L. A. Outlaws Page 24

  My lucky day.

  He comes back and hands me the license.

  “Do you need help, Ms. Jones?”

  “I’m very well, thank you. I appreciate your asking.”

  “This is just a no parking zone here tonight. Street cleaning ten to midnight. Sorry.”

  “Is it that late?”

  “Yes, it is. Far from Valley Center, aren’t you?”

  “Good friends are worth a drive.”

  “Thank you for standing up to that guy. You did the right thing.”

  I start the car and put it in gear. “Thanks, Officer.”

  “Thank you. And have a nice night.”

  So I hold up a 7-Eleven down in Huntington Beach instead.

  I’m the only customer. The clerk is Indian and quite polite as he puts the bills into a plastic bag. He’s a young man but he wears glasses and he looks over the top of them at my face, then my gun, then my face again.

  “You should go,” he says. “The police come here almost every hour.”

  I turn just as the door swings open and three surfer dudes spill in—flip-flops and sweatshirts and matted hair. They laugh until they see me coming their way, then they quiet down, bumping into each other as they come to a halt. Their eyes are slits and their Adam’s apples bob.

  “Whoa.”

  “Allison.”

  “Gun.”

  “Hey, can I like take a picture?”

  “Sure, but be quick.”

  The clerk comes around the counter. “Perhaps I can be in the picture, too?”

  “Cool.”

  “Get close,” says one of the surfers.

  He steps back toward the door, a cell phone out. His buddies and the clerk join me but they’re too scared to get up close so I gather them in. The smell of weed is strong.

  The surfers laugh their stoned laughs and I’m in a little bit of a hurry here so I yank one of them in by the hood of his sweatshirt and Cañonita goes off.

  The roar is deafening.

  The surfer dude screams and drops. The cameraman runs outside. The third surfer dives to the floor and scrambles down the aisle on hands and knees, flip-flops jumping off his feet. The clerk backs away from me with terror in his eyes.

  I stride to my car, mask off, head up, plastic bag containing maybe a quart of beer or a box of cereal swinging in my left hand. But my right ear is ringing from the gunshot and my heart is racing and my nerves feel they’ve been stroked with a wire brush. Once again I’ve forgotten to hand out business cards. I wonder if it’s a run of bad luck or if I’m losing my nerve.

  An HBPD patrol car swings into one of the 7-Eleven lot entrances as I exit another and goose it for the on-ramp.

  Back at the Rendezvous Hotel I shower and change and go down to the bar in the ballroom. The Vietnamese dance to an orchestra. Everyone is Vietnamese, not a round-eye in the room except for me. Most of the people here are older and established. They had the means to flee the war and ended up here, where they built a place to remind them of home. They’re good dancers—cha-chas and fox-trots and waltzes. The men are in suits and the women in dresses and the air is thick with smoke. The walls are mirrored.

  I’m tired all the way to my bones. I think about my boys and my mom and Hood and almost blowing the surfer’s brains out. Wait until that makes the news. I must have had a tighter grip on Cañonita than I thought. I must have been more nervous than I thought. I don’t know. But I do know that luck changes like everything else and I get the idea that Quang should have names and addresses to send that jewelry to in case I’m not able to deliver it personally.

  Joaquin wrote in his journal about coming across an old man and his white dog walking the road to Nevada City one day. The man wore clothing that was little better than rags and his shoes were held together with baling wire. Joaquin slowed his gang of bandits and got off his horse and walked along with the old man and they spoke Spanish and the man told him that he had once been rich and now he was poor and rich was better. He said the worst thing about being poor wasn’t hunger or cold but being made to look ridiculous. Joaquin unloaded a bundle from one of the packhorses and in the grass he unrolled it. Inside was a new suit of clothes, a pure woolen suit in black, with a white cotton shirt and a black satin necktie. From another packhorse Joaquin got a new pair of leather boots, black and beautiful. Joaquin loved clothes. The bandits waited while Joaquin used a needle and thread to shorten the pant cuffs. The old man went into the trees and when he came out he was wearing the suit and boots and his chin was up and his eyes looked clear and he was smiling. Joaquin and his men then mounted up and pounded away in clouds of dust and continued on to Nevada City. They gambled and drank and bought women and things. Joaquin bought two new suits. Three days later on the road out of town they came across the old man, hung by his neck from a big sycamore tree, still dressed in his finery. The white dog lay beneath him, baying and growling. A note pinned to the coat lapel said: “This is what happens to friends of Murrieta.”

