L. A. Outlaws Page 22

  “It is.”

  “I’d love to hear the story of how you got them.”

  “You won’t hear it from me.”

  “I know. I know. I wish our business could be lighter and less formal, don’t you? I’d love to hear the stories behind things. All the tales of how we work and how we steal and how we get what we want.”

  “Tales can be testimony.”

  “You’re right, of course.”

  Guy is staring at the rocks. He reaches out with a blunt fingertip and rearranges them slightly. The newly revealed facets throw back the light in new ways. He uses the loupe, taking his time, finally setting it down to look at me.

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars,” he says.

  “My heart just broke.”

  I stare at him and he stares back. Guy has cool blue eyes and they don’t let on much. I’m not really sure what I look like to him. I’m mad enough to pull my gun and shoot him and I don’t care if it shows.

  “Guy, say something better to me. The situation demands it.”

  “Laura,” he says, leaning forward confidentially. “These jewels are from the Miracle Auto Body massacre. They are hotly pursued. Everyone knows it. You must.”

  “I know they’re worth four hundred and fifty grand at the mall, and forty-five grand to you. Twenty-five? All I can say to twenty-five is the obvious—it’s two in the morning and you are wasting my time.”

  “Then in deference to Anthony, and to your valuable time and your skill in acquiring these stones, I offer you twenty-seven thousand, five hundred dollars. I will not pay more.”

  I shake my head and look out at the busy port. I think of plenty of things to say, but I don’t.

  Guy finally breaks the long silence.

  “Laura, you’re new to this. Listen. Let’s say that we do business but you don’t get your price this time. If you sell to me now, I’ll be here for you again. We can build respect. Respect leads to responsibility. We would become responsible for each other. Back and forth. Left and right. Containers going and containers coming. I buy and sell almost everything. You can continue your relationship with Anthony, whatever that might be. I can be an ally and a source for you. There would be times when I hear things that can help you. There would be times when you need something I can supply. I am a man you want to be in business with. I can help your friends. You can put your ear to any door in this city and you’ll never hear an uncertain word about me. Why? Because I make money for everyone around me. If you say no to me now, Laura, you’re closing the door on a secure and profitable future.”

  I stare at Guy through this whole proclamation. He’s unflinching. Slowly, he sets a card on the table before me. It’s blank except for a phone number, handwritten in blue ink.

  I look down at the diamonds. Even the minor, involuntary movement of my head makes them shine with unpredictable brilliance.

  “You can take the diamonds and go. You’re free to do that, of course. If you change your mind, you can leave a message at that number.”

  “I can find another buyer.”

  “Yes. But really, it doesn’t matter what you do with them now.”

  “How can it not matter?”

  “Because they don’t belong to you. Do what you want. But the diamonds will come back to me.”

  “I fail to see how,” I say.

  “No matter what you do, they’ll be revealed. Blood diamonds are always revealed. That’s what makes them blood diamonds, correct? And when they’re found they’ll be brought to me or someone like me. And my offer will be taken because it’s fair.”

  “It’s not fair. You didn’t do the work.”

  “I’m management and you’re labor.”

  I take my time sweeping the diamonds back into their papers. My heart is beating hard and I have this terrible sense of doom and defeat inside me. I hate this man and everything he says because in my heart I know he’s right.

  “Fourteen men have died for these diamonds,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “Not counting the ones who died in the mines, searching them out.”

  “Yes again.”

  “How can I take less than what they paid for them?”

  “That sounds noble but really it’s just sentimental. The stones are only worth what they are worth.”

  “I like them,” I say. “I’ve become attached to them. Maybe I’ll have some set for people I love. Maybe have some set for me. Maybe just enjoy them for what they are rather than selling them. Some things are more precious unsold.”

  The look on Guy’s face is authentic disappointment. He exhales softly but keeps his cool blue eyes on mine.

  “We all know that Lupercio is going to find you, Ms. Jones.”

  Of course Guy saw Lupercio and me on TV. Half of L.A. saw Lupercio and me on TV. I didn’t think someone would use that story to rip me off. Honor among thieves? What a pitiful notion.

