L. A. Outlaws Read online

  Hood gets out and shuts the door and comes toward the house, all elbows and angles. He’s got a little notepad in one hand but I don’t laugh.

  “Little bit out of jurisdiction, aren’t you?”

  “More than a little, ma’am. I want to talk about last night.”

  “Last night, well. Come on up. These dogs bite but only when they’re told.”

  “Can you tell them to roll over and wag their stumps?”

  “They don’t do tricks.”

  Hood makes the porch, looks at me, the dogs, the food bowls lined up in the shade. Hood’s a one-thing-at-a-time guy, thinks he is anyway.

  I let him in, introduce him to Ernest and Kenny. Hood and Ernest do the man-stare, but after a long second Hood unwraps his sunglasses and averts his gaze respectfully, then turns his attention to the infant on Ernest’s knee. Kenny burps something and his eyes wobble like loose buttons.

  “This will just take a few minutes,” says Hood.

  “You guys can have the table,” says Ernest. “I’ll get Kenny ready. See ya, Suze.”

  Ernest swings Kenny up into one of his big arms and I watch him walk out. The bottoms and rims of his feet are pale and the rest of him is a splendid island bronze. He’s from Oahu. He’s got a ready smile and a skein of island tattoos across the back of his shoulders. I met him at a luau, where he danced with a spear. You could get your picture taken with the dancers after the show and we got to talking. A spear chucker. Months later, he showed me how he could throw that thing—with unbelievable power and accuracy, for a spear anyway. Then came Kenny.

  Hood and I sit across from each other at the long picnic table and he lays it on me: the Asian Boyz, Mara Salvatrucha and diamond broker Barry Cohen. Hood is relaxed, calm and intense. He seems like an old guy in a thirty-year-old body, a pretty damned nice combination if you ask me. He wants to know everything I saw in the area of Miracle Auto Body last night, even the smallest little detail can be a help. I stare past his shoulder to a wall, where I’ve tacked some of my middle son’s drawings and paintings. Jordan. He’s ten and a very good artist.

  Hood’s got the cover of his notepad open and his pen in his hand. “Did you see anything unusual, out of place? Put yourself back there. Sometimes things will—”

  I nod. “I saw an old Lincoln Continental, once before you stopped me and once after. First time, it was pulled off the road. That count as unusual?”

  “Did you see the driver?”

  “Just a guy.”

  “Where did you see him pulled over?”

  “I don’t know. In the dark. Beside the road. Sorry, I’m a history teacher, not a cop.”

  “What year was the car?”

  “Late seventies. Just before the redesign.”

  Hood looks at me with surprise and doubt. He wants all the stats so I give them to him: the Continental was black, and shiny like it was just washed, and the chrome really popped because that was the last of the great Detroit chrome years, and I tell Hood I couldn’t guess the age of the guy inside, just that he had this totally geo-dynamic planed-off flat-top haircut, and of course I know Hood is all over this, he’s thinking bad guy, another one of the Asian Boyz or Mara Salvatrucha, an answer to the mystery of the dead diamond broker but no diamonds. To build intrigue I give the Lincoln driver a cell phone, glad to be of assistance to law enforcement.

  “I saw that car go past when I was talking to you,” says Hood. “Slowly.”

  I say nothing for a moment. I know Hood’s hot for the Lincoln.

  “What was a diamond broker doing with all these bad people?” I ask.

  “We don’t know.”

  Hood writes slowly and smoothly. I like the way he holds his pen. Then he looks at me for a moment, same look as when I said the car was a late-seventies Continental.

  “What.”

  “Last night I was surprised you knew what the yellow Corvette had in it,” he says. “Most people, they don’t know which engine they’ve got.”

  “You mean most women don’t know.”

  “No, women almost never know.” He’s smiling now. “I didn’t see it parked out front.”

  “I won’t park it outside. If I have to explain that, you’re simple enough to hide your own Easter eggs.”

  Hood laughs quietly. It’s an old man’s chuckle behind a young man’s smile.

  “And you surprised me just now about the Continental, before the redesign. You know your cars.”

