The Renegades: A Charlie Hood Novel

by T. Jefferson Parker

  After that were the long confusing hours in court. All he understood about it was that his ass was in a sling and he couldn’t remember a fuckin’ thing. The worst part was remembering, then not having words to describe the memory, then having the memory go away again. He said that memory is the only thing that means squat, without it we’d all be just rocks.

  Eichrodt told them that after court he wanted to die, and at the mental hospital he hung himself with a strip of bedsheet but the ceiling sprinkler came off from his weight and he stood there in the middle of his room with the noose around his neck and the water coming down, freezing his ass off instead of being dead. But a few days from then he started feeling a little better, and the medications began to free his memory but he thought that the cold water had something to do with it and son of a bitch if Dr. Rosen hadn’t told him that an early American mental therapy was dunking the maniacs in cold water hoping to shock them out of being nuts but it didn’t do nothing but half freeze them. He said Dr. Rosen was a genius.

  Hood drove and listened and said nothing. Ariel turned in her seat so she could maintain eye contact with Eichrodt, and she made notes.

  She asked if the deputies had their guns out when they approached his car.

  He said they did not.

  She looked at Hood, then back at Eichrodt and asked him if they said anything to him.

  He said nothing but license and registration and step out of the car, please. During the whole time they were whackin’ on him all they did was grunt, like it was just a job they had to get through.

  She asked about the white van, Lopes and Vasquez.

  He said they kept asking him that in court. And he kept trying to remember and maybe talked himself into remembering something that never happened. Because if you can forget something that did happen, you could just as easily remember something that didn’t, right? But now he knew he never saw any white van or any dead men or any money. He said he didn’t see one goddamned interesting thing that whole night until the cops’ lights showed up in his rearview mirror and he pulled over and the little blond and the muscleman got out. And if he really had taken all this money and put it in his truck, then the deputies must have found it and turned it in, right? Right? So what was the big deal?

  They drove for a while in silence.

  “Man,” said Eichrodt. “Did you see that hawk back there?”

  “It was a red-shouldered,” said Ariel.

  “Had something in his claws.”

  “Looked like a gopher,” said Ariel.

  “To me it looked like a hot dog but I doubt it.” He watched the bird sail over a hillside. “Thanks for driving. I’m gonna take a…ah fuck, you know a…”

  “Nap,” said Ariel.

  “You read my smashed-up mind.”

  He leaned his big head back on the rest and fell asleep.

  A few minutes later Ariel handed Hood a sheet of paper from her notepad. It said: Does he remember the truth, or just how to lie?

  Hood shrugged and she wrote again.

  I don’t believe what I just heard. I believe every word of it.

  Hood nodded and steered the car south down Highway 101. They stopped in Carpinteria for lunch and got an outside table in the cool afternoon, where the orange giant wouldn’t get stared at by customers. Eichrodt concentrated on his food and ate slowly. When the sun came out from behind the clouds Eichrodt faced it and closed his eyes.

  “I never got my ass kicked that bad,” he said. “Makes me feel old. I don’t need that kinda shit. You going to send me to prison?”

  A moment of silence.

  “Shay,” said Ariel. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with you.”

  He nodded and smiled, his eccentrically white false teeth gleaming and perfect.

  “I like it longer,” he said, pointing at her hair with a fried fillet of cod.

  “Thanks, Shay. Finish your lunch.”

  He nodded and gave her an arch stare.

  AFTER DELIVERING Eichrodt to the county jail that evening, Hood and Ariel had dinner at the Pacific Dining Car and drinks at the Edison. This would have cost Hood the day’s pay but Ariel insisted on paying half, and she talked her way into a good table at the Edison on what turned out to be a very busy night.

  She sipped an appletini and stared off into the crowd but she didn’t seem to focus on anything.

  “You did a good thing today, Charlie. We’ll reconsider the case against Eichrodt. With Laws dead and Draper under suspicion we might have to delay or dismiss. That could lead us to charges against Draper. With the kind of detail Eichrodt was giving us today, I think a jury would believe him. I did. Mostly.”

  “Good you asked him whether Laws and Draper had their guns out on the approach,” Hood said. “That’s important.”

  “It sure got my attention. If the deputies really believed they’d pulled over a double murderer with a truck full of drug money, they’d have had their guns out and ready. That’s when I thought—this guy might be telling the truth.”

  “And Rosen can lay down a medical foundation for the recovery,” Hood said. “He’s musty and kind and believable.”

  It was Hood’s turn to stare off at the people in the bar, and consider what he was doing. Six months ago he had helped to bust a fellow deputy, and failed to help a reckless woman stay alive. He had voluntarily left L.A. for Antelope Valley, where he had hoped for quieter days and time to reflect. But now he was IA and deep into a cold case involving murdered drug couriers, suspect deputies, mysterious piles of money and a machine-gunned partner. Hood felt like a wrecking ball.

  “What?” said Ariel.

  “I used to like being a deputy.”

  “You still should. You’re a good one.”

  Hood wondered if that could be true. “In Anbar I got myself hated for chasing some soldiers who murdered a family for no good reason. There were some bad reasons. Now, back here, I spend half my time ruining the lives of my own men. Ariel, I signed up to throw the bad guys in jail.”