  Joaquin said a prayer for the old man, called the dog and rode away.

  When I first read that part of the journal I could feel Joaquin’s luck changing. He could feel it, too, and he said so. He said it was like a dark cloud he couldn’t see but he could feel the way it blocked the sun and made the world a cold place. Thirty days later they shot him down and cut off his head and you know the rest.

  I wonder what I’ll do with Joaquin’s head. I don’t love it but it is rightfully mine and it is my personal history, love it or not. Is it a curse? Is it a blessing? Either way it will belong to my sons after I go. I wonder if it’s time to have the talk with Bradley.

  The talk.

  I’ll never forget the talk I got. My great-uncle Jack— Mom’s side—took a liking to me when I was very young. He paid special attention to me. I remember him holding me on his lap, listening to my early words, just sitting and watching me. He read to me. Later I noted that none of his other great-nieces or -nephews or even his own grand-children had anything nice to say about him. But he continued to give me special gifts for my birthday and Christmas. He taught me to dance.

  He was a slender, quiet man, silver-haired and dark-eyed. He had been a farrier by trade, which is a person who shoes horses. He had a vertical scar on his forehead, curved as a hoof is curved. He had a mobile farrier service that was successful in the seventies and eighties. He drove all around Southern California shoeing horses. He told me later that he was also a bookie—a “front” as they call them in that business—which is the person who takes the bets. His mobile farrier business made it easy. He drove a junkyard crane part-time because the money was good and his brother owned the wrecking yard. When I was little he’d take me there, let me work the levers and push the buttons of the big crane, let me grab some junkers with that big magnet hoist and put them in the stack. Fun, but all the dead cars made me sad.

  One day when I was fifteen and he was sixty-two he took me out for a “driving lesson” in my mother’s 1974 Alfa Romeo Spider. Jack loved cars. I had my learner’s permit, so I could drive with an adult in the car, and we raced all around Bakersfield in the little red roadster and I can’t explain what a joy it was to drive that thing. It was the last year the Spiders had the cool bumpers, and the last year before catalytic converters were required, so it put out 129 very adequate horses. And the four-speed had a short, sweet throw, with a lively clutch. That car stuck to the road like a tick. The air conditioner didn’t work. The door handles kept falling off. Radio? Forget it. Nothing on it really worked, but Jack just sat back and let me blast around, the top down and the wind blowing back his long silver hair. Of course I wasn’t exactly learning to drive because by then I’d been taking my mother’s and several other cars for joyrides for months. I was good. Thought I was.

  When we came back I pulled the Alfa into the garage and shut off the engine.

  Jack turned to me and put his hand on my knee.

  “You are a special child,” he said.

&nb
sp; “Thank you, Jack,” I said. “You always made me feel that way.”

  He handed me a key with a tag attached. On the tag was an address and a number.

  “This is yours,” he said. “My great-great-great-great-grandfather was Joaquin Murrieta. You will come to understand.”

  “I wrote a report on him.”

  “One night while you slept I told you his story. You were very young but I think you heard me.”

  “I remember every part of it, Jack. The wind was blowing that night.”

  “It seemed like the right time for an outlaw story.”

  It took me a week to get out to that address, what with school and hapkido and my jobs at KFC and Taco Bell. Bradley’s father-to-be drove because he was three years older than me. I was two months pregnant with Bradley. Funny how that first walk across the floor in the morning would leave me queasy back then but the eighty-mile-an-hour Alfa jolt left me wanting more.

