The Renegades

by T. Jefferson Parker

  On the dark fast run through Camp Pendleton, Hood settled in five cars behind him, then fell back a few, then moved over and closer for a few miles. He watched the red X. He looked out at the Pacific to his right, black and shiny as obsidian. He thought of Ariel Reed.

  Then, with a bright shower of sparks, the M5 veered sharply out of the fast lane, cut across three more lanes and barreled onto the shoulder.

  Hood sped past and worked his way to the right shoulder a mile south of where the M5 had pulled off. He checked the screen. The X wasn’t flashing or moving. Through the back window of the Charger he could see the M5, flashers on, parked on the shoulder a mile behind, near the top of a slight rise.

  Hood’s first thought was a blowout and the exposed wheel sparking on the freeway. But the M5 hadn’t hobbled off. It looked fine, except for the sparks spraying out from beneath the back end. His second thought was road debris—a muffler or hubcap or body trim or something metallic that had fallen from another vehicle and caught underneath the car. And if Draper got under the car to look for damage or dislodge something caught there, Hood thought, he could see the transponder.

  He got out of the car and stood looking back up the freeway. The cars and trucks roared past in an endless speeding river. He got the Night Hunter binoculars from the front seat and steadied them on the roof of the Charger. At first he didn’t see Draper, just the M5. Then Draper rose into view near the driver’s side of his car, annoyedly brushing off one shoulder of his leather bomber jacket. He walked around to the other side and dropped out of sight again. A moment later he stood, holding what looked like a long strip of body molding. It was bent and dented and shiny. Hood watched him chuck it onto the shoulder and smack his hands together and climb back into the car.

  Then Draper’s emergency lights went off and the M5 moved forward on the shoulder, signaling a merge into the right lane. Hood pulled into the slow lane and puttered along at about fifty for a minute or so, keeping an eye on the X and the rearview. The X gained on him and Draper raced past in the middle lane, sparkless and fast, apparently making up for lost time.

  Next came an uneventful thirty minutes at seventy miles an hour that took them down into San Diego and toward the border. The X blinked comfortingly. Hood’s guess was that Draper hadn’t found the tracking device. Since he’d been working in the dark under a low-slung car, there was a very good chance that he’d missed it. Hood thought it was possible that Draper had found it, and had the presence of mind to leave it on and act normal while he hatched a plan.

  The rain started at the San Diego city limit. It was light and uneven and the roadside trees shined and swayed in the breeze.

  Suddenly, Draper broke pattern and swung off the 5 and onto Interstate 8, heading east. Hood followed, past the college and La Mesa and El Cajon and Alpine. As he left the sprawl of cities, the darkness of the land met the darkness of the sky and the traffic thinned and he fell farther back. He called Warren to tell him about Draper’s car hitting the debris, and his abrupt change of route. Warren said it was pouring rain in L.A., high wind, flights grounded at LAX and wrecks all over the place.

  “Stay back and don’t pressure him,” said Warren. “The center of this storm is headed your way. Be cool.”

  “Always cool.”

  “I mean it, Charlie. If you get out of cell range you’re on your own. If Draper saw the transponder, you’re the hunter and the hunted.”

  Hood followed Draper into Cleveland National Forest, hills black, rain steady. An occasional light twinkled far out in some valley or high up on a hill, but they were tiny in the vast darkness. Hood thought that Draper was heading for the border crossing at Tecate. Then he thought Draper was going to Jacumba—home turf. Hood stayed a mile behind, with three vehicles steadily between them. To his right trucks groaned up the grade while on his left a yellow Corvette passed him, easily going a hundred, and Hood thought of Allison Murrieta, who was driving a yellow Z06 the night he pulled her over for speeding and changed their lives and a lot of other people’s lives forever. Again Hood wondered if he had been one block south, or maybe back at the donut shop getting coffee, or if he’d pulled a different beat that night, he might never have laid eyes on her and who knew, maybe she’d still be alive.