  “Maybe he’ll pay me a better price,” I say.

  “He’s going to kill you and take them. But the diamonds aren’t why he’s going to kill you. You can hand all of those over to him, and a hundred thousand dollars in cash, and give him your beautiful young body, then move to another state, and change your name and your appearance, and he’ll still kill you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you saw him. Maybe you described him to the police artist. Or, maybe someone else saw him and described him to a police artist. Maybe. But Lupercio is free now because he doesn’t allow people to see him. I’m not trying to frighten you for yourself or your family. I’m not trying to negotiate with you. I’m not trying for a better price. I can get a better price just by waiting.”

  “Can you stop him?”

  “He can be influenced.”

  “If you get your price.”

  “Which is a fair price.”

  “In exchange for allowing you to steal my diamonds you influence Lupercio?”

  “Correct.”

  So, Guy is basically what KFC and Burger King and Taco Bell and all those other businesses were when I was a kid—a low-wage employer with a feeble benefits package and the proud ability to save me from terrors that he himself will bring upon me. They’re all poverty vendors with protection rackets on the side. I swear for just a second that Guy looks like that damned Victor they brought in from the East to take Ruby’s job at KFC.

  I’m also pretty sure that Guy’s swank laptop is the one I saw on the coffee table in the Marina del Rey safe house. I’ve never seen one like that—not in a store, not in an ad, not in a movie, never. So I think Guy is not only a cop but one of Hood’s bosses. A thought: in Marina del Rey he was downstairs outfitting my Sentra with a locator for Lupercio to follow, while I was upstairs making a video to lure Lupercio into a trap. A fucking cop, helping Lupercio kill the only witness who can put him near Miracle Auto Body that bloody night. And now trying to steal her diamonds for a song. A bad song.

  Cute.

  Too bad I can’t tell Hood about it.

  It would all be kind of funny, if I didn’t have my life to consider. And the lives of my boys. Ernest, too. Even my students. I teach a mean hour of history to eighth graders for nine months a year, and believe me, they need some tiny sense of the past. They need to know that there was life before cell phones. They need to be relieved of their overstimulated, overscheduled, overamplified, overcom mercialized, overrated, overpandered-to present. But a classroom hour a day isn’t enough to accomplish that, and teaching is not a way for me to get ahead in life. I took this extra job partly for my family, though I’ll admit it was mostly for me. I took it because I was tired of following the orders of corporate drones and compromising with district fools. And I took it because the blood of Joaquin runs through me. It pulls at me like a hand from the grave. I did not become an outlaw to get more laws to live by.

  “I’m keeping the diamonds, Guy. Get Anthony back in here. I’m gone.”

  “Let me be the first to say good-bye.”

  “Say go
od-bye to yourself. You don’t impress me.”

  “I’m not trying to.”

  “You don’t have enough balls to impress me. You just rent them from Lupercio.”

  He offers me a dull smile.

  I stand as Angel and his ward come back through the invisible door. Wise Angel senses disaster.

  “May I have a few private words with Guy?” Angel asks.

  “Give me the truck keys,” I say.

  “Why, Laura? I’ll just be a minute.”

  I look at Guy. “I can’t take another minute of this.”

  “Of course, Laura. Of course.” Angel hands me the hood.

  “Is there a navigation unit in the truck?” asks Guy.

  “There is none, Guy,” says Angel. “I can still read a map.”

  “Escort Laura to the truck,” says Guy to Rorke. “Confirm Anthony’s statement.”

  I give Rorke a hateful stare as I put the hood back on. He cinches up the ties behind my head and I feel the knot go tight. He walks me out with firm pressure on my arm and beeps me in to the truck. He guides me into the passenger’s seat. I’m sure he’s looking at the dashboard to confirm that there’s no screen, and I hope he doesn’t bother to look under the seat for my portable. Thank God it’s small and black. I hear the driver’s door open and the clink of keys as he slips one into the ignition, then closes the door. I hit the door locks and give Rorke a blind wave, then turn on the radio and crank the volume. I give Rorke a moment to get inside and lose interest. A minute later I’ve got my hand around the GPU and I push the current location save button. I’ve practiced this in the dark and I can do it with either hand.

