The Renegades

by T. Jefferson Parker

  IA DROPPED Hood off at the substation, where two of the homicide detectives were waiting at the main entrance. One was big and white and the other was big and black.

  “I’m Craig Orr and this is Oliver Bentley,” said Big White. “We’ve got lots of questions and a fresh pot on.”

  “Lead the way, Bulldogs.” Hood used the nickname for LASD homicide because he’d worked with them in L.A. for a few weeks, and he had wanted badly to be a Bulldog.

  “Want to clean up that face, Hood? Looks nasty.”

  “Later.”

  Sitting in a small conference room he told them what happened, then told them again. Orr used a digital recorder and Bentley wrote notes. The coffee was bad and they drank a lot of it.

  “So,” said Orr. “Did Warren just recruit you to IA?”

  “I’m on Terry.”

  “Thanks for being square with us,” said Orr. “We all have jobs to do.”

  Bentley looked at Hood for a beat, then tapped his fingers on the desk. “Someone cut the battery cables in your cruiser while you and Terry were with Roberts. The door was jimmied to get to the hood latch.”

  And I didn’t hear it in the wind, thought Hood.

  AN HOUR LATER Hood put on a canvas jacket with a blanket lining and buttoned it all the way up and got in his old Camaro and drove back to the Legacy development.

  It was two in the morning. The investigators were gone and the bullet-riddled cruiser had been towed away. The yellow crime scene tape had torn loose from the peppertree and now it flapped in the wind like it was trying to escape.

  Hood circled the area with his flashlight. He picked up a few of the shards of windshield safety glass and rubbed their edges with his thumb, then dropped them into a jacket pocket. He could see where the crime scene investigators had dug into the asphalt to retrieve bullets and bullet fragments.

  He shined the light up into the peppertree and watched the loose branches swaying in and out of the beam. He walked across the front yard to the fence that the shooter had so easily cleared, counting his steps: ten. Then he ran the light up the fence, then along the top, wondering if the man might have snagged something on the rough wood. If he had, the investigators had found it first.

  He drove around the block to where he’d heard the car start up, and he sat there a minute with the windows down and the heater turned up high.

  AT HOME, HOOD showered and dressed his wound and scrolled through the LASD enforcement-only Gangfire site. He could picture the familiar face he was looking for, and now, after the great slow settling of his adrenaline, the name came to him. He was an Antelope Valley Blood named Londell Dwayne.

  Hood had shaken him down a few times and Dwayne was unpredictable. Once he ran. Once he smiled and offered Hood a Kool. Once he told Hood that if his johnson was as big as his ears then Hood must have happy ladies. Hood had told him his ears were nothing compared to his johnson and Dwayne liked that. On that occasion, Dwayne had been wearing a Detroit Tigers hoodie.

  Hood looked at the picture of Dwayne and a chill registered across his shoulders. He wrote down Dwayne’s numbers on a small notebook he carried in his pocket.

  Hood thought. L.A. County had fifty thousand gangsters, he knew, and more than two hundred clicks. The killer’s red bandana meant a Blood affiliation, but sometimes shooters flew enemy colors to mislead witnesses and to implicate rivals.

  He looked at Keenan Roberts’s picture and saw that he was not the shooter. Kelvin wasn’t either. They were too big and too heavy. And it was hard for Hood to imagine either of them getting their hands on a weapon like the M249 SAW. He had seen their destructive talents in Anbar. A properly working SAW throws a thousand rounds a minute.

  He went outside to the deck and looked out at his Silver Lake neighborhood. When Hood had requested a transfer to the desert he had kept this apartment in L.A. because he liked the city, and because it gave him another hour of driving time each way, to and from the substation in Lancaster.

  Hood smelled rain. He fingered the sharp pieces of safety glass still in his jacket pocket and for the hundredth time that night he wondered why Terry Laws had been murdered.

  It wasn’t done in the heat of the moment. It was an execution. An execution of a sheriff’s deputy known to his friends as Mr. Wonderful.

  Beach and wave.