  A mile before the McCain Valley Road turnoff, Draper signaled and moved into the exit lane. The rain was heavier and it was harder to see his lights. Hood couldn’t follow him without announcing himself so he stayed where he was and drove past the exit and when he was out of sight he braked and pulled onto the center divider and made a wide, slow U-turn. He parked, turned off the lights and watched the blinking red X. Draper was heading southeast on old Highway 80 toward Jacumba, the last American outpost on the screen, bordered on the south by black, blank Mexico.

  Hood wondered if Draper had planned all along to cross in Jacumba tonight, illegally. Draper would know the back ways in and out. He’d know them very well.

  Or, he might have stopped there just to gas his car, or drive by his old home, or the restaurant his family used to own, then back onto the interstate to cross legally at Tecate or Calexico.

  But maybe he knew he was being followed and he was about to destroy the transponder, vanish into the topography of his boyhood, cache his treasure, and make his way back home to L.A. in a day or a week or a month or never.

  The red X moved slowly toward Jacumba. Hood looked in the direction of the town, just a faint nest of light cradled in the dark border hills.

  He checked his cell phone but there was no service this far out. The rain drummed on the roof of the car. Hood knew that if Draper had found the transponder, the game was over. But if he hadn’t found it, then Hood was still a secret shadow. Draper wasn’t driving like a man on the run. Hood wondered if he was making too much of a piece of highway debris caught up in a rear end strut.

  The X made Jacumba in five minutes. Hood watched it turn onto Railroad. At the Calipatria intersection it stopped. He remembered Amigos restaurant, once owned by the Draper family. Four minutes later the X began moving again. This time it backtracked to Railroad, then went north toward Draper’s boyhood home, now owned by his friend Israel Castro.

  Hood sat there for thirty minutes, watching the red X. It neither blinked nor moved. Unable to resist a better look, he swung onto the interstate, then took McCain Valley Road to old Highway 80. As the interstate receded in his rearview mirror, the dim and scattered lights of Jacumba waited ahead.

  Then he was there. He drove slowly past Amigos restaurant, circled and drove by again. An older couple hustled out into the parking lot with newspapers over their heads. A younger couple with an umbrella went in. A young man in a white straw cowboy hat stood smoking outside the front door. The rain came off the awning in slanting silver and the “Amigos” sign wobbled in the wind. The bar looked busy. Behind the glass brick windows Hood saw the silhouettes of patrons, and a string of what looked like Christmas lights blinking above them.

  He drove to Draper’s old home and parked down the street in the darkness. Home was where people went. There were lights on in the house and in the garage. Ten minutes later the garage door went up. The M5 was there, alongside a black Durango. Draper and another man stood behind the BMW, looking into the open trunk. Hood recognized Israel Castro from a newspaper picture of him addressing the El Centro Rotary Club. They were talking, apparently, about what was inside. Draper had missed the transponder, thought Hood: I’ve got you.

  Draper had put on a dark baseball cap. From where Hood sat he could hear nothing but the sound of the rain on the roof of the Charger. Then Draper closed the trunk and got into the car. He backed out and the garage door closed on his friend and the Durango.

  Draper backed up all the way through the chain-link gate, which opened automatically. Hood could hear the rumble of the M5 and see the dust swirling about his taillights as Draper slowly picked his way back to Railroad.

  But, watching the red X, Hood saw that instead of going north toward town, Dra
per was taking Railroad south toward the border. He gave Draper a few minutes to get well ahead, then he started up the Charger and followed. He wondered again if he was following or being led.

  Soon the few and scattered lights of the city were behind him. According to his GPS locator the M5 was a mile ahead, but he could see nothing of it—no taillights, no shine of paint or reflection of glass—only the tire tracks left in the soft mud of the road. He turned off his headlights and found his way in the faint light. Then he felt the car bump and the rough road become smooth, and he felt asphalt beneath his tires. Hood looked at the locator map and saw that they were now in a place where the roads had no names, paved or not.

  Near the top of a minor rise he stopped, got out and pulled on a blanket-lined canvas coat and an old oilcloth cowboy hat for the rain. He walked to the crest and glassed a wide valley. The scrub was dark and the boulders were pale and dulled by the rain. But the field glasses took advantage of the slight ambient light, giving Hood a decent view. Raindrops rapped against his hat. He saw the M5 creeping along below, no headlights for Draper now, either, just red taillights and the running lights moving through the rough country. The car made a wide curve to the right and disappeared.