  “But they come in all shapes and sizes. And, sometimes, uniforms.”

  “I don’t feel sorry for them. Or for myself. What I’m saying is I want to be part of a team I believe in. I want it real clear—us and them. Us and them. I want to believe in us. I want to be on our side. Simple.”

  “Simple hardly ever works.” She leaned forward and tapped her glass to Hood’s. “Charlie, if I could pick one guy they could clone into thousands of cops and deputies, it would be you. You’re honest and smart and you give a damn. There isn’t much more.”

  “A thousand Hoods. Scary.”

  “But we only get one of you. And to be honest, I’m very happy to be the woman sitting across from you in this bar. Glad to be in the same molecule with you, Hood—one little atom to another.”

  She gave him her small, thrifty smile and he saw the glimmer in her eyes. He looked into them. What he saw thrilled him: someone singular, irreplaceable, beautiful.

  “You’re going to make me blubber,” he said.

  “We have napkins.”

  Hood smiled back and sipped his drink. An old man came across the room toward them. He walked slowly with an ornately carved cane. His hair was white and neat and his eyes were clear. His suit was expensive and well tailored. When he got to their table he stopped and put both hands on the cane and looked down at Ariel, then at Hood.

  “It is good to see two young people who are happy,” he said. “Enjoy every sandwich.” He nodded and slowly walked away.

  “What a nice thing to say,” said Ariel. She flushed and the color was still on her fair cheeks. Her dark hair shined and she looked brilliant.

  “Charlie, you know I love to drive. Name something you like to do.”

  “I drive a lot, too. Not racing. Just driving and watching out the windows. I drive hours and hours and hours for work, then I drive more. Then I dream about driving. Then I wake up and drive again.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m looking for
something that got away.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Where did it get away from?”

  “Inside. I actually felt it go. So I weighed myself and I was a pound and a half lighter. But you know how bathroom scales are.”

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “No, I’m really not.”

  She studied Hood with her level gaze, her legal assessment look. Then she pulled her chair closer and put her hand inside his jacket and over his heart.

  “Something’s left in there, Charlie. You didn’t get completely cleaned out.”

  Hood lowered his face to hers, touched her temple with his nose, breathed in. She turned and brushed his lips with hers.

  “Let’s drive,” he said.

  Hood drove the Camaro over to Sunset, then headed up into the Hollywood Hills. He passed the turnout where Allison Murrieta had taken him last summer and he tried to postpone the memory of her for just a moment, but this was a new thing for him and he felt disloyal. He found another overlook, a little farther up. He parked the car and left the engine idling and the defroster on low. Below them the dark flanks of the hillsides cut shapes in the city lights, and above them a cloud drifted, quiet as a ghost, over the moon. The stars glimmered in the sharp March night.

  “Let’s continue that kiss, Hood.”

  They continued it. Even with the defroster on, the windows fogged up and Hood had to turn the air conditioner on also to get them clear again. He pawed blindly at the controls with one outstretched arm, the other still wrapped around Ariel, their lips locked in a passion for the ages. He felt like a teenager.

  Much later Hood drove back down out of the hills to Ariel’s car, still in a downtown lot near the Edison. He stood by her El Camino as she let herself in.

  “Come to my place,” he said.

  “Could you replace a hot outlaw with an atom-splitting lawyer?”

  “You can’t replace anybody with anybody.”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Does someone else have that honor?”

  “Once upon a time.”

  “He was lucky.”

  “He’s no longer with us. Or, is he?”

  “I understand that question. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s enough. That’s adequate. That was a good kiss.”

  33

  That Friday night Hood followed Draper’s M5 three or four cars back from Venice to Cudahy, then dropped even farther behind when the streets narrowed. The windows of the BMW were tinted dark, and the most Hood could see of the driver was a profile and a flash of blond as he made a turn. Hood knew Cudahy as a rough little city, a backwater of gangs and drug trafficking and bureaucratic corruption, once patrolled by LASD, now patrolled by a police department with a poor reputation.

  He also knew that one of Cudahy’s criminal fixtures, a heavy named Hector Avalos, was found shot to death last week just a few miles from here, dumped on a side street in South Gate. But Hood knew that Avalos was a Cudahy homie all the way, had done his time in County and Corcoran, and was widely suspected of running narcotics out of this complex. Hood had heard the rumors of dogfighting. Avalos was tight with the city government. There was a big funeral for him but from what Hood had heard, nobody from city hall showed up.

  From a curbside two blocks away he saw men depart the shadows and escort Draper’s car off the street and into what looked like a large warehouse. Hood heard the boom of the rolling metal door when it closed. The men were gone. He drove around the block once and parked out of sight down the dark avenue, and waited.

  The laptop on the seat beside him in the Camaro had a large monitor with a brilliant picture. The color maps of the locator program had five levels, from a one-block close-up to a five-hundred-square-mile overview. In any setting, Draper’s car was marked by a flashing red X. If his car moved so did the arrow, at a proportionally corresponding rate. The nearest address and cross-streets were listed in a window on the right of the screen, when applicable. When Draper had hit sixty on a Cudahy boulevard, the window was a blur of letters and numbers, like a slot machine in midwhirl. The locator program even had a beeper, so Hood could estimate distances by the frequency of the tone.

