The Renegades: A Charlie Hood Novel

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “So we may be trying him for murder after all.”

  “You might be.”

  She shrugged. “Stick around after the race and I’ll buy you a beer.”

  Hood got a good seat, up top in the bleachers with a touch of sunshine on his back. The northern sky had darkened more and the Pomona foothills were green. The first two drivers rode their cars to the start line, gunned their engines into ear-shocking roars of rpm and took their burnouts to heat the tires and make them sticky. Then the racers lined up for the real thing. The Christmas tree lit up yellow and red. The sound of gunning nitro engines was thunderous. The cars growled like beasts that knew they were about to be unleashed for just a few seconds. Then the bottom lights went green and the world roared with torque and fury. The dragsters shot forward. Hood watched the bodies shudder and the tires dig for traction in the blast of speed. One second they were coming at him, then they were racing away. He saw how close the drivers were to losing control but how skillfully they maintained it. Then the roar lessened and the parachutes blew into shape behind the cars and the finish line light gave victory to the winner. The crowd clapped and cheered but the totaled response of thirty thousand spectators was little more than a gesture compared to the spectacle of sound and motion that Hood had just witnessed.

  Hood thought of his family, lined up shoulder-to-shoulder on these same bleachers, soft drinks in their hands and plugs in their ears while the top fuel eliminators and funny cars rocketed past. He was five. They would stay with an uncle in Pasadena and make the drive to Pomona for the races. Hood loved then what he loved now: the smell of the fuel and the sound of the engines and the impossible velocity shaped by human skill into a straight line. And he had always liked the way you could get a pit pass and meet the drivers and the crew and see the cars up close.

  Ariel was matched up against Walt Bledsoe in the fifth race. Bledsoe’s AA methane rail was black and cobalt blue—a stallion with major attitude. According to Hood’s program, Bledsoe was tenth in the states in the NHRA Sportsman Top Alcohol Dragster Class. Ariel was forty-first. When her red-and-gold rail came onto the launching pad burping fire and smoke Hood was impressed and proud. He looked down at her in the cockpit, harnessed in, her helmet soon to be pushed back against the seat in an explosion of power. The two rivals did their burnouts, jockeying and bellowing at each other. Then they rumbled up to the starting line and the lights on the Christmas tree illuminated downward.

  Flames belched from the chrome pipes and the dragsters were off. Both drivers were a little eager on the throttle and Hood saw the faint rise of their front ends, then the corrections—a shimmy as weight moved downward—followed by a surge of speed and a howling sprint to the finish line. The parachutes deployed and filled and the finish light gave the win to Bledsoe: 215 mph in 6.64 seconds.

  Hood stood and clapped as Ariel guided her car off the track. She won her next race and lost her last. By then it was dark and the starless sky above was heavy with the gathering storm.

  Hood found her in the pit, helping get the car onto its trailer behind a big silver pickup truck. Her crew of three ignored him. When the dragster was fastened down Ariel shook hands with each one; then the crew climbed into the truck and eased it out of the pit and toward the exit. She watched the truck and trailer amble slowly into the darkness.

  “Didn’t exactly set any records,” she said.

  “You’ve got a steady foot, young lady.”

  She leaned into the bed of a shiny black El Camino and brought two beers from a cooler.

  “Let’s walk,” she said.

  The pit was almost empty of fans now but Ariel stopped and talked with a few other drivers. They congratulated each other with easy fraternity.

  Then Hood and Ariel walked down the track, beers in hand, she in one lane and he in the other. The lights were still on above the bleachers and the safety railing shone softly.

  “My mom and grandmother raced,” she said. “And my daddy and granddad—that’d be Bill and Frank. Frank died eight years ago but Dad’s still going strong.”

  “My dad’s got Alzheimer’s.”

  “I’m sorry for that.”

  “It’s just a fact.”

  Ariel sipped her beer, then reached out the bottle and tapped it against the finish light stanchion.

