L. A. Outlaws Read online

  In the lobby by the cash register a young South Side Compton Crip gesticulated elaborately before two more patrol deputies and three of his homies. Hood could hear some of his words through the shut glass doors, and he could hear the wail of sirens in the distance.

  “The bitch has me dead but she don’t pull . . . ”

  “Murrieta was robbing the place and the Crip shot her,” said one of the deputies, nodding toward the lobby without looking. “Someone said her gun jammed. She ran into the parking lot, through the bushes.”

  Hood made his way across the lot, then through a wilted hedge of hibiscus to the poorly lit street. Three more cruisers and a paramedic unit were parked at the end of a cul-de-sac ahead of him. He ran down a narrow, dislocated sidewalk, past the old cars and the beaten houses and the people inside their heavy screen doors or standing in their yards.

  “That Allison in there at Rachman’s?”

  “That’s Allison, shot up and bleeding.”

  “You go get her, cowboy. You rescue old Rachman!”

  Hood bent low and joined the deputies behind the forward car. Cruz, the patrol sergeant, squatted with a megaphone in one hand. A big deputy peered over the hood of the car cradling a combat shotgun in one arm. Three other deputies steadied their sidearms on the roofs of their units, feet spread for balance and heads still.

  “She’s got an old man hostage,” said Cruz. “She shot at us a few minutes ago. SWAT and the negotiators are on the way.”

  “Give me the megaphone,” said Hood.

  To his surprise the sergeant gave it up. Hood stood and looked at the house. It was square and plain, with a dirt front yard and a “For Sale” sign and simple iron grates over the windows and curtains behind them. The lights were faint inside.

  “Allison, it’s Charlie,” he blared. “Charlie Hood. I’m going to come talk to you. If you want a hostage, use me. I’m coming now.”

  He tossed the megaphone to Cruz and walked toward the house with his hands up and open. He heard the sirens getting louder and the voices behind him.

  “The man’s goin’ in. He is actually goin’ into Rachman’s!”

  “Get her, cowboy!”

  “Take that mask off her! Rescue Rachman!”

  Hood knocked on the door. He heard voices. A moment later the door cracked open and Hood found himself looking up at a large black face.

  “She said let you in. But I ain’t sure.”

  “Open the door. You’re free to go.”

  “She needs help.”

  “Go.”

  “Deputy, you can’t throw me out of my own house.”

  He turned and walked away, and Hood followed him inside and shut the door. He was taller than Hood by a head and almost twice as thick.

  “It’s the teacher,” Rachman said. “Crazy. The teacher is Allison. That’s something. But she won’t let the paramedics in. I can’t talk any sense into her.”

  Suzanne lay on her back on the living room sofa. She was wrapped in what looked like bedsheets and a brightly colored purple-and-blue afghan. Her wig and gun and mask were on the floor beside her. Her face was pale and he heard her teeth chattering and saw the rapid rise and fall of the covers that she had pulled up tight to her chin. Her knuckles were hard and white.

  “Charlie.”

  “Don’t talk—listen. The medics can keep you from dying, Suzanne, but I can’t.”

  She shivered and coughed red. Hood touched her forehead, which was cool and damp. When he’d worked the covers free of her grip, he lifted them and saw the blood and smelled it.

  “I’m getting the medics, Suzanne.”

  “Okay.”

  Hood slid the derringer far under the couch, then crossed the room and threw open the front door. He called out from the porch. Rachman joined him, waving them in.

  Back inside, Hood knelt beside her. He took Suzanne’s hand. Her fingers were strong and her nails dug into him and her voice was thin and wet.

  “Like your diamonds, Charlie?”

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “It took that kid forever to get his gun up. I just couldn’t shoot him.”

  “That’s okay, Suzanne.”

  “Bradley’s age.”

  “You did the right thing.”

  “Tell the boys I love them.”

  “You can tell them that yourself.”