  The address was a storage facility down in the south part of Bakersfield. I made Bradley’s cute fool of a father wait in the car. The key fit a well-oiled Schlage and got me into unit number 227.

  There were two large cardboard boxes, big enough for a microwave or a small TV. They were taped shut. I picked the one on the left, slit the tape with my knife—a beautiful four-inch, walnut-handled Buck I’d shoplifted from Oshman’s Sporting Goods when they refused to hire me one summer. I still carry it in my satchel.

  The first box was filled with papers, books, yellowed news clippings, flyers for exhibitions of the head of my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, the outlaw Joaquin Murrieta. There was a leather duster with bullet holes in it, worn boots folded over and stiff with age, a lariat, an Indian arrow. His journal was at the bottom.

  In the other box was his head in a jar of yellow liquid. A bit of a shock, even to a knocked-up fifteen-year-old with no discernible sense. I looked at all that hair lilting around near the bottom and the face as dead as a face can get, and I felt that I was a part of this man and he was a part of me.

  I didn’t go back there for thirteen years. I took over the rent payments when Jack died.

  I moved it all out to Valley Center a year and a half ago. It’s not hard to hide two boxes. The property is big and truly, people don’t see what they don’t want to see.

  The Vietnamese are dancing to “The Tennessee Waltz.” I turn and look at the nearest mirrored wall and I see a blonde looking back at me. She looks confident. I take the elevator up to my fourth-floor suite.

  I keep thinking of the surfer dude I almost blew away. I can feel the dark cloud that Joaquin wrote about and I wonder if it’s going to pass by or stay right over me, freeze my bones with me still on them.

  I call my boys and talk an hour with each, not counting Kenny of course. Ernest is quiet and gentle as always, willing to let me avoid all truth.

  I call Hood and listen to him say hello then I hang up and turn off the phone.

  33

  In the darkness Hood waited for Lupercio to come into the motel parking lot. The Mariposa was on Aviation near LAX, and when the jets roared over, Hood heard the window glass buzz and the lamp stand rattle on the table.

  Sitting back from the window in room 6, Hood could see each parking place and the side of the motel office. Fog had broken the heat wave and now the night was heavy and damp. The Mariposa’s security and courtesy lights were yellow, casting the property in false colors.

  There were twenty-six rooms. The parking places were nearly all taken. Around the perimeter was a cinder-block wall that had been heavily tagged and sandblasted and tagged again. A low concrete planter lit by a yellow ground light stood in the middle to divide the incoming and outgoing traffic, and in it grew three sagging queen palms blanched by the foggy illumination.

  A pale minivan pulled in, circled around and found a place at the end of the row. So far tonight Hood had seen six new arrivals and eight departures. The Mariposa offered a park-and-ride deal at ninety-nine dollars according to the sign out front.

  Suzanne had checked in at four P.M. then met him at a liquor store on Sepulveda to give him the room key and exchange cars. She had already talked to Betty Little Chief about parking Hood’s Camaro out of sight in her garage. Hood hoped she could make Valley Center by six-thirty, which would still be well before dark. He left a cigar box full of tapes of the Bakersfield sound on the passenger seat for her.

  Hood drank coffee straight from a thermos and had a bag of snack food under his chair to keep up his alertness. Suzanne’s white Sentra—tinted a sour yellow by the motel lot lights—faced him from the parking space directly in front of his door.

  The bait now sat before his superiors.

  That afternoon he had told Wyte that Suzanne was checked into the Mariposa for one night. Wyte told him that he and his bride had stayed there when they first came to L.A. The planes kept them awake all night, or maybe it was each other. Then Wyte gave him a look that Hood couldn’t read and turned back to his monitor.

  Later Hood told Marlon that Suzanne Jones was spending the night at her home in Valley Center. Marlon questioned her wisdom because Lupercio had already found her there once. Hood said he’d told her the same thing but Jones was stubborn. Marlon said if Lupercio showed up there tonight it would prove he was psychic and they’d have to get the psychic-crimes team on the case.