  “It’s a family thing. Generation after generation, speeding down the track. But I’ll let you in on a little secret—I don’t care if I win or not. I don’t do it for history. I do it because it thrills me.”

  “To thrills,” said Hood. They touched bottles.

  Some time passed and Hood sensed that Ariel was brooding in her silence.

  “You think thrills are a sign of immaturity,” she said. “Because you were a soldier. Because you enforce the law on the street. Because your partner got shot to death right in front of you.”

  “Nothing about you is immature, Ms. Reed.”

  “I said you think thrills are overrated.”

  “You don’t know what I think.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “I like it that you put bad guys in jail. I like it that you drag race. I like your smile.”

  She pulled the band off her ponytail and shook out her hair. “I’m wound tight as a golf ball, Charlie.”

  “I know.”

  “Doesn’t that make you want to walk away?”

  “It makes me wonder what makes you tick.”

  “You found out what made Allison Murrieta tick. An armed robber.”

  “Thrills,” Hood said. “Gain. Fame. Vengeance. History. It was complicated.”

  “There must be something in the thrill seeker that attracts you.”

  “She loved fast cars, like you do.”

  “It’s not really my business, but you and her were about all the DA’s office talked about for most of that week.”

  They walked into the grandstands and up the rows of empty seats. When they got to the top it started to rain and Hood could hear the patter on the sunscreen over their heads. The drops came faster and heavier and the racetrack looked like it was coming to a boil. They sat and looked out at the track and watched the rain slant down through the lights.

  “Bakersfield. You like the music, Deputy?”

  “I wish they’d make more of it. I got just about all of it they ever recorded. They put out a Bill Woods Live at the Blackboard in ’03. Red Simpson, Don Rich. Great CD.”

  “I wish I could play an instrument. I’ve got no discernable talent for anything. Except maybe for splitting atoms, as you pointed out.”

  “It was kind of a compliment. I took it as one.”

  “Wish I had another beer,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  “Long walk back to the cooler in this rain.”

  “Let’s watch it for a minute.”

  “While you tell me about Shay Eichrodt.”

  He told her what he’d seen and heard. Ariel listened without interrupting, her expression dark.

  “You really think Laws and Draper cuffed him and beat him?” she asked.

  “Possibly.”

  “I very highly doubt it.”

  “I can go one uglier.”

  “They killed Vasquez and Lopes and took their money, which explains Terry Laws’s sudden fortune.”

  “That and a whole lot more,” he said.

  Hood looked out at the rain.

  “All you have is the very questionable word of a brain-damaged felon who can face a death sentence if he’s convicted,” said Ariel.

  “In some simple-ass way, that’s why I think he’s telling the truth.”

  “If a jury doesn’t, the state can execute him.”

  “Yes, it can,” said Hood. “But what’s he supposed to do? Shut up and stay in a mental hospital the rest of his life?”

  The rain roared against the shade roof above them. Hood watched the water pour off the racetrack lights, little waterfalls bent south by the wind of the storm.

  “What’s all that me
an to a Blood gangsta machine-gunning Terry Laws one night?” asked Ariel.

  “I don’t know what it means.”

  “What have the homicide guys come up with?”

  “Londell Dwayne. He looks right. He’d threatened Terry. We talked to him but his alibi fell apart pretty quick. Next thing, Londell maced two detectives and blew into the wind.”

  They sat for a long while without saying a word. The rain got heavier, then it slowed. Hood held her hand as they went down the wet steps and across the track to the pit.

  They got into her El Camino and she gave Hood a ride to the parking lot.

  “Nice Camaro,” she said. “Glasspacks and fat soft tires. Maybe you’re not immune to thrills after all.”

  “I’m really not.”

  She pushed the car into park and took Hood’s face in both her hands and kissed him and he kissed her back.

  “Nice,” she said. “Very nice. Thank you. That’s a dumb thing to say.”

  “Thank you. There.”

