The Renegades

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “Yes,” said Draper.

  Hector handed his empty red tumbler to Rocky. “Refill, man. Pronto, pronto.”

  HERREDIA WAS most pleased by his thirty-three-pound haul of U.S. cash. He sat behind his big steel desk at El Dorado and sipped a very dark tequila. The suitcases were flat on the floor and the vacuum-packed bundles were stacked neatly by the scale on the desk.

  Herredia looked at Draper and his thick eyebrows lifted up and away from each other and he looked soulful. “To this crazy life, Coleman.”

  “Yes,” said Draper, holding up an invisible shot glass.

  The old man, Felipe, sat where he always did, but he had propped his shotgun against the wall behind him rather than holding it on his lap, a gesture that suggested trust.

  “I was very surprised to hear about Terry,” said Herredia.

  “So was I. I still can’t believe it.”

  “A black American gangster?”

  “That’s what a witness saw.”

  Draper felt the weight of Herredia’s attention.

  “I’m sad,” said Herredia. “I admired him. But I believe he was becoming dangerous. You know this.”

  Draper nodded and looked down at his hands.

  “But, twice as much for you,” said Herredia.

  “Yes.”

  “You are not pleased?” asked Herredia.

  “Twice as much pleases me.”

  “But you do not drink. You do not talk to me.”

  “The drive was long tonight.”

  “You have your bed and your whore.”

  “I have a real woman in my life,” said Draper.

  Herredia looked puzzled, but he nodded as if he understood.

  “And I’m going to drive home tonight,” said Draper. “I mean no disrespect, Carlos.”

  Draper guessed that Herredia was taking in well over two million a month now. Draper knew that the Eme faction led by Avalos was the primary collector of Herredia’s money, taking it from the hundreds of street gangsters who sold product, and paid obeisance and taxes. But Herredia had other arrangements, too. The drug world was filled with secret allegiances—some very old and others very new, such as Draper’s and Laws’s sudden and dramatic entrance as Herredia’s new couriers. It was a world in flux. Loyalties shifted. Allies became enemies. Friends became dead. The cartels were as complicated as the Vatican.

  And Draper had always believed that disorder was opportunity.

  “Con permiso,” he said, rising slowly and taking two steps toward Herredia’s desk. He folded his hands in front of him and looked first into Herredia’s now glowering face, then to the flagstones on the floor.

  “Sir, I think—”

  “You think I’m going to force you to take another partner.”

  “That is another—”

  “Silence, gringo. And listen to the sound of my good news. You have my trust and respect. You have your gun and your badge if you need them. In two years you have never been late or short. You have never given me reason to worry. So I say this to you: you will continue to work for me, alone, as you wish.”

  Draper bowed. “Your trust means very much to me. But—”

  “And you will take five points, not four, on all of what you deliver.”

  Draper was truly flabbergasted, so it wasn’t hard to portray it. “It’s hard to speak.”

  “This is probably because I am interrupting you. Tell me now, Coleman, what you are trying to say.”

  “Avalos is cheating you.”

  Draper heard the old man shift behind him, the soft clink of the shotgun leaving the wall.

  “I have trouble hearing sometimes,” said Herredia.

  “Avalos is cheating you.”

  “You prove this.”

  “I can’t. But Rocky can. He’s seen it. Rocky is afraid that when you find out you’ll have him killed along with Hector and Camilla. I told him I would try to keep that from happening.”

  “How much does Hector cheat me?”

  “Approximately two points every week. Camilla takes it before the bills are stacked and pressed and weighed. A few hundred here, a few hundred there, from many different people. Rocky said she’s proud of her defiance. She doesn’t bother to hide her thievery. But Hector never sees her do it, so he can tell himself there is nothing to see. So he can tell us all there is nothing to see.”

  The old blackness had come back to Herredia’s eyes. It was like shades being drawn on a window for the enactment of secrets inside.

  A moment later Herredia rattled off a series of commands in Mexican Spanish bristling with obscenities. Draper had trouble making out the rapid phrases that involved a series of names he had never heard.

