L. A. Outlaws Read online

  I bring my satchel to my lap so I can get what I need without taking my attention away from Cavore for more than half a second.

  I lay the Colt .45 on the table, stare straight into Carl’s small, quick eyes, then fan out the papers facing up and away from me, so he can read the labels. I set the satchel on the floor. He reaches out and presses down lightly on the two-carat masterpiece, his finger circling the paper. His knuckles have dimples and they are hairless.

  “You going to palm my best rock?”

  “Just feeling the nipple through the blouse.”

  “Eighty-one stones,” I say. “Mostly round, but some nice princess cuts. Uniformly fine clarity, colorless, excellent cuts. The smallest are one-third of a carat and the biggest is that poor thing you’re crushing under that hand of yours. Jason, take your goddamned hand off my diamond right now.”

  He flinches just a little. Then pulls away his hand and reaches into his shirt pocket and lays the calculator on the table beside the papers. Gives me what he thinks is an injured look.

  “Good man,” I say. I pick up the envelope to make sure he hasn’t pulled some kind of magic trick on me. I can feel the big rock inside. I look at it just to make sure. My heart slows down a little.

  “Maxine,” he says in mock disappointment.

  “It’s out of respect for your cleverness,” I say.

  “I’ve never even tried to cheat you. And when you leave, I drive this lonely city, thinking about you.”

  Shifting my gaze quickly between Carl and the papers, I unfold them slowly, one at a time, to reveal the treasure. Carl’s eyes move as he watches my hands, but the rest of his mass is pale and damp and still.

  When I’m done, Carl sits up straighter and leans forward with the magnifying glass. I look at him and he smiles and brings the glass up to enlarge his big gums and little teeth. He wiggles his fat tongue and laughs and the glass steams up, then clears.

  “You probably scared the girls with lizards,” I say.

  “Toads. I’d throw them as high as I could into the air, and when they hit—”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Graphic. And the sound was unexpectedly loud, because they fill up with air when they’re scared. The smaller ones lasted longer—five, six throws.”

  “Never learned the difference between scary and disgusting, did you?”

  “I was not popular.”

  Cavore looks through the magnifying glass in his left hand and with his right hand slides a gemstone paper directly under the lens. He studies the rocks, using the tip of his right little—actually big—finger to reposition certain diamonds, then others. Then without looking he reaches out with his right hand and taps at the little calculator resting on the table by his elbow. He pushes the buttons by feel. I can hardly see the calculator beneath his big mitt of a hand. He deftly moves the packet to his right. Outside I hear the voices of a family trying to get into their vehicle, not six feet away from where I’m sitting: “Wait until I unlock the doors, Cody. Cody, wait!”

  Cavore examines and taps, examines and taps.

  He lingers over the two-carat trophy. “You wonder where they come up with the ratings.”

  “They’re quantifiable.”

  “This isn’t SI2 clarity. It’s less.”

  “Smarter people than you say it’s SI2, Jason. They’re professionals, not thieves.”

  I expected him to criticize the product, but I’m not in the mood to indulge him.

  “This is four hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth,” I say. “If you want to come up with my forty-five grand, I’ll be on my way.”

  “Ten percent for this quality?”

  “Jason, that was the agreement.”

  “Contingent.”

  I lean back in the little folding chair and look straight at him. “A gemologist rated those stones.”

  “But I’m buying them. I’ve been doing this since you were ten years old. This is not four hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of stones, Maxine. It’s four hundred, even. Quantifiable. The quality varies from good to only fair. The slight inclusions? I see them at only five-times power, when you know that ten-times is the GIA standard. Don’t try to fool me. I’ll give you eight percent—thirty-two thousand. They’ll be hard for me to sell because of the quality, and I am not eager to have them. But a deal is a deal. This is my best and final, pretty woman.”

  This is a new obstinance from Carl. He always starts low and comes up.

  “I’ll take forty-two thousand.”