  Hood got out of the El Camino and shut the door. Ariel gunned the engine and looked at him for a long moment, then smiled. Suddenly the El Camino burned away and slid into a big screaming one-eighty on the wet asphalt, back tires throwing up rooster tails of water, which brought her right back to where she’d started. Her window came down.

  “Call me later.”

  19

  In the Hole’s early chill Hood unlocked the center drawer of his desk. The CD was there—a recording of the anonymous tipper. And so was Coleman Draper’s package from HR, both promised by Warren.

  He listened to the recording. It was just as Ariel had described it—hissing with wind noise, barely audible, a drunk-sounding man with an accent. Hood knew that spectrographic voice prints were not allowed as evidence in California state courts but he was still hoping that the recording would be clear enough to tell him something about the caller. Now he doubted it.

  This was disappointing, but what Hood really wanted was a basic understanding of Coleman Draper.

  First he scanned through Draper’s package, which was surprisingly light, even for a reservist. Hood went straight to the money, looking for signs of Draper’s cut of the courier cash, which had sent Terry Laws into the charitable trust scam. Draper’s bank was First West, and at the time of his “hire” four years ago by LASD, he had a savings account with $5,890 in it, and a money market savings account of $15,433, a stock portfolio valued at $12,740, and a SEP IRA with $8,500 in it. He was making reasonable payments on a home in Venice Beach, with a purchase price of $939,000. He owned a late-model Audi valued at $40,000. His last year’s income from Prestige German was $82,000.

  Hood’s computer led him to newspaper accounts and government sites and the usual personal sites and pages. His law enforcement status got him into state and county information that a normal civilian cannot access.

  He read patiently.

  Coleman Marcus Draper was born on December 12, 1980, to Gerald and Mary Draper, formerly Coleman. That made him about three months younger than Hood was.

  Gerald and Mary briefly made the news in 1990 when a local man named Mike Castro was gunned down outside their restaurant in Jacumba. They said he was a regular customer and a nice guy. The restaurant was called Amigos. According to unnamed sources, Castro was a suspected smuggler of drugs and human beings.

  Coleman attended San Diego County public schools and graduated from Campo High School in 1998. He was the oldest of three children—his sister, Roxanne, was twelve and his brother, Ron, was ten when an explosion rocked the Draper home in Jacumba.

  Hood read from the digitized San Diego Union-Tribune of February 5, 1995:

  FOUR PERISH IN JACUMBA BLAZE

  Four members of a Jacumba family were killed early yesterday morning when their home exploded into fire.

  A minor and a neighbor who was spending the night survived the blast but authorities are withholding both names pending further notifications.

  One firefighter suffered smoke inhalation but was treated at the scene.

  A San Diego County Fire Department spokesman said the apparent cause of the fire was a propane gas leak but the fire is still under investigation.

  The fire broke out in the early morning hours when the family was sleeping. It is believed that the victims died of asphyxiation while they slept.

  Liquid propane turns to an odorless gas at normal pressure and is usually mixed with a strong odor-causing compound in case of leaks. Flames rapidly engulfed the wood-sided home.

  A county fire crew extinguished the fire after a one-hour battle. No neighboring structures were damaged.

  Jacumba is a small town of less than 1,000 on the U.S. Mexican border in East County.

  George Bryan, a neighbor, said the family were lifelong residents of the quiet border town and were well liked. He said that his dogs woke him up barking in the early morning but the house had not yet begun to burn. He said “it sounded like a bomb went off” shortly before four a.m. when the house exploded.

  Hood studied the page-one photograph of the Draper home after the fire—blackened and skeletal, nearly roofless, windows and doors blasted out by the firefighters’ hoses.

  A follow-up story the next day identified the four victims, and the survivor, Coleman Draper, fifteen. His friend, Israel Castro, was on the property at the time of the fire, and was unhurt.

  The boys were friends and sophomores at Campo High. They had been sleeping in the barn with the family dogs, something that they had done several times in the past, especially on cold nights. The Union-Tribune said the temperature in Jacumba that night got down to thirty-seven degrees.