  Hood drank more coffee and listened to the window vibrate and the lamp stand start up again. His department-issue Glock was holstered over his left shoulder and his own eight-shot Smith AirLite .22 was strapped to his right ankle. He had brought his folding chair from home, with armrests and a low seat that was surprisingly comfortable.

  He thought of Suzanne down in Valley Center, perched in the tree house in the massive oak that grew in her barnyard. He had remembered the tree house and thought that if Lupercio materialized on her property, Suzanne would be as safe in that tree as an observer of Lupercio Maygar could get.

  The idea got better when she showed Hood how Ernest and Bradley had rigged the hidden line that released a rope ladder so you could climb into the tree house, then hoist the ladder up and out of sight once you were in. Hood had sat on a derelict couch on the deck of the tree house and confirmed that you could see the back of the house, the barn, the pond, the outbuildings, the drive and part of the road that led past Betty Little Chief’s house. But there was small chance that anyone approaching could see you.

  Hood had given her his twelve-gauge Remington automatic and a box of number sixes just in case, and that was how Hood now pictured her, sitting on the couch—how did they get that up there?—with the scattergun propped against it, listening to the coyotes yapping and the night birds singing and waiting for a glimpse of Lupercio. He liked her new do, but in his imagination her hair was still brown and wavy.

  Now Hood scanned the cars parked in the motel courtyard, looking for movement. The perimeter was poorly lit, and the cinder-block wall with its bold swirls of graffiti fooled him into seeing motion. He half expected to see Lupercio emerge from one of the cryptograms.

  If so, Hood would deal with him. And later, somehow, with Wyte.

  If Lupercio went to Valley Center then Suzanne would see him and they would know that Marlon was their betrayer.

  And if what Hood thought would happen happened—if Lupercio stayed out of sight tonight—then either Marlon or Wyte had sensed the trick and called him off.

  There was also the possibility that they were in it together.

  Hood drank more coffee, slapped his face and pulled a packet of donuts from the bag under the chair while he scanned the yellowed parking lot again.

  At four-fourteen a dark old Lincoln Continental rolled into the courtyard, hugging the wall on the far side of the planter.

  Hood backed his chair farther away from the window without taking his eyes off the car.

  The Lincoln moved along the wall, turned and turned again, then came back toward Hood alongside the cars parked outside the rooms.

>   The windows were smoked and he couldn’t see the driver, or if there were passengers. It looked like the one from the sand hills outside Bakersfield. When the car had come full circle to the exit, it turned hard left into the entrance lane and began the circle again. Like someone looking for a good parking place, Hood thought, or someone looking for his room.

  Or someone else’s.

  A jet roared over, and Hood’s heart beat steady and fast as the Lincoln cruised the lot again. It slowed at Suzanne’s Sentra, almost stopped. He couldn’t see in. When it got to the exit, it stopped then bumped onto Aviation and went south toward the airport.

  Hood hit the door running, made the Sentra in seconds. He started it up, slammed it into reverse, then punched it off the lot and onto Aviation southbound.

  Ahead he could see four sets of taillights, red halos in the fog. He closed hard on them, flashing the brights and honking, hoping to cut Lupercio away from the pack.

  The Lincoln jumped into the fast lane and accelerated. Hood floored the little four-cylinder and closed the distance as they approached Century. He thought he saw a backseat passenger in his high beams, a faint face looking at him.

  Hood rode the Lincoln hard, flashed his lights again, backed off a little.

  To his surprise the Continental signaled right and pulled over.

  Hood followed it to the curb then gunned the Sentra again, shot past the Lincoln and skidded to a stop ahead of it. The Lincoln didn’t move. He hit reverse hard and backed almost into the Continental, then rolled out of the Sentra and came up with his Glock out and ready as he crouched and ran toward the car. He stayed outside of the headlight beams and yelled for the driver to step out. He kept the door of the Lincoln just above his front sights, and when it opened slightly, he dropped to his knees in a shooter’s stance and swung his left hand up to support the weapon.

  “Get out and step away from the car!”