Hood heard a siren. The morning light was choked off by the crowd behind him. The boy with the earbuds and the harmonica squeezed in close beside Hood then turned and played to his audience.
43
Three days later Hood was called into Undersheriff John Robles’s office. Lieutenant Warren was there, and the coroner, Larry Parks.
Hood sat.
“We’ll get right down to it, Charlie,” said Robles. He was a short, stocky man with a head of silver hair and a wide, dashing mustache. “Your report on the Draper shooting said you fired twice. The techs recovered two casings that came from your service weapon, and two bullets—one from Draper’s body and one from a wall in the building. But Larry did the autopsy and there were three bullet holes in Draper’s body. So we’ve got a math problem. Any ideas?”
Hood’s idea was Bradley. Hood had wondered a dozen times about him: why he was there, what he was planning, what he actually did. Hood never saw or heard another gun go off—not unusual during simultaneous fire. He understood that Bradley had set him up for Draper with his invitation to breakfast, but after that, things got iffy. How and where did Bradley and Draper meet? Did Bradley not understand that Draper would try to kill him? Did Bradley then try to save Hood? Did Bradley know full well what Draper was planning, and only change his mind about his own allegiance at the last moment?
So Hood told them about his arrangement to meet Bradley, and seeing him crossing the sand. He told them that Bradley was Allison Murrieta’s son, and that he had kept in loose touch with the boy since her death. Hood said that he and Bradley had a distrustful, competitive, uncertain relationship. Hood told them that Bradley was smart and strong and he admitted to liking and feeling some responsibility for him.
The men traded looks.
“LAPD questioned Jones in the Skid Row shooting,” said Warren. “Kick—the gangster who shot his mother. They made no arrest. What’s your take on that, Charlie?”
“He denies it. He has a decent alibi.”
“Your take, I said.”
“I think he did it.”
“Well,” said Robles. “I guess we should talk to young Bradley Jones.”
TWO DAYS LATER Bradley strolled into the room wearing new Lucchese boots and a leather duster. He was ten minutes late. He nodded at Hood and introduced himself to Warren, Robles and Parks, shaking hands. He took off the long jacket and tossed it onto a sofa. Then he sat in the hot seat directly across the desk from the undersheriff. He crossed his legs and leaned back.
“Well, I’ve gone straight to the top,” he said, looking at the undersheriff. “Almost.”
“Tell us about Kick,” said Robles.
“I’ll tell you the same thing I told the L.A. cops. I was home when he bought it. I was sixty miles away. I’ve got five witnesses to that fact. Logically, the L.A. cops are looking elsewhere for the shooter. It was gang-related, my guess. Kick killed my mother and I’m glad he’s dead and that’s the end of it.”
“We’d like the names and numbers for your five friends,” said Robles.
“Bit out of jurisdiction, aren’t you?”
“Tell us about Draper.”
“Now that’s an interesting story. He tried to recruit me for LASD at a career fair at Cal State L.A. a couple of weeks ago. He recognized me from what happened to my mom. I told him I wasn’t interested in law enforcement and he said he wasn’t strictly talking about law enforcement. We had some drinks later. He told me to apply with you guys. He said with him as a reservist and me as a deputy, we could do some good things together. No specifics. At the end of it, he told me that he and Hood were tight, but not to tell Hood that we’d talked. I figured he wanted to recruit me all himself, with no help from another deputy. Later, after some trouble he had in Mexico, Draper asked me if I could set up a meeting with Charlie. Charlie was acting wrong, Draper said, and Charlie couldn’t know Draper would be there. A public place, he said—the boardwalk in Venice. I agreed but I didn’t like it. I don’t love you, Hood, but I don’t wish you any serious harm. So I thought I should attend that meeting, just in case. In case of what, I wasn’t sure. I had no idea what was going on when the black dude drew on Charlie and Charlie blew him away. It wasn’t until the next day I found out it was goddamned Draper.”
