Blood Money

by Doug Richardson

  Until then, Garvin would do what he did best. Bill for copious hours served.

  14

  While the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was established in 1850, the City of Los Angeles managed to survive without its own police department until 1869. Six officers were hired and led by City Marshal William C. Warren, who served in a dual capacity as both tax collector and dog catcher. While the mandate for the Sheriff’s Department was the general law and order of the entire county, the city police focused on collecting fines and fees, without which the cops wouldn’t have ever been paid. Therefore it might easily be assumed that from the beginning, sheriff’s deputies looked down their noses at their lesser brethren. A natural and sometimes healthy rivalry developed.

  A century and a half later, the friction remained. Some antagonism was natural. And some of it was good-natured. But some of the conflict bordered on criminal. Over time, those former fee-collectors dressed in deep navy blue had become glamorized in fiction and movies and television shows. All while sheriffs toiled in relative public obscurity. To the LAPD, sheriff’s deputies were the underclass of police down to their green and tan uniforms—which better resembled togs worn by park rangers than the clothes worn by world-class cops.

  “Do the math,” said Lucky. “L.A. Sheriffs got four times the manpower, covers more badass territory than the PD, and we operate with ten times the autonomy.”

  “I’m not exactly arguing with you,” said Gonzo in a massive understatement. She hadn’t uttered a word in ten minutes. Whatever argument in play was between Lucky and Lucky.

  “Just sayin’,” said Lucky. “Trying to make polite conversation.”

  If she hadn’t already been exhausted by the situation, Gonzo would have let out a belly laugh. But so far she had found absolutely nothing polite about Lucky. Take away the grief and the fatigue, Lucky was less human and more like a force of nature. Gonzo’s keen survival instincts always told her to steer clear of such dangerous personalities. Cops like him spent every waking hour on the prowl for trouble. Be it criminals or women. Case in point: after a brief visit to the Lynwood crime scene, where Lucky damned all normal protocol for visiting officers and conducted his own brief witness interviews, he had driven two blocks and set his parking brake some fifty yards down the street from a catering truck—or roach coach—surrounded by a smattering of local color supping on carne asada and machaca burritos. This is what cops called fishing. An experienced cop would sit and watch, all the while profiling each customer based on style of dress, behavior, or groupings. Once the cop identified his target, he would stalk him until he became isolated, then make a move.

  “You’ve had a rotten day,” said Gonzo, trying to let both herself and Lucky off the conversational hook. “Don’t feel like you have to chat me up.”

  “What?” asked Lucky. “You don’t like conversation?”

  “I’m just sayin’—”

  “Look. It’s either you talkin’ or some asshole on the radio,” said Lucky. “I need the distraction right now. Otherwise I’m gonna put my fist through the windshield.”

  “Copy that,” said Gonzo.

  And Lucky wasn’t lying. Denial was morphing into anger. Soon, he’d be able to taste another man’s blood in his mouth. Lucky briefly shut his eyes in an attempt to purge the photo-like images of his smiling younger brother that played across the windshield in a dim, mental slideshow.

  “What about you?” asked Lucky.

  “Yeah? What about me?”

  “Been a cop long?”

  “Long enough.”

  “How long is enough?”

  “Thirteen…no. Fourteen years.”

  “Respectable, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “Yeah. I guess,” said Lucky. “I don’t know where you’ve been. What you did to get here.”

  “Like sittin’ here with you is some kinda upgrade?” said Gonzo, possibly too glib, yet she was becoming less concerned about seeming insensitive in the presence of a cop whose dear brother was less than twenty-four hours murdered.

  “Like you’re a woman.”

  “Last time I checked.”

  “What I’m sayin’ is that I meet a guy cop,” explained Lucky, “it’s a helluva lot easier to figure out what kinda guy he is. Qualitatively.”

  “There’s a big word.”

  “Hey. Whether you liked it or not, bar was lowered for you. From the academy to all the way up the line.”

  “Wow,” said Gonzo, feigning true surprise. “You actually went there.”

  “You sayin’ I’m wrong?”

  “If you hadn’t noticed, I’m not sayin’ much of anything.”

