L. A. Outlaws (40 page)

There’s a moment in the near dark when I can just barely make out his shape. I know he’s watching me. I can see the glimmer in his eyes. They look like lights across a vast ocean.

“Good-bye, Charlie. I’m leaving something for you. I’ll put it on top of the notebook.”

“
Vaya con Dios,
Suzanne.”

41

H
ood got back his old Region II patrol shift. It felt right to be in the summer-weight cotton-poly uniform and the law enforcement Ford. He had failed homicide and he felt shame but some relief. Maybe someday he’d get another shot. His thoughts were often of Suzanne Jones and Reginald Wyte, and his dreams were haunted by them.

Rolling through his first September night back on patrol, Hood had the repeating thought that he was alone in L.A. and far removed from the powers that shaped it but nonetheless entrusted with this small piece.

On his third night out Hood was up in Vernon when Marlon radioed him. “Charlie, Allison Murrieta just stuck up the Lynwood Denny’s on Long Beach Boulevard. Shots fired. I’m on my way.”

Hood hit his siren and running lights and made the scene in twelve minutes. Gunning the Ford down Long Beach Boulevard, he saw three cruisers jammed at crazy angles outside the restaurant, their lights pulsing yellow and red in the darkness, and the bristling silhouettes of armed officers moving like figures in firelight. A helicopter already hovered in the sky above.

Two deputies stood guard at the entrance. Hood saw blood on the ground and bullet holes in the windows. Through the shattered glass he saw that two other deputies had witnesses corralled in a rear section and they were letting some of the diners exit by the back door.

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.

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.

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

T
he 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 him—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.

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.