  Then he wondered something else for the hundredth time that night. Had the executioner let him live, or had his M249 jammed? They jammed in Iraq all the time from age and dust—it was an untrusted weapon.

  If the gun had jammed, then he was lucky.

  If the shooter had let him live, why?

  The only explanation he could come up with was that Londell Dwayne—or whoever was hidden behind the sunglasses and the bandana—had wanted to be seen.

  He’d wanted a witness to tell his tale.

  3

  “Listen and don’t interrupt. I invited you here to tell you a story. It’s about a friend of mine we called Mr. Wonderful, and the things that happened to him and why they had to happen to him. Your friend Hood plays a role in this story, too. But it’s bigger than both of them. It’s about chaos and opportunity.”

  We’re sitting in La Cage, a rooftop cigar bar on Sunset, which puts us at eye level with a billboard of two enormous models posed in a pouty stare-down. Their bodies are painted a gold that glitters in the upturned lights. It’s an ad for a scent that both men and women can wear and, sure enough, you can’t tell if these people are male or female or what. They’re teenagers, just like the boy sitting across from me, though he looks older than they do.

  His brow creases skeptically and he looks around as if someone could hear, but we’ve got this corner of the rooftop to ourselves. He leans toward me. I have his undivided attention. Terry Laws is big news in L.A. Everybody knows what happened to him, or thinks they do. The boy across from me starts to say something, but I shake my head and put a finger to my lips.

  “Picture a desert night in the Antelope Valley, August, two years ago. I’ll help you get started, my friend—it’s black and hot and windy. The tumbleweeds roll and the Joshua trees look like crucified thieves. Terry Laws and I are on patrol out of Lancaster substation, northern L.A. County. The wind bumps the cruiser, moves it around a little. The sand hisses against the windows and you can’t see a single star. And that’s when we spot the van, parked on the Avenue M off-ramp, halfway between L.A. and nowhere. Right where the tipster said he’d seen it. When I open the door of the cruiser, the wind tries to rip it off, and it takes me both hands to slam it closed before I pop my holster strap and follow Terry to the van. I’m whistling something because that’s what I do when a situation gets tight. Helps settle the nerves, okay? Even walking up to the van I see it’s all wrong—windows open, windshield smeared, liftgate up. Up close, there it is, two men inside shot dead, all sand and blood, sure, we check for life but it’s fucking pointless and we both know it. All this had happened minutes ago. Not hours, minutes—”

  “The Baja Cartel couriers, Lopes and Vasquez. This was all in the papers, Draper.”

  “We didn’t know who they were. We call it in and wait for the crime scene people and the coroner and the dicks. We set up the detour cones then close the ramp. Hardly any cars using that exit in the middle of the desert at two a.m. An hour later the dicks and sergeants don’t need us anymore so it’s back in the cruiser to finish our shift. Not long after that we see the truck, a red Chevy half-ton, just like the caller said, and he’d gotten most of the plate right, so we flash the truck at the ruins off the Pearblossom Highway, where the utopia used to be.

  “The tipster said he’d seen an older red pickup truck speeding away from the Avenue M off-ramp where the van was parked. We figure there’s a good chance that the guy in the truck did the shooting. But the truck driver plays good citizen and pulls right over when we flash him. He parks by the river-rock columns of the old Llano commune. Terry and I get out and put a few yards between us. We both have our flashlights up and o
ur hands on our gun butts.

  “The driver gives Terry his license but he looks high, tweak city, shaggy hair and a beard and a black T-shirt. I can see blood spray on his upper left arm and when Laws gives me a look I know he sees it, too. The inside of the Chevy stinks like ammonia, you know, meth sweat. Terry orders him to get out of the vehicle. When he steps out I see he’s about six foot seven or eight—Laws was six-two and this guy made him look small. He’s looking at us like he wants to eat us.

  —I haven’t done nothing wrong tonight, he says.

  —For a whole night, says Laws, congratulations.

  “Then Terry hands me the guy’s license. Shay Eichrodt, thirty-four, six-eight, three hundred. I’m going to run it for warrants just as soon as we get this guy cuffed and stuffed.