  A few minutes later Hood stopped where he had last seen the M5. The flashing red light issued from half a mile away but from here Draper’s car was invisible. The great black mystery of Mexico filled the bottom third of the monitor. Again Hood got out, quietly nudging the door closed with his hip. From behind a boulder he glassed the scene below.

  A metal building stood at the bottom of a wide swale. It looked like an airplane hangar, or a machine shop, with a big rolling door large enough for cars and trucks. From where Hood rested on the boulder he could hear the sound of a generator, and the rain drumming on the roof. The building was unlit until the M5 pulled up. Then it was flooded in hard bright light.

  Draper let himself into the building through a side door. Lights went on inside. A moment later Hood heard the hum of a motor and the rattle of the metal door rolling up. Draper stood for a moment in the doorway, lit from inside. Hood could see a dusty old car behind him, and a black dune buggy with fat tires, and a couple of small dirt bikes. Slowly Hood lowered the binoculars and set them on the boulder in front of him and waited to see what Draper would do.

  Draper pulled the M5 in and parked it beside the dune buggy. Then he got out and opened the trunk again with the key fob and he pulled out two suitcases.

  He’s going to make the run through the hills tonight, thought Hood. No checkpoints, no Customs. Just friendly faces and familiar trails on a rainy night, and Mexico only a mile away.

  Suddenly, light hit the boulder in front of Hood. He could see the grains in the rock.

  “Do not turn. If you see my face, you die. Raise your hands slowly.”

  Hood didn’t know the voice. It was a man’s voice, calm and certain. He raised his hands. Far below he could see Draper looking up at him.

  “I’m a Los Angeles Sheriff deputy,” said Hood. “I’ve got ID in my wallet. Think about what you’re doing.”

  “Do not move.”

  Hood heard footsteps coming fast, then felt a gun barrel against his back. The man roughly popped the snap and pulled the .45 from his belt holster and Hood heard it land on the ground behind him. Draper was leaning against the trunk of the M5, still watching.

  When the man behind him bent to run a hand down his calf, Hood lifted the binoculars by their strap, turned fast and whipped them down on the man’s head as hard as he could. The heavy glasses hit like a mule kick. The man went over in a heap. Hood pulled the gun from his limp hand and turned off the hiker’s headlight. Then he rolled the guy onto his face and cuffed him with a plastic restraint. Hood was expecting Israel Castro, but this man was older—forties, dark hair and a dark mustache. Behind the Charger, Hood saw a small dune buggy, black and chromeless, made for running almost invisibly on dark nights like this.

  When he looked back down at the metal building Draper was gone and the power door was rolling closed.

  38

  Hood’s prisoner was out cold. The cut on his scalp was bleeding, but not hard. Hood used the hiker’s headlight to find his gun, then he slid the gunman’s forty-caliber into his jacket pocket.

  He locked the Charger and began the descent, stepping sideways down the embankment. There was prickly pear and cholla cactus, and the rocks were loose and slick from the rain.

  By the time he made the building the rolling door had clanged into place and the lights had gone off. There was still a slit of light from inside, visible at the bottom of the rolling door, and the rough sound of the generator burning gas to make electricity.

  He drew his gun and put his hand on the doorknob. He took a deep breath, then threw open the door and rushed inside, weapon up. Close to the M5 he ducked down and scanned the concrete floor for feet. Just a dusty car and a black dune buggy and two small BMX bikes with dirt-covered tires and exhaust pipes.

  Draper was gone and so was the luggage. The rain hit the metal roof. The generator labored patiently in one corner. Gun still up, Hood went through a door and into a smaller room. There was a desk and chair, and a couch. Shop lamps burned overhead. No windows. On the floor between the couch and the desk was a woven Mexican blanket with pictures of jumping swordfish on it. He knelt to catch the light better and saw the muddy footprints on the floor. The blanket was bunched carelessly.