  “Hey. I asked. You wanna give me a buncha two, three word answers, then I got the right to fill in the blanks.”

  “County Sheriffs, man,” said Gonzo, shaking her head in mock disbelief. “Aren’t you the poster child.”

  “I’m a poster child?” barked Lucky. “Me? Look at you. Female. Ethnic. Lesbian—”

  “The hell?” angered Gonzo. “You don’t know shit.”

  “So maybe you’re not a dyke. Whatever. But I bet there’s not a race or gender card that you haven’t pulled. Bet you know the whole minority, the-world-is-biased-against-me-playbook by memory. I’m right, yeah.”

  Gonzo swallowed hard. Was Lucky that much of an asshole? Or was he baiting her out of boredom?

  “You know what?” said Gonzo, summoning what she feared was her last molecule of patience. “I’ve been on the job almost fifteen years. I’m comfortable with where I’m at. I’m not a rookie and you are not my training officer.”

  “Your T.O?” asked Lucky. “If I was your T.O. I’d tell you to shut your fuckin’ eyes and describe homeys one through three, all waitin’ on their taquitos.”

  Homeys one through three…

  Gonzo snapped her attention back to the roach coach. Sure enough, standing at the concession window were three young black men. Each was uniformed as an affiliated Blood in oversized white T-shirts, shorts or baggy pants with the right leg rolled up to the calf, hat tilted starboard, basketball sneaks with red shoelaces. While Lucky had been shoving Gonzo back on her mental heels, he hadn’t missed a trick.

  With his cell phone in hand, Lucky hit a speed dial number.

  “Three candidates,” Lucky said into the phone. “Gonna let ’em get their fiesta on before we jam ’em.”

  “Nothin’ like no probable cause,” said Gonzo.

  “Watch and learn how the sheriffs do it.”

  With the slightest shake of her head, Gonzo clamped her mouth closed and set her jaw on shut the hell up. She silently observed the targets pay for their hot food wrapped in aluminum foil then cross the street back to their wheels, a custom-painted blue Camry with wide chrome rims and run-flat tires.

  Lucky eased the Charger into a U-turn from his curbside spot and set his heading eastbound on El Segundo Boulevard, keeping his eyes glued to the Camry in his rearview mirror. Gonzo lowered her window and finger-tipped the passenger side-view mirror until she had her own bead on the target. She watched the Camry easing in behind them, headlights switched on while silhouetted against a blistering red sunset. The driver and two passengers appeared equally engaged in their take-away meals, unsuspecting that they were under surveillance.

  “At the stoplight, boys,” said Lucky into his phone.

  Gonzo flicked her eyes ahead. The next stoplight was shifting from yellow to red. As Lucky braked, the Charger’s taillights flared and ignited two of the gang members inside the Camry. Baby faces, thought Gonzo. The eldest of the pair couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old.

  “Heard this Sheriffs versus LAPD story once,” said Gonzo, involuntarily needing to ease up on the tension. “Maybe you can tell me if it’s true.”

  “Where are you guys?” asked Lucky into his telephone.

  “Normandie,” said Lopes over the tiny little speaker. “At your two o’clock.”

  Pulled up against
the curb on the cross street were Lopes and Bledsoe, the bigger man stuffed behind the wheel of a maroon Chrysler 300.

  “Drive-by homicide with a lotta bodies. Big mess,” continued Gonzo. “Bad boys on the run in a car. LAPD with air support, pretty much herds the pair all the way to Compton just so Sheriffs are forced to make the arrests and follow up with a dead-end investigation.”

  “Sounds kinda familiar,” said Lucky.

  “So the Sheriffs down in Compton get all pissed off. The way they retaliate is to roll an ice cream truck up to a Crip party, load it full of unarmed gang members, then make a heading for South Central. PD territory, right? Drive around ’til they find a Blood party. Leave their cargo to fend for themselves in Bloodville. Hightail it back to Compton.”

  Gonzo watched Lucky’s eyes perform a four-point ballet, first sliding sideways her direction, then checking in with Bledsoe and Lopes in the Chrysler 300, a shift forward to the stoplight as it switched from red to green, then finally resting in his rearview mirror on the three targets in the Camry.

