L. A. Outlaws Page 3

  I think about taking their cash but realize that if the cops see this event like I do, it’s case closed and nobody knows anything about diamonds.

  This is one crime scene where I’m not leaving my card.

  I cross myself as my great-uncle Jack taught me to do and begin a quick prayer for the dead men. A place where ten men have just been killed has a chopped-off kind of feeling. Like frayed rope, a whole bunch of ends. I believe that God hears prayers but generally doesn’t answer.

  I’m almost to Amen when I see light slowly advancing through the lobby hallway, then through the side windows.

  Very faintly, over the whirring of the fans and the incessant rush of cars on the freeways, I hear a vehicle stop in the parking lot.

  My heart is pounding hard as it falls, an acknowledgment of disaster.

  But my plan is simple.

  If it’s the Sheriffs, I’ll have a lot of explaining to do.

  If it’s Asian Boyz, they’ll use a key and come through the front door and I’ll go out the side window the way I got in.

  Anybody else will likely head for the nearest window for a look inside, just like I did. Which means I’ll get the door keys from one of the dead men closest to the lobby and sneak out the front door if they climb in.

  I run to the lobby and crawl to the counter. There’s a side window facing the parking lot, and I see an old black Lincoln Continental parked midway between the Escalade and my Corvette. Big old thing, opera windows and fender louvers, armored with chrome, seventy-eight or nine. Mint condition. Its lights are off and there’s nothing moving inside. I can just make out the shape of someone in the driver’s seat.

  Asian Boyz, I figure—the Boyz do love their rides.

  I scuttle back down the hallway on my hands and knees. When I hit the high bay, I stand and run straight for the window. I’m through the opening and crouched outside on the walkway in less than ten heartbeats.

  I climb over the safety railing and drop six feet down to the dark ground.

  I’m away from the light now. I’m underneath the world.

  And a good thing because I hear the catwalk above me vibrate then stop. Vibrate then stop.

  Someone’s coming my way. Slowly.

  I curl up in the darkness next to the building. Looking up through the perforated steel of the catwalk floor, I can see the dark outline of someone approaching. He moves smoothly. He stops at the first window, but he’s not tall enough to see in.

  A kid?

  But when he jumps and locks his hands on the window frame and pulls himself up to the level of the opening, I get a better look. He’s a very short, compact man. Dark hair, flat-top, straight up. He’s not Asian. He effortlessly holds himself up. I can see his head moving left and right, then back again. He’s got on jeans, cowboy boots and a red-and-tan plaid shirt. There’s about eighteen inches of scabbard fixed to his belt and tied to his leg like a gun-fighter’s holster—a small machete with a handle double the size of a regular one. For swinging two-handed, I figure.

  He drops lightly to the catwalk and comes my way, stops right above me, and seems to look off in the direction of the freeways. Then he pulls himself up to the second window. I watch his right shoe find a hold against the wall, then flex, then follow the rest of him as he vanishes through the window.

  I give him a full minute, then unfurl and run for the parking area.

  I remote the door lock from thirty feet away, then the trunk. Without probable cause cops can’t inspect what isn’t in plain sight, and that’s why you need a car with a trunk.

  I swing up the lid, fling in the backpack and slam it shut.

  A few seconds later the engine roars and I’m burning rubber away from Miracle Auto Body with my middle finger in the air, which is a childish thing to do, but I haven’t felt so relieved in a long time, oh man, you just can’t know what it feels like to pull off something like this and see ten dead people in a place that would be happy to make you the eleventh, and I’ve never felt more alive than right now, just so thankful and grateful that I’m not lying back there full of bullet holes but right here with a backpack full of diamonds and almost a full tank of gas.

  I hit the brakes when I see the Sheriff’s patrol unit pulled over to the side of the dark road, but it’s too late.

