The Renegades

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “Maybe it’s not meant to be,” she said.

  Juliet was as godless as a lizard but believed life to be scripted, something that Draper found odd.

  “Have faith,” he said.

  “I want to be normal, like everyone else,” she said. “I want things to be easy and natural. For you, too, Cole. You don’t want it all to end, either. I know that.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  In fact it bothered him not at all that it would end with him. Draper was the end of his family line. Being the last of his kind gave him broad and sometimes terrible liberties. He thought, if he bothered to think of such things at all, that the world would actually be better off without people like him.

  “We can be phoenix people,” she said. “We can rise out of the ashes and become beautiful and strong, even when the odds are against us.”

  “You’re already beautiful and strong and I’m proud to be with you.”

  She sighed into his ear and gently kissed his cheek.

  In the Fiori store Draper bought a four-foot-tall ceramic vase, a stunning piece with rich blues and bright yellows and a luminous glaze.

  He handed her the receipt and hefted the big piece over his shoulder and they wandered down Coast Highway to Splashes, where Draper sat the vase beside them in the bar and they ordered drinks and watched the waves.

  “I think I’ll have more than one,” she said.

  “You have whatever you want.”

  Draper took her hand and turned it up and gave her a wildly optimistic palm reading, as he often did. It was rich in children and dogs, all with preposterous names.

  They talked about a sailboat painting she’d seen at the Pacific Edge Gallery, how good it would look in the media room. Draper registered concern over the $7,500 price tag.

  He got her to gossip about her restaurant coworkers, and tell him about the great puppies that came to the shelter this past week, then he guided her into talking about her childhood. She was comfortable there. It was the only truly happy time of her life. It was mostly in San Bernardino, humble but fun. She had friends, and a swimming pool in the tract home where she lived with her wild older sister and mom and stepdad, and there were dogs, and long walks to the 7-Eleven for snacks and pop. She could talk on for hours about those times.

  But Juliet’s childhood stopped abruptly at age fifteen, when one of her stepfather’s handsome friends had convinced her, not absolutely against her will, to do bad things. It had gone on a while. There were female problems and a late-term procedure with complications. After that came the chaos, the pills, the men, the purposeful overdose that just barely failed. Finally came the rebirth of Juliet in Laguna. She had told Draper this dark tale only once, and he had held her hand while the tears spilled out of her.

  Draper ordered another drink for each of them, then went off on a chipper monologue about his own childhood in Jacumba—his family’s restaurant; his little brother, Ron, whom he had loved and protected from rougher boys; his cute sister, Roxanne; dogs and friends; hitting a grand slam on the frosh-soph baseball team. He told her about the heat and the dust, and the drug runners and human traffickers who used the complex of roads and trails and caves and tunnels and gullies and canyons to transport their products to the north. He told her of the car chases and the spectacular wrecks and even about Mikey Castro, gunned down just like a thirties gangster as he walked from his shiny clean Suburban toward the Draper family’s restaurant—Amigos.

  She squeezed Draper’s hand in high surprise as he told her this tale, though she’d heard it before. She had empathy and it led to genuine emotions and Draper liked this quality in her.

  Like Juliet’s childhood, Draper’s had a sudden ending when he was also just fifteen years old. A propane line had broken while the Draper family slept on a very cold night, and when the accumulated gas hit the pilot light of the oven, the explosion killed Coleman’s parents, his brother and his sister. Draper had been sleeping out in the barn with the horses and dogs. The explosion had blown fireplace bricks through the barn wall. He had never forgiven himself for surviving. Several times, though, he had asked Juliet to hear the story and forgive him. Please tell me I’m forgiven, he would whisper. It was the deepest, darkest jewel he could offer her.

  So when the river of Draper’s memories approached the great black dam that marked its boundary, he became quiet and looked out at the waves. Juliet worked herself closer to him and ran her fingers through his soft blond forelock.

  “Be my phoenix,” she whispered.

  “I’ll be that.”

  “And I’ll be yours. Take me home. Fill me up.”

  Draper paid and hefted the vase onto his shoulder and they walked slowly down the beach.

  Inside he set it on the hearth as Juliet unbuttoned her blouse, then took him in her arms and kissed him.

  THE NEXT MORNING Draper drove down to Jacumba. He passed through the remote-controlled gate and parked in front of his old family home, which had been rebuilt long since the catastrophic fire. It was bigger now, and Draper had had the propane heating system completely replaced by electric.

  The old barn that had saved his life was still there. Draper walked over and slid open the door and stepped inside. He stood for a moment, enjoying the smell that never changed and the images flickering in his memory.

  He closed the barn door behind him and headed for the house. He’d sold the property a few years back to Israel Castro, which was almost like selling it to a brother or sister. Better, in some ways.

  Israel now came through the front door and gave Draper a big hug, slapping him on the back.

  Inside he poured cold beers as Draper set the duffel stuffed with cash on the kitchen counter.

  They drank to health and Draper piled the vacuum-packed bundles of cash on the granite.

  “Fifteen thousand,” he said.