  An hour and a half later the black M5 came rumbling out of the warehouse and bounced onto the street. Hood let Draper get around the first corner, then pulled away from the curb.

  Southbound traffic was light until they hit Santa Ana, where a new-car transport trailer had jackknifed and closed all lanes of Interstate 5. New Toyotas were littered across the asphalt, some on their sides, some upside down, all with the protective white tape still wrapped around them. Hood winced at the sight of the battered new cars. The heavy traffic was detoured off at Seventeenth Street, then through Santa Ana and Tustin and finally back onto the interstate again at Red Hill. It took forty minutes.

  In San Clemente Draper exited suddenly at Palizada. Hood wondered if he suspected he was being followed, but he couldn’t see how or why. Hood stayed well behind the Beemer. Draper drove directly to a fast-food place, pulled into the drive-through line, ordered, paid, got his bags and was back on the freeway in less than ten minutes.

  An hour after that he pulled into the passenger vehicle entry lane to Mexico at the border crossing in San Ysidro.

  Hood glassed Draper’s car from a parking lot of a Mexican insurance office. His Steiner Night Hunter binoculars brought him in very close to the M5, and the special lens coatings allowed in a remarkable amount of light. There were four cars in front of Draper. When it came his turn Hood could see him handing identification to the Customs man. Soldiers walked around the M5, inspecting it with a lazy curiosity. Then the official handed back Draper’s ID and waved him through.

  The flashing red X vanished, as Hood had known it would. The virtual world ends at the border—Mexico is as free from the digital net as the United States is clutched by it. Which left Hood with the task of following someone who didn’t want to be followed. He knew that Draper would spot him.

  So he put down the binoculars and sat in the lot for a while, then drove to a market and loaded up on food and drinks with lots of caffeine in them, and a cooler and ice to keep them. He bought a plastic beverage bottle in case he got stuck away from a bathroom for too long a time. He found a restaurant lot and parked away from the building, facing the incoming border traffic. He was only about one hundred yards from the U.S. Customs booths.

  He ate and drank and listened to the radio. He turned on the beeper full volume, walked around the car a few times, then dozed and ate and drank more. It was midnight, then it was two, then it was two-ten. He moved to another lot with a worse view. He dozed and waited for the beeper to sound.

  It went off just after three-thirty. Hood followed the black M5 through San Ysidro and onto the northbound 5, headed for L.A. He stayed six or seven cars back and both cars made good time in the light predawn traffic.

  Then Draper cut northeast on the 57, took it all the way up to the 210 and exited in Azusa. He drove up Azusa Avenue to where it changed to San Gabriel Canyon, and rounded the bend. The road was almost deserted so Hood pulled over and watched the screen. Draper exited San Gabriel Canyon at Mirador, drove three short blocks and stopped moving at 122 Clearwater. Hood waited ten minutes for the red X to start up again but it didn’t.

  Hood drove to Mirador and started across a bridge over the San Gabriel River. The river was whitecapped and high from the recent rain and he rolled down his windows to hear it. When he reached the peak of the bridge at the halfway point he saw the community guardhouse on the far side, still faintly lit in the dawn. Behind it he saw the nice new houses, gated and huddled up against the steep San Gabriel Mountains. As he approached he saw that the entrance barrier was down and the booth light was on and a guard was inside, hunched in a heavy black jacket. Hood stopped in the pull-out short of the booth, U-turned and headed back across the river.

  BACK IN THE HOLE at the prison, Hood did a title search
of 122 Clearwater in Azusa and came up with the Ronald Draper Trust. He thought about that for a minute, then did title searches on units 18, 29 and 45 at the Laguna Royale.

  And just as he had figured, one of them was owned by the Roxanne Draper Trust.

  Both properties had been purchased in the last year and a half. Hood called the county to confirm what he suspected: Coleman Draper was the sole trustee for both trusts.

  Because it was Saturday, it took Hood a long time to track down an official with the Azusa Water District, but when he finally found someone she was able to tell him that the water bills for 122 Clearwater were paid by Alexia Rivas. Another half hour of phone calls got him a Laguna-Moulton Water District assistant manager who said that water service charges to unit 18 of the Laguna Royale were paid by Juliet Brown.

  HOOD MET JIM Warren at a Palmdale bar one hour later. It was strictly a drinker’s place: a TV, a country-only jukebox, a shrunken old bartender wearing jeans, a red cowboy shirt, and a belt with a buckle the size of his head. There was a pool table in the middle of the room but no players.

  They carried their drinks to an empty booth in the back. In the dim overhead light Warren looked old and weathered.

  Hood told him about Draper’s run to Mexico and back. He told him about the Friday nights that Terry Laws had invariably taken off work since the murders of Vasquez and Lopes, and the Friday night fishing trips that Draper had talked about with Deputy Sherry Seborn. Hood told him about the valuable properties in Laguna and Azusa that Draper had bought in the last year and a half.