  In the rearview I watch him pull out and hit the lights, and I’m cursing really fucking bad as I drive onto the dirt shoulder and slam the tranny into first and punch the kill button. I put my gun under my seat. I unplug and slide the police band radio under the passenger seat, too. Then I turn on the interior light as a courtesy, roll down my window, dig my CDL and registration from the center console and watch him approach in the sideview mirror.

  Tall guy, slender like a boxer, light hair, alert. His summer-weight uniform looks tailored because they don’t design them for guys that skinny.

  He’s got a Maglite in his left hand, but his right hand is free, and I see him look at my plate and reg sticker on his way by. He stops away from the door and looks at me.

  “Evening, ma’am.”

  “Evening, Deputy.”

  “In a hurry?”

  “No. Just a fast car.”

  “This the Z06?”

  “Five hundred and five bhp at sixty-three hundred rpm. Just about scalp you in second.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home if you don’t mind.”

  “Drinking tonight?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  He nods and stares at me. “I need your license and registration for the vehicle.”

  He steps up and I hand them over. His badge says C. Hood. C. Hood steps back and turns the flashlight on them. The registration will pass a visual from a deputy every time. It won’t fool a document examiner with the right tools. The driver’s license is genuine, and its bearer—Suzanne Elizabeth Jones, SEX: F, DOB 12/26/1976, 5-9, 135, BR N and BR N—has never had a ticket or been arrested. She’s a good girl.

  He stares at me again and I look out the windshield and sigh. He’s got wheels turning behind those eyes. Someday someone is going to look at me and in their mind they’ll put a black wig over my brown hair and a black mask with a crystal on it over my face and I’ll be history, like Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Joaquin.

  “I support Sheriff Whatshisname,” I say.

  “Warm night for gloves, isn’t it, Ms. Jones?” he asks.

  “They’re for driving.”

  “Remain in the vehicle.”

  Great.

  A red Porsche 911 turbo goes by eastbound. Beautiful animal. The engine sound alone is enough to get me blushing and bothered. I can lay it off for fifty grand to the right people. Would end up in Mexico City or Caracas or Cartagena, altered and practically untraceable. Then a Mitsubishi Lancer rolls by the other way. It’s the second most often boosted car in America, right behind the Caddy Escalade. It’s worth only three grand, but they’re twice as easy to steal and ten times easier to sell. Bread-and-butter stuff.

  The deputy is back five minutes later, handing me the CDL and registration slip.

  “What are you doing out here this time of night, Ms. Jones?”

  “I was visiting relatives. Now I’d like to get home.”

  “Valley Center. That’s way down in San Diego County, isn’t it?”

  “It’s an hour and forty minutes this time of night, without traffic.”

  He nods. Hood. Handsome Hood. Thirty years old, maybe not even that.

  “Drive safely. You were doing sixty in a forty-five when I pulled you over.”

  “I promise I’ll drive more slowly.”

  “Good night.”

  Hood turns for his car but stops when the old black Lincoln comes past. I flip off the Corvette’s interior light, cursing silently for leaving myself momentarily illuminated.

  As the black Continental drifts by, the driver studies me. Young or old—I can’t tell. His hair shoots straight up from his head, then is planed into a flat-top as black
as the extra-long handle of the machete on his belt. Thick neck and a big sharp nose, like a Central American Indian. The red-and-tan shirt is buttoned up all the way, like a school-boy’s. I don’t know why I notice things like this, other than it reminds me of my sons. My scalp crawls.

  Hood is back in his unit by now.

  I start up the ’Vette and guide it back onto the street. The Sheriff ’s cruiser stays put for a beat, then U-turns toward Miracle Auto Body. C. Hood is going to see what I saw. I go easy westbound, come to the signal at Eastern.

  The black Lincoln is pulled over to the right and the guy stares at me as I drive by. Big down-turned lips, head shaved on the sides and tapering up to the flat-top. A Mayan warrior, no doubt.