  The old man listened, his face dark and wrinkled as a peach pit, his hair long and white, then he vanished.

  “You will spend the night here and we will talk, Coleman. Tonight I want to talk.”

  Draper was surprised to see the sadness in Herredia’s eyes.

  IN THE BLACK of early morning, Draper idled at the United States Customs booth in San Ysidro. He offered his badge holder and Sheriff’s Department ID and answered the usual questions: two days, friends at La Fonda, purchases of two bottles of Santo Tomás table wine and a silver bracelet inlaid with turquoise. These items, supplied by one of Herredia’s jolly cooks, sat in pasteboard boxes on the seat beside him. His fishing gear was piled in the back. His dollars were vacuum-wrapped and fitted into a bumper cavity.

  “How many times a year do you cross this border?” asked the official.

  “Six or eight,” said Draper. “I’ve never counted.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I fish.”

  “For what?”

  “Snapper. Bass. Jack. Tuna, if I’m lucky.”

  The Customs man peered into the back. Draper saw the second Customs official appear at the passenger-side window and he rolled it down.

  The inspector swung open a rear door and pulled one of the boxes across the seat and rummaged through it. He slammed the door and went around to the back of the vehicle and Draper popped the hatchback for him. In the rearview Draper watched the man paw through his fishing gear.

  “Slow night?” he called back.

  No answer. He knew these idiots wouldn’t find anything; even the dogs of secondary inspection would have a tough time with the vacuum-packed bills.

  Then the hatchback slammed and the man to his left waved him through.

  “Proceed, Deputy Draper.”

  He drove the speed limit north on Interstate 5, but his mind was filled with Herredia’s proposal, its details and possibilities, its potential consequences.

  When he hit Solana Beach he called Alexia. She answered on the first ring.

  “I’ve been called,” he said. “I’m very sorry.”

  He heard the breath catch in her throat. Then she whispered, “Coleman, I love you.”

  “I’ll come back to you and Brittany, alive and soon. You have my solemn promise.”

  “I will pray and wait. And when you come back I will be alive again.”

  “I’ll be alive again, too, Alexia.”

  He clicked off and dialed Juliet in Laguna. He got her machine, said her name and waited.

  “Coleman?”

  “I’m home.”

  “I don’t know why I do this.”

  “Yes, you do. I’ll be there in less than an hour.”

  She didn’t bother to get out of bed. He showered in the darkness and slipped in beside her. She pretended to be asleep, then vaguely receptive, then she greedily took Draper and fled to that place he couldn’t see or name, a place all hers, located somewhere behind or beyond her tightly closed eyes.

  12

  Hood’s phone rang early the next morning, not long after he’d let himself into the Hole.

  “Latrenya changed her story,” said Bentley. “Now she says Londell was gone all night—business down in South Central. She didn’t see him until morning. She said she lied to us because Lon
dell threatened to kill her if she told the truth. She got Tawna and Anton in on the plot, too. But Londell beat up Latrenya on an unrelated matter—something about her gaining weight. ER called us. Latrenya wouldn’t press charges but we sent two uniforms over to arrest Londell. He maced them. Now he’s in the wind and he looks a little better for Terry’s murder. We’re searching Londell’s Oasis pad in ten minutes. You are cordially invited.”

  Hood, Bentley and Orr crammed into the small outer office of the Oasis manager, Sanjay. Sanjay was a young Indian man who smoked eagerly and said he wanted no trouble. He said Londell Dwayne was rude but always paid his rent, though never on time. And he played his music loud.

  The men climbed the wobbly stairs and walked single file to the front door of Dwayne’s apartment. It was quiet now—no Londell and no Latrenya and no music. Orr knocked. Hood noted that the foil on the window had been tattered by the last storm.

  Sanjay stomped out his cigarette, then unlocked the front door. When the lock disengaged, Bentley gently but firmly moved the manager back and away and told him to stay outside for now.

