  “Black male, six feet tall, medium-to-slender build. Sunglasses and a red bandana worn pirate-style. His face was narrow, not wide. His nose and mouth were unremarkable. His skin was very dark. His hoodie was black with the Detroit Tigers logo on it. He used an M249 squad assault weapon. He fired it right-handed, with the butt jammed into his middle and his left hand pushing down on the stock to keep the muzzle down. I recognized the gunner’s stance from my months in Iraq. Then he was gone. He could have been sixteen years old or forty. I’d guess young, by how easily he jumped the fence.”

  Warren nodded but Hood saw that he was looking past him. “Not bad, Hood, for a guy with a machine gun firing at him.”

  “I think it jammed.”

  “God and his mysterious ways?”

  “I don’t know anything about God. But my life was on his finger and I don’t know why I’m alive.”

  “Tell me if you get any ideas about that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How long have you been up here in the desert?”

  “Six months.”

  “L.A. Internal Affairs speaks highly of you. I think highly of them. Some of them.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  Bomber turned and looked at Hood, then back at the road.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “No, sir. IA is all I know.”

  They turned south on 110th Street, back toward Lancaster.

  “What did you promise Laws, Hood?” asked Warren. “Before he died.”

  “He was dead by the time I could form a thought.”

  “Then what did you promise him when you saw he was dead?”

  “That I’d find who killed him.”

  “Do you believe that, Hood?”

  “Without question.”

  “Good. You are assigned to this case as an officer of Internal Affairs. The fewer who know that, the better for everyone. Your superiors will be advised and tomorrow someone will e-mail you an IA charge number for your time card.”

  Hood thought about this. From his tours in Iraq assigned to NCIS he knew what it was to be hated. And not just by the enemy, but by his own men. “Mr. Warren, I don’t want to work for Internal Affairs.”

  “You made a promise and this is the only way for you to keep it.”

  “You have more experienced investigators.”

  “None with his partner’s blood on his shirt.”

  Someone in front pushed a button, and an overhead light came on. Hood looked at the front of his winter-weight wool-blend shirt and at his shield and he knew it was more blood than could have come from the shrapnel still caught in his cheek.

  “I respect what you did in L.A.,” said Warren.

  “The last thing I wanted to do was take down a fellow deputy.”

  “It was unavoidable for anyone with a functioning moral compass. Hood, I want you with us. I want you watching the watchers, protecting the protectors. There’s no higher calling in law enforcement-you will learn this with time. I’ll have Laws’s package on your desk tomorrow morning.”

  “I don’t have a desk,” said Hood.

  “You do now. It’s at the prison. In a place we unjokingly call the Hole. Report to the warden’s office at seven a.m. His secretary is named Yolanda.”

  Hood watched the dark desert march past the windows, sand blowing upon sand, Joshua trees stiff against the wind.

  “You can say no, Hood. But you can only say it once, and that time is now.”

  Hood was not a planner. He was a man of the present, used to following his heart, which had gotten him mixed results.

  “I’m in.”

  “Know the target and you’ll find the shooter. They meet-beach and wave. I want you to bring me the beach. Bring me Terry Laws. Bring me everything he ever did at this department. He’s ours. He’s mine.”

  Ia dropped Hood off at the substation, where two of the homicide detectives were waiting at the main entrance. One was big and white and the other was big and black.

  “I’m Craig Orr and this is Oliver Bentley,” said Big White. “We’ve got lots of questions and a fresh pot on.”

  “Lead the way, Bulldogs.” Hood used the nickname for LASD homicide because he’d worked with them in L.A. for a few weeks, and he had wanted badly to be a Bulldog.

  “Want to clean up that face, Hood? Looks nasty.”

  “Later.”

  Sitting in a small conference room he told them what happened, then told them again. Orr used a digital recorder and Bentley wrote notes. The coffee was bad and they drank a lot of it.

  “So,” said Orr. “Did Warren just recruit you to IA?”

  “I’m on Terry.”

  “Thanks for being square with us,” said Orr. “We all have jobs to do.”

  Bentley looked at Hood for a beat, then tapped his fingers on the desk. “Someone cut the battery cables in your cruiser while you and Terry were with Roberts. The door was jimmied to get to the hood latch.”

  And I didn’t hear it in the wind, thought Hood.

  An hour later Hood put on a canvas jacket with a blanket lining and buttoned it all the way up and got in his old Camaro and drove back to the Legacy development.

  It was two in the morning. The investigators were gone and the bullet-riddled cruiser had been towed away. The yellow crime scene tape had torn loose from the peppertree and now it flapped in the wind like it was trying to escape.

  Hood circled the area with his flashlight. He picked up a few of the shards of windshield safety glass and rubbed their edges with his thumb, then dropped them into a jacket pocket. He could see where the crime scene investigators had dug into the asphalt to retrieve bullets and bullet fragments.

