L. A. Outlaws Read online

  And then he walked past the sergeant. There were no bodies by now but Hood saw the blood pooled on the concrete and splashed against the rough-hewn stalls and thrown across the floor almost to the door. He had learned from a Shia executioner that a decapitated adult will send twin jets of blood about ten feet, sometimes more, depending on how afraid he is at the time of his death. A trail of bloody boot prints faded toward the barn door. They seemed hardly larger than a child’s.

  He convinced a San Diego Sheriff’s photographer to scroll back through his digitals, and he saw how the big men had fallen, and the terrible work of the blade or blades that had butchered them. He saw practice and efficiency and something that was harder to put into words. Hood asked if they’d found a weapon, and the photog said just a Buck knife still gripped in the fist that was chopped off—actually chopped completely off—one of the Indians. He had several close-ups of this. He said the other one’s head was still on but barely; it must have been one helluva sharp sword or ax or whatever.

  Hood looked up into the eaves and saw the pigeons unmoving in the heat. Dust climbed a column of sunlight. He thought of riding horses with his father once when he was a boy, on a clear October morning in the desert when the world was clean and beautiful.

  He found a Sheriff’s homicide detective, Felton, who told him that one of the boys who lived here had found the bodies about eight o’clock last night. The dead men were brothers—Harold and Gerald Little Chief—and they lived right across the stream. Almost kids themselves, he said, just eighteen and nineteen years old. Rincon Indians.

  “One perp?” asked Hood.

  “One set of prints leading out. That’s all we’ve got so far.”

  “The Jones family still here?” asked Hood.

  “They left last night.”

  “I’d appreciate a number.”

  “Who the hell are you again?”

  “Los Angeles Sheriff’s homicide,” said Hood. He showed his badge. “Suzanne Jones is a witness. The ten gangsters.”

  “I heard about that one.”

  “We don’t have much either.”

  Felton looked at him doubtfully then flipped open his notepad, wrote something and tore off a sheet for Hood.

  “So what?” he said. “This Jones babe happens to see ten bangers get shot dead in L.A., then she comes home and this happens in her barn? She the angel of death or something?”

  “She’s a schoolteacher.” Hood didn’t try to explain Suzanne Jones and Miracle Auto Body, wasn’t sure he could.

  “Give me a call when you got it all figured out, son.”

  “I’d be glad to.”

  Hood walked across the barnyard, felt the sun heating his neck and shirt. He stayed away from the reporters under the enormous oak tree. As he passed them he looked up at a knocking noise and saw two acorn woodpeckers working an upper branch near a tree house. The house was way up there, not quite hidden by the twisted black branches of the tree. Hood saw no ladder or rope, no way to get up to it.

  The front door of the house stood ajar, and there was a crime scene notice in a clear plastic sheath thumbtacked to the wall. Hood saw that the dog bowls were gone. He opened the door and called loudly then walked in. It was hot. Things looked the same as they had the day before, but the house felt abandoned. There was no burglar alarm console in the entryway.

  He walked into the dining room with the picnic table where they had talked, then he went into a large living room with a big-screen TV and two unmatched couches pushed side by side, with plenty of pillows misshapen from use. There was a tiki bar at one end of the room, complete with a thatched roof and woven bamboo barstools. There was a set of island drums in the corner near the bar, and decorative wooden clubs and spears and ukuleles hung on the woven-grass-covered wall.

  In the kitchen there were dishes in the sink, but the refrigerator was empty of perishables. No alarm console here either. In the corner of the pantry floor was an open space with nothing but two dog kibbles on it. He walked through the teenager’s room and a boy’s bedroom and a nursery.

  Another room had books on shelves, a couch with reading lamps at each end and a small desk with a computer, a printer/copier and a telephone on it. He looked for a personal address book but found none. In a file cabinet in the corner he found the household bills for electricity, propane, water and phone. He took the most recent phone bill, ran a copy and put back the original. He folded the copy and studied the shelves, mostly books on history and some best sellers. There were stacks of magazines on cars and skateboarding, fishing and cooking.