  “Just the ones I like.”

  “Tell me about the Lincoln again. How far away was it from where I pulled you over?”

  I tell him a maybe a few hundred yards, but it was dark and late and I was turned around, thinking I’d made a wrong turn but not sure. Hood writes something more in his handy little pad.

  “You never told me your first name,” I say.

  “It’s Charlie. Sorry.”

  “You know I’m thirty-two from my CDL. How old are you?”

  “I’m twenty-eight.”

  “Bakersfield High, I’ll bet.”

  Hood clears his throat and nods. “How do you know that?”

  “It’s something about you. Your ears, maybe.”

  “Explain what.”

  “I can’t. But I love Merle Haggard. I graduated from high school in Bakersfield, too. It was Vista West Continuation, where the pregnant girls go. We were the Ga tors.”

  I smile at him. This makes him uneasy.

  “I think we got offtrack.”

  “What else do you want to know?”

  “Exactly what happened at Miracle.”

  “Can’t help you there, Charlie. Is it Charles?”

  “Charles Robert.”

  Just then my eldest son slams through the door. He’s sixteen but looks nineteen, a beautiful boy. Bradley’s dad was beautiful but worthless. My middle son, Jordan, has a different father than Bradley, and of course baby Kenny’s father is Ernest. It’s all pretty simple. I’ve never married and I’ve named my children after me. Jones. I digress.

  “Mom,” he says. He’s wearing a trucker’s cap pulled down low over his long black hair. “There’s nothing I can do with the throttle cable.”

  He looks at Hood a beat longer than he looks at most people, including me.

  “So, now what?” he grunts.

  “So do what you can with it, Bradley. A Ford is a Ford. This is Charlie Hood. He’s a cop.”

  “Hi,” Bradley says.

  “Hi,” says Hood. “A Sheriff’s deputy, actually—L.A. County.”

  “I’m thinking LAPD. When I’m old enough.”

  “They need good people.”

  “The pedal sucks, Mom,” Bradley says to me. “Can I just go boarding?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Thanks for looking at it. You put the new wheels and tires on the Cyclone?”

  “Before you even got out of bed.”

  “How do they look?”

  “The shoes are too small but the meats are sick.”

  “Awesome. Thanks, son.”

  “Sheriff ’s pay good?” Bradley asks Hood.

  “Fair.”

  “Good as the cops?”

  “About the same,” says Hood. “But we get better cars and a little more open road to drive them on.”

  “I’m good with large-caliber handguns.”

  Hood raises his eyebrows.

  “Nice IROC,” says my son.

  “Thanks. I bored and stroked it, goosed out another thirty horse.”

  “Glasspaks?”

  “Yeah, first thing I added.”

  “I could tell by the sound.”

  Bradley hesitates then leaves, letting the screen door slam behind him. A front of hot air floats in from outside. In the sudden silence Hood closes his notepad. I see him looking past me now into the living room, a mess of a place, kind of a Polynesian party room in honor of Ernest. It’s got a very nice tiki bar.

  “You’re climbing the ladder pretty quickly,” I tell Hood. “Last night you were a patrolman an
d now you’re a detective.”

  “They moved me up for the Auto Body thing. This week I’m both.”

  “Bet they won’t pay you twice.”

  Hood smiles and shakes his head.

  For about two seconds I wonder if I should say what I want to say. If it takes longer than two seconds to give yourself permission to speak, then your rule book is getting overlong. I hate rules.

  “I like the way you look, C. Hood. I like your voice and your attitude. I teach eighth-grade history but I’m nothing like the eighth-grade teachers you had. So I think you ought to hit the road, keep yourself out of trouble. That’s the last time I’ll make the slightest effort to protect you.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “You’ll do what?”

  “Hit the road.”

  “I caught you checking out my legs and just about everything else.”

  He looks away.

  “I run eight miles a week and do hapkido.”

  “It shows. I apologize, Ms. Jones. My first day as a detective I was hoping not to make a complete ass of myself.”

  I have to smile at C. Hood. “Be honest with me right now, Charles Robert—that uniform shirt you wore last night, did you have it tailored?”