  “I look in the truck bed and see four suitcases, the big rolling kind, all lying flat. Like this guy’s headed to the airport for a vacation, right? Terry tells Eichrodt to turn around and put his hands on the truck and spread his legs. Eichrodt turns around. He sways and loses his balance and I can see he’s not just high, but drunk, too. Son of a bitch falls down to his knees then groans and pitches over facedown in the dirt, prones himself right out for us. Terry takes a wrist restraint and goes to lock him but Eichrodt kicks Terry’s shins and knocks him ass over flashlight. Eichrodt is up, fast as a cat, and I’m drawn and yelling but he and Terry are already going at it and there’s no way I can fire, so I holster up and draw my baton and jump right into the fun. I hit him hard on the knee, so he picked me up and threw me against the cruiser. I weigh one-eighty, and none of it’s fat, but he threw me like I was a doll. Even Eichrodt wasn’t strong enough to lift Terry and all of his muscles off the ground, but I could see them in the cruiser lights, Terry with the baton and Eichrodt with his fists, bludgeoning each other like a couple of giants in combat. So I charged back just like I had good sense, working his legs and knees before he could hit or kick or throw me. But that bastard just wouldn’t fall. He was a bloody mess. So were we. For a minute I thought he was going to win.

  “When Terry hit Eichrodt over the head with his baton for probably the tenth time, Eichrodt went down hard and he didn’t move.

  —He looks dead, says Terry.

  —He’s breathing, I say. He’s alive.

  “We cuff him with two pairs of restraints on his wrists and two on his ankles. Then Terry and I check our wounds. Terry’s got a deep cut over his eye and a torn ear, and his jaw is swelling up like it’s broken. I have a cut lip and a swollen eye, and my forehead has a lump the size of a baseball from hitting the car. But we’re okay, none of it is that serious. Terry calls in. I kneel down by Eichrodt and check the restraints and I watch the cars going past just a few yards away on the highway, and it dawns on me how close I’ve just come to getting killed by this guy.”

  I pause for a moment and sip my tequila. The boy drinks beer. I relight my cigar then pass the lighter to him and he relights his. Down on the Sunset Strip the sidewalks are busy with people. The cars move slowly. Taillights twinkle and brake lights flash. A million hearts, a million hustles.

  “I read the papers, Coleman,” he says. He yawns. Like a lot of teenagers, he is eager to be unimpressed. “You and Laws found a handgun and forty-eight hundred dollars in a toolbox in the truck. You found brass that matched the gun, and the bullets that killed the couriers. That would have nailed Eichrodt in court but he never made it to trial.”

  “Correct.”

  I watch the parade on Sunset. The cops have pulled over a black Suburban and I think of all the black Suburbans I saw in Jacumba, where I grew up. Jacumba squats at the Mexican border down east of San Diego. Noman’sland. Suburbans are the vehicle of choice for soccer moms and Mexican drug traffickers, and there were no soccer moms in Jacumba.

  “I’ve already told you one thing that didn’t make the papers,” I say. And I’m sure he knows what it is.

  “The suitcases,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what was inside? What did you do with them? How come they didn’t make the news?”

  “Before I answer that, I want to tell you something. It’s something that the young don’t understand. It’s the most important thing I’ve learned so far and I want to give it to you now. Listen: Things in life only happen at two speeds—fast, or not at all. That’s why you need to know what you want. Because when you know what you want, you’ll be able to see the difference between chaos and opportunity. They’re twins. People mistake one for the other all the time. You get about half a minute to decide what you’re looking at. Maybe less. Then you have to make a choice.”

  “So what was in the suitcases?”

  The boy is staring at me now. I’m about to tell him something that I’ve never told another person, something damning and dangerous and unretractable. I’m going to do it because I see big potential in this young man. He’s gifted by history and inspired by his blood. I think he’s what I’m looking for.

  I curl a finger at him. He leans in and I whisper in his ear.

  “The couriers’ money, Mexico bound. Four suitcases. Three hundred forty-seven thousand and eight hundred dollars.”