  In another bedroom that appeared unused Hood glanced at the pictures on the shelves and walls: mostly Suzanne Jones with three boys who looked several years apart and not a lot alike, and a few shots involving Ernest, the islander, and other men Hood didn’t recognize. There were commendations from the Los Angeles Unified School District, including a framed Primary Teacher of the Year Award. Hood saw Suzanne’s diplomas from Dominguez Hills State University and Vista West High School. She’d graduated from high school four years before him. He wondered if he might have seen her at a football game or a rodeo or a store.

  The master bedroom was spacious and shaded by a big coral tree outside the French doors that framed a view of the wooded valley and the stream. Bright orange orioles hopped in the thorny branches. Against one wall was a dresser with the drawers hanging open. There were mounds of clothing on the floor in front of it. A wooden jewelry box had been rifled and tossed on top of the clothes. The closet shelves were bare because everything had been pulled down to the carpet.

  A plainclothes investigator glanced over his shoulder at Hood, a video recorder in his hand.

  “Someone went through here pretty good,” said the man. “Watch the stuff on the floor.”

  “Did you talk to her? Jones?”

  “No. I’m crime scene, part of the second wave. She’d gotten her kids out before I arrived.”

  The bedroom smelled lightly of human beings and laundry soap and perfume. The bed was unmade. Hood looked at Suzanne Jones’s pillow.

  He wondered how much four hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds weighed, and how much volume it would occupy in space. Not much.

  In the hallway he checked the thermostat, which was turned to off. Back in the family room he played the recorded message—Ernest saying to leave a number and they’d call back. There were three incoming messages. Hood took down the names and numbers and locked the door behind him on the way out.

  He stood for a moment in the big three-car garage, half expecting to see the yellow Corvette, but the only vehicles were a nice little minibike caked with red dust and a small tractor fitted with a mower.

  Hood crossed the stream rock-to-rock and climbed the embankment toward the home at the top of the rise. It was beige stucco, peeling and rain-stained, and the shingles on the roof were warped. There were three huge satellite dishes and some old appliances in the dirt patch beside it. A window-mounted air conditioner was held up by two-by-fours placed at splaying angles.

  Betty Little Chief was a large, big-faced woman with black hair and a soft, singsong voice. Her cheekbones were high and pronounced and the whites of her eyes were bloodshot. She wore reading glasses on a lanyard around her neck. Hood could see that Betty’s blouse and her glasses had been recently cried on, and the lenses were not yet wiped.

  After he identified himself and gave her his commisera tions and told her his purpose, she looked straight through him and nodded. For a moment Hood felt that he had vanished.

  “I saw a car parked down by the stream on my way to the store,” she said. “And I saw it on my way back home, too. There was a man fishing the stream. The fish in that stream are about four inches long. That’s the only thing unusual about that day, except my sons being murdered.”

  “What did the man look like?”

  “A hat. A pole. A fisherman.”

  “What time?”

  “Afternoon. Three-thirty and fou
r-thirty, about. No one fishes down there.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “Lincoln Continental. Black. My old man bought one like that once. Used and he was proud of it.”

  “When? When did he buy that car?”

  “Late seventies. He died in ’eighty.” Now Betty Little Chief focused her gaze on his face instead of through it. Her eyes shone like black suns beyond the peaks of her cheekbones. “Evil was here. I’ve had that feeling twice before in my life and both times I was right. It’s still strong.”

  “I have it, too.”

  “You don’t look like you could.”

  “You can’t know what other people have seen.”

  “No. That’s why secrets are good to keep.”

  “Did Suzanne Jones ask you about a car parked down by the stream?”

  She hesitated as her eyes scanned his face. “She did. And all of you police, too. I told everyone.”

  “Thank you. I’m sorry what happened to your boys. I truly am.”

  She closed the door on him not impolitely. Hood touched the wood with his fingers before he walked away.

