L. A. Outlaws Page 23

“You remember, honey,” said Iris. “The Webster’s boxer got ahold of Noel and you ran him down and got her back out. Christmas Day, 1986. Four stitches in your hand. Charlie and I were in the front yard and we saw the whole thing.”

  “Charlie being one of my sons?”

  “Yes, hon, the one sitting right next to you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Look, Dad, here’s my first year of Little League. The Angels. You were the coach.”

  Douglas set his finger under the team picture and appeared to give the photograph his complete attention. He leaned away and looked at Hood.

  “Charlie. Right?”

  “Right, Dad. Charlie. Perfect.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  They ate in the dining room. For Hood and his mother it was an anguished hour of nonsense piled over sense, of imagined events crowding out the memory of real ones. There were moments of pure lucidity but even in these Hood saw nothing of his father’s once capacious heart. Mostly he complained.

  Hood forced down the dinner and thought of what Madeline had said. The past is now . . . a grave and a birthplace . . . it’s all one instant . . .

  His father looked at him. “I hate my life.”

  Hood drank at a bar in Hollywood, watched the Dodgers beat the Cards, chatted up two nurses from Chicago and came back late to Silver Lake.

  His cell rang as he came through his door.

  “Talk to me,” said Suzanne.

  “Where are you?”

  “Far from you and Lupercio.”

  Hood toured the little one-bedroom place to make sure everything looked the way he had left it, a habit and nothing more. He turned off the lights and sat in the dark in his living room.

  “We shouldn’t talk here, like this,” he said.

  “Remember Laguna, before you helped me check out?”

  “Hard to forget.”

  “Then walk across that sand in exactly two hours. Alone.”

  Two hours later he walked alone across the sand north of Laguna’s Main Beach. The sky was close and starless and the moon trailed a river of silver on the water. The waves were small and sharp and they crashed hard. He remembered that the rock archway had been easy to find at low tide but now the tide was high and the beach was smaller and steeper.

  He hugged the cliff to stay dry and when he was close enough to make out the shape of the archway Hood heard a crunching sound behind him.

  Suzanne skidded down the cliff face and her boots landed quietly in the sand. Her face was mostly hidden under a cowboy hat, and she wore a faded denim jacket against the beach chill.

  “Keep going,” she said. “Talk.”

  Hood walked, and she almost caught up with him but not quite.

  “I’ve got a leak,” he said.

  “No shit. A cop. How many lives has he helped rub out?”

  “Four for sure.”

  “I liked my neighbors, Hood. I liked Gerald and Harold Little Chief. They were men. What were you thinking?”

  “That I was working with good people. I am, mostly. I think I am.”

  “That’s really damned comforting.”

  “It’s a soul killer, woman.”

  He stopped and turned, and Suzanne stopped, too. He looked at her and felt the good thrill of having her here, caught in his eyes, unmoving for this moment.

  “When I found the transponder on my car I thought it was you.”

  “It was not.”

  “Prove it.”

  “You know me is the only proof I’ve got.”

  “You don’t strike me as a chickenshit coward.”

  “I care about you.” Hood hadn’t planned to say that, had never quite said it to himself. It was against all the rules, but that list was long by now. The odd part was that he cared about Allison Murrieta, too.

  She cocked her head slightly, as if to hear something better.

  “All this, because I saw a guy one night.”

  Hood knew that the only way to keep her close was to honor her lie. Back in Anbar he’d vowed to never honor a lie again—not after Lenny Overbrook’s false confession on behalf of the men who used him. Now he was doing it again.

  “It was bad luck,” he said.

  “What are you going to do about it? School starts in a few days and if I don’t work I don’t get paid.”

  Past the archway they came to a place where the beach widened and the pitch of the cliff face softened. Hood looked up at a gazebo outlined atop the bluff in the faint moonlight.

  Halfway up the stairs to the gazebo they stopped and Hood looked back at the beach below them and the soft black Pacific.

