L. A. Outlaws (41 page)

He sat down with his back to the wall and closed his eyes.

An hour later he covered the artifacts with the blanket and carefully replaced the insulation and finally slid the access cover back into place.

He was shouldering the stepladder from the bathroom back into the barn when Bradley appeared at the open door then stepped inside.

“What are you doing?”

“I didn’t hear you drive up.”

“They made us view her on a TV screen. I insisted that we see the actual body. There was an argument but I stayed patient and they let us.”

“I’m sorry, Bradley.”

“I asked you what you’re doing.”

“Looking for stolen property.”

“Find any?”

“None at all.”

“What’s the stepladder for?”

Hood looked at the boy, then at the stacked boxes he’d been through earlier. He saw the illogic of using a stepladder to reach the high boxes and knew that Bradley saw it, too.

“I need the extension ladder,” said Hood.

Bradley glanced toward the bathroom then gave Hood a hard stare that looked very much like his mother’s.

Hood saw his choices—either show Bradley the truth of his blood history, or show him nothing and let that truth either expire or be discovered later.

“I’ll help investigate,” said the boy.

“I can’t let you,” said Hood. “There’s a chain of evidence you need for court, and if it’s compromised by a citizen the case can be ruined.”

“Even the son of the accused?”

“Especially.”

“Then I’ll watch.”

“I’ll check a few of those boxes up there, then I’m done.”

“No stolen property so far?”

“None that I can see.”

Hood traded ladders then started up on top again and checked through different boxes. The pigeons watched him, heads down and cocked in curiosity. Bradley sat on the hay bale where Hood had sat.

“How old are you?”

“Almost seventeen.”

“Still thinking LAPD?”

“That’s a long time away.”

“You just started your junior year?”

“Yeah, but I’ll be done with all my solids at the end of it. I’ll have sixteen college units by the end of my senior year, something like that.”

“You should go to college.”

“What’s the minimum age for the Sheriff’s?”

“They want twenty-one, with a couple years of college.”

“But what’s the minimum age?”

“Nineteen and a half, and they’ll swear you for duty at twenty. It’s a good gig, Bradley. It keeps you fit and the people are mostly good and you can hang it up after twenty years with some nice bennies.”

“Have you killed anybody?”

“No.”

“Want to?”

“I used to want to make a really great shot that saved a life. Most young deputies imagine that. Not anymore. I’ve seen enough blood.”

“A gangbanger. My age.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s his gang name.”

“I know what it is. You talk to him?”

Hood nodded. “Not a whole lot there to talk to if you know what I mean.”

“They going to charge him with murder?”

“I don’t know. The DA decides that.”

“I always knew she was hiding something.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

“She was her but not her. Joaquin Murrieta was a real outlaw. They cut off his head and put it in a jar and showed it for money. It wasn’t unusual. They decapitated dead suspects back then because there was no refrigeration and the heads were easy to identify. He was twenty-three, barely old enough to be a deputy. She told me about him when I was a kid. I never knew she wanted to be like him. Maybe that was my fault. Maybe I should have seen that in her.”

“There’s no way you could have seen it, Bradley.”

The boy glanced toward the bathroom but said nothing.

Hood looked down at him, sitting on the hay bale. “If you want a recommendation to the L.A. Sheriff’s, I’ll make it when the time comes. With your grades, Bradley, and the college units, and those athletic skills of yours—you’ll get in.”

Bradley shrugged. “I’ll think about it. Maybe as a deputy I’d run across Kick someday. And I could draw my sidearm and blow his fucking heart out his back.”

“You could.”

He shrugged again. “You were in love with her, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I was, too. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen or ever would see. Everything I did was for her. Just a common Oedipal thing. I knew I’d outgrow it like most boys do.”

“Bradley?”

“What.”

“Go to college.”