  He shakes his head. No smile. Just the little eyes sucking at me like he’s draining a pond to see what’s at the bottom.

  “Talk to me, Jason.”

  “How did you manage this? Why? Everybody is talking. MS-13 is very unhappy about those stones. And the Asian Boyz hate to lose anything. They’re asking questions everywhere. They’re looking. They’re listening. Someone always knows something. Someone always sees. Someone always talks. Maybe tomorrow or maybe already. They’ll discover your sources and stomp your luck flat. The diamond market people won’t buy the stones together as they are. Not at five percent, not at any percent—I’ve talked to them—try them if you don’t believe me. They’re afraid of the same things you should be afraid of. They’ll turn you over to the MS or the Boyz. I can’t imagine what they would do. There are rumors of Lupercio.”

  “Explain Lupercio.”

  He gave me half a chuckle.

  “Mara Salvatrucha, OG, original gangster, Maxine. Then he left them, dramatically. A lot of blood was spilled but Lupercio endured. Mara Salvatrucha offered the truce. They say he can see in the dark. They say he’s the devil himself.”

  “He’s a little guy with a machete.”

  “It’s more than a machete.”

  “More how?”

  Cavore shrugs and yawns. “I wasn’t told. Magical powers, no doubt. Did you hear about the Indian brothers in Valley Center?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Nothing,” he says. “It was nothing.” Cavore keeps his small-eyed stare on me. I know he can’t link me to Valley Center so I stare back. But I wonder at his thinking, the way he put things together so quickly.

  “So, Maxine, what are you going to do? Take it or leave it. I can deliver you to the money in under ten minutes. Thirty-two thousand dollars for something you found like litter in the souls of ten dead men.”

  “Your spirituality moves me.”

  “I’ll add five hundred for you-know-what, right now, back there.”

  I watch Carl as I fold and collect each gemstone paper. I square and riffle them like a deck of cards before the shuffle, then slide them down into my satchel without taking my eyes off him. I pick up the gun and stand.

  “I’d rather you tried to rape me,” I said. “Then I’d have an excuse to shoot you.”

  “I’m not sure you could do it.”

  “There’s a way to find out.”

  “Have you ever killed a person?”

  “You’re not a person.”

  “Maybe you just would.”

  “I promise you I would.”

  “You won’t survive where you’re going. You believe in yourself because you’ve had good luck. Good luck always changes. You won’t survive.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t sell these diamonds to you, Jason. If you offered me the full forty-five right now, said this was all just a prank, I’d still walk out of here with them.”

  “That’s why you won’t survive, Maxine. Because you become emotional about the wrong things. You are emotional about inert stones. You should be emotional about saving your life.”

  “It would break my heart to put such beauty into dimpled, hairless hands.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you do with the rocks,” Jason says. “They already belong to someone else.”

  “No. You’re the only one who’s seen them. You’re the only one who knows what I have.”

  “Don’t forget Lupercio. What if he’s been pointed in your directio
n? They say he never gives up. If he brought MS-13 to its knees for a truce, he’ll find and crush you, easily.”

  “There’s no evidence of Lupercio,” I lie. “No evidence that anyone knows except for you. The last few days have been peaceful. If I see evidence, I’ll attribute it to you.”

  “You don’t have the weight to hurt me.”

  “Believe in that.”

  Carl opens his hands palms up. “The only two things I know about you aren’t even true. A first name that isn’t yours. And a phone number that will be useless before the sun comes up. I’d betray you, if I had enough of you to betray.”

  “How about you just get me back to Jack in the Box?”

  I’m put out and hungry so I hit the drive-through. A few minutes later I pull into a driveway in Hollywood, roll down the window and drop a paper grocery bag to the ground.

  In my rearview mirror I can see Melissa grabbing her ten grand in cash as I head back toward the freeway.

  A deal’s a deal.

  I’m still pissed off.

  I want to shoot Cavore so badly I have to stop by the indoor range, where I fire fifty rounds of .45-cal wadcut ters at twenty, thirty, forty and fifty feet. Nice groups except for my occasional stray. I love that Colt.