  In the streambed he found the small boot prints and followed them down the stream on one side then back up the stream on the other. Where there was a view of the Joneses’ meadow and pond, the toes faced another set of prints in the soft earth and these were certainly a child’s athletic shoe of some kind. The child had walked from the direction of the Joneses’ property. Hood wondered what they had talked about. Fishing, maybe. A child and a man. He retraced the child’s steps toward the pond, then lost them in the dead summer stubble of the meadow.

  On the way to his car he dialed the number he’d gotten from Felton and listened to the computerized voice telling him to leave a message.

  He asked Suzanne Jones to call him and left his numbers. He said it was important.

  Five minutes later Ernest called back to say that Suzanne was out of town and not available.

  “I want to talk to your child,” said Hood. “The middle one.”

  “I’ll bet you do.”

  12

  So I’m up in the Hotel Laguna and Ernest and the boys are safely stashed in Oceanside. I still can’t believe that flat-topped Lincoln-driving machete-wielding son of a bitch tracked me to my home in less than one day and killed two of my neighbors. Fishing. Yeah, Jordan’s an observant boy. I’ve got the diamonds, and in my satchel plenty of cash and a very nice .45-caliber Colt Gold Cup that shoots like a dream.

  I’ve already called the people who might know about this man, this violent collector, and I’ve gotten not one single call back. I think he’s MS-13, maybe the boss, and he knew about the diamonds and came sniffing around Miracle Auto Body when none of his boys returned. Now he wants my rocks and I’ve seen what he’ll do to get them. But I’m betting on me.

  My son Bradley found the bodies late last night and he was still clammy and near silent when I kissed him good-bye in Oceanside a few hours ago. This from a kid who skateboarded two miles home with a compound fracture of his arm when he was ten. I will not forgive that man for making Bradley see what he saw. It was indescribable. Something in Bradley was changed by it. The look on his face. They were Gerald and Harold and then they were hacked meat. Buckets of blood. The cop said it happened with tremendous speed.

  I’m still betting on me.

  It’s evening now and the sun is still up over the water, but I turn on every light anyway. My heart is beating quickly and not deeply. I upend the red backpack and shake the parcels to the bed.

  I study them. There are only six. According to the wholesaler’s writing on the paper, one parcel contains sixteen one-and-a-half-carat diamonds, near colorless, SI1 and SI2. They are a mix of round and princess cuts. Another parcel contains a like amount of one-carat stones, same color, clarity and cut. Three others contain the same stones, but in diminishing sizes, from three-quarters down to one-third carats. The sixth parcel contains one round-cut two-carat diamond, near colorless, SI1 in clarity. It’s beautiful and it’s worth twenty grand if you want to buy it in a store.

  I set one of my black leather gloves on the bed pillow, swing out the reading light, then unfold the gemstone paper and place this rock on the glove. There’s an explosion of light and color. The red of the sun and the blue of the sky and the deep green of the Pacific and the electric lights of the hotel all find their way through this stone. The diamond doesn’t just reflect light, it radiates the light. I see this with my own eyes, though I know it can’t be true. The facets shift up and down the color spectrum as I slowly pivot the glove atop the pillow—fresh detonations of blues and reds and yellows. Does a diamond shine if there is no one there to see it? Dear Joaquin in heaven—it must. I can’t take my eyes off it, and I think it’s watching me, too. Besides a very few men and maybe three cars, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Millions of years in the making. Harder than steel. Sharper than the blade that killed the Little Chiefs. Extremely difficult to find. Unseen by the masses and untouched but by the few. Stunning. Brilliant. Hypnotic. Seductive. Pure. Eternal. Worth a potload.

  Mine.

  I put it in the palm of my hand and walk around the hotel room, watching the plays of light. I drop it and catch it in my other waiting hand. I toss it back up to the first. I foxtrot as my great-uncle Jack taught me, with the diamond in my right hand, then I flick it to my left hand as I one-two-three-four into the corner near the entertainment center then one-two-three-four back out of the corner then balance the heavy jewel—yes, two carats have heft—in both cupped hands as I do an unhurried spin like Jordan’s daddy Joe used to do to me and I’ll tell you I miss that man, reminds me of Charlie Hood, not so much the way they look but they both have that good man thing inside them that you can’t move no matter how much woman thing you push against it; then I glide between the window and the couch and watch myself as I pass the mirror, nice-looking woman there, then I’m into the alcove with the closet and the bathroom, and the diamond rolls from hand to hand, one-two-three-four, I, Allison Murrieta.