  “There’s a way, Suzanne. There are two people other than me who’ve known where I was going, and where you might be. If I give each man a different place to find you, and Lupercio shows up at one of them—we’ll know.”

  “Who are these assholes? How high up are they?”

  “A sergeant and a captain.”

  “Men, women, white, black?”

  “It’s better you don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what’s better for me. So we find the leak. Then what?”

  “There’s internal affairs. There’s feds.”

  “More cops. Great.”

  They climbed to the top of the bluff and stood in the gazebo and looked down again. They were alone. Up here the breeze was stronger and Hood could hear the cars swooshing along behind them on Coast Highway. Suzanne brushed back her hat and the strap caught her throat. She stood in front of him. Over her shoulder he saw a restaurant long closed for the night and a lamplit patch of highway.

  “I saw my boys today. It made me happy.”

  “I’ll bet that made them happy, too.”

  “I’m a good mother.”

  Hood said nothing.

  “I’ve raised them on independence and they know they’re loved. I’ve exposed them to good things, a lot of them. I’ve taught them to think for themselves, to be curious about everything and to doubt everything. I’ve never missed a birthday, a holiday or an illness. Well, not many.”

  “They seem like good boys. Really. A good look in their eyes.”

  “After you arrest Lupercio I’ll let you take me somewhere no one knows us. Somewhere beautiful. We’ll be lazy.”

  “Ernest might not be too happy about that.”

  “Listen. Ernest is a truly good man. But he knows that things end. I told him they would. And I told him that again, until he really got it. I wouldn’t take him until he understood that our time would be short. Because of that I treated him like a king.”

  “I’ll stay out of that one.”

  “You’re smack in the middle of it, Charlie. Here’s the deal: I’m not easy and I’m not property. I’m not up to you. I’m up to me. I’ll help you find your murder-loving boss and I’ll help you nail Lupercio. I want them both to rot in hell. I’ll trust you, Hood, but I’m still up to me. Those are my terms. Acceptable?”

  “Those are fair.”

  “Good, because I got us our old room at the hotel.”

  32

  So I’m down in Little Saigon, Orange County. The people here aren’t likely to know Suzanne Jones and there’s a nice little hotel on a side street built to look like a French one in old Saigon.

  Hood needs time to set his trap and I have things to do.

  First I get my hair cut short and dyed light blond. I tell the stylist to brush it back and let it fall where it falls. It’s chaos. Good. Sometimes a girl needs a change.

  I meet in the afternoon with Quang, a jewelry maker and acquaintance of mine. We sit in the back of his shop on Bolsa with the front doors and the security screen locked tight and the OPEN sign turned out. Quang chain-smokes and when he smiles his face creases with wrinkles and smile lines. He’s been hit by armed robbers twice in the last four years and he won’t open up for anybody who doesn’t look right. Lots of the Vietnamese businesspeople keep their cash in floor safes right on the premises just like their parents taught them back in
Vietnam, which encourages armed robbery. They’d be better off with their profits in banks but there’s no convincing them of that.

  I sketch out a setting for Ernest’s ring, which will be an eleven-stone bolt of electricity on gold. Gold, because it looks so good against his dark Hawaiian skin.

  Quang smokes and smiles and nods.

  I draw a masculine silver ring setting for Bradley’s half-carat diamond, which will be mounted inside a crescent of lapis cut in the shape of a wave.

  I sketch out a broad, flat fish with a trail of dorsal diamonds that will hang from Jordan’s neck. Both the fish and the chain will be brushed stainless steel, built to last.

  Quang suggests a simple ring box for baby Kevin’s third-carat diamond, which I can set on his dresser until he’s old enough to wear something valuable. I think briefly of having Quang affix the stone to the grip of a teething ring but this seems gauche.

  I ask Quang to set the two-carat whopper as a ring for myself, something shameless in platinum.

  For Hood I draw a pendant shaped like an H, studded with smaller third- and half-carat diamonds, totally dope. And it will ride with ’tude around his neck because the chain hole is in the left vertical bar of the letter. I’ve got no idea how I can give him this without him questioning where I came up with the money to buy such a thing. I don’t think he still suspects me of having something to do with the Miracle diamonds, but I can’t be sure. Hood is honest and he blushes and I can read him like a book but he holds things back, too. He’s smart.

