The Renegades: A Charlie Hood Novel

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Hood thought for a moment about how a person can be one way to some people and the complete opposite to others. Nature. Training. Necessity. Juliet was not a fool, but she had been fooled by Coleman Draper.

  “Juliet,” he said. “Coleman Draper is alone in his own world. The rest of us are only in it to be used. He would explain himself to you with different words. But that’s what he does.”

  She took another long draw on the wine, then held up her glass and rocked it at the waitress.

  “When was the last time you saw him?” Hood asked.

  “He was home last Tuesday and Wednesday.”

  “Do you know when he’ll come home to you again?”

  “There is no plan. There is never a plan.”

  “That just changed,” Hood said. “We’re going to make a plan to arrest him. He’s dangerous—to you, to everyone. You do the right thing and nobody else will get hurt. Will you help us do that?”

  “You strip my illusions and break my heart, then demand civic responsibility?”

  “That’s right,” said Stekol with a smile. “Same thing that happens to us cops every day we show up for work.”

  The waitress set a glass of wine on the table. Juliet looked at it but didn’t drink. “I wondered if he had other women. I convinced myself that it didn’t matter. Coleman and I are an arrangement. But I didn’t simply fall into it. I jumped. I closed my eyes and jumped.”

  “You don’t owe him anything,” said Hood.

  “I still don’t believe that I’ve been making love to a murderer. I truly felt it in him at times—love.”

  “You’re not the only one he fooled, Ms. Brown,” said Stekol. “He fooled our whole force. There’s hundreds and hundreds of us.”

  “Can you help us?” Hood asked.

  “I will help you.”

  “No,” he said. “Can you? Can you fool him? Can you lie to him convincingly? He’ll be alert to anything different because now he knows that we know.”

  She took another long sip of the wine. “I’ve never been a good liar.”

  “I’m going to make it easy. If he tells you he’s coming, call me before he gets there. If he arrives unannounced, wait until it’s safe to call me. Wait an hour. Wait a day.”

  “And act as if everything is the same.”

  “He already knows that nothing is the same. So you can’t give him any reason to suspect you. If you can’t do this, Juliet, say no. It’s dangerous—it can come down to a word, a moment, a look. I won’t ask you to and you don’t have to.”

  Juliet looked at the men. Having interviewed so many suspects and dealt with so many crooks, Hood had a good sense for the lie. But he also had a good sense for the truth, and some people are not capable of duplicity.

  “We never talked,” said Stekol. “Erase us from your mind. And put Coleman back in. Put him back in just like he was before—cute and full of love for you and so intuitive when it comes to your feelings.”

  “Don’t mock me.”

  “No mockery at all,” he said. “If a woman was as good to me as Coleman is to you, I’d be with her every minute I could.”

  She swirled her wine and frowned down into it. “How sure are you about what he’s done?”

  “I took a bullet in the back four nights ago because of him,” said Hood. “That’s how sure I am.”

  “But what if you’re wrong?”

  “Then he’ll walk and sue us and I’ll still have a nice scar to talk about. And you and Coleman can stay together and be happy and look back on what fools we cops were.”

  “I don’t think that that is impossible.”

  “He betrayed you,” said Stekol.

  She finished her wine and set down the glass. She didn’t look at either of them. “I can do it.”

  Stekol glanced at Hood. His expression said: But will you?

  40

  Draper walked into his Laguna Beach condominium a week later, tan and fit. He set his bags in the entry-way but kept the box tucked under his arm. He looked through the sliding glass door at the pale moonlit cove and the glimmering black Pacific and thought of the sliding glass door through which Hood had escaped in Jacume. And he thought of the bad luck of having a U.S. task force apparently mistake his pursuit of lowly deputy Charlie Hood for an upper-level cartel disturbance. Because of that, Hood was still alive, and the tunnel was useless, and extra law enforcement attention was now focused on Jacumba and Jacume, and Draper would never work again as a reserve deputy, at least for the LASD. It was a small consolation that he still had his shield and service sidearm.

  He heard the faint sound of the TV from the bedroom, and saw the subtle shift in the light as it played into the hall.

  “Coleman?”

  Draper stood in the bedroom doorway. “Who else lets himself in here at night?”

  “So many. But you’re the one I miss.”

  Draper was not used to sincere greetings from Juliet, even humorous ones. This was an Alexia greeting. It put him on alert though he was tired of being alert.

  She was sitting up in bed, surrounded by pillows, a glass of wine on her nightstand. She had on red satin pajamas and a black silk robe with a multicolored dragon on it. She tapped the sheet beside her and he came in and sat there. He handed her the long gold box.

  “Things did not go well.”

  “I tried your number.”

  “I have a new one.”

  She opened the box and smiled and touched a blossom. “Beautiful.”

  He leaned in over the roses and kissed her, just barely touching. He inhaled her breath and gently bit her lip. He took a deep breath of clean cool Laguna air and cut roses and slowly blew it back into her. Her hand was warm on his cheek.

  “Disaster, Juliet.”

  “Did anyone die?”

  “Not that kind. The kind that will multiply and complicate, like a tumor.”