  He shined the light up into the peppertree and watched the loose branches swaying in and out of the beam. He walked across the front yard to the fence that the shooter had so easily cleared, counting his steps: ten. Then he ran the light up the fence, then along the top, wondering if the man might have snagged something on the rough wood. If he had, the investigators had found it first.

  He drove around the block to where he’d heard the car start up, and he sat there a minute with the windows down and the heater turned up high.

  At home, Hood showered and dressed his wound and scrolled through the LASD enforcement-only Gangfire site. He could picture the familiar face he was l
ooking for, and now, after the great slow settling of his adrenaline, the name came to him. He was an Antelope Valley Blood named Londell Dwayne.

  Hood had shaken him down a few times and Dwayne was unpredictable. Once he ran. Once he smiled and offered Hood a Kool. Once he told Hood that if his johnson was as big as his ears then Hood must have happy ladies. Hood had told him his ears were nothing compared to his johnson and Dwayne liked that. On that occasion, Dwayne had been wearing a Detroit Tigers hoodie.

  Hood looked at the picture of Dwayne and a chill registered across his shoulders. He wrote down Dwayne’s numbers on a small notebook he carried in his pocket.

  Hood thought. L.A. County had fifty thousand gangsters, he knew, and more than two hundred clicks. The killer’s red bandana meant a Blood affiliation, but sometimes shooters flew enemy colors to mislead witnesses and to implicate rivals.

  He looked at Keenan Roberts’s picture and saw that he was not the shooter. Kelvin wasn’t either. They were too big and too heavy. And it was hard for Hood to imagine either of them getting their hands on a weapon like the M249 SAW. He had seen their destructive talents in Anbar. A properly working SAW throws a thousand rounds a minute.

  He went outside to the deck and looked out at his Silver Lake neighborhood. When Hood had requested a transfer to the desert he had kept this apartment in L.A. because he liked the city, and because it gave him another hour of driving time each way, to and from the substation in Lancaster.

  Hood smelled rain. He fingered the sharp pieces of safety glass still in his jacket pocket and for the hundredth time that night he wondered why Terry Laws had been murdered.

  It wasn’t done in the heat of the moment. It was an execution. An execution of a sheriff’s deputy known to his friends as Mr. Wonderful.

  Beach and wave.

  Then he wondered something else for the hundredth time that night. Had the executioner let him live, or had his M249 jammed? They jammed in Iraq all the time from age and dust-it was an untrusted weapon.

  If the gun had jammed, then he was lucky.

  If the shooter had let him live, why?

  The only explanation he could come up with was that Londell Dwayne-or whoever was hidden behind the sunglasses and the bandana-had wanted to be seen.

  He’d wanted a witness to tell his tale.

  3

  “Listen and don’t interrupt. I invited you here to tell you a story. It’s about a friend of mine we called Mr. Wonderful, and the things that happened to him and why they had to happen to him. Your friend Hood plays a role in this story, too. But it’s bigger than both of them. It’s about chaos and opportunity.”

  We’re sitting in La Cage, a rooftop cigar bar on Sunset, which puts us at eye level with a billboard of two enormous models posed in a pouty stare-down. Their bodies are painted a gold that glitters in the upturned lights. It’s an ad for a scent that both men and women can wear and, sure enough, you can’t tell if these people are male or female or what. They’re teenagers, just like the boy sitting across from me, though he looks older than they do.

  His brow creases skeptically and he looks around as if someone could hear, but we’ve got this corner of the rooftop to ourselves. He leans toward me. I have his undivided attention. Terry Laws is big news in L.A. Everybody knows what happened to him, or thinks they do. The boy across from me starts to say something, but I shake my head and put a finger to my lips.

  “Picture a desert night in the Antelope Valley, August, two years ago. I’ll help you get started, my friend-it’s black and hot and windy. The tumbleweeds roll and the Joshua trees look like crucified thieves. Terry Laws and I are on patrol out of Lancaster substation, northern L.A. County. The wind bumps the cruiser, moves it around a little. The sand hisses against the windows and you can’t see a single star. And that’s when we spot the van, parked on the Avenue M off-ramp, halfway between L.A. and nowhere. Right where the tipster said he’d seen it. When I open the door of the cruiser, the wind tries to rip it off, and it takes me both hands to slam it closed before I pop my holster strap and follow Terry to the van. I’m whistling something because that’s what I do when a situation gets tight. Helps settle the nerves, okay? Even walking up to the van I see it’s all wrong-windows open, windshield smeared, liftgate up. Up close, there it is, two men inside shot dead, all sand and blood, sure, we check for life but it’s fucking pointless and we both know it. All this had happened minutes ago. Not hours, minutes-”

  “The Baja Cartel couriers, Lopes and Vasquez. This was all in the papers, Draper.”