43

T
he memorial service was up in Bakersfield in an old cemetery that sheltered sixteen of Suzanne’s relatives. There were news crews all over the place, allowed in by Madeline so her daughter could make history instead of only teach it. The casket was open, and at a good moment Madeline fainted into Bradley’s arms. The cameramen scrambled and shot. When it was his turn, Hood could hardly stand to look.

The day was clear, with an east wind that carried an infernal heat, and Hood stood graveside with the mourners in the insufficient shade of a pepper tree. Suzanne was buried above her great-uncle Jack, with an empty plot on either side of her for Madeline and her grandmother.

Hood went over and stood with Ernest and the boys when it was over. They talked for a minute while the mourners went back to their cars and the gravedigger waited patiently atop his front-end loader.

On his way back up the hill to his car, Hood decided for probably the one hundredth time that he’d show and tell Bradley everything he knew about his mother. But two steps later he decided for the one hundredth time to let the boy find his own way through life.

He visited friends and stayed in a Bakersfield motel that night. He got drunk and slept poorly but rose early for the drive.

At eleven A.M. Hood was admitted into a fourth-floor room of the Manhattan Beach Marriott Hotel, hungover but ready to face internal affairs. Three of the four men he’d never seen before. Two were scruffy and didn’t look like cops. Another looked like a TV version of the driven prosecutor. One was an assistant sheriff, clearly unhappy about this.

On the coffee table were two digital recorders. Beside it was a small video camera on a black tripod.

Hood sat on a floral rattan sofa and looked through the window to the warm, hazy sky. He was exhausted by his own betrayals.

One of the scruffy cops turned on the voice recorders and the lawyer fixed the camera on Hood then in a strong clear voice established the place and time and players.

“Deputy Hood, tell us about Wyte,” he said cheerfully.

44

T
wo days later Hood again let himself into the Valley Center barn. Bradley was due in half an hour. He had agreed to be on time for what Hood promised would be an important meeting.

Hood got the stepladder and slid open the bathroom attic hatch, careful not to tear up the insulation.

When he turned on the light, he saw that the blanket was thrown to the floor and everything was gone. Everything gone but the blanket and the table.

He climbed back down and settled the access cover into place and took the ladder back where it belonged.

Outside in the barnyard he looked out at the massive old oak tree and the pond and the dirt road that separated the property from Betty Little Chief’s.

He sat on a bench in the shade of the barn and tried to figure out what would happen next, knowing he had little say in it now.

Then up the dirt road came Bradley’s green 1970 Cyclone GT, slowly but thunderously, the dust rising behind the fat back tires and the Glasspaks spitting up dirt. It made a deliberate turn at the pond, and Hood heard the snarl of the 351 Cleveland in first.

Behind it was a low-slung Honda Accord, and behind the Honda was a cobalt blue Mitsubishi Lancer, and behind that was an old red-and-white two-tone F-150 agleam within the swirling dust.

The Cyclone rumbled along and came to a stop twenty feet from Hood. Bradley was at the wheel and the back-seats were piled high with luggage and boxes. The other cars idled in a loose line behind the Cyclone, exhaust stirring the road dust. Two of the other drivers were young men, genuinely tough-looking. Hood couldn’t see much of the truck driver.

The driver’s-side window went down, and Bradley looked at Hood from behind dark sunglasses.

“Looks like you’re moving out, Bradley.”

“That’s because I am.”

“You going to just drop everything, or finish up school and sports?”

“More or less.”

“Where you going?”

Bradley shook his head. “Places.”

“Take off those glasses, Bradley.”

Bradley hesitated then pushed his sunglasses up into his long black hair. “I knew you’d been up there. You didn’t put the insulation back right. Sorry I had to spoil your surprise.”

“I thought you might do this. I don’t know what your mother wanted for you, but I’ve thought about it a lot. I decided the right thing was to tell you, show you those things in the attic, let you take it from there.”

“She tried to tell me a couple of times. She never quite got the words out. But really, how hard was it to find that stuff? I had years.”