  “I’m very sorry, Coleman. But you look good. Did you draw an assignment in Maui?”

  He smiled. They had a standing joke that if secretive, world-hopping Coleman were to travel to Maui for work, he would have to take her. She loved the Grand Wailea. In fact he had fled to Honolulu on a forged ID and spent six days lost among the tourists in Waikiki. She parted the lapel of his sport coat just a little, confirming the gun.

  “Juliet, I wish it had been Maui.”

  “Let’s just go there on our own.”

  He looked at her. He instinctively distrusted her eagerness. He had not chosen her for eagerness, but for her stubborn reticence, her pride, her belief that she could fight distance with distance.

  He got off the bed and went to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of the wine. The bottle was half full but there was an empty in the wastebasket under the sink and when he touched the opening his finger and thumb came back wet. She drank more when stressed. So far tonight: emotional, eager, stressed. He looked out at the aimless heave of ocean, and the cracking little waves racing up the sand. He thought that everything might really be okay. Juliet might just be happy to see him, and stressed by work, or by her inability to conceive children, or by life itself. Or not at all. Maybe he was reacting poorly.

  He still felt some of the raw surprise and insult he had felt upon seeing the GPS transmitter clamped to the chassis of the M5. But it was more than surprise and insult. It was a total questioning of self. Of his intelligence, his abilities, his preparedness and his luck.

  Hood: whistle-blowing, skirt-chasing, slow-on-the-draw, Bakersfield hick Charlie Hood. When Draper had seen the transmitter, and later the image of Hood himself sitting in the black Charger in Jacumba—caught by a security camera hidden in a tree—Draper had for the first time in his life felt enmity toward a fellow human. It was a new emotion for him, or at least a sharpening of older ones, and very different in its magnitude. For the first time in his life he truly wanted to kill somebody, rather than simply seeing that it was the easiest and most practical thing to do. Other people had come between him and his desires, but H
ood had thrown himself between them. Hood had seen him.

  She came into the kitchen with her wineglass and hugged him lightly, then went into the living room and turned on the gas fireplace. The flame popped to life behind the ceramic logs. Juliet sat on the leather love seat and crossed her legs under a throw blanket. She looked at the flames.

  “Come sit with me,” she said. “We can see a beach without tourists and a flame without fire. I’ll rub your back.”

  Draper joined her, set his wineglass on the end table and leaned forward, elbows on knees. He felt her hands on his clenched neck and knotted shoulders. She was empathetic, her strong fingers drawn straight to the trouble spots and the bundled tension. He’d been riding in the SUV that turned over, and he’d wrenched his neck and shoulder. The driver had taken one of Hood’s bullets through his hand and gotten safety glass shards in his face.

  Draper took a deep breath and let it out. Juliet’s thumbs found two mounds of pain on either side of an upper vertebra and she methodically kneaded them away. She was better tonight than usual. Another concern. By the time she finished half an hour later and led him to their bed, Draper was sure that something had happened and he was reasonably sure what it was.

  She made love to him with less self-absorption than usual, now more generous and attuned to him. When they were finally finished he held her face against his beating heart and he smelled her tears before he felt them on his skin.

  “Talk to me, Juliet.”

  She sobbed instead.

  “When something hurts you it hurts me,” he said. “We can’t have a beach without tourists and a flame without fire and tears without a reason, all in one night, can we?”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you something.”

  “I know. What is it?”

  “They asked me to betray you. Hood and Stekol.”

  He felt the adrenaline hit. It wasn’t there and then it was. He felt his body fortify itself and his vision take on a new sharpness as he looked to his holster lying on the floor beside his shoes.

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said yes. I said I would call when you came.”

  He said nothing while he dressed and slid on the shoulder rig and put on his coat over it. He stood to the side of the bedroom window and looked through the edge of the drawn blinds without touching them. More condos. A street lamp. A peek of Pacific Coast Highway. Headlights and taillights and the glittering parade of chrome, glass and paint.

  “Are they watching us now?”

  “No. I’m supposed to call.”

  “How do you know they’re not watching us, Juliet? Why would you say that to me?”

  “I can’t be sure. You have to trust me. I told them I would call, Coleman. I deceived them. But I need to ask you a question.”

  Draper was glad for the darkness of the room because she couldn’t see him. What he had wanted to do to Hood he now wanted to do to Juliet, but the desire was urgent, and here she was, not five feet away, utterly defenseless.

  His voice was a mamba in dry grass. “Ask.”

  “Did you kill the men they say you killed?”

  He walked to the bed and looked down at her. He lay beside her and again held her head against his heart. He stroked her hair and took the back of her slender neck in his strong right hand, and he pressed his body down the length of hers. “I did not. Before you and the god of beaches, flame, and tears, I swear to you that I’ve never killed anyone in my life.”

  “I would know it if you did.”

  “You would know it if I did.”

  “I told them you didn’t.”

  “You told the truth.”

  “They told me about Alexia.”

  “Alexia is married to my cousin. They rent my property in a town called Azusa. She’s not their business, or your worry, Juliet.”

  She moved her face away from his in order to see him but he knew she would not see him truly enough. Her eyes were wet stones in the darkness.