  “Wasn’t an ice cream truck,” said Lucky, easing his foot from the brake to the accelerator. “Just three black and white units was all it took.”

  “So it wasn’t even twenty-five bangers.”

  “Oh, it was at least that many,” said Lucky. “Maybe more. Sheriffs hooked ’em up with zip ties then stacked ’em like cord wood in the back seats.”

  “Wasn’t Compton, was it?” asked Gonzo. “Was Lennox. Was you and your pals.”

  As if on cue, Lucky’s pals, Bledsoe and Lopes, turned off of Normandie and slipped in behind the three Bloods in the Camry.

  “You knew it was Lennox before you asked,” suggested Lucky. “Yeah. You did.”

  Once again, Gonzo turned silent. She was finding herself having trouble staying in the present. Images of young black men, cuffed and loaded one on top of another like wooden planks stacked in the back of a sheriff’s vehicle, glued in her mind like photos of tortured prisoners in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib.

  The Bloods in the Camry turned right onto a street flanked by shaggy palm trees and three-story apartment buildings faced in different shades of pinkish stucco.

  “They’ve turned,” said Gonzo.

  “Yeah,” said Lucky, well ahead of her. Through his rearview mirror he had watched the target car followed by Bledsoe and Lopes in the big Chrysler exit the boulevard. He then twisted the wheel counterclockwise, throwing the Charger into a U-turn so tight the tire rubber chirped in what sounded like eighth notes.

  Without thinking, Gonzo’s right hand moved to her waistband, her fingers instinctively tracing the hard-leather edge of her holster to the safety on her Beretta pistol. The fine hairs on her forearms were at attention. Something was about to happen. And whatever it was, Gonzo’s sixth sense wanted to make sure it didn’t happen to her.

  “Wanna clue me in?” asked Gonzo.

  “Watch, learn, enjoy the show.”

  “Gladly be a witness to the crime you’re about to commit.”

  “You can video this for all I care.”

  “Great idea. I can post it on YouTube so cops all over the world can see how L.A. Sheriffs do business.”

  Lucky gassed the Charger up the residential street, quickly making up the distance between himself and Chrysler. What followed was a maneuver so practiced it almost seemed choreographed. When he had pulled the Charger up within mere yards of the Chrysler, Bledsoe lowered his pedal, wheeled left and accelerated around the Camry and its unsuspecting occupants. As soon as Bledsoe had taken position two car-lengths in front of the Camry he hit his brakes. This caused an instant chain reaction. The Camry braked hard, as did the Charger, Lucky slowing his front bumper only inches from his target.

  The gang bangers in the Camry were trapped. Caught unaware and licking hot sauce off their digits. The initial shock of being boxed in had the trio barking at each other and spilling what was left of their meals as they dove under the seats for weapons. Then they got a look at their pursuers. Two middle-aged crackers and a wetback. All five-oh. Plus some mixed race Amazon with a fro, recording the event on her smartphone.

  Lucky tapped one-two-three on the rear windshield with the muzzle of his pistol.

  “FACE DOWN ON THE STREET!” he yelled.

  Practically in unison, three doors of the Camry popped open and the three young Bloods crawled out. Compliant to a fault. Ready to accept just about anything the plain-clothed sheriff’s deputies had to dish out.

  “Here’s what’s gonna happen,” announced Lucky. “We’re gonna look through your car. We’re gonna find shit you don’t want us to find. And it will fuck up the rest of your day.”

  Gonzo kept moving to her left in a continuous wide orbit recording the event. As big Bledsoe entered her frame of reference, he queried, “Why don’t you put that away, sister.”

  “Not ever,” said Gonzo, making sure to keep Lucky at the center of her attention.

  “But guess what?” continued Lucky. “My day has already been so fucked up that it might fuck up the rest of my life. So I don’t wanna hear no sour grapes. I’m gonna ask and you’re gonna tell me. Do I have your attention?”

  All three gang bangers nodded their heads while keeping their faces to the asphalt.

