The Renegades: A Charlie Hood Novel Read online

  She was still staring down at her desk. She dabbed her eyes again.

  Hood believed her rationalizations, especially when he factored in the thirty-something thousand per month that Build a Dream was bringing in to Carla Vise’s small credit union. It was easy for Carla to believe in Terry Laws. It was profitable, too.

  Four hundred grand in less than a year and a half, thought Hood. “When did Laws create Build a Dream?”

  She flipped through the file, still not looking at Hood. “He opened the account on August 13 of 2007, with two hundred dollars. His next contribution was on Monday, August 27, for seven thousand and thirty dollars.”

  “Then once a week thereafter?”

  “Yes. Every week.”

  “Look at me. You know you should have reported him.”

  “I broke no law.”

  “The world dies a little when good people do nothing.”

  She nodded and looked down while Hood set his card on her desk and walked out.

  Sitting in his car, Hood thought back to August of 2007. He had been riding patrol in Section I, down in south L.A., glad to be out of Iraq.

  Meanwhile, Terry Laws was riding patrol up here in the desert, making his first big deposit in the charitable trust he had just created.

  After that, seven thousand dollars plus change fell out of his pockets every week, straight into Build a Dream. And when the trust amounted to just over four hundred thousand dollars he paid it to himself and put it down on a horse property in the valley.

  Hood looked up to see Carla Vise coming across the parking lot toward him. She had her arms crossed against the chilling afternoon breeze. He lowered the window and she leaned in and looked at him with tearful, angry eyes.

  “The day he opened the savings account for his new charitable trust, Terry Laws was happy and smiling. Light came from him. He looked like he could carry the world on those big shoulders of his. But two weeks later, when he made that first big deposit, he was pale and he wouldn’t look at me. His face was bruised. He had stitches. I asked him if he was okay and he said he’d made a difficult arrest. But it wasn’t the arrest, because he never got over it. The bruises and stitches went away but he never got his light back. He never looked at me the same. His posture was not the same. I don’t know if other people noticed. I don’t know if his oblivious and condescending wife even noticed. But I noticed every single thing about Terry Laws, Deputy Hood. He was a different man.”

  Hood thought for a moment. He believed that people could be changed immediately and irrevocably by what they chose to do. The mark of true foolishness was to ignore this fact.

  “I was swayed by my own foolish heart,” said Carla. “It’s the story of my life.”

  “It’s everyone’s.”

  Hood drove back to the prison wondering about Terry Laws. The Terry Laws he had known was neither radiant nor haunted. He was a nice guy but Hood had always thought Laws was trying too hard. He was vain about his muscles and proud of his smile. But he had the decency to take sides against the Housing Authority on behalf of Jacquilla Roberts and her imperfect sons.

  Again, Hood remembered what Laws had said that night. There’s no profit in this. He wasn’t sure why it stuck in his head. Maybe the odd application of the word “profit” to a routine citizen interview.

  He wondered what had changed Terry Laws. When he got to the Hole he let himself in with his shiny new key, turned on the lights and took Laws’s package from the locked desk drawer.

  Hood knew that on August 13 Laws had opened his trust with two hundred humble dollars. He was happy and strong. He had the light.

  But less than two weeks later, when he brought that first big cash deposit for the trust, he looked battered and tormented. If you saw him as clearly as Carla Vise had, thought Hood, it was clear that Terry Laws had died a little.

  Hood saw that two things had happened in between.

  One: Laws and Draper had arrested Shay Eichrodt—the kind of high-profile, get-a-killer-off-the-street arrest that any cop would love to make. An arrest that mattered, protected people.

  And two: Laws had come up with seven grand in cash.

  Hood stared out the window at the prison, the razor wire, the cold blue Antelope Valley sky. The sky and the wind and cold reminded him of Anbar. When he thought of Iraq his mind resisted and his heart became heavy.