  Quang smiles and nods and smokes and pokes at a little calculator so old the figures on the keys have worn off. When he turns it around to me the charge looks right but I haggle anyway and get him down a few hundred. I think of Guy and how he tried to rip off my diamonds. I’m all but sure he’s a cop and that he’s running Lupercio. I’m still furious about that but I’ve pushed it to the back of my mind. I pay Quang half his fee in cash. The other half will be in diamonds, due on delivery.

  One week, he says.

  In my Rendezvous Hotel suite in Little Saigon I put on my work clothes and check that all my tools are in order. I don’t put on the wig or mask.

  I know I can’t publicly contribute to my favorite charities in a Sentra, so I find a very nice Escalade in a South Coast Plaza parking lot and use the slide-hammer that Angel had made for me. It fits my hands perfectly and it’s got torque galore. I hate ripping out the lock assembly of a fancy newish car, but I love fancy newish cars so what am I going to do?

  I’m southbound on the 405 in less than a minute, wig on and the AC blasting because it’s late August and I run hot when I work. I work on the wig, saving the mask until the last minute.

  The Laguna Club is just a preschool but it’s got good people running it and they always need money. They helped out a friend of mine once by keeping her son an extra fifteen minutes a day. Not for just one day either, but for an entire school year. So I’ve given them four thousand dollars over the last year, and I’ve got another four thousand in a large clasp envelope beside me here in the Escalade. I should mention that this Escalade has the big V-8 in it, 345 hp, and it handles very well. It’s also got twenty-two-inch chrome wheels that retail at $2,995 if you can believe that, and of course a navigation system, a rearview camera and a DVD player. It’s kind of garish—bling on wheels—but it’s got attitude and it hauls butt.

  I’ve timed it right at the Laguna Club because the staff is escorting the students up from the playground and the parking lot is filling with the cars of parents who are there to pick up their kids. On goes the mask.

  I gun the Escalade into the lot, stand on the brakes and yank the steering wheel hard left.

  The tires scream and smoke and the moms and dads scatter. They stare at me. Some of them realize who I am but they don’t know what to do—it’s like seeing Jesse James walk into your bank: Do you dive for cover or say what’s up, Jess?

  Then from the clubhouse marches a very angry young woman in a red Laguna Club T-shirt.

  I hurl the envelope through the open window and it lands at her feet.

  “Allison Murrieta says thanks!”

  In a screech of tires and white smoke I’m back to Coast Highway. Here, I slow down and pick my way to Interstate 5 south of Dana Point. Mask off, then on again.

  At the Project Concern headquarters in San Diego I just walk in and set five envelopes on the receptionist’s desk.

  “I’m Allison Murrieta,” I say. “And this is fifty thousand dollars for a new water truck down in Ethiopia.”

  “Ayisha District. It’s terrible.”

  A few weeks ago I read the Project Concern brochure about this dilapidated old water truck that breaks down all the time. It brings water to—get this—seventy thousand people, and when the truck breaks down they go without water. One truck. Of course these people are in the middle of nowhere in Ethiopia or they wouldn’t need a water truck to begin with.

  “I was happy you saved that old man,” says the receptionist.

  “He was, too.”

  “We can’t do anything with this money, Ms. Murrieta. We have to turn it over to the police.”

  “Deny those people a new water truck? Honey, talk to your boss. Declare a couple grand. Figure it out.”

  “Oooh. Tempting.”

  “Temptation is good. Now give me the keys to your car. Don’t report it stolen. If you write your number on this card I can tell you exactly where it is. I won’t hurt it.”

  I transfer the remaining charitable contributions and my work tools to her Kia and head for the Olivewood Home back in Orange County. Incidentally, the Kia is a very nice little car, firm and peppy for a four-banger, a value car.