  He nods and his ears actually turn red. I want to lock the doors and jump him but I won’t do it here. My social guidelines are somewhat relaxed but I’d never drag Ernest’s pride through the dirt like that for no good reason. Then Ernest would break Hood in half and that would become another problem I don’t want to have.

  “I’d like the name and a telephone number or address for the relative you were visiting last night,” says Hood.

  “Nice try at reestablishing your law enforcement control. But it’s none of your business who I was visiting.”

  I watch him weigh the options, which are two: arrest me or back down. It’s a mismatch.

  I get up and walk over to him and lean in. I touch my nose to the bottom of his trimmed sideburn, about halfway down his ear. And breathe in.

  Supermarket soap, drugstore shave cream and Charlie Hood.

  Then I turn and walk back into the house, waving good-bye over my shoulder.

  8

  Hood sat in the activities room with his mother and father. He was still rattled by Suzanne Jones and he couldn’t put her out of his mind. He kept seeing her nightshirt against her back as she walked away, the soft material creasing left then right with each step. She made him feel skinned. Now he was back in uniform and on his way to swing-shift patrol that evening and he figured maybe patrol was where he belonged.

  His father, Douglas, introduced Hood to his latest girlfriend, whom Douglas believed to be Hood’s mother, Iris, his wife of forty-eight years. Iris herself sat beside Hood, and together they faced Douglas and his “wife” as they held hands. Douglas was young to be in such an advanced state of dementia, and it had come over him with surprising speed after he retired from the city of Bakersfield. He’d been a landscape supervisor. Hood wondered if the herbicides and insecticides and fertilizers had contributed. The doctors talked on and on about genetic predisposition, sedentary retirement and myeloid plaque. Douglas was seventy-five years old and no longer recognized his wife. He had hit her. Now he fussed over the potted plants and the frail indoor ficus trees of the assisted-living center, and held hands with the girlfriend. Charlie could watch himself ebb and flow on his father’s memory like a small ship on a fast tide. Iris had tried to detach herself from her husband except to appear for these weekly visits.

  “Go with threaded pipe, never cement,” he said to Charlie. “Make sure you’ve got enough silicon tape to do the job right. Never put the cement on threaded pipe. I had a guy with the city doing that out at the park and I fired him. Probably should have killed him while I was at it.”

  “Seen any good shows, Dad?”

  “Same old.”

  “They’ve got Bewitched on tape,” said the girlfriend. Charlie and Iris had gathered that her name was Brenda.

  “Fanfuckingtastic,” muttered Iris.

  “We always had plenty of shovels around,” said Douglas.

  Later Hood took his mother out for an early dinner, and she caught him up with his brothers and sisters, two each, all older than him by quite a bit. His memories of childhood in Bakersfield were usually of him looking up at his towering siblings or later watching them drive away in cars. He learned early to hate good-byes. He developed into a decent student, a good friend, a fair tennis player. The girls usually skipped over him in favor of the louder and more clever boys. His ears were slightly large and blushed before the rest of his face did. He dated during his years at JC and Cal State Northridge but found it disappointing and expensive. He got B’s and a political science degree. The Sheriff’s Department had given him a start on life, then the first Iraq tour that led him to the Navy Criminal Investigative Service, then the second tour. By the time he came home from Anbar in ’05 he was twenty-five and he wanted to get his deputy’s job back, find a good woman and maybe have a little fun.

  Hood followed his mother’s gaze out the window to the planter flowers wilting in the San Bernardino heat. The bank thermometer across the street said “102 degrees . . . 4:35 P.M. . . . TWELVE MONTH CDs TO 4.25% . . .”

  When she looked back at Hood, there were tears in her eyes though her expression was steady and unpitying.

  “Mom.”

  “It’s okay. I’m okay, Charlie.”

  “There’s going to be more.”

  “More what?”

  “Good things.”

  “The kind you have to be dead to get?”

  “Not those kind.”

  “Tell me when you spot one coming.”

  “You did all you could.”

  “I loved him.”

