L. A. Outlaws (42 page)

A short hallway led to another room, a windowless, high-ceilinged warehouse filled with neat rows of industrial shelving nearly twenty feet high. Hood saw the big rolling platform ladders like in a home improvement store. Hundreds of televisions, DVD players, computers and peripherals, telephones, faxes, stereo equipment, cameras, musical instruments, coffeemakers, toys—all new and still in their boxes. Near the big roll-up door in the back he saw the pallets heaped with cases of liquor and wine and beer and soft drinks and candy, wrapped in heavy translucent packing plastic. Pallets of tile and car wheels and cigarettes. Pallets of porno magazines and service china and sprinkler heads and hand tools and ready-to-assemble bicycles and swimming pool chlorine and extra-virgin olive oil. Bins of granite and marble and electrical cable and shiny new copper pipe.

Hood shook his head and walked back out to where the cops were interviewing Wyte. He walked past them looking at no one, took the elevator down and drove home.

Two mornings later he walked into the Navy Criminal Investigative Service headquarters on Camp Pendleton with Lenny’s list in his pocket. It weighed a thousand pounds.

Lenny walked in behind him, buzz-cut and ramrod straight, the familiar inexplicable light in his eyes.

46

H
ood sat on a rock on the bank of the Merced River in Yosemite and tied a fly on for his father. It was early and they were alone. The morning was cool and quiet, and Douglas seemed uninterested in the skills he had mastered and taught to his son and then lost, all within his lifetime.

Hood finished the knot and watched his father stare out at this new old river. Beyond it the hills were thick with conifers and the sky was a pale blue and there was a plume of smoke from a distant fire.

“We may as well start with a caddis,” said Hood.

“By all means.”

“Thanks for coming out here with me.”

“I don’t see any reason to stay more than just a few minutes.”

“All right.”

They waded into the cold water. Hood pointed to a riffle upstream of them, possibly the same riffle that Douglas had pointed out to him when they first fished this stretch twenty years ago. Hood understood that the saying about something going past in the blink of an eye can be literal, not just figurative.

Hood stepped back to give his father room to cast, the water powerful against his legs. Douglas held his old handmade rod in the air with his right hand and some slack line in his left. The fly was in the water, skittering in place on the surface at the end of its downstream tether. Beyond this basic posture for casting Douglas appeared flummoxed and looked at his son.

Hood waded up behind him and took his father’s hands and started the old motion that Douglas had shown him, the rod tip held high and the wrist firm and the elbow forming a fulcrum and the left hand feeding line or hauling it tight. It was an easy rhythm, and up this close Hood could smell his father’s aging body and the after-shave he’d used his whole life, and he could feel the loose coolness of his skin and the lightness of his bones and the reluctant machinery of his joints.

Douglas shrugged him off with an obscenity and Hood waded toward the bank so he could watch.

His father looked at him, then took up the cast again, and Hood watched the white fly line loop back and forth overhead in increasing lengths until it shot forward straight and settled and a silky filament unfurled at the last instant, placing the tiny fly at the head of the riffle.

His father mended the line then smiled at Hood with joy and the memory of joy.

Standing where this river briefly intersected time, Hood believed that all on Earth was forgiven.

He smiled back.

History reached out and clenched me as I sat in my fourth-grade class, reading about the great outlaw Joaquin Murrieta. He was allegedly bloodthirsty, and an accomplished horse thief, gambler and killer. Joaquin’s picture made him look certifiably crazy. There were rumors he gave some of his loot to the poor. We crew-cut 1960s fourth graders were supposed to be fascinated by the California missions built by the Spanish, but in my young and impatient mind the missions were stone-cold adobe boredom compared to dashing Joaquin.

Many years later, when I went to write
L.A. Outlaws,
I set out to do some more serious research on Joaquin. But I found that the harder I pressed for the truth of his life, the more quickly the “facts” were either complicated, changed, or sometimes simply made to vanish.

His date and place of birth are disputed.

The spelling of his name is disputed.

Some say he was forced into a life of violence by the rape of his young wife, Rosa; others say this was legend only.

But this much is agreed: The outlaw Joaquin Murrieta was shot down and beheaded in 1853, and such was his notoriety that the head—preserved in a jar of alcohol—was exhibited on tour. It cost a buck to see it. It was possibly lost in the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

So, the Joaquin you read about in
L.A. Outlaws
was very much a real man.

In
L.A. Outlaws
I’ve compiled the Joaquin myths and added a huge fiction: the existence of his great-great-great-great-great-great granddaughter, Allison Murrieta.

If you want to read more about Joaquin, you can hit the library, the Internet or a good bookstore. I’ve written a piece on him at
www.tjeffersonparker.com
.

If you want to read about Allison—his beautiful, brave, audacious outlaw descendant—read the novel you’ve got in your hands.

It’s all the stuff of legend.

I’d like to thank Steve and Pam Cardamenis for all of their help with the diamonds.

And Dr. Kurt Popke and Noah Byrne for knowing how to save a life.

I thank John Austin and Dave Bridgman, brothers of the badge, for their expertise on fast cars and hot guns.

Thanks to Ken Wilson for the early read.

And once again, thanks to researcher Sherry Merry-man, SuperSleuth, unlocker of secrets.

My humble thanks to all of you.

H
ood got partnered up with Terry Laws that night, another swing shift in the desert, another hundred and fifty miles of motion on asphalt, another Crown Victoria Law Enforcement Interceptor that would feel like home.