  Next Hood spent some time on the search engines, but couldn’t come up with Terry Laws’s Build a Dream Foundation. There were plenty of Build a Dreams, but none were charities raising money for poor children in Southern California. He could find no number through Information, no listing in the Antelope Valley phone books, no one at the Antelope Valley Chamber of Commerce or Rotary who had ever heard of it. He called some of his deputy friends and not a single one of them had heard of it, either.

  Hood called Ariel Reed. Then he drove south to LASD headquarters in Monterey Park, and signed out the Lopes/Vasquez murder book from Records.

  9

  “The tip came from an anonymous caller,” she said. “It was made from a pay phone in Lancaster a little after two in the morning. Poor quality—wind and road noise. He said there was a shooting on Avenue M at the highway. Said a guy with a gun drove off in a red pickup truck. He’d gotten partial plates. He gave those to the nine-one-one operator, then hung up. I heard the recording. Mexican accent. He sounded drunk.”

  Hood looked up from his notebook and bumped into Ariel’s frank gaze.

  “Laws and Draper were first responders,” she said. “Both victims were gunshot to the head, both dead on scene. The deputies sealed it off and gave the detectives what they needed. By three-thirty were they back in the cruiser, finishing out the graveyard shift. And lo, the maybe-drunk tipper got the partials right. At four-twenty Laws spotted a red Chevy pickup westbound on the Pearblossom Highway. They saw some of the right numbers, pulled it over. It was right there where the ruins of Llano del Rio are—you know, the old socialist utopia. Anyway, no utopia that night, just a bloody battle.”

  Ariel’s office had a view to the west. It was evening and the old DA building was hushed. The sun had rolled off the horizon but there was still a tint of red in the blue-black sky. The lights of L.A. flickered below. Hood thought of his view from the Hole.

  “It was violent,” he said.

  Ariel nodded and flipped through the file. “Shay Eichrodt, age thirty-four, six-eight, three hundred pounds. A felon, Aryan Brother, later determined to be very high on crystal meth and alcohol. Laws ordered him out of the vehicle. Eichrodt complied. But instead of shutting the door, he collapsed in a heap on the road shoulder. They went to cuff him and he came up fighting. He punched and kicked and blocked their blows for several minutes—he had some martial arts and he was strong as a bear. They struck him approximately forty times before he went down and they finally got him cuffed.”

  Ariel handed Hood the Sheriff’s Department photographs of Eichrodt, Laws and Draper shortly after the arrest.

  Eichrodt was an immense, unconscious and bloody pulp. Laws and Draper were cut, bruised and bleeding, too, but it was nothing by comparison.

  “Some of the blows were glancing,” said the prosecutor. “Some were not. The head shots took eighty stitches to close. Eichrodt had a severe concussion, a fractured cheek, fractured shin, two fractured hands, a broken forearm and four ribs. Your Citizens’ Oversight Board took thirty days to investigate that arrest, and they decided it was reasonable use of force. There wasn’t much public or media reaction—no video was shot, Eichrodt had attacked the deputies, Eichrodt was a white racist felon. He had few friends or family to stir things up with the press. He had just gunned down two Eme-protected drug runners in very cold blood, and taken their money. It took your detectives less than a week to flesh it out. Which was about the same amount of time that Judge Arthur Suarez took—two months later—to rule that Eichrodt was unable to assist in his own defense. Suarez committed the suspect to Atascadero State Hospital for an indefinite perio
d of time. Eichrodt has been there for almost nineteen months.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Slightly improved.”

  Hood wondered if Laws’s arrest injuries might have been worse than they appeared. He was glad to have the name of Terry’s doctor, courtesy of Laurel.

  Hood looked up at the photographs of the race cars on Ariel Reed’s wall.

  “Three generations,” she said. “Grandma Ruthann on top in black-and-white. That was 1955. My mother, Belinda, in the middle in 1980. Me on the bottom last year. I ran a 6.95 at 202 miles an hour and got ninth overall. That was the NHRA sportsman class Top Alcohol Dragster. I don’t have the reactions to become a pro, and I won’t dedicate the time it would take. I do it for fun. And I like the idea that you enjoy what your ancestors enjoyed.”

  “It must be really something to go that fast and not leave the ground,” said Hood.