  He sits back and his brow furrows again and he looks out the window then returns his gaze to me. He wants to smile but he doesn’t want to be caught smiling. Love has a face. So do fear and envy and surprise and every emotion under the sun. His face is joy.

  “Incredible.”

  “Not really.”

  “You and Laws took it.”

  “Did we?”

  “You had to. It’s the whole point of the story—chaos turning into opportunity.”

  “I’m glad you understand that. Because this is where the story begins to get interesting. Another beer and another cigar?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  I nod to the waitress and she nods back.

  4

  Yolanda led Hood down a hallway in the rear of the admin building of the Mira Loma Detention Facility, then down a flight of stairs half-hidden behind some vending machines. The door to the IA room had no window, just a plastic shield with the numerals 204 on it. There was no electronic card entry. She opened the door with a bright new key and placed the key in his hand.

  Inside, the office was small and cold. Four cubicles shared an empty common area. The carpet was sea green. There was one window in the office, vertical, narrow and fortified with chicken wire. Through it Hood saw the concrete retaining wall for the basement level, and above the wall was a peekaboo view of the west prison grounds, the twenty-foot chain-link fences topped by razor wire, and the sun-bleached gun towers.

  Hood looked at the neat, impersonal cubicles.

  “This is your station,” she said. She had a pleasant face and bony hands.

  Hood’s cubicle was smaller than a prison cell. Yolanda gave him one of her cards, with a county number hand-written on the back for charging long-distance calls on this, the state line. The phone on the desk was black and heavy and had a curled cord and looked Hood’s age. Terry Laws’s package—department slang for a personnel record—sat squarely in the middle of Hood’s new world.

  “The state watches every penny,” said Yolanda. “So please turn off the lights when you leave. The thermostat is centrally controlled, so there’s no use trying to turn up the heat.”

  “No heat.”

  “There is heat. But it’s unavailable.”

  On the way out she flicked the lights off, then on again. When the door swung shut behind her, the lock clicked loudly.

  HOOD SOON DISCOVERED that Terry Laws had been a solid deputy. He’d played football and graduated from Long Beach State at twenty-three, one year after the L.A. riots. A year later he’d completed training at the L.A. Sheriff’s Academy, and begun his sworn duty at the Twin Towers jail in Los Angeles.

  Laws had worked his way up to deputy III, leaving the jail after two years for patrol, then warrants, then back to patrol. His base salary was $4,445 a month. He’d been cited for distin
guished service for resuscitating a child after a swimming pool accident. He was LASD bodybuilding champion in 2001, when he was thirty-one, and again the next year.

  He had never been cited for excessive use of force and his number of citizens’ complaints was average. He’d fired his weapon only once on duty, at a fleeing assault suspect who had fired at him. Both had missed.

  He and his partner, Coleman Draper, had arrested the killer of two narcotrafficantes back in the summer of 2007. Hood remembered that story. The murderer was an Aryan Brotherhood head-cracker named Shay Eichrodt. He was later committed to Atascadero State Hospital. Both Laws and Draper had been commended for making the arrest.

  Laws had married at twenty-four, had a daughter a year later, and another a year after that. He divorced at age thirty-four and asked to be transferred from L.A. to the desert substation in Lancaster. Just like me, thought Hood. Why the desert? Hood wondered if Laws liked the miles, the motion, the flat, wide-open land, the twisted Joshua trees and the hot orange sunsets. Hood read that Laws had remarried eighteen months ago. For the last four holiday seasons Laws had helped run the sheriff’s Toys for Tots program.

  Hood looked at the pictures. Laws’s department mug showed a square-jawed man with wavy dark hair and a forthright smile. There was a picture of him receiving a bodybuilding trophy, the sleeves of his sport jacket taut with muscle. The Daily News photographed him with two other LASD deputies, all wearing elf caps and standing behind three large boxes overflowing with new toys.

  Hood saw that he would have been forty years old in June.

  He remembered what Laws had said the night before, about helping the Housing Authority shake down Jacquilla Roberts: There’s no profit in this.

  He remembered the sound of bullets going through Terry Laws’s award-winning body.