  With his sport coat open and one hand on the butt of his automatic, Bentley turned the knob and pushed open the door. “Sheriffs,” he called out. “We’re coming in.”

  The place was small and smelled of reefer and bacon. The carpet was dirty and there were yellow stains on the popcorn ceiling. The kitchen sink was piled with dishes and the refrigerator hummed loudly. There was a counter between the kitchen and the living room and on it were dinner plates with old food on them, and plenty of King Cobra empties.

  Orr slipped down the hallway with his weapon drawn and went into a bedroom. Hood walked past him, gun at his side, went into the next room and flicked on the light.

  It was a small room, with small windows up high. It was cold and it reminded Hood of the Hole. There was a mattress on the floor in one corner, with some sheets and blankets wadded up on top. There were dirty clothes in another corner. Hood spotted a Detroit Tigers hoodie. Down deeper in the pile were two red bandanas. Hood saw that one of them had been worn pirate-style, rolled on one edge and knotted, with a loose flap on top. He set them on the floor next to the black sweatshirt.

  There was a chest slouching against one wall, drawers hanging open. On top of it were two empty cigarette hardpacks, four gun magazines and a blackened hash pipe. The closet doors hung askew but Hood got one open enough to see in: a few wire hangers, a few shirts, some beaten sneakers on the floor.

  Hood went through the dresser looking for black gloves but didn’t find any. There was nothing under the bed. He stood looking down at the Detroit sweatshirt and the bandanas.

  Then he heard Orr’s voice from the other bedroom. “Gentlemen, we have something here.”

  The room was close and crowded by a king bed. The mattress had been swiveled out from the springs. Bentley and Orr stood in the cramped space between the bed and the closet. Hood joined them and looked down on the M249 SAW set into a crude cutout in the box spring. The mesh material had been cut open and a yard-long section of one of the slats had been broken out. The gun was jammed into the space. Orr replaced the flap that was cut in the cover material, hiding the weapon, then lifted it open again.

  “Dead man,” he said.

  13

  By late morning Hood was standing on the Avenue M off-ramp of Highway 14, where Johnny Vasquez and Angel Lopes had been shot to death. The day was cool and the breeze came and went like a doubt.

  He balanced Freeman’s murder book on his left arm and used the crime scene drawings and photographs to find where the van had been parked. Now there was nothing but sand and gravel.

  According to Laws’s report, the van engine and lights had been off when they got there.

  Detective Freeman had guessed the temperature at eighty degrees, and he wrote that the night was clear and windy. The moon was new on the twelfth of August, four days earlier, so there wasn’t much moonlight.

  Hood flipped forward: in the impound yard the next day the van started up and idled without a problem. The tires were good. The gas tank was full. There was a second mention of the flats of strawberries found in the back of the van and the basket of them spilled up front.

  Deeper in the book Hood found that Vasquez and Lopes both lived in Lancaster.

  So, he thought: two men, midlevel bangers with an Eme blessing, thought to be working for the North Baja Cartel, heading south around two in the morning, seventy-two hundred in pressed five-dollar bills stashed in two suitcases.

  He talked into his recorder: “Why two big suitcases for only seventy-two hundred dollars? Why such a small amount pressed and stacked?”

  He found the crime scene photographs of the two pieces of luggage thrown into the desert. The clothes were strewn across the road. A lot of clothes. It looked like a table at a rummage sale. Hood wondered how those clothes could fit back into the two bags, large as they were.

  Again to the recorder: “How so much clothing into two suitcases?”

  Then he walked a slow circle around the place where the van had stopped.

  Another question for the recorder: “Why did they pull over and stop on the off-ramp? Illegal, plain sight, no car trouble.”

  He set the murder book on the hood of his car and found the ballistics pages, which established the shooter’s positions through angles-of-entry drawings and victim body positions. All four shots had been fired through the passenger-side window. Eichrodt had used a Taurus nine-millimeter automatic—a budget gun, unregistered. He’d shot Angel Lopes, the man closest to him, first. Lopes had crumpled and turned partially away when the second shot struck him in the right temple. Meanwhile, Vasquez was apparently trying to get out. The first shot hit the back of his head, the second entered through the right ear.