  “This isn’t right. So much to do. So much you don’t know.”

  “Right now you think about good things, and you keep breathing in and out. You’re going to be okay, Suzanne. They’re almost here. These guys are good.”

  Hood leaned over her and put his face next to hers, felt the coolness of her skin against his, smelled the faint aroma of her perfume and the strong metallic odor of the life draining out of her.

  “Oh, I like you,” she whispered.

  “I love you. Be strong.”

  He heard Rachman’s voice, then the deputy with the shotgun burst into the house, then more uniforms with their weapons drawn. Last were two firemen carrying medical equipment, and two paramedics angling a back-board through the doorway.

  Suzanne coughed again. Hood rose up, and he felt her nails digging deeper into his hand.

  “Call me later,” she said.

  She looked at the men, then back at Hood. Her throat rattled and the light retreated from her eyes and her face relaxed.

  “I will.”

  He stared at her a moment. The paramedics pushed Hood aside, and threw back the covers and lifted Suzanne to the floor. One of them strapped an Ambu bag to her head then started an IV in each arm. A fireman cut away her blouse and pressed a big defibrillator patch to her chest while the other started CPR. A moment later the EKG monitor showed only a small, occasional blip.

  “She’s in PEA,” said one of the medics. “Epinephrine and atropine, run the IVs wide open. I’m going to needle her.”

  He stabbed a large IV needle between her ribs. Hood heard the trapped air hissing out but the EKG line had gone flat.

  He turned away.

  A minute later he stopped for Marlon on the front walkway. “Suzanne was Murrieta. A kid shot her.”

  Marlon nodded.

  “I’ll notify her family,” Hood said. “If that’s okay with you.”

  “It’s okay. I’m sorry, Charlie. I know she meant something to you.”

  “Her gun is under the couch.”

  Back at the Denny’s Hood talked to the shooter for a few minutes, found out his gang name was Kick because he took kung fu once, and his gun was a .38-caliber. A South Side Crip. Kick asked about the reward and Hood told him there was no reward and Kick said too bad, his mama needed money for an operation. Hood had no idea what they’d do with him—just carrying a concealed piece was a crime, and it was probably stolen property anyway—but when a woman in a mask is brandishing her own handgun, you’ve got a good start on self-defense.

  He walked back through the parking lot and down the cul-de-sac. He lingered outside the house until the coroner’s team wheeled her out, wondering how to tell Ernest and the boys.

  Two hours later when he pulled up, Ernest was standing on the Valley Center porch in the glow of a yellow bug light with a mug of coffee in his hand and the dogs alert at his feet.

  42

  The next afternoon Hood stood in the Valley Center barn while the sunlight slanted through the old boards and the pigeons cooed up in the eaves.

  He felt that he owed Suzanne a good-faith search for the head and effects of Joaquin Murrieta, though he knew what he would find. Two hours in the house had yielded nothing and neither had the garage. The barn would be Joaquin’s last stand.

  Ernest and the boys were up in L.A. Hood had explained that an autopsy was required by law after violent death, and Ernest and the boys had left at first light, wanting to be closer to her.

  Hood understood. In his imagination he sheltered her body from the terrible saws and blades used for autopsy.

  Ernest had wept openly when Hood told hi
m—he’d known something was wrong.

  Ernest had told Bradley and Jordan himself. A few hours later, when they left, Hood saw in Bradley a withering rage that reminded him of Suzanne on the night he betrayed her into arrest. Bradley was taller and fuller than Hood had remembered and there was something both controlled and wild in him.

  Hood listened to the pigeons.

  He looked down at the unmistakable stain left by Harold and Gerald Little Chief.

  All this for forty-five thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds.

  He sized up the big industrial shelves along one side of the building, the way they were filled with clear stacking plastic boxes, each labeled. She could hide things in plain sight, thought Hood, but it wasn’t likely.