“Did you fire?”
“Fire what? I wasn’t even armed.”
“Why’d you split?”
“I could see that Charlie was okay. I knew the cops would be there soon. I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble but I don’t see any reason to run straight into it.”
“Draper was hit three times,” said Parks.
“Good shooting, Charlie,” said Bradley.
“He only fired twice,” said Robles.
“Very good shooting, Charlie.”
In the silence, Bradley looked at Hood, then to Warren and Parks, then across the desk to the undersheriff. He smiled, then he laughed. “No,” he said. “No, guys. Sorry. It wasn’t me.”
“Then who was it?” asked Warren.
Bradley looked at each of the men again. “Well, the obvious call is that Charlie thought he fired twice but let loose three. You carry an autoloader, Hood. I’ll bet you whittled that trigger down real light, too. Easy to pop off rounds in the heat of combat.”
Hood had wondered the same thing himself. It was possible. It was also true a person who has fired a gun at another person knows exactly how many times he pulled the trigger. You remember it. You hear it and you see it, over and over.
Bradley looked at him. “Then be logical about it. How many casings did you pick up, Charlie?”
“Just the two I fired,” he said.
“What caliber was the phantom bullet?” he asked.
There was a moment of silence then. “We couldn’t come up with it,” said Robles. “It went through Draper and the store, out a back window and into the neighborhood.”
Bradley looked at each of them, then laughed again. “How do you guys expect me to explain a bullet you can’t even find?”
“There was a third entry wound up closer to the neck,” said Parks. “My ballistics guys said the exit path lined up with the hole in the window.”
“And two witnesses said a guy in a bomber jacket and a cap was there when Draper went down.”
Bradley shook his head. He took a deep breath. “So, did Bomber Jacket fire a gun or didn’t he?”
“They weren’t sure. Confusion. Fear.”
“So, the witnesses have no idea who fired a bullet you don’t have. Gentlemen, I need direction at this point. What do you want from me?”
Then Bradley stood and hooked his thumbs into his jeans pockets and looked at each of the men again. “One of the reasons I came down here was to answer your questions, just casual, like Charlie said it would be. I don’t mean to be a wiseass but when I get falsely accused of shooting somebody, I feel the need to state my defense clearly.
“But I also came down here because I wanted to tell you a couple of things. One, Coleman Draper was doing some side work that was bringing him ten, twelve, fourteen grand a week. A week. It involved some Mexican heavies in the North Baja Cartel and some Eme connects here in L.A. Two, something went wrong with the deal, then Terry Laws was murdered. Draper never told me that Laws was part of it but I think he was. I think Draper and Laws were in it together. And Draper killed Terry, but I don’t know why.”
Glances all around, then Robles sat back in his wheeled leather chair. “Tell me, did Draper indicate that his status as a reserve was a part of this profitable side job?”
“When he recruited me he said the badge and gun would open doors for me that I hadn’t even known were there. He implied that he wasn’t talking about legitimate doors within law enforcement, sir.”
“Why do you think Laws was involved?”
“Draper talked about him a lot. You know how he sounded when he talked about Terry Laws? Regretful. Like he regretted what had happened to Terry but it was somehow necessary. I got the v
ery strange feeling that he was recruiting me to the department to somehow replace Terry. That may be way off. But it’s the feeling I got from Draper.”
In the silence that followed Hood formed a deeper appreciation of Bradley Jones’s intelligence and bearing, and a deeper suspicion of his stories.
“Gentlemen, I want to tell you one more thing. I could never tell Coleman Draper this because I never fully trusted him. But I can tell this to all of you—I want to join this department. I want to be one of you. I’ve got about a year before I can apply and I’ll spend that time in college, and in the Sheriff’s Cadets Program. I’ve got twenty-ten vision, I can run the sixty fast as anyone in your department, I can press my weight, and I’ve got an IQ high enough to embarrass me but it doesn’t. It’s all yours. Put me to the test.”