  “There’s nothing like it.”

  “Do you get dizzy, or disoriented?”

  “Disoriented at times, not dizzy.”

  “What does it feel like when you see the light go green and push the pedal down?”

  “You go before the light goes green. By a fraction of a second. You anticipate.”

  “Well, okay, then how does it feel?”

  “There really is nothing like it. So I can’t say, it’s like this or like that.”

  “But I asked you how it feels.”

  “First you asked what it feels like. Then you asked how it feels.”

  “Way to split that atom.”

  “I’m possibly too good at splitting atoms.”

  “I still want to know how it feels to blast off the starting line.”

  “It’s by far the most exhilarating feeling on Earth. You’re humbled by the power, and it makes you godlike at the same time. You are helpless but in control of your fate. I highly recommend it.”

  Reed smiled. It was the thrifty smile that Hood had seen before, not an expansive one. It made her nose wrinkle. There was something like play in it, and a touch of malice, too. It was the same one she had given Hood when she talked of throwing the crooked captain in prison for ten years.

  Hood smiled back. “Terry had an interesting financial situation.”

  “Money problems?”

  “The opposite of money problems.”

  She gave him the hazel stare.

  Hood told her about Build a Dream and the cash donations allegedly raised by LASD deputies and deposited by Terry every Monday for two years, the down payment he took for himself, the admiring credit union employee who believed Terry Laws’s lie because she wanted to.

  “What lie?”

  “I’ve never heard of Build a Dream. None of the people I work with have, either. I rode with Terry half a dozen times but he never once mentioned Build a Dream. It’s not in the search engines. It’s not in any listing of charities that I could find. It only exists on paper and it’s taking in thirty grand a month in cash.”

  Ariel was looking out the window now, her elbows on the desk and her chin resting on her hands.

  “Was he a trust funder?”

  “No. No inheritance, no lottery score, no smart investments that went big. I’m not finding any of that.”

  “Did he make any big arrests? I mean big assets recovered?”

  “If he did, I haven’t found them yet.”

  “Well, there’s the obvious: drugs, gambling, loan-sharking and prostitution. They’re still the cash crops of our society. There’s robbery for the desperate and vending machines for the organized. A deputy rubs up against all of that.”

  “He never worked narcotics or vice. He was a patrolman. He was in that car forty-eight hours a week, doing overtime, earning his sixty-five a year. If you patrol five or six shifts a week when do you have time to earn seven grand on the side?”

  “On your day off,” she said.

  “That’s an interesting idea.”

  “I was half joking.”

  “The other half interests me.” Hood made a note to look more closely at Terry’s time cards.

  “Private security?” she asked.

  “Even a posh security gig two days a week wouldn’t net him seven thousand bucks.”

  Hood made more notes. He kept coming back to the idea that Terry couldn’t be earning seven grand a week on the side while driving forty-eight hours on patrol. But he was.

  “Tell me about Eichrodt’s preliminary hearing,” he said.

  “We laid out the evidence we’d bring to trial. Truly overwhelming. Both victims’ blood was on a jacket in Eichrodt’s truck. We found a Taurus nine in the big locking toolbox in the bed of the truck. It fired the four bullets that killed Vasquez and Lopes. Eichrodt had collected the brass and tossed it in with the weapon. His fingerprints were all over them. He had forty-eight hundred in cash hidden down in the bottom of the toolbox. And we had the anonymous witness who put the shooter in the red truck.

  “Eichrodt’s PD claimed that Eichrodt was unable to assist in his own defense and Suarez said okay, we’ll see, put him on. So, for about two hours, Eichrodt sat in a wheelchair at the defense table and tried to answer questions. He knew his name. He was able to name his father and mother. He wasn’t sure what country he was in, but he did say ‘California’ when asked what state he lived in. His long-term memory was spotty, but his short-term was practically nonexistent. He wasn’t sure what kind of facility he was in, couldn’t remember anything about his arrest, couldn’t explain his presence in the courtroom. Couldn’t remember a van, two dead men or four-plus grand. The PD was furious. He said someone should sue the living daylights out of the County of L.A. for what they had done to this man. Suarez took testimony from three doctors—a neurologist, a GP and a psychiatrist. Suarez thought about it for three days, then ten-seventied Eichrodt to Atascadero pending recovery enough to stand trial.”