  Then I fire Cañonita at ten and twenty feet. I’m in the black of the silhouette at ten, but at twenty it’s tough to keep them on the paper.

  When the range master isn’t looking, I fire both the Colt and the derringer at the same time, left and right hands, a brief Armageddon featuring Cavore’s blubbery greed-bag rapist’s body at the receiving end.

  I breathe deeply and listen to the ringing in my ears, in spite of the foam plugs.

  Then I reload Cañonita and slip her into my waistband and close my eyes. The target is at twenty feet. I breathe deeply, then see Cavore at twenty feet, coming at me. I open my eyes and draw the derringer. The first shot flies over his left shoulder, but the second one hits the middle of his black little heart.

  I smile at the range master on my way out.

  13

  Hood found Ernest and the boys at the beach down by the Oceanside pier. A summer swell pushed the waves high along the pilings, and Hood watched the surfers carve the green walls with their short, quick boards. The sign outside the lifeguard headquarters said the waves were six to eight feet and the water temperature was sixty-six degrees.

  Ernest sat in the cool of a portable sunscreen. There were blankets and backpacks strewn in the sand and a cooler with its lid ajar. Kenny lay on his back in his portable crib, head to one side, his eyes locked onto towering Hood.

  Hood squatted for a moment, trailing his fingers through the fine gray Oceanside sand.

  “That’s Bradley, with the black wet suit and the red-and-white twin-fin,” said Ernest. He nodded to the surfers.

  “Big waves today.”

  “He’s fearless.”

  “Children can afford that.”

  Ernest’s face was unyielding and his eyes calm.

  “Where did your wife go?”

  Ernest shook his head. “She’s not my wife and she didn’t tell me.”

  “She just took off?”

  “There are times when she needs to be out of sight. She doesn’t tell me where she is and I don’t ask.”

  “K ind of an odd arrangement.”

  “There’s nothing odd about trust. Why do you care where she went?”

  “I think she’s in trouble. I think the man who killed the brothers was looking for her.”

  “Why does he want her?”

  “Maybe she knows.”

  “Who is he? Tell me where he lives. I’ll settle it.”

  “I don’t know either of those things.”

  “But you say he’s looking for Suzanne? You’re not making sense.”

  “Why did she run away?”

  “Staying out of sight is not running away.”

  “Why is she staying out of sight?”

  Kenny rolled over to his stomach and strained his head up from the floor of the crib. Ernest looked at him then at Hood, then out at the waves. “I respect her fears and her worries.”

  “Ernest, if I could talk to her I might be able to put some things together. The other night she saw this man near a crime scene in L.A. He saw her, too. I think he’s the one who killed Harold and Gerald. But he didn’t go all the way down to Valley Center to do that. He went for Suzanne. He was on her property. He thinks she saw something in L.A., or has something. That’s why I need to talk to her.”

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  Hood watched Bradley ride a wave. It didn’t matter if Ernest was lying if Ernest wasn’t going to tell where she’d gone. “Tell her to call me.”

  “She got your message.”

  “Tell her again. Is she going back to school? It starts in a few weeks. She can’t teach history and stay out of sight.”

  “We haven’t planned that far ahead.”

  “Plan ahead if you want to stay alive,” said Hood.

  Ernest stood and reached down into the crib, touching the baby’s head. “Watch the baby. You wanted to talk to Jordan.”

  Hood watched the Hawaiian amble down to the surf line. A dark-skinned boy ran past him, slid his skimboard into the receding backwash and jumped on. He raced along, threw a rooster tail and shot into the incoming white water, landing on the back side of it while still balanced on the board. The boy said something to Ernest, who shrugged and took the board and waited for the next backwash. Ernest was big-chested and short-legged, but he rode the board with an easy power, managing most of a three-sixty just before he got air then wiped out. He was smiling and shaking his head as he pointed up to Hood.