  Then I lean my head back against the rest and try to figure out what to do about Guy.

  31

  On his first tour Hood spent time at the “Baghdad Tennis Club,” a Green Zone facility with a single court made from Tigris River clay and patrolled by men with machine guns. The Chinese-made tennis balls were pressureless and heavy as rocks. But the Iraqis love tennis almost as much as soccer. The play usually took place during the evenings, under the soft hiss of the Green Zone palms.

  Hood was a steady player, having been number two on his Bakersfield High School team. He enjoyed having a racket in his hand again. He had a big forehand that was somewhat mitigated by the yellow Tigris clay, though sometimes the gravel composition gave his shots some horrendously advantageous bounces. He didn’t mind hitting with the Iraqi youngsters just learning to play.

  The club was often visited by Nasir al-Hatam, Iraq’s number-one player. Amid the rubble and chaos of Baghdad Nasir was trying to get an Iraqi Davis Cup team together. Hood could rally with him, but in games the Iraqi’s serve and his deep, steady ground strokes easily did Hood in. Al-Hatam was good-natured and generous with his time, and he became the club pro, giving lessons to American soldiers, who played in combat boots and fatigues.

  Hood remembered all of this as he drove away from Officer Steve Ruiz’s funeral that Saturday afternoon in Bakersfield, one week after the shootings in Madeline Jones’s courtyard. The palms lining the cemetery road looked like the Baghdad palms, and the cooling evening had the same rosy desert light. And Steve Ruiz and Nasir al-Hatam had looked very much alike—tall and dark-haired and slender, with a warm smile and kind eyes. At least that was how Ruiz looked in the portraits on easels beside his coffin. Hood had seen the similarity when he’d first laid eyes on Ruiz, terrified and dying in Madeline’s courtyard, but his mind had been too frantic to make the connection.

  Hood drove to his old high school and parked and walked out to the tennis courts. There were players on one of them. He sat on a bench and watched. He tried to concentrate on the ball going back and forth but all he could think of was Ruiz.

  Ruiz was his age—twenty-eight. At the funeral Hood had seen his widow and his children, his brothers and sister, his mom and dad. There was no point in approaching any of them, in telling them that his own carelessness had contributed to Steve’s death. He believed that anyone who looked closely at him would see this. It surprised him that no one at the funeral truly saw him, but no one truly saw Suzanne Jones either, and millions of people had watched her commit armed robbery on TV. Maybe seeing was a lost art.

  So he loitered far back in the standing crowd, black as a crow in his weddings-and-funerals suit, wondering if better CPR would have saved Ruiz. And wondering if it was Marlon or Wyte or both who had guided Lupercio to Bakersfield that night. Marlon or Wyte? The names had been endlessly ratcheting through Hood’s mind since Arrowhead. Marlon, Wyte. Hood had told Marlon that he was going to Jones’s mother’s house in Bakersfield. Marlon had likely informed Wyte. Where was the leak? Either way you cut it, Lupercio knew where Hood would be and that Hood was looking for Suzanne Jones. Hood had set the stage on which the force of Lupercio’s character collided with the luck of two young, strong, unsuspecting deputies—a mismatch.

  Hood watched the ball go back and forth over the net. He remembered winning a big match against his cross-town rival, Suzanne Jones’s alma mater, in fact, right there on that court. Now the players were middle-aged and rounded, mixed doubles teams grunting and shrieking and playing hard.