  He tries to fall in behind me, but I goose the seven liters and lose him in a roar of beautiful white tire smoke and rich gray exhaust.

  I hit Interstate 10 east. Things are too hot for me and Allison Murrieta in L.A. right now so I’m going home for a few days.

  Not to a hotel, to my real home.

  I stop in San Berdoo, park on a side street, take off the ’Vette plates and slide them into my satchel. I remove both plates from a very sweet black Ford F-150 and drop them down a storm drain. I replace them with a set of cold truck plates then quietly load my stuff from the Corvette—toolbox, suitcase, police radio, backpack with diamonds, etc.—into the bed of the truck.

  I can pull a lock and hotwire a stock car in just over a minute. Most don’t have alarms, but the few that do will stop when the engine starts up. That can be a long thirty seconds while the horn wails with you inside, and that’s where your nerves get tested. You beat LoJack by staging a hot car and waiting for the cops to show. If they don’t show in two days, it’s your car now, baby. People think the Club is insurmountable, but I just cut slots in the steering wheel with my carbide saw and pull the damned Club off. You have to replace the steering wheel at some point, but they’re relatively cheap.

  The truck purrs like a kitten and I hit the road for Interstate 15 south. The ’Vette had over twice the power, but I’d been driving it for five days and I get bored after five days of just about any car. And hot cars—even cold-plated ones—get risky.

  I’m looking forward to seeing my main man and my kids. It’s been a while. Or I could stop off and see a friend of mine, give him a cute little diamond to put in his ear.

  Right now, though, I just want to get the hell out of L.A.

  I love this city, but there are too many dangerous people up here.

  5

  Charlie Hood looked at the brightly lit office lobby that was never lit at three A.M. Then he climbed the steps to the front door and looked in at the stillness. He saw the overturned chair at the threshold of the office then looked down the hallway leading to the bay.

  He tried the door and felt the bolt knock against the lock plate and the housing. He looked out to where the 710 crossed over Interstate 10 and listened to the steady toneless roar of the cars.

  Hood took the catwalk around one side of the building and looked through the first window he came to, at the cars and the whirring fans and the lilting curtains sprayed in various colors and the dead people strewn across the floor. It looked like an Anbar alleyway in ’04.

  From the next window down he saw five more dead. He waited a long time for something to move other than the curtains and fan blades, but nothing did.

  He went back to the unit and called in backup and ten bodies’ worth of coroners, paramedics, the homicide and gang units.

  He sat on the metal office steps with his arms on his knees looking at the parked cars and wondering what kind of hell the Wilton Street Asian Boyz had stirred up.

  After a minute he lit three ground flares at the entrance of the parking area to keep the county vehicles from driving in and wrecking evidence.

  Within an hour there were thirteen men and women on scene and an entry/exit log taped to a front window next to the door that a deputy had forced open with a four-foot pry bar.

  The homicide sergeant was Bill Marlon. He was pale-complected and black-haired and not young. When the door fell open he motioned Hood in ahead of him, a courtesy to the first responder that surprised and pleased Hood.

  “Sign in, everybody,” said Marlon. “The usual—look, don’t touch.”

  Hood scribbled his name on the log and stepped in. He glanced at the office and the overturned chair. With his hand on the butt of his service weapon and his ears and eyes on alert, Hood moved through the open counter door then slowly down the hall toward the bay.

  Hood recognized three of the dead as Wilton Street Crazy Boyz. Another, no more than a boy, the one with the painter’s mask still half-on, looked familiar, but Hood couldn’t place him. The other Asian was new to him. Maybe another Boyz click, he thought. The four Latins were Mara Salvatrucha by the tattoos, but hard to say where they came from because MS-13 wasn’t about turf but about money and violence.

  Hood scrolled back through his almost four years with the Sheriffs trying to remember Mara Salvatrucha and the Crazy Boyz mixing it up, but couldn’t think of one incident.

  “Haven’t seen much of this,” he said to Marlon. “Different gangs fighting it out.”