  Hood compared the line-of-fire sketches with the crime scene photographs. It all made sense. Through all the gore and ugliness emerged a clear picture.

  “But these were Eme runners,” he told the voice recorder. “Where were their weapons? Why didn’t they use them? Were they surprised? Did they know Eichrodt? Were they expecting him?”

  He found photographs of the guns that had been recovered from the van. There were two, both within easy reach. But neither man had so much as gotten a hand on a weapon, in spite of the shooter at their window.

  Hood carried the book back to where the van had been parked.

  It was hard for him to imagine that these guys had been surprised, unless they were both very drunk or exhausted. He found their autopsy reports and checked blood alcohol. None at all. They had both ingested amphetamines in moderate amounts. A long night ahead, he thought. A long drive? They were chemically enhanced. Were they surprised by a six-foot-eight, three-hundred-pound gunman as they sat exposed on an off-ramp, windows down in the heat? There was no place at all for Eichrodt to hide. The night was dark, but a jackrabbit couldn’t have hidden where Hood now stood.

  No. They weren’t surprised, he thought. They just didn’t react. Why?

  Freeman had concluded that Eichrodt and the two couriers did not know each other. Freeman had asked that same question that Hood was asking: why hadn’t they reacted? And he never answered it.

  Hood leafed through the murder book, prospecting. He looked at the graphics and read the words and let his mind wander as his hands turned the pages.

  A few minutes later he was struck by another anomaly. It was looking back at him from an evidence photograph of the brass casings that had been found in Eichrodt’s truck. It took Hood a long quiet minute of staring to find it. The casings had been tossed into the same locking toolbox where the gun and money had been found. There were four of them. They were heavily smeared with blood. He pictured the scene, the order of shooting, the distances to the targets. He pictured Eichrodt collecting his casings. And it made no sense that the brass would be heavily smeared. Touched with blood? Sure, he thought. Dotted with blowback from Lopes, the closer victim, to Eichrodt’s fingers? Possibly. But all f
our casings, smeared heavily? No.

  So he turned to the lab reports and found what he expected: the fingerprints lifted from all four casings were Eichrodt’s. But he couldn’t find anything about the blood itself. Whose was it? And, more important, why was there so much of it?

  He sat in his car with the windows down in the cool desert breeze. It took him a while to get through to the crime lab technician who had lifted the prints from the casings. Keith Franks spoke in a soft, high-pitched voice that sounded young. He told Hood that the prints had come off the brass clearly and cleanly. They were Eichrodt’s. He said he hadn’t run the blood on the casings because his superior said there was no reason to—Eichrodt’s prints and Lopes’s blood were on the Taurus nine-millimeter and that was all the DA needed. It was beyond reasonable doubt that Eichrodt had fired the gun. And of course, the lab was overloaded with work.

  Hood flipped to the photographs of the Taurus and saw that it, too, was heavily marked by blood. There was a misting on the muzzle, as you’d expect—Mr. Lopes again. But down on the handle and the trigger and the trigger guard the smears were heavier. There was no positive identification on the lower, heavier traces.

  “I want you to type the blood on the casings,” he said. “And on the handle, trigger, and guard of the Taurus.”

  “Detective, the case is closed.”

  “I’ll get the DA to reopen it.”

  “You know they won’t. It was an open-and-shut case.”

  “Then how come Vasquez and Lopes used two big pieces of luggage for only seven grand plus change? How did they get all those clothes and the money into two bags? Why did they pull over in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night, then park in plain sight? Why didn’t they defend themselves? How come Eichrodt’s brass was thick with blood? And his gun? There’s too much. The blood is wrong and you know it.”

  For a moment Hood thought Franks had hung up on him. The cool breeze hissed against the phone and he turned his back to it.

  “What’s your name, again?” Franks asked.