  An hour later the papers are laid out open on the bedspread, each gem gleaming in the light. There’s a total of eighty-one stones. The two-carat whopper sits in the middle of the bed, shining like a beacon on all the little twinkling ships around it.

  The buyer is named Cavore but he has no idea I know this. I saw his car once when I arrived early for a meeting, and later gave the plate numbers to my DMV acquaintance. The registered owner was Carl Cavore. I’ve dealt with him before and he is just barely tolerable. He calls himself Jason.

  I make the Jack in the Box in Redondo Beach in an hour twenty minutes in the light traffic. He pulls up in his conversion van, a hulking black GM with cobalt blue pin-striping along each flank. No windows except the ones up front. I step up and put one knee on the captain’s chair and swivel around for a look in. He says hi and I ignore him. The van smells like a man’s bed, not recently laundered. I’ve been here before: up front is the cockpit, then a small built-in table with two folding chairs facing each other, a very small bathroom, and at the rear, poorly lit and unmade, the bed. We’re alone, so far as I can tell. I swivel forward and drop the satchel between my legs.

  Cavore pulls out of the lot. I still haven’t said a word to him. He takes us up Pacific Coast Highway half a mile, to the Beachside Center parking lot. He parks up close to the stores with the other cars tight around us. As soon as the engine and lights go off, he motions me to the back.

  “No. You know I sit closest to the exits, Jason. Claustrophobia.”

  He chuckles and moves past me. The van shifts with his great weight. I don’t take my eyes off him. He steps down into the pit of the vehicle, lifts the table in order to get around it, then lowers it behind him.

  When he’s settled in at the far end, I lug my satchel back to one of the folding chairs and I sit.

  I clap my hands and the lights come on. Cavore snaps his fingers and they go out.

  I clap again.
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br />   “You’re cute,” he says. He smiles.

  “Thanks, but I’m really not.”

  “I know cute when I see it.”

  Cavore is big, fat and wears his hair in a pompadour. The pompadour is orange on top and brown down at the roots. The rest of him is pale and moist. Large gums and small teeth. His yellow Hawaiian shirt is tight to his enormous arms and the tail rides up over the revolver he carries in a holster approximately at his waist. I don’t know how he could find that gun under all his blubber. But I’ve seen the benches and weights and the heavy bag in the warehouse he used to rent, and by the stacks of fifty pounders I think Cavore has something capable under all that fat.

  He sets a magnifying glass on the table and smiles without opening his lips. “Maxine, I’ll pay any reasonable amount to take you to my bed.”

  “The answer’s still no. You’d crush me.”

  “I’ve been told I can be overwhelming in a good way. Huge is huge.”

  My LASD staff acquaintance ran a records check on Cavore. Among other things, he has raped. Got her in the backseat of a car and let his body weight almost suffocate her while he did his thing. Suspected in two others, but never charged. This was a while back, for what little that matters. The first time he propositioned me was at his warehouse, and I put Cañonita against his gut and cocked her. At that moment, standing pretty much face-to-face with him, feeling like I was in the backseat of a car about to get smothered in fat and raped—I would have shot him. I wanted to shoot him. Cavore had understood.

  “I’ll just have to believe it, Jason. Let’s get down to business, okay? I’ve got things to do.”

  If I knew a fence who paid better than Carl, I’d go to him. In this business it takes decades to build up the right associates. I’ve had about eighteen months at it. Carl pays good dollar, such as the 10 percent he offered for all this lovely ice, because he moves a lot of product. The other L.A. diamond guys, they’ll give you 5 percent, maybe 8 or 9 for the big stones. Greedy. Diamonds are easy to sell again because only a very few out of millions can be identified.