  “We didn’t know who they were. We call it in and wait for the crime scene people and the coroner and the dicks. We set up the detour cones then close the ramp. Hardly any cars using that exit in the middle of the desert at two a.m. An hour later the dicks and sergeants don’t need us anymore so it’s back in the cruiser to finish our shift. Not long after that we see the truck, a red Chevy half-ton, just like the caller said, and he’d gotten most of the plate right, so we flash the truck at the ruins off the Pearblossom Highway, where the utopia used to be.

  “The tipster said he’d seen an older red pickup truck speeding away from the Avenue M off-ramp where the van was parked. We figure there’s a good chance that the guy in the truck did the shooting. But the truck driver plays good citizen and pulls right over when we flash him. He parks by the river-rock columns of the old Llano commune. Terry and I get out and put a few yards between us. We both have our flashlights up and our hands on our gun butts.

  “The driver gives Terry his license but he looks high, tweak city, shaggy hair and a beard and a black T-shirt. I can see blood spray on his upper left arm and when Laws gives me a look I know he sees it, too. The inside of the Chevy stinks like ammonia, you know, meth sweat. Terry orders him to get out of the vehicle. When he steps out I see he’s about six foot seven or eight-Laws was six-two and this guy made him look small. He’s looking at us like he wants to eat us.

  – I haven’t done nothing wrong tonight, he says.

  – For a whole night, says Laws, congratulations.

  “Then Terry hands me the guy’s license. Shay Eichrodt, thirty-four, six-eight, three hundred. I’m going to run it for warrants just as soon as we get this guy cuffed and stuffed.

  “I look in the truck bed and see four suitcases, the big rolling kind, all lying flat. Like this guy’s headed to the airport for a vacation, right? Terry tells Eichrodt to turn around and put his hands on the truck and spread his legs. Eichrodt turns around. He sways and loses his balance and I can see he’s not just high, but drunk, too. Son of a bitch falls down to his knees then groans and pitches over facedown in the dirt, prones himself right out for us. Terry takes a wrist restraint and goes to lock him but Eichrodt kicks Terry’s shins and knocks him ass over flashlight. Eichrodt is up, fast as a cat, and I’m drawn and yelling but he and Terry are already going at it and there’s no way I can fire, so I holster up and draw my baton and jump right into the fun. I hit him hard on the knee, so he picked me up and threw me against the cruiser. I weigh one-eighty, and none of it’s fat, but he threw me like I was a doll. Even Eichrodt wasn’t strong enough to lift Terry and all of his muscles off the ground, but I could see them in the cruiser lights, Terry with the baton and Eichrodt with his fists, bludgeoning each other like a couple of giants in combat. So I charged back just like I had good sense, working his legs and knees before he could hit or kick or throw me. But that bastard just wouldn’t fall. He was a bloody mess. So were we. For a minute I thought he was going to win.

  “When Terry hit Eichrodt over the head with his baton for probably the tenth time, Eichrodt went down hard and he didn’t move.

  – He looks dead, says Terry.

  – He’s breathing, I say. He’s alive.

  “We cuff him with two pairs of restraints on his wrists and two on his ankles. Then Terry and I check our wounds. Terry’s got a deep cut over his eye and a torn ear, and his jaw is swelling up like it’s broken. I have a cut lip and a swollen eye
, and my forehead has a lump the size of a baseball from hitting the car. But we’re okay, none of it is that serious. Terry calls in. I kneel down by Eichrodt and check the restraints and I watch the cars going past just a few yards away on the highway, and it dawns on me how close I’ve just come to getting killed by this guy.”

  I pause for a moment and sip my tequila. The boy drinks beer. I relight my cigar then pass the lighter to him and he relights his. Down on the Sunset Strip the sidewalks are busy with people. The cars move slowly. Taillights twinkle and brake lights flash. A million hearts, a million hustles.

  “I read the papers, Coleman,” he says. He yawns. Like a lot of teenagers, he is eager to be unimpressed. “You and Laws found a handgun and forty-eight hundred dollars in a toolbox in the truck. You found brass that matched the gun, and the bullets that killed the couriers. That would have nailed Eichrodt in court but he never made it to trial.”

  “Correct.”

  I watch the parade on Sunset. The cops have pulled over a black Suburban and I think of all the black Suburbans I saw in Jacumba, where I grew up. Jacumba squats at the Mexican border down east of San Diego. Noman’sland. Suburbans are the vehicle of choice for soccer moms and Mexican drug traffickers, and there were no soccer moms in Jacumba.

  “I’ve already told you one thing that didn’t make the papers,” I say. And I’m sure he knows what it is.

  “The suitcases,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what was inside? What did you do with them? How come they didn’t make the news?”

  “Before I answer that, I want to tell you something. It’s something that the young don’t understand. It’s the most important thing I’ve learned so far and I want to give it to you now. Listen: Things in life only happen at two speeds-fast, or not at all. That’s why you need to know what you want. Because when you know what you want, you’ll be able to see the difference between chaos and opportunity. They’re twins. People mistake one for the other all the time. You get about half a minute to decide what you’re looking at. Maybe less. Then you have to make a choice.”