They walked to the motor yard without talking. Hood was tall and lanky and Laws had a weightlifter’s body, which made his jacket tight across his shoulders. Various sections of the lot were marked by signs bearing the names of fallen deputies, and there were other sections still unnamed.

He logged the mileage and checked the tires for pressure and wear while Terry checked the fluid levels. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department patrol fleet was old and worn, so they had to check even the obvious. Two days ago the LASD Lancaster station had lost another prowl car engine, more than 260K miles on it, finally succumbing just half a mile short of the yard with a clanging metallic death rattle. The deputy had pushed it to the curb and called a tow.

Hood drove. He bounced the car from the yard onto the boulevard and he felt the comforting sense of motion that connected him with last night’s motion, which connected him with the motion of the night before, and of the week and the months before that. Motion ruled. He believed that it might lead him to what he was looking for. It had to do with a woman who had died, and a piece of something in him, perhaps soul, that had gone missing.

It was windy and getting dark, and the desert cold was sharp and weightless as a razor blade. A tumbleweed skipped across Avenue J. The overhead traffic light at Division Street shivered on its cables. Snow was coming and Hood had not yet seen snow in this desert.

He drove and watched and listened as Terry talked about his young daughters—basketball players, good students. Terry’s friends called him Mr. Wonderful because he was two-time L.A. Sheriff’s Department bodybuilding champion, a devoted father, and a Toys for Tots warrior each Christmas season. He had a heroic chin and an open face and a quick smile. He’d made a high-profile arrest on a double homicide almost two years back, which gave him good mojo in the department. He was thirty-nine—ten years older than Hood. Hood had patrolled with Laws before and had thought that something was eating the big man, but Hood believed there was something eating most of us.

They drove north on Division, east on Avenue I past the fairgrounds. Tuesday nights in winter are slow.

Hood’s world was the Antelope Valley, north of L.A. The valley is the new frontier, the final part of the county to be heavily developed. It is high desert, ferociously hot and cold, and dry. The cities are booming but not quite prosperous. Thousands of the homes are new. They’re affordable. The cities have nice names, like Palmdale and Rosamond and Pear-blossom and Quartz Hill. There were no antelope in the Antelope Valley until the twentieth century, when some were released so the valley could live up to its name, a California thing, to dream big and fill in the details later. Beyond the Antelope Valley is the vast Mojave Desert.

“What do you make of AV after six months?” asked Laws.

“I like that you can see so far.”

“Yeah, you get the wide-open spaces. It’s not for everybody. You’ll like the snow.”

Antelope Valley was in fact the Siberia of the Sheriff’s Department, but Hood had asked to be transferred here after some trouble in L.A. He wanted to forget and not be seen. He had been a Bulldog-in-training—LASD homicide—for about four weeks but it didn’t work out. Then he had talked to internal affairs about a superior he mistook for an honest man, and who was soon to stand trial for eight felonies. Hood would be called as a witness by the prosecution, which he dreaded.

They got coffee and continued out Avenue I, made the loop around Eastside Park. On the western horizon the last yellow strip of day flattened under the black weight of night. Hood looked out at the new walled neighborhoods stretching for miles, tract upon tract, houses huddled roof to roof like they were trying to beat the cold. Hood had thought that he would like Siberia and he did. He was a Bakersfield boy, used to open land, heat and wind, fast cars and good music.

“I hate these housing-authority raids,” said Terry. “They make me feel like a hired thug.”

“Me, too,” said Hood. At roll call they’d been told to expect an early-shift assignment to assist L.A. County Housing Authority at the Legacy in east Lancaster. The Legacy was section 8, federally subsidized housing. When the owners had a problem with tenants they went to the housing authority, but HA officials had no real authority at all—they were not armed, could not make arrests or serve warrants. Tenants were not even required to allow them into their homes. But HA could request assistance from LASD deputies, and fear opens doors. The deputies resented these assignments, which played out by class and race: the owners and renters, the landed and the poor, white and black.

Dispatch called a drunk and disorderly out at the Orbit Lounge and a west-side cruiser rolled on it. Hood had quickly learned that the AV was flight country—Edwards Air Force Base and Yeager and the Right Stuff to the Stealth Skunk-works to the huge commercial aircraft plants that once flourished here. He knew that most of that work was done elsewhere now, but the bars still had names like the Orbit or the Firing Range or the Barrier.

“I feel action on tap tonight, Charlie. That’s good. You know Mouse Washington? You seen him? Big, Eight Tray Crip, built like a Hummer? Lives with his mom and a bunch of pitbulls in a section eight? He beat the piss out of two Bloods right outside the mall yesterday. Two of his dogs held them, deep puncture wounds all up and down their legs. One of ’em’s still in the hospital.”

Hood, in his six short months up here in the desert, had seen that the gangs were thriving. There had been another killing just last week, a seventeen-year-old clicked up with 18th, standing on a street corner waving a big foam NEW HOMES sign shaped like an arrow. Hood had learned that these people were called “human directionals” by the developers who hired them, but most people just called them sign wavers. He’d also noted that some of them got really good at it—twirls and aerials and behind-the-back NBA stuff. They could entertain you at a stop-light. But when the Blood gun car had passed by, the human directional with the NEW HOMES sign had six bullets in him and he died later in a hospital.

“Speaking of dog bites,” said Laws. He unbuttoned his long-sleeved uniform shirt and showed Hood his left forearm, discolored and punctured, but healing. “That’s what I got for helping a guy out.” He turned on the dome light for a moment and looked at the wound as if it was a mystery he hadn’t yet solved.