  One of my students lived at Olivewood before he found a foster family in my district. It’s a place for children who don’t have anyone to take them in when their families explode or dissolve or, in the case of my student, simply disappear and leave the child to be found. His name was Tim and he was a cool kid and the Olivewood people looked out for him.

  The trouble with Olivewood is that it’s right next to the Sheriff’s substation and not far from Juvenile Hall, so this corner of Orange is crawling with law enforcement.

  I take off the wig in plenty of time. I wait for a Sheriff’s cruiser to pass before I turn into the Olivewood lot and look for a parking place. A Santa Ana Police car backs out ahead of me. I turn the A/C vent straight onto my face and hit Max.

  I park and put the envelope in my satchel. I walk through the lobby to the restrooms and lock myself in a stall. The door has a coat hook and I set the handles of the plastic shopping bag over the hook. Inside the bag is ten thousand in cash and a note that says: “Olivewood Home for Children—Allison Murrieta thanks you for all of your hard work!”

  On my way back out of the lobby a plainclothes cop holds open the door for me and gives me the cop eye. I smile slightly without making eye contact and I’m very happy to be a blond.

  I backtrack to South Coast Plaza, where I leave the Kia and pick up my Sentra. I call the Project Concern receptionist on my way up the 405.

  By the time I get up to L.A. it’s sunset and the charitable organizations have closed for the day. The evening is warm and touchable and the sky is layers of blue, black and orange.

  There’s something nice about giving thousands of dollars to an organization you believe in. It lightens the heart almost as much as having a two-carat diamond set for yourself. I can’t wait to see that thing on my hand. I stop by the admin building of the Los Angeles Boys & Girls Club, then Children’s Hospital, the Make-A-Wish Foundation and the Heart Association.

  I slide the envelopes into the mail slots and walk away. Each has a large sum of cash and a note from Allison Murrieta—I write them left-handed so it won’t look like my own rather graceful cursive script. Of course I’m hoping that the PR departments of these organizations can find a way to thank Allison publicly for at least a portion of the money. If they can’t quite declare the full amount,
I understand. Even with my new haircut I’m not insane enough to brave the LAPD Foundation, so I’ll mail the money to them as usual. I only give them small amounts because I know they’ll set it aside as evidence. Maybe they check it for numbers or secret watermarks or something. It tickles me that they have to deal with Allison in this way.

  On my way back to Little Saigon I stop in Carson to rob a 7-Eleven. I park on the street, past the entrance. The freeway is a blessed two hundred yards away. I adjust the rearview mirror so I can check the storefront, then I get Cañonita ready and clip the pepper spray to my waistband. I get the mask on, the wig right, the gloves snug.

  I have to turn to see the police car pulling up behind me.

  I drop Cañonita into a box of tissues then swing the mirror back in place and the sun visor down. I strip off the wig, mask and gloves and jam them under my seat. I make sure my leather vest covers the pepper spray at my waist. My heart smacks my chest and my breath gets faster. It’s a solo car, one officer getting out now, his flashlight on. He walks toward me, hugging my vehicle to discourage a shooter. I get my purse onto my lap and come up with a mascara pencil, which I now use to touch up my left eye in the vanity mirror on the top side of the visor. When the officer gets to my window I look at him and power it down. He’s a big-shouldered white guy, looks like a weightlifter.

  “Good evening,” he says.

  “Hi, Officer.”

  “Driver’s license please.”

  I drop my mascara pencil back into my purse and dig out my wallet. I give him my CDL, where I have long brown hair. The officer looks at me, then again at the license.

  “Suzanne Jones,” he says. “The witness? The schoolteacher?”

  “Yeah.”

  He takes my license back to his unit and I can see him on the radio. He’s not sure what to do with me, and his watch commander won’t be sure either. For one thing, I’m not under his jurisdiction as a witness, and for another, I’m not wanted. I’m just a schoolteacher being victimized by a killer. They can even run the Sentra plates, but thanks to Angel the vehicle title is in order and it hasn’t been on the hot list since the cops recovered the stripped chassis months ago.