  “Why didn’t someone sue the county?” Hood asked.

  Ariel nodded. “The ACLU considered, but the homicide evidence stopped them. If our case would have been wobbly, they might have filed, but even the ACLU doesn’t want to spend its resources on a double murderer. And, like I said, Eichrodt had few friends and family. There was literally nobody interested in going through a long and expensive lawsuit on his behalf.”

  “What’s his medical prognosis?”

  “The swelling damaged his brain. The craniectomy did little apparent good. The chances of meaningful recovery are slim, according to the doctors at Atascadero.”

  Hood thought that if there was a definition of aloneness it was Shay Eichrodt. Even Shay Eichrodt had been taken away from Shay Eichrodt. The louder truth was that he’d brought this down on himself, thought Hood. We make our own luck. Character is fate. All that.

  As a deputy Hood saw things from Laws’s and Draper’s side. A violent arrest is a cop’s nightmare. But there was one thing Hood saw that he would have done differently: he would have waited for backup. Laws should have, too. Draper was not even a true deputy, but a successful businessman acting as a reservist for one dollar a year and a chance to experience the thrill of law enforcement. Their opponent was large, strong, probably high on meth, and had very likely just committed a crime that would get him an LWOP or a death sentence. They should have known better.

  “Why didn’t Laws wait for backup?”

  “He never called for backup. He said he wanted the homicide collar for himself and his partner. The suspect was being cooperative by pulling over and turning off his engine. Then everything happened too fast. Laws admitted it was pure pride and pure foolishness to go after Eichrodt without backup.”

  “He was right.”

  “His pride. His physique. Foolish, but I can see it.”

  Hood saw it, too: Mr. Wonderful.

  “What can you tell me about the men that Eichrodt murdered?”

  “Bad guys with Eme ties, probably working for the North Baja Cartel. That’s Carlos Herredia and company. Both men were U.S. citizens. East side vatos. Joh
nny Vasquez and Angel Lopes.”

  “Doing what, parked early in the morning in the middle of the desert?”

  “Good question. Waiting for someone? Waiting for Eichrodt? We don’t know. Your helo spotted luggage strewn on a dirt road about two miles from the murder scene. The dead men’s prints were all over it. At one time that luggage almost certainly contained seventy-two hundred dollars in pressed five-dollar bills. Eichrodt had forty-eight hundred of it in a plastic bag in his toolbox. There was another twenty-four hundred down in one of the suitcases left by the road, in a zipping plastic pouch for toiletries or wet items. Apparently he’d missed it.”

  Ariel showed Hood pictures of the van and the dead men and the luggage thrown into the desert.

  “You guys have more pictures,” she said. “The lead detective was Dave Freeman. He worked hard. Brought us a very strong case.”

  Hood noted the name. Freeman was big on the LASD softball team. When Hood looked up from his notepad, he caught Ariel Reed looking at him.

  Hood smiled and looked out at the city—office lights and streetlights and headlights and taillights and brake lights and traffic lights all sparkling in the cool wake of the storm. The eternal parade. He thought how death can be so slight, barely registering, just a small event that is momentarily considered before we march on. He shifted his gaze and saw Ariel’s reflection in the glass, looking at his reflection. They held each other’s image.

  “I’m racing out at Pomona a week from Saturday,” she said to the glass. “Get yourself a pit pass and I’ll sign a picture for you.”

  Hood smiled and nodded, then they broke the moment and stood.

  10

  Hood drove around L.A. for a few hours, listening to music, James McMurtry and the Heartless Bastards, hard guitars and hard lyrics, country music less by way of Nashville than Hood’s own beloved Bakersfield. He liked to drive and look. He liked to see. Hood’s uncorrected vision was twenty/ten, a rare blessing, he knew.