  Hood reached out and took her hand. Her skin was cool and soft, and he could feel the hardness of the bones beneath it. The waitress brought their dinners then came back and topped off their iced tea.

  “A soldier called,” she said. “Lenny Overbrook. He said he knew you over there and wanted your number. I said no and he gave me his.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s perfectly okay.”

  She dug into her purse and finally handed Hood a torn-off corner of notebook paper with a number on it.

  “I’ll handle it, Mom. Thanks.”

  “He sounds polite. He said you understood him.”

  “Lenny was always polite.”

  Hood cruised Miracle Auto Body at eleven. He saw that the Escalade was in the lot but the other cars were gone. A new Suburban with dealer plates was parked beside the Cadillac. The lights were on both outside the shop and inside, and Hood could see three young men standing on the catwalk smoking.

  They looked at him with stoic alertness as he came up the steps toward them. The night was hot and still, and in the near distance the two illuminated freeways rose against the darkness like monuments.

  Hood caught the leader’s eye and nodded. He remembered the guy’s name from the department gang book: Kyle Ko. Hood had seen him several times in a popular Garvey Avenue Internet cafe, always with a different pretty girl.

  “Sorry your friends got killed,” said Hood. “I was the one who found them. I’m Hood.”

  “Too bad you didn’t find them when they were still alive, Hood.”

  The two others were younger. Kyle looked at them, and they moved down the catwalk out of the light, toward the window where Hood had first looked down on the massacre.

  Kyle was midtwenties. He was tall and slender with a short brush cut and a loose silk shirt for the heat. Hood now saw that Kyle looked like the dead car painter, the guy who was very young.

  Hood asked him for a smoke and leaned in when the lighter clicked and flamed. The smoke went to his brain in a once familiar way.

  “What happened in there?” he asked.

  “You tell me.”

  “That would get us exactly nowhere.”

  “We talked all day t
o people like you.” Kyle flicked his cigarette butt off the catwalk, and Hood watched it pop and sparkle on the asphalt below. “And it got us nowhere, all right.”

  Hood told him he’d never seen the Wilton Street Boyz with Mara Salvatrucha, wondered if they’d gotten together for some business.

  Kyle shrugged and looked out at the freeways.

  Hood played his only real card. “Sorry about your brother. I’ve got two. Older.”

  Kyle looked at him.

  “Talk to me,” said Hood. “I can’t put ten dead men out of my mind. I bet you can’t either.”

  “He was fifteen years old.”

  Hood watched Kyle and listened to the drone of the cars elevated in the night beyond them.

  “And he followed you into the gang life even though you told him not to.”

  Kyle locked eyes with Hood. “Cohen owed us seventy-five grand. Gambling. He brought us diamonds instead. MS-13 found out about the transaction. Either they took the diamonds or you people did. So Mark died for nothing.”

  “There weren’t any diamonds when we got here.”

  “There were plenty of diamonds before you got here. Tony called me from the office. Cohen brought them in a red backpack at ten-fifty P.M.”

  “We turned this place over more than once. No gems.”

  “That’s interesting, then, isn’t it?”

  “Where were you?”

  “Business or pleasure, you know—what’s the fucking difference?”

  One of his Internet cafe beauties, thought Hood. Add some more guilt over his little brother’s death. Of course it was very possible that Kyle was lying and he’d carried off the loot himself.

  “Maybe you came by an hour after the call,” said Hood. “You were wondering why Tony hadn’t bothered to update you. You sized it up quick, took the red backpack and split.”

  “I wouldn’t be here now.”

  “This is exactly where you’d be.”

  “Maybe that’s what happened, Deputy. If so, then good for me. I’ll drop twenty thousand on Mark’s funeral, give the rest to the Girl Scouts.”

  Then the idea hit Hood that MS-13 was tipped to the payoff either by Barry—who could promise them, say, half the diamonds he owed the Asian Boyz—or by one of the Boyz who knew the score and had a grievance. Gangs had internal problems just like any other organization. Kyle obviously knew the score and was conveniently out with one of his girlfriends.