  Israel produced a checkbook from a drawer and wrote a check on the East County Tile & Stone account for $8,450 to Prestige German Auto and another for $6,550 to Coleman Draper.

  Draper wrote a check from Prestige German Auto to Castro Commercial Management for $2,535 and another for $3,875, which were mortgage payments on two of the four Jacumba investment properties that Israel had shown and sold him.

  They exchanged checks, then clinked their beer bottles together again. Thanks to Israel’s numerous capacities—most of them legitimate—he could launder Draper’s cold hard cash with just a few strokes of the pen. Israel owned a construction materials business, was a commercial property landlord and manager, a real estate agent, a mortgage originator, a credit union board member and a notary. He did business in both the United States and Mexico, most of it along the half-lawless strip of borderland where he and Draper had grown up. He also helped transport large quantities of heroin and cocaine into California, but not nearly as often as he used to. It was too risky—a young man’s work. His goal was to be 100 percent legit by the time he was thirty years old, and it looked as if he might make it.

  “Let’s go see how Jacumba looks today,” said Israel. “You’ll like the progress on the hacienda.”

  They took Israel’s trick black Denali, the big tires kicking up dust as they rode through town. Jacumba was poor and parts were nearly squalid, but to Draper it was simply where he had grown up. The fact that it had changed little was a comforting reminder of how far he had traveled from here.

  They passed Amigos restaurant, which Draper had purchased five years ago, then closed, gutted, remodeled and reopened. The lunch business looked brisk. Draper looked at the sign that he had commissioned. It featured two happy men with big mustaches, arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling and brandishing cartoonishly large pistols.

  “Oh, the new waitress,” said Israel, pain in his voice. “Miranda.”

  “And how is your child bride?”

  “Glory be to Gloria. She’s in Puerto Vallarta with the kids. I behave. I look but don’t touch.”

  As they rumbled out a rutted dirt road hea
ded east, Coleman thought back to when they were ten years old and Israel’s father, Mikey, was shot down outside Amigos. He and Israel had watched it happen. Coleman would never forget how clean Mikey’s Suburban was. In Jacumba no vehicle stayed clean overnight and when Mikey pulled up across the street from Amigos Coleman knew that it had just been washed. Mikey was wearing new creased jeans and a blue cowboy shirt and snake-skin boots and a black Resistol. Ten seconds later a black Chevy 1500 rolled by and stopped and when it rolled on again Mikey was just a tattered rag on the street. His hat blew into the gutter. Israel’s mother had left his father years before, so at Coleman’s insistence the Draper family had taken in the boy. Three years later he moved in with a gang of traffickers living across the border in the Mexican half of Jacumba, called Jacume. Israel was drawn to a pretty girl and some very easy money helping the mules and coyotes navigate the bleak desert border. He was fast, strong and fearless. He’d married Gloria at sixteen, with the full permission of her narcotrafficante father. After the tragic death of his family, Draper had joined Israel over in Jacume.

  Now they came to Draper’s hacienda east of town, just a mile from the border. Draper had named it Rancho Las Palmas. The parcel was fifty acres, mostly just dry rolling hills, but part of it was thickly wooded with manzanita and some oak, and there was a glade with a spring where Draper had seen deer and mountain lion.

  Thanks to Israel and his labor connections south of the border, the structures were going up under budget and ahead of schedule. There was a main house built of concrete and iron and river rock, a wooden barn, a five-car garage with an apartment over it, and three guest cottages. The swimming pool was excavated and framed, and as Draper approached he saw that the masons were making the artificial rocks that would form an overhang and waterfall. Draper craved water and the idea of water, and his four wells were dug deep into the bountiful aquifer and ready to be plumbed for service. Dozens of Canary Island palms, still in their big wooden boxes, were positioned around the site for planting. There were queens and kings and sagos and blues, too, and a bounty of palms that Draper couldn’t even identify.

  “In six months you’ll have one of the best properties in East County,” said Israel. “It’ll be magnificent. Ten years from now, when you sell it, it will be worth five times what you paid for it. Between your wells and your spring, you’ll never have to buy one pint of water. You’ll be self-sustaining.”

  “You don’t have to sell me on it,” said Draper.

  “And shade. You’ll always have the shade of the palms.”

  They walked over to a grove of seven Canary Island palms. Draper put his hand on the big wooden box and looked up at the stunning symmetry of the fronds emanating from the center.

  “Let’s go see your old house. I’m in a sentimental mood.”

  “Yes, we should see it. It’s been years for you, hasn’t it?”

  “Two at least.”

  Using a series of perilously rutted roads and a short dark tunnel, Castro delivered them to the other side of the border fifteen minutes later. They traveled unseen by the law but were duly noted by the cartel lookouts and the human smugglers dug into the rocky hillsides with their powerful spotting scopes. These men and boys communicated by walkie-talkies because cell phones wouldn’t work down here. They scurried back and forth across the border with impunity, sometimes hourly, like fleas hopping from one part of a dog to another.

  The old Castro family home was still large and rambling. It was freshly painted, white with pale green trim. Draper had lived there for the three years following the death of his family thanks to an influential Castro uncle who was rarely ever there.