Hood looked back at the other cars then at Bradley again. These guys looked too young to be outlaws, but he knew they weren’t too young.

“The trouble is, you’ll get shot down and you’ll be dead forever,” he said. “It happened to Joaquin and Suzanne and it’ll happen to you.”

“Do you feel obligated to say that?”

“Only because it’s true.”

“Well, Hood, thanks for the counsel.”

“You can do better, Bradley. The whole world is out there. You can be whatever you want.”

“I’m already what I want.”

Hood didn’t answer. The driver in the Honda gunned his engine, then the Lancer and the pickup truck followed suit. Bradley answered with some throttle of his own, checking his buddies in his sideview mirror.

“It’s a waste of your life and you’ll regret it.”

“I like you, Hood, but you old guys don’t know shit.”

“Are you going track down Kick?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Don’t try it in my jurisdiction.”

Bradley lowered his sunglasses. Then he reached into the passenger’s seat and brushed aside a leather jacket and lifted the jar containing Joaquin’s head. For a moment he held it up in front of his face. The head shifted slowly and the hair lilted and the surface vibrated with the car engine. Then Bradley put it back on the seat and covered it with the jacket. He looked at Hood and nodded and gunned the engine.

Then the Cyclone trundled around the oak tree, spit some dirt and rocks against the old trunk and lumbered back down the road the way it had come.

Bradley’s gang followed, engines growling, the first two drivers giving Hood their best killah stares as their cars eased past him.

The truck came last and paused, and Hood saw that the driver was a girl, red-haired and beautiful.

She studied Hood for a moment with an expression beyond her years, then the truck accelerated around the oak tree and down the road.

45

H
ood sat on the dais in Captain Wyte’s fortress in Long Beach. The room was dark except for scattered indicator lights in red and blue, some blinking and some not. Outside the great cranes of the Port of Long Beach hovered over the containers and the powerful lights made the port look as if it were the most important place in all the night.

He heard the elevator moan. His Glock sat on the table next to one of Wyte’s custom computers, a brushed aluminum masterpiece that shivered with subtle colors even in the near darkness of the room.

Hood heard the elevator come to a stop, then the door slide open. Wyte stepped from the lighted box, a leather briefcase in one hand and a bottle-sized brown paper bag in the other.

He went to the wall and turned on the lights low, then adjusted them lower. He had taken just two steps toward Hood when he realized he was being watched and he tried to not react. Hood placed his hand on his pistol as he spoke.

“I’ve got a weapon in my hand, Captain.”

Wyte stopped and looked up at him.

“This is private property and you are trespassing.”

“You’re a sworn peace officer. Within the Sheriff’s Department you have fewer rights than a convicted rapist.”

“You’ve been talking to IA.”

“I have.”

Wyte nodded to the space around him. “All of this can and will be explained. I look forward to it.”

“Me, too.”

“Suzanne started you down this path, no doubt. Something about a computer in the safe house, right?”

Hood shrugged.

“Charlie, she should never have gone after blood diamonds.”

“You shouldn’t have either. All those lives for forty-five grand? What a fuckin’ waste.”

“You have no idea of the truth.”

“I know a lie when I hear it.”

“Why are you here, Charlie?”

“Just to see the look on your face.”

“Let’s talk.”

“Let’s.”

“Drink?”

“First, say hello to some friends of mine.”

One of the IA pack turned up the lights and the others emerged from their respective corners and shadows. Wyte broke for the elevator, but one of the scruffy undercovers shot him straight in the chest with a Taser. Wyte flew backward with a scream and crashed to the floor. The briefcase went one way and the bottle went the other, exploding when it hit. It looked to Hood as if Wyte had been struck by lightning. The cops disarmed him and cuffed him and dragged him upright and dumped him onto the leather sofa below the dais that Suzanne had described to Hood.

Hood stood and holstered his sidearm, went down the stairs then through a side door.