  Still, he carried over an extension ladder and searched the highest and most remote boxes. Old children’s clothing. Years of Mexican TV soap opera magazines, some of them with her mother on the cover. Old quilts and comforters redolent of naphthalene. He sneezed from the dust as he slid them back into place, moved the ladder, then opened more.

  He poked through the cardboard boxes behind the bicycles, but they were all filled with outgrown toys. He walked the perimeter of the barn tapping for a false wall but found none.

  Ditto the floor for some kind of basement, but the concrete slab was continuous and gave up nothing.

  Suzanne would be laughing, wouldn’t she?

  He sat on a hay bale and looked through the open door at the bright barnyard and the towering oak in which she had sat waiting for Lupercio.

  The sun is coming up over the hills and colors are starting to form.

  No more hills for you, he thought, no colors. He felt the diamond H against his chest.

  Hood had never lost a lover to death before. His feelings were deep and clear—sorrow, regret, blame, anger, helplessness—all taking their separate turns to advance and retreat and then advance again, holding hands in varying combinations. But the most powerful feeling of all was one without a name and therefore unspeakable—a recognition of having lost forever someone singular and irreplaceable and beyond valuation.

  There was a recently added bathroom built into one corner of the old barn, and Hood used it and drank from the tap and splashed water in his face and looked up at the too-noisy ceiling fan before he pulled the chain to turn it off.

  He saw the access hatch. He walked out of the bathroom and across the barn enough to get a good perspective, and when he turned, he saw what he thought he might: the roof of the bathroom was a good seven feet higher than its ceiling. An attic.

  He stood on his toes and popped the hatch and slid it under the insulation and away from the opening. He pushed on the insulation. He got a stepladder this time and stood on the first step, moving the sheets of batting to the side. The layers of it were neat, and the paper backing was in nearly perfect shape, and Hood could tell that it had been placed there to suggest that the space was dead, insulation only, without further utility. Maybe it was. It took him a while to make an opening for himself.

  When he was finally able to stand and pull the chain for the ceiling light, the white walls of the attic came to life and Hood found himself facing a simple wooden picnic table. It was covered by a thin woven blanket beneath which Hood could see the shapes of things.

  He ran his hands over the shapes, dubious but imagining.

  Then like a magician he took up the corners of one end and lifted the blanket high and slowly, moving in small side steps to reveal the illusion beneath.

  He dropped the blanket just beyond the edge of the table and it landed in a quiet puff of dust.

  The head sat in a jar of vague yellow liquid, skin gray and eyes closed. Peaceful. Bald. The black hair was long and formed a loose bedding at the bottom. The neck was severed cleanly. Beside the jar was a lariat. Beside that was an oily red bandana, which Hood moved aside to see the Colt single-action revolver. An old handmade arrow with a small obsidian head lay in front of two topless, rough-hewn wooden boxes. In one was a nameless leather-bound book sitting atop a stack of carefully folded but very old clothes. In another were newspapers and photographs and a nearly empty bandoleer.

  He sat down with his back to the wall and closed his eyes.

  An hour later he covered the artifacts with the blanket and carefully replaced the insulation and finally slid the access cover back into place.

  He was shouldering the stepladder from the bathroom back into the barn when Bradley appeared at the open door then stepped inside.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I didn’t hear you drive up.”

  “They made us view her on a TV screen. I insisted that we see the actual body. There was an argument but I stayed patient and they let us.”

  “I’m sorry, Bradley.”

  “I asked you what you’re doing.”

  “Looking for stolen property.”

  “Find any?”

  “None at all.”

  “What’s the stepladder for?”

  Hood looked at the boy, then at the stacked boxes he’d been through earlier. He saw the illogic of using a stepladder to reach the high boxes and knew that Bradley saw it, too.

  “I need the extension ladder,” said Hood.

  Bradley glanced toward the bathroom then gave Hood a hard stare that looked very much like his mother’s.