  Hood thought of Nasir al-Hatam again, his smoothness on the court and his humility off of it. The story that Hood later put together went like this: Nasir was approached by his old homies to drive a bomb into the Hunting Club, a ritzy tennis club where Nasir had learned the game during Saddam’s reign. Nasir said he wasn’t sure that he wanted to do that. His family was relocated, and Nasir kept teaching and training for the Davis Cup, stayed low, varied his schedule. His old friends caught up with him and two teammates in the Baghdad neighborhood of Sedeya one day and gunned them all down. Nasir and his buddies were wearing the green-and-white warm-ups of the Iraqi tennis team and the Adidas knockoffs that were all you could get in Baghdad. Bullets and fake tennis shoes, thought Hood, all that Iraq could offer its number-one player.

  Hood watched the ball go back and forth but he didn’t see it. He was back in the Baghdad, hitting with Nasir. Then he was in Madeline Jones’s courtyard. Then all he could see was the names Marlon and Wyte scrolling through the window of his mind’s eye, like symbols in a slot machine.

  He watched the tennis for another few minutes then drove south to L.A.

  Hood sat in the activities room with his mother, Iris, beside him. His father was across from them as usual, but without the girlfriend he had mistaken for his wife. Earlier in the week Douglas had punched the woman, and now his activities were restricted. He had lost his swagger and sat with his hands folded in his lap and a hangdog expression on his face.

  Hood had brought a picture album he’d assembled from the shoeboxes of photographs he’d gotten from his mother. The doctors had said that visible tokens from Douglas’s past might help to slow the deterioration of his mind, or at least please him. So Hood went and sat next to his dad and flipped through the pages.

  “Look, that pool you got me when I was four or five,” said Hood. He sat in the small blue pool with the bright shapes of seahorses and shells on the walls all around him. He was startlingly skinny but smiling big.

  “You look like a POW,” said his father. “They should have fed you more.”

  “I always got enough, Dad.”

  “Where was I living then?”

  “Right there at the Bakersfield house.”

  “That was the last year we were all together,” said Iris. “Donny moved out that December, and Sharon left the next spring.”

  “I have no memory of them,” said Douglas. “But the maintenance yard I remember very well. That’s where we’d pick up the trucks and sprayers and pipe and fertilizers. I remember a stack of new Rain Bird sprinklers, brand-new, still in the boxes, that got stolen on Good Friday, 1989.”

  “You miss work, Dad?”

  “I miss the donuts.”

  Hood flipped through. Douglas nodded but Hood could tell that he wasn’t remembering much of what he saw. When Do
uglas pointed to a picture and asked a question, Hood saw that his hands were still strong and steady, and Hood wondered that a man’s mind could wear out so much faster than his hands.

  But Hood found himself enjoying the closeness of his dad, the touch of his bare arm along his own, his familiar smell. He remembered Douglas taking him up to Yosemite on fly-fishing trips when he was a boy, the cold water and the elusive fish and the painstaking knots that his father taught him to tie. He could remember his father standing behind him up on the Merced River, taking his hands and showing him the rhythm, how to cast the line with his wrist firm and his elbow doing most of the work and the left hand paying out line. Hood remembered getting it right once in a while, and having brave little rainbow trout crash his fly, and the silver red flash of the fish in the sun as it jumped, then the furtive darts back and forth underwater as he reeled it in. The rainbows were impossibly beautiful, the brook trout even more beautiful. His father always let them go, carefully working the hooks out while keeping the fish submerged. Hood had never loved fly-fishing like his father loved it, but he had fished hard to please him. When he was on a river with Douglas it was always a time of beauty and slowness and that absurd concentration in which anglers become lost.

  Hood also remembered riding horses with his dad, especially one warm spring day when Douglas trotted past him on a black warmblood and Hood had so thoroughly admired the way he sat that horse that he tried to emulate it on his own, sitting up and squaring his shoulders but trying to look relaxed also and being thankful that this man so good with horses was his father. In Hood’s memory his father trotted by, then trotted by again.

  “Look, Dad, remember Taffy?”

  “Not one iota.”

  “The collie you got us. Remember? And she dug up the yard so bad you took her to the pound and came back with a kitten. We named her Noel because it was Christ mastime. And Mom put little squares of masking tape on her feet and we laughed when she tried to shake them off and she knew we were laughing at her.”

  “Sorry to have missed all that.”