  Jordan wrapped a towel around his slender shoulders. His teeth chattered while he said that the fisherman was short, dark-skinned and dark-haired. No mustache or beard. His hair was cut flat on top. He was “not an old man and not a young man, either.” He wore jeans and cowboy boots and a short-sleeved plaid shirt and a straw cowboy hat. He was small but powerful. It was really hot that day. His fishing rod and reel looked new and he caught several fish, which he threw back. When they talked, the man said the worms worked best, but you had to hook them so you could feel the tug when the fish bit them.

  “Show him what you did,” said Ernest.

  Still hunched in the towel Jordan hustled bent-legged over to a backpack and came back with two folded sheets of paper. Hood remembered the child’s paintings and drawings he’d seen on the wall of the room where he’d embarrassed himself in front of this boy’s mother.

  Jordan gave him the papers and Hood unfolded them. They were better than any IdentiK it or police artist’s drawing that he’d ever seen. They looked like a well-observed man—not a composite, not an interpretive sketch of someone else’s memory. A man. There were two versions: one with a straw cowboy hat and one without. With a pencil Jordan had shaded in a little behind the portraits. He had signed them. Hood rubbed his fingertip across one pen ciled corner and it came back without a smudge.

  “Mom said you would come,” he said.

  Hood eyed Ernest silently.

  “May I have these?”

  “She told me to give them to you. She told me to tell you it was the guy from Miracle Auto Body.”

  Hood looked at the drawings again. This run of good luck was making him uneasy. “Why did he take off his hat?”

  “To wipe his forehead, but only for a second. His hair was exactly like that—short and straight up and cut flat. Like the deck of a skateboard.”

  Hood looked down at the drawings. Jordan’s skill was a gift, he thought. When Hood looked at the boy, his teeth had quit chattering but his lips were pale.

  “Will you please tell me everything again? Every single thing you remember. I’m going to ask you all those questions again. Maybe something new will come out. Something you overlooked.”

  Hood thought that Jordan Jones, or whatever his last name was, overlooked very little.

>   “I gotta stand in the sun.”

  “Ernest,” said Hood. “Can we go up to the snack bar for a drink?”

  “Up to you, Jordan.”

  Jordan kept the towel around him and led the way. “That guy caught like eight fish. He put them back. Did he kill Harold and Gerald?”

  “I believe he did. Did your mom keep the originals of your drawings?”

  “Yeah. She saves a lot of my stuff. We have a whole wall of it at home.”

  “Is Ernest your father?”

  “My father was Joe Iverson. He died when I was two. There’s me and Bradley and baby Kenny and we all have different dads. Bradley’s cool. Kenny cries a lot.”

  “Bradley’s dad come around much?”

  “Not a lot. He’s afraid of Mom.”

  By the time they went to the snack bar and back Jordan had told Hood his mysterious fisherman story three more times. He remembered nothing new and did not change a single detail from his original version, right down to the number of different lures he used to try to catch a bass that day: thirteen. Hood found it significant that Jordan told Lupercio that the family was going to the movies that day. Apparently, Lupercio had waited down by the stream for them to go, and was interrupted in the barn by Harold and Gerald.

  Ernest held his right hand out to Hood, who thought it was to shake, then saw the business card in it. The card was for Ernest Kaleana Electric and featured a graphic red lightning bolt. On the back was a handwritten phone number.

  “Try that,” said Ernest.

  On the way to his car Hood dialed the number and got a computerized voice telling him to leave a message, which he did.

  14

  Captain Wyte handed the drawings back across the desk to Hood.

  “A ten-year-old did those?”

  “Yes.”

  “We should hire him.”

  “Do you recognize the man?” asked Hood.

  “Lupercio Maygar,” said Wyte. “One of the original MacArthur Park MS-13 gangsters. Our most recent photograph of him is ten years old. He broke ranks with Mara Salvatrucha and vanished. They say—well, they say a lot of things. Have you heard any of them?”