  Hood went to a window and looked out and saw nothing. Then he came back to the rug and kicked it into a pile in front of the desk. Beneath it was a sheet of plywood fitted into the concrete floor. It was about a yard square, with a black enameled handle screwed onto each side. He chose a side and lifted, then pulled away the plywood.

  Below him was a cavern approximately ten feet square. A ladder down. There, another generator along one wall, vented with metal flex tubing through the ceiling of the tunnel. Two red gasoline containers. And a lightbulb hanging by a wire that ran down a tunnel, overhead and out of sight. The tunnel walls were framed with two-by-fours, and the bottom planked with two-by-sixes.

  His training told him to stop right here, retreat and come back in daylight, with help. But that was a long wait, a cold trail, and hours for Draper to disappear, hide evidence, reappear. Standing on the ladder and reaching up, he moved the rug over the opening as best he could, then pulled the wooden door fully into place. It thumped solidly shut. A wiggle of fear came up Hood’s back and crawled across his scalp.

  When he got down into the cavern he strapped the hiker’s headlight on and walked into the tunnel.

  Smuggler’s tunnels are not long. A tunnel is a slow and difficult thing to make, and once located by an enemy, they are pure liability. Two hundred feet is average. Hood knew the Mexican border was close, but he didn’t know how close.

  The light was good and the tunnel was straight for twenty steps. It went right. The overhead lights were twenty feet apart. It was cold and Hood heard the patient drip of water. Between the walkway slats he saw the oily blue reflection of light on pooled liquid.

  The tunnel went on. Twice more it made a right turn of thirty degrees. On his fiftieth step Hood stopped and listened. Still, the drip and the distant groan of the generator. The lights flickered off, came back on.

  Hood felt the proximate terror of being underground. He was mildly claustrophobic and he felt the first flicker of panic deep inside him, sharp and small, a spark made by flint. He ignored it.

  At step one hundred he stopped again. He believed that he was halfway through but this was only a sense in a place that confounded sense. On his one hundred and ninetieth step Hood found himself in a small room. There was a generator here, too, but it was not on. There was a ladder.

  He climbed to the top and waited for a long minute. He found it hard to believe that he was a man of sound judgment. There was no light around the edges of the hatch. He heard nothing. He sensed open space on the other side of the wood but again, this was only a fe
eling.

  Hood tested the plywood with the fingertips of both hands. It rocked slightly.

  The hatch opened on hinges to an interior darkness: no stars, no breeze, no rain. In he climbed, closing the hatch and turning on the headlight. He was in a very small room. There were brooms and buckets and a fire extinguisher and two toolboxes and stacks of toilet tissue. He looked down at the wooden door through which he had come, and saw the big red-and-white plate with the graphic bolt of electricity and the electrocuted cartoon man tilting off his feet and the word Peligroso!

  He pushed open the closet door to rows of student desks. Beyond them was a table and a blackboard stand. There was a Mexican flag in a stand in one corner and a Baja California flag in another. Between them was a sliding glass door through which he saw nothing but darkness. Rain on the roof. Through the dripping windows on his left Hood saw only night, and through the ones on his right flickered the lights of the village of Jacume.

  The suitcases from Draper’s car—side by side and handles down—stood by the door on the other side of the classroom.

  Hood turned off his light and stood still for a moment. He tried to see through the windows but only saw darkness and rain. There was just enough light to pick his way past the rows of desks to the luggage.

  The suitcases were heavy. He rolled one onto its back and unzipped it. He turned on the light again and saw newspapers and rocks the size of softballs inside the bag. No cash. The other was packed with the same thing. The papers were the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune, recent dates. The rocks were the ones you’d find all over the vast borderlands between California and Mexico. He turned off the light again and squatted on his haunches beside the suitcases.

  Hood realized that Draper had seen the transponder way back in Orange County. Some quick thinking and a call to Israel Castro was all it had taken to turn his luck. Hood figured the money was now headed back to Tijuana from Jacumba in the black Durango, driven by Castro. They’d made the luggage switch in Israel Castro’s garage. Draper had drawn him into the labyrinth of Jacumba, then lost him like a fox playing a hound. Hood saw that the man with the gun was supposed to deliver him to Draper, or a shallow grave in a big desert. The cost of the huge error began to settle on him.