  There was a picture of young Coleman sitting on a blue sleeping bag on a bed of hay in the Draper barn with two Jack Russell terriers and two Labrador retrievers nearby. He looked to Hood much like the Coleman Draper he’d had breakfast with just a few short days ago—slender-faced, serious, a curl of white hair on his forehead. In the picture he had a blank look on his face; and though he was looking at the camera, his eyes seemed to be focused on something else.

  Two days later a county fire department spokesman said that the cause of the fire was a faulty propane coupling on a hot water heater located in the hallway.

  “The gas leaks into the home and if the people are asleep they might not awaken to the smell,” he said. “When the accumulated gas hits a pilot flame or any kind of spark, it explodes. Even static electricity can ignite a gas-filled room.”

  Hood saw that one month later there was a Union-Tribune article about the friends Coleman Draper and Israel Castro. It pictured the two boys outside the barn, dogs present again.

  The article said that five years ago the Draper family had taken in then-ten-year-old Israel Castro after his father was murdered by suspected drug cartel gunmen. Three years after that, Israel had left the Draper home and moved in with relatives living across the border fence dividing Jacumba of the United States from Jacume of Mexico.

  Now, in what the writer called a reversal of fortune, fifteen-year-old Coleman was going to move in with Israel’s extended family in Jacume. It would be temporary. He would finish his education at Campo High. It was an example of good international relations.

  And, as far as Hood could determine, it was the last time Coleman Draper was mentioned in the Union-Tribune.

  A decade later, Israel Castro’s name appeared twice more, both in connection with water-rights issues and his businesses, East County Tile & Stone, and Castro Commercial Management.

  Hood looked out the narrow window of his prison room and saw the morning sun reflected on the razor wire of the eastern cell block. The storm had passed and the high desert was damp, clear and cold.

  He wondered how Coleman had gotten along in Jacume, if Coleman had been allowed to bring his dogs, if Draper and Israel Castro were still friends.

  And he wondered what the San Diego County Health and Human Services case worker had thought of young Coleman running off to live with a friend
in a smuggler’s hive like Jacume.

  But most of all Hood wondered if the fire investigators could explain why the propane coupler had leaked abundantly on February 4, but apparently not before.

  THREE HOURS LATER he was sitting across a desk from Teresa Acuna, head of the Child Welfare Services in National City. She had handled the Coleman Draper family-to-family living arrangement back in 1995.

  “We had grant money to seed that program,” she said. She was black-haired and heavyset, early forties. “There had been some success in Ohio. The idea was to make it easier for the families of children who were friends to become foster caregivers. We wanted continuity, familiarity, cohesion. In Coleman’s case, this was complicated by the fact that Israel Castro’s extended family was living in Mexico. We’d never tried anything like that before, so we opened talks with the Baja Norte Bureau of Social Services. At first they said it would be impossible. Then they said it wouldn’t be a problem. That kind of wavering is not as unusual as it sounds, in a place where graft, corruption and dishonesty abound.”

  “Jacume.”

  “Jacumba. East County. North Baja. The entire border, really. It’s a paradise of iniquity out there.”

  “Baja Norte Social Services changed its mind?”

  “Yes. With no explanation. The Castro family was influential and I assumed that they were behind it. When I say family, I mean it loosely. I personally traveled to Jacume to see the home that Coleman had been invited into. It was neat and clean and large and had a free and open feeling to it. Although there were only an aunt and an uncle of Israel’s present that day, I knew from my Jacumba sources that the home was actually shared by three married couples and usually filled with children—cousins, friends, friends of friends. There were frequent guests. The uncle was a landowner in the Santo Tomas Valley. He grew grapes and owned a large winery. He had government connections in Mexico City. There was a taint of prison in that line of the Castros—not the uncle, but the uncle’s uncle. This was not talked about.”

  “Why did you let the boy into this paradise of iniquity?”