  “I wonder if anyone walked away,” said Marlon.

  “Funny they’d leave the guns.”

  Marlon nodded. “If there was a winner, I’d put my money on the Salvadorans. I wish this guy could talk.”

  They were standing next to a dead man dressed in a black suit and a white open-collared shirt and a pair of dull black dress shoes splayed out at the end of his thick legs. To Hood, shoes had come to seem irrelevant on dead men, of whom he had seen more than several in his twenty-eight years. The Racks in al Anbar wore sandals or nothing, so to him death was a shoeless thing.

  He looked at the four holes in a diagonal line across the front of the white shirt, automatic fire from the Salvadorans almost for sure. The guy had no gun, apparently. He looked wrong here, like he’d wandered in from another place or time.

  Without turning him over, Marlon worried out the man’s wallet and stood. “Barry Cohen,” he said. “Hollywood. Cohen and Cohen Gemstones in the diamond district, says this business card. What’s a nice Jewish boy doing at this party?”

  Hood had been thinking the same thing. “Maybe it was his party,” he said. “Him and the Asians. This is their turf. Maybe the Salvadorans crashed it.”

  Marlon nodded but didn’t look away from the bodies. “Him and the Asians doing what?”

  “Diamonds come to mind.”

  “I wonder. The Asian Boyz wouldn’t pay him a tenth of what they’re worth retail. Barry’s got a fat markup for engagements and anniversaries.”

  Hood considered. “How much cash did he have?”

  “Eighty . . . three bucks.”

  “Maybe Barry was paying for something with gems instead of money. To a broker, gems are cheaper than cash.”

  “Maybe he was. And if tonight was the night he brought payment to the Boyz, then the diamonds are either here in this mess or went out with the winners. Good you sealed off the parking lot, Charlie. There might be some blood out there if one of these guys got away.”

  “If he was shot, that would explain leaving the guns.”

  Marlon put his hands on his hips and looked down at the bloody heap of dead men. “Looks like Cu Chi.”

  “Or Hamdaniya.”

  “Ten men. Jesus.”

  Marlon had invited Hood one evening after work to a bar where they drank and agreed that war is worse than hell, because hell punishes sinners but war punishes everyone.

  Marlon led the walk-through, and Hood gave way to photographers and videographers, crime scene specialists, coroner’s investigators, more detectives, an assistant district attorney and an LASD commander.

  Hood followed Marlon at an increasing distance but listened and watched carefully. He knew that the proper deployment of personnel at a crime scene was something he’d need to learn. Here it was orde
rly and systematic, and people knew their jobs. But in Anbar province there had been sullen crowds and sudden lethal chaos, and Hood was hated not only by the people but by the soldiers whose actions he was sometimes called on to investigate. Sometimes it seemed like everybody wanted to kill him.

  Two tours was enough. He had left a good job with the Sheriffs to go over there because his father was navy and his grandfather was navy. They put him in NCIS—Navy Criminal Investigative Service—because of his law enforcement background, though most of his time as a deputy he’d worked the jail. His last tour had ended almost three years ago, when he was twenty-five years old, but Hood still woke up in the dark sometimes with the echoes of IEDs and gunfire in his ears and the taste of Iraqi dust in his mouth.

  He shadowed the Miracle Auto Body crime scene investigation for two more hours. Nobody found any evidence that the diamond broker had brought any of his wares. There might be dozens of other explanations for Barry Cohen getting together with the Asian Boyz, but Hood couldn’t think of one. It looked to him like MS-13 had ambushed the Asians and Cohen, like they knew something valuable was in the mix. But they’d been a little short on manpower.

  He went outside to watch the physical evidence team search the parking area in the bright white of the searchlights. A generator hummed against the distant roar of the freeways. The coroner’s team wheeled the bodies out one at a time, the dead wrapped and strapped and jiggling as the gurneys came down the steps.