Another silence. Then Robles leaned forward and shook his head. “It’s not up to any of us whether you make it into the academy or not. It’s strictly merit.”
“Fine,” said Bradley. “I understand that. But I want you to understand this: I want what you have. I’m engaged to a beautiful woman I don’t deserve. I’m going to give her the life she deserves. I’m going to give her love and loyalty and a family. I know some of you think I took vengeance on Kick, but I didn’t and I’ve proven it. So far as this idea of someone other than Hood shooting Coleman Draper, well, you got the wrong guy. I can’t explain it and I’m not going to try.”
Bradley lifted his leather duster from the sofa and swung it on and walked out.
44
Hood drove up the highway in the morning, headed north through the Antelope Valley California Poppy Preserve. The wet winter was a week over and the hills were carpeted with flowers, miles and miles of them, eye-shudderingly bright, rippling in the breeze.
Ariel Reed sat beside him in the Camaro, fiddling with the CD player. She had listened to one of Erin McKenna’s nightclub recordings twice by then, and Hood was betting that she was going to play it again. He had seen that Ariel tended to do things over and over. Sure enough, the first song pounded to life again as they sped through the flowers.
Later they parked and Hood got the basket and blanket from the trunk. They hiked up over a rise, then down into a swale and along a dry creek bed and into a valley formed by two long hills, the flanks of which shivered with orange poppies.
They walked until the road was far behind them. A sudden surprising silence rose up to meet them. Hood felt small but not unimportant. He spread the blanket on a flowerless spot and they sat under a sky so blue it stretched credibility.
Hood poured two powerful margaritas over ice. They toasted and Ariel drained hers in one swallow, set the glass back in the basket, then kicked off her sandals. She lay back and hiked up her dress to get the sun on her legs. She spread one arm out on the blanket and shaded her eyes with the other.
“I feel like a lizard.”
“In a yellow dress.”
“In nature, color has a purpose. I might attract a mate.”
“You have.”
“Can you do some push-ups for me?”
Instead of push-ups Hood took off his shirt and lay faceup beside her, but not too close. He rested the margarita glass squarely over his navel. He thought of Bradley, and the choices facing him in the next few years, and which way he would go. He wondered if the Bulldogs might take him back, or if he should stay with Warren in IA. Then he drifted. It was easy to drift. No feeling like the sun on your skin, he thought. Even through his eyelids it was bright.
Hood thought briefly of the dogs he’d had when he was a boy. Then of riding horses and playing tennis. All of this past seemed to play forward logically and in a necessary way, as a prelude to the here and now. To him, these were good memories of good things. He turned his head and peeked at Ariel sprawled carelessly on the blanket nearby. He couldn’t believe his good fortune in getting her out here, though all he’d had to do was ask. She’d told him once that she was wound as tight as a golf ball and Hood had seen this to be true. Her brain fired so fast her mouth had trouble keeping up. He had hardly understood her when she told him that the DA had dropped the charges on Eichrodt—all he heard was a jumble of words. But now, that version of Ariel was gone, replaced by someone unwound and happily reptilian.
“I know you’re looking at me,” she says.
“Hard not to.”
“Quiet is an actual thing, not an absence.”
“Another margarita and you could become one with it.”
“I have no sunscreen on. My skin is a different kind of warm. My vision is hopping with little dark flecks that seem to move on their own.”
“My sister called them eye skippers. Like a water skipper but—”
“Give me a kiss like that one up in the hills.”
Hood downed the drink and tossed the glass and rose to one elbow. He looked into her eyes to see a gloriously alien creature. The bullet wound hurt but his heart felt whole. The blanket was big enough to keep them in and the world out.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I sincerely thank the team at Trident Media, agents supreme, the best allies a writer can have. Huge thanks also to Gary Shimer for the cars, Dave Bridgman for the guns, Sherry Merryman for the research, and Gary Backe for the Antelope Valley. You rock my casbah, every one of you.