  As the Denali idled at the gated driveway, Draper looked at his old home and thought of the great dusty freedom of life in Jacume. There were hours out-of-doors, making trails and paths and tunnels and learning how they connected to the bustling warren of trails and paths and tunnels that already existed. There were motorcycles and ATVs and dune buggies and, of course, SUVs. There were moonless runs and flashlit sprints and elaborate distractions involving flares and even dynamite—all to throw off the DEA and the Baja Police and the Border Patrol and the sheriffs and the cops. There was easy cash and there were easy drugs and easy girls.

  After the death of his parents and brother and sister, Draper had felt like a rocket launched into space. All things were blurred and indefinable by his senses. He was speeding, barely controllable, totally unstoppable. For the first time in his life he felt truly free and truly happy.

  “I need a man,” he said. “Someone who can pull a trigger.”

  “Jacumba and Jacume are still full of them.”

  “No one close to you.”

  “Oh?”

  “You know. A onetime job. Someone slender, but don’t give me a boy.”

  “I do know. Well, that’s another thing.”

  “There’s five thousand for the work and five thousand when the work is done.”

  “When?”

  “Friday. I need him in L.A. by afternoon. I’ll have everything he needs. Tell him that someone will bring him back here later that night.”

  Draper took the thick square of folded hundreds from the rear pocket of his jeans and gave it to Israel.

  “I’ll get a man for you,” said Israel.

  “To Amigos,” said Draper. “I’m starved.”

  “I can introduce you to Miranda.”

  “I’d like that.”

  HE PULLED ONTO Laurel Laws’s horse property just before sunset. Standing on her porch he neatened his necktie, then knocked.

  A moment later he heard movement behind the door and he looked at the spy hole.

  “Coleman?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry to just come over unannounced.”

  The door opened and Laurel stood before him. Her face was puffy and her hair was a mess and her blouse was wrinkled. Draper bowed.

  “Well…,” she said, and stepped back into the foyer.

  Draper entered and pursed his lips solemnly and gave her a brief, formal hug. He handed her a sympathy bouquet.

  “I’m so sorry, Laurel,” he said. “He’s all I can think about.”

  “Me, too. It’s sinking in. Thank you for your calls.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  She looked around the foyer and back into the living room as if searching for a chore or project. “Well, oh, no.”

  “Anything at all, Laurel.”

  “I’m fine, really. Come in.”

  “I won’t stay long. I’m sorry I didn’t call. Right up until I knocked on your door I was telling myself I’d turn around and call later.”

  “It’s okay. I wasn’t doing much.”

  They sat in the darkened living room, Laurel at one end of a leather nail-head sofa and Draper across the room in what he assumed was his partner’s favorite recliner. This usurpation pleased him in a way that had nothing to do with the reason for his visit. Draper told her a little about his grief, then he began praising Terry in a soft voice, telling Laurel some anecdotes from their years together. Draper had never become close to Laurel because he and Terry socialized less and less after he was married, but there was still a broad bond between them and Draper felt its natural weight and comfort as he talked. The flowers lay on a coffee table in front of her and the distant glimmer of a street lamp came through the window to land on the plastic wrapper and prompt the faint colors of the lilies.

  “What about you, Laurel? Are you handling it?”

  She was quiet for a moment. Draper was surprised that she was this thoughtful. And he was more surprised as he listened to her words.

  “I always wanted nice things and I always thought I was happy. I wanted a man who was impressive and controllable. I told myself that what I got in life was because of my taste and personality. When I married Terry I thought I would finally have it all. Then, when he died, I realized I have almost nothing. Our life is gone. It’s very strange, but—and maybe this happens all the time—bu
t I love him more now than when he was alive. I just miss him, so much. I never even got to tell him good-bye. When it’s so sudden…”

  Draper said nothing, just let the darkness absorb her tears. His instinct was to go to her.

  A while later he spoke again. He told her about losing his parents and brother and sister to fire, how this childhood event had replaced the boy he was with a new, strange one he didn’t know very well at first. He’d felt the same vast loss, he said, and for many years—even now, actually—the thing he wanted most was to be able to say good-bye to them.

  There was another long silence.

  “Have they told you anything about who did it?” he asked.

  “Two detectives came out and I talked to them. Bentley was one of them. Then, later, another one—Hood or something. He was Terry’s partner that night. They asked questions, over and over. They were interested in Wayne, or Dwayne or…you know, the one with the dog.”

  “I know the detectives. How many times have they come out to talk?”

  “The two of them, twice. The other guy, just that once.”

  “Hood is part of Internal Affairs. They police the police. Was he respectful?”

  “I don’t know what he was. He didn’t say much. He looked a lot. At our things. I was out of it. I was weak and angry at Terry for leaving me. Nothing had sunk in yet.”

  “Hood probably focused on Terry’s state of mind.”

  “Yes. He asked if Terry was happy.”

  “I know the answer to that.”

  She said nothing. Draper sensed that she was looking at him.

  “Laurel, I know Terry was happy. But I also felt that he was troubled by something that he’d done.”