  Hood saw his choices—either show Bradley the truth of his blood history, or show him nothing and let that truth either expire or be discovered later.

  “I’ll help investigate,” said the boy.

  “I can’t let you,” said Hood. “There’s a chain of evidence you need for court, and if it’s compromised by a citizen the case can be ruined.”

  “Even the son of the accused?”

  “Especially.”

  “Then I’ll watch.”

  “I’ll check a few of those boxes up there, then I’m done.”

  “No stolen property so far?”

  “None that I can see.”

  Hood traded ladders then started up on top again and checked through different boxes. The pigeons watched him, heads down and cocked in curiosity. Bradley sat on the hay bale where Hood had sat.

  “How old are you?”

  “Almost seventeen.”

  “Still thinking LAPD?”

  “That’s a long time away.”

  “You just started your junior year?”

  “Yeah, but I’ll be done with all my solids at the end of it. I’ll have sixteen college units by the end of my senior year, something like that.”

  “You should go to college.”

  “What’s the minimum age for the Sheriff’s?”

  “They want twenty-one, with a couple years of college.”

  “But what’s the minimum age?”

  “Nineteen and a half, and they’ll swear you for duty at twenty. It’s a good gig, Bradley. It keeps you fit and the people are mostly good and you can hang it up after twenty years with some nice bennies.”

  “Have you killed anybody?”

  “No.”

  “Want to?”

  “I used to want to make a really great shot that saved a life. Most young deputies imagine that. Not anymore. I’ve seen enough blood.”

  “A gangbanger. My age.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Kick.”

  “That’s his gang name.”

  “I know what it is. You talk to him?”

  Hood nodded. “Not a whole lot there to talk to if you know what I mean.”

  “They going to charge him with murder?”

  “I don’t know. The DA decides that.”

  “I always knew she was hiding something.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “She was her but not her. Joaquin Murrieta was a real outlaw. They cut off his head and put it in a jar and showed it for money. It wasn’t unusual. They decapitated dead suspects back then because there was no refrigeration and the heads were easy to identify. He was twenty-three, barely old eno
ugh to be a deputy. She told me about him when I was a kid. I never knew she wanted to be like him. Maybe that was my fault. Maybe I should have seen that in her.”

  “There’s no way you could have seen it, Bradley.”

  The boy glanced toward the bathroom but said nothing.

  Hood looked down at him, sitting on the hay bale. “If you want a recommendation to the L.A. Sheriff’s, I’ll make it when the time comes. With your grades, Bradley, and the college units, and those athletic skills of yours—you’ll get in.”

  Bradley shrugged. “I’ll think about it. Maybe as a deputy I’d run across Kick someday. And I could draw my sidearm and blow his fucking heart out his back.”

  “You could.”

  He shrugged again. “You were in love with her, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was, too. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen or ever would see. Everything I did was for her. Just a common Oedipal thing. I knew I’d outgrow it like most boys do.”

  “Bradley?”

  “What.”

  “Go to college.”

  43

  The memorial service was up in Bakersfield in an old cemetery that sheltered sixteen of Suzanne’s relatives. There were news crews all over the place, allowed in by Madeline so her daughter could make history instead of only teach it. The casket was open, and at a good moment Madeline fainted into Bradley’s arms. The cameramen scrambled and shot. When it was his turn, Hood could hardly stand to look.

  The day was clear, with an east wind that carried an infernal heat, and Hood stood graveside with the mourners in the insufficient shade of a pepper tree. Suzanne was buried above her great-uncle Jack, with an empty plot on either side of her for Madeline and her grandmother.

  Hood went over and stood with Ernest and the boys when it was over. They talked for a minute while the mourners went back to their cars and the gravedigger waited patiently atop his front-end loader.

  On his way back up the hill to his car, Hood decided for probably the one hundredth time that he’d show and tell Bradley everything he knew about his mother. But two steps later he decided for the one hundredth time to let the boy find his own way through life.