  “Okay. So here’s what I wanna know. Four hours ago one of your ‘blood brothers’ got his face blown off by a shotgun. I don’t care what he was doing. Don’t care if he did or didn’t deserve it. I just want the man behind the trigger. Somebody saw that bastard and I need a description. I know about the truck. I know it’s big and black like every one of your dicks when you don’t have my boot up your ass. I don’t want you. I want him. If you got his name, that’s what I want. If he’s got a Minnie Mouse tat and a bad case of acne, I wanna know about that. So. I’m gonna stop talkin’ and you’re gonna start. If I don’t hear something I like, that’s when your day turns shitty.”

  Lucky leaned against the Camry, hands on his hips, elbows sharpened.

  It was just starting to get dark. A buzz sounded as the sodium-vapor streetlamp arching overhead began to wake up, just like the neighborhood itself. As each second ticked off inside Lucky’s head, more spectators appeared on balconies and in doorways and on porch stoops. The cops were putting on a show. And the three most sympathetic characters were prostrate on the ground. Black youths. Gang affiliated. But the zip code assured that no matter how righteous the cops might have been, they were the antagonists in the play. And it was only a matter of moments before the spectators became participants.

  The air felt electrified and prickly on the back of Gonzo’s neck. This was the kind of circumstance that could quickly become unglued. The LAPD would have called for backup—cops need assistance. There was nothing that tossed cold water on a potentially violent situation than flooding a neighborhood with a dozen black and whites plus a police helicopter loudly disturbing the air from above. Gonzo would have touched her weapon if she hadn’t remembered that she had already done that before exiting Lucky’s Charger. She was fully prepared to drop her smartphone and draw.

  “Lucky?” said Lopes, keenly aware of the increasing number of local residents creeping closer to the scene. Nine spectators had multiplied faster than melanoma cells. The detective made a mental estimate north of twenty witnesses. Each stoic and black. In a matter of moments, those numbers would double again. Next would come the taunts. It wouldn’t take but a heartbeat for the cul-de-sac to explode into violence.

  “Indians are getting restless, Luck,” warned Bledsoe.

  “These boys wanna talk to me. I can tell,” said Lucky, crouching between the pair of prostrate gang bangers who had climbed from the right side of the vehicle. This is when Lucky’s voice dropped an octave, turning soft. Almost plaintive. “Before this bad guy took out one of yours? He took out one of mine. So you need to look at me as somethin’ other than the cop that jammed you. You need to look at me like the angry motherfucker who wants nothin’ more than to disembowel this evil prick
.”

  “What’s dat?” asked the youngest of the crew, a sixteen-year-old so slight of build that even when lying flat on the ground, his shoulder bones poked out like knives underneath his T-shirt. “What’s disembowel mean?”

  Lucky smiled. Pleased. It was the very first smile Gonzo had witnessed from the bereaved brother.

  “To disembowel…” said Lucky, “is to cut a man so that he watches his own guts spill out of his body before he dies.”

  A schoolboy’s giggle escaped from the young gang member.

  “That’s some slick shit,” said the black teenager.

  The following laughter was contagious. The gang bangers, still lying flat on the ground, were first to bust loose with guffaws. Joined by Lucky, then Bledsoe and Lopes. Guns found their holsters. Gonzo discovered an ending to her cell phone video.

  It was as if the air’s density had miraculously thinned into something more breathable. Gonzo let her lungs fill with nerve-cleansing oxygen. The crowd thinned and the sun fell below the horizon. A breeze came that was slight, but enough to cool the sweat on the back of Gonzo’s neck. Thoughts of a shower slipped into her mind. A cool spray of water and a bottle of jasmine-scented body wash would surely feel heavenly. How soon that was going to happen for her was anybody’s guess.

  15

  At one point Rey Palomino had zero ambition in the pool construction business. His father’s dream was for Rey to stay in school and become an engineer. And for some time, that was Rey’s plan, too. A former illegal immigrant and day laborer, Rey’s father had built a career as a warehouse supervisor upon earning his hard-won citizenship. He toiled to pay college tuitions for both Heber and Rey. And while the elder brother graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business, the younger didn’t make it through his junior year at Cal State Northridge. Rey had temporarily taken over a part-time pool cleaning route for a grade school friend who had gone on a surfing sabbatical to Central America.