  “I told them we’re an arrangement but that’s not true anymore. I love you, Coleman. With all of my big unruly mess of a heart, I love you.”

  “I love you, Juliet. I’ll call you and tell you what to say to them. I’ll tell you what to do.”

  “I need that now.”

  Draper glided off the bed and looked again through the crack alongside the blinds, then he went to the living room. There was nothing in the bags to incriminate him, nothing that he needed.

  The best way out, in case they were watching, was through the sliding glass door, down to the beach, south across the cove and over the rocks, then through the side streets to Coast Highway. A cab would get him up to Newport and he could figure things from there.

  He went back into the bedroom and kissed Juliet on the cheek and told her he loved her again. Her fingers trailed off his face.

  Then he unlocked and opened the slider and slipped out and carefully pushed it closed. He was thankful that he could do this instead of jumping through it headfirst like Hood.

  He leaned back and skied down the embankment, his shoes filling with beach sand, and when he hit the firmer floor of the cove he kept to the shadows of the rocks and loped south.

  41

  Saturday night was starless and damp, a night for secrets and consequence.

  Draper steered the Touareg south on I-5, past the power plant and on to Pendleton. He looked to the place he had pulled over to retrieve the piece of chrome trim caught under the chassis of the M5, and reminded himself that this had been a curse that he could still turn into a blessing.

  “So, this is all we do?” asked Bradley. “We drive a few hours and I make five grand?”

  “This is all we do.”

  “Rocky doesn’t trust me.”

  “You’ll have to do better with Herredia.”

  “He’s not famous for trusting. I heard he used a cartel rival for chum on one of his fishing trips. He personally cut up the pieces.”

  Draper heard no worry in the boy’s voice. Bradley looked out at the ocean, slid his automatic from the deep pocket of his duster, considered it, then put it back. Next he brought out a pack of chewing gum, gave a stick to Draper and took one for himself.

  “I saw the flash of green once,” the boy said absently. “Right there, off Trestles. I was sitting on my board outside, waiting for the set. It was November and when the sun went behind the water there was a green rectangle and it sat on the sky, then it was gone.”

  “I watched three sunsets in a row from Mallory Dock in Key West,” said Draper. “I never saw any flash of green or anything else.”

  But it was dark now, the sun hours down, and Draper aimed his thumb toward the box in the backseat. “What’s your gift for El Tigre?”

  “You’ll see. A lot more impressive than your collection of fishing trinkets.”

  Draper enjoyed the boy’s truculence and was annoyed by it, too. Earlier, when Bradley had loaded his box into the backseat, Draper had seen that it was heavy. The boy handled it with care. It was a square pasteboard box, big enough for a computer or a small TV perhaps, sealed with clear packing tape.

  “So,” said Bradley. “Where we picked up the luggage and weighed the money, that’s not the usual place, right?”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “There was an air of uncertainty.”

  “It was more than uncertainty.”

  “But I’m right. That’s not where it usually happens. I understand that Hector Avalos was Herredia’s L.A. man. But Hector bought it, and the money wasn’t in Cudahy. So I’m thinking Rocky is the man now. And you.”

  “Things change, Bradley. Routine is death.”

  “For Avalos it was.”

  “You should watch, shut your mouth. Learn.”

  “Yep. For five grand a week, I can do that.”

  Bradley was quiet for a while. Draper saw the lights of Oceanside to the south. At the border, Draper didn’t recognize the American Customs man, who quickly waved him through. Satur
day shift, he thought, not the Friday night people he was used to.

  The desultory Mexicans were new to him, too. They looked at his ID and LASD shield and asked him to roll down the windows of the SUV, and in the white glare of the floodlights they perused the plastic tubs of fishing gear, the loose rods, Bradley’s pasteboard box, and the rolling luggage in the back.

  When Draper had passed through Tijuana and got onto the toll road he felt the familiar relaxing of his body, the comfort of American law surrendering to the darker, more flexible liberties of Mexico.

  IN THE DUSTY DRIVEWAY of the compound Old Felipe pointed his shotgun at Bradley while a compañero patted him down. Draper studied Felipe’s puzzled expression as he sized up the boy. Bradley chattered away in Spanish. Draper saw the other gunmen, more than usual, stationed in the shadows. He knew that word of his troubles in Jacumba had traveled south on Herredia’s network. And that news of a new partner nominated to replace Terry Laws had been dispatched by Rocky through his Eme confederates. Draper had asked Rocky for positive spin. Draper was bullish that Bradley would pass his audition. Rocky had clearly disliked the boy, but the decision was Herredia’s. Draper remembered what El Tigre had once said about Laws: The desert is made for secrets. Draper hoped to hear none of that tonight, fully understanding that he was the executor of the fate of Bradley Jones.

  They entered Herredia’s inner sanctum. First went Felipe, then Draper, then Bradley, bearing his gift box, then a big man and a skinny man who went to the back corners of the room. Two more men wheeled in the luggage and went outside and closed the door behind them but Draper didn’t hear them walk away. He looked back at Felipe in his usual seat by the door, the combat shotgun across his lap, his hand on the grip and his weathered brown index finger tapping the trigger guard.