T. Jefferson Parker
* * *
Read on for an excerpt from T. Jefferson Parker’s novel
IRON RIVER
Available now.
* * *
The car hurtled west towing a swirl of black exhaust into the first light of day. It was old and low, with Baja plates and a loose muffler that dangled and sparked on the dips. The woman drove. She was silver-haired and flat-faced, and though her eyes were open wide to gather the light, her face was still slack from sleep. Her husband sat heavily beside her, boots spread and hat low, nodding slowly through the rises and falls of the highway, a coffee cup riding on his thigh.
“Cansada,” she said. Tired. Then told him about a dream she had had the night before: an enormous wave made of white lilies, a blue sun, and a nice talk with Benito, thirty years dead, who told her to say hello to his father.
Cansado, he thought.
He looked out. It was desert as far as he could see or remember seeing. He worked on cars at the gas station in Bond’s Corner. She had motel rooms to clean in Buenavista.
She told him about another dream she had had, and her husband lifted the cup and sipped and set it back on his thigh and closed his eyes.
The sun rose behind them. The woman checked its progress in the rearview mirror. Something registered ahead, and she dropped her gaze back through the windshield to a young coyote sitting just off the shoulder next to a paloverde. She had never seen a coyote sitting down. She wondered if all her maids would show up today or if she would have to clean a block of rooms herself. The sore neck. The weak arm. She steered the car down a steep dip and lifted her eyes to the mirror again. What did a wave of white lilies mean? In her dream, Benito looked young and sweet, exactly as he had in life. Benito the Beautiful. She was crossing herself as she neared the rise and still looking back at the sun while thinking of him, and when she looked ahead again, she saw that she had drifted far into the oncoming lane. When she topped the rise, the truck was barreling down on her, the grille shiny and looming and the windshield a sun-forged plate of armor. Her husband cursed and reached for the wheel, but she was still in her genuflection and his hand closed not on the wheel but on her wrist so that she could use only her half-crippled left hand to correct the course of the big, heavy Mercury.
She swung the wheel to the right with all her strength. She felt the back end come around and the front end slide away, and she clutched the wheel with both hands now, and her husband was thrown against her, and orbs of his coffee wobbled in space but he held the wheel, too, and the truck thundered by with a sucking howl. The sedan broke loose from the pull and spun twice quickly, and she was so utterly dazed by the force that when she saw
the man crouching on the right shoulder by his pickup, she had no idea which way to turn the wheel in order to miss him. Then it was too late anyway. She saw the long hood of the car sweep across him, and she felt the sharp impact, but the Mercury kept spinning, and when it finally ground sideways through the gravel to a stop, she had no idea how she had missed the pickup, or where the dead man had landed.
She threw the shift into park. They sat for a moment, breathing hard, hearts pounding, dust rising around them in the sudden silence. She looked west down the highway and saw nothing but road, and when she looked behind them, she saw the pickup truck and the rise far behind it.
“Dios,” she whispered.
The man looked hard at his wife, then pulled the keys from the ignition and tried to brush the coffee from his new jeans. He pushed open the door and stepped into the morning.
It took them a few minutes to find the dead man sprawled back in the desert on the white sand between clumps of yucca. He was a gringo. He was small. His face was covered in blood, and his body was misshapen. He wore the same kind of clothes she saw at Wal-Mart. He had a watch but no rings.
“Don’t touch him. He’s alive,” said her husband.
The man’s breath whistled in and out, and a tooth moved in his broken mouth. Then for a long time nothing. Then he breathed again.
She crossed herself and knelt beside him. Her husband looked around them, then back at the sun just above the horizon now.
She asked God and Ignacio what to do with such a broken body. She said there was the hospital in Buenavista, famous doctors who treated important people.
“Go away,” whispered the dead man. He opened his eyes. They were blue beneath the blood. “Please.”
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