L. A. Outlaws

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Half an hour later a faint pink haze appeared in the east, and the power towers stood in diminishing perspective against the growing sunlight, arms stretched and the wires drooping. Marlon and the commander came from the building. The commander was on a cell phone, and he stepped among the damaged cars for privacy.

  Marlon waved Hood over.

  “I’m bringing you on with us,” Marlon said.

  “Great, sir. I didn’t know if it would happen.”

  “Admin’s been slow but I’ll push it the rest of the way through. Wyte will okay it if I ask him to. We’ll have you out of patrol by the end of the week, so for now, you’ve got two jobs—patrol and homicide.”

  “Thanks again.”

  “You asked for it. The dogs will be glad to have you.”

  Hood nodded. LASD homicide called themselves the Bulldogs because they never gave up. Even in law enforcement circles they were known to be indefatigable.

  Marlon ran a comb back over his head, the black hair parting into neat, close rows, an old man’s ritual, thought Hood. Marlon blew through the comb teeth and slipped it into a back pocket.

  “I stopped a woman tonight just before I came here,” Hood said. “She drove right by, kind of middle of nowhere. Came up clean but she could have seen something. I wasn’t sure what to make of her. A little eager to be on her way.”

  “Local?”

  “No, San Diego County.”

  “Talk to her. You know these dead Asians?”

  “I’ve seen three of them around. Wilton Street click.”

  “Notify their families and find out what they know. The coroner will help with addresses. That part of it is lousy work, but welcome to the dogs.”

  6

  L upercio stood before the Bull with his hands folded in front of him, looking down at the crease in his trousers left by the tie of the machete scabbard. He repeated the license number of the yellow Corvette and watched the Bull poke at his PDA with the stylus. Lupercio wondered at the tools of men: a machete, a computer, a stylus. He didn’t know the man’s name.

  Above him the Bull sat behind a very large brushed aluminum desk on a raised dais. The wall behind him was mirrored all the way to the ceiling, where recessed low-voltage bulbs blared down a bright white light. In the glass Lupercio saw the reflection of the Port of Long Beach behind him, the great cranes rising against the first rosy light of the morning, sunrise on steel. Even early Sunday the place was moving. Lupercio had heard that the longshoremen who ran the cranes got a thousand dollars an hour on Sundays and holidays.

  “What model year was the Corvette?” asked the Bull. His voice was clear and forceful.

  “This year,” said Lupercio. “The license plate holder said Gooden Chevrolet.” You’ll get a good’un at Gooden, he thought.

  Now the Bull tapped at a keyboard. There were four flat-screen monitors on the desk, two on each side of him, and four keyboards. Four printers. Under the desk were four computer towers. All of the computers were housed in handsome brushed aluminum cases, finished in such a way to catch light and reflect it in soft colors, like a muted rainbow. They were nothing like you saw in the computer stores or on the TV, noted Lupercio. They made urgent humming noises. There were very few cable connections between them.

  The Bull glided to his right on a wheeled office chair that rolled on the raised platform with the sound of distant thunder. He tapped at the keys again. Then he rolled and looked down through the opening between the monitors, and Lupercio felt the weight of his attention.

  “Did you see her in actual possession of the material?”

  “No.”

  “Describe what you saw.”

  Lupercio described it for the third time. It was plain to him that some kind of experience with law enforcement had taught the Bull the power of repeated questioning. Lupercio had been questioned by every American law enforcement agency from the FBI on down to the local police and sheriffs, and he had never been asked a question just once. Never. He wondered again if the Bull’s experience had been as the questioner or the questioned.

  “Yellow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Model year?”

  Lupercio told him again. As far as he was concerned the Bull could ask him a thousand more times, if that’s what it would take to convince him that a young brown-haired woman in a yellow Corvette had almost certainly driven off with the diamonds, not Lupercio. The Bull had told him before that Lupercio had “final responsibility” for his work. That was why Lupercio was paid such high commissions. Responsibility was what the Bull looked for in a partner. It was more valuable than any metal or any stone from the earth, he said. Responsibility was the son of faith, whatever that meant.

  Lupercio turned and looked out the big windows. The morning light was full now, and the container ships and tugs and port cranes continued their eternal transportation of the world’s goods. One of the Bull’s men passed by the window wearing a suit and sunglasses and a tiny wireless headset fixed between one ear and his shaven chocolate-colored head.

  “And the year and make of the Sheriff ’s patrol car?”

  Lupercio turned and told the Bull the information for the second time in ten minutes.

  “Did you get the unit number off the side of the cruiser?”

  Lupercio gave it again.

  The Bull tapped rapidly on the far right keyboard, then rolled to his left and looked down on Lupercio. Lupercio heard a whirring sound.

  “Describe the inside of Miracle Auto Body,” said the Bull. “Focus on the location of the men and your interpretation of what happened there.”

  Lupercio took a deep breath and tried to clear his mind of everything but that memory.

  When he had gotten to Miracle Auto Body at two-ten that morning, he assumed the outdoor lights would be on and the indoor lights off, but the opposite was true. He knew that a diamond merchant was supposed to have arrived over an hour ago with four hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of high-quality cut diamonds to pay off an outstanding loan to the two ranking Wilton Street Asian Boyz. The Bull had told him all of this. And he told Lupercio that four heavily armed and proven MS-13 gunmen would take control of the body shop and the diamonds by whatever means necessary. Their leader was supposed to have delivered the diamonds to a knowledgeable and neutral courier who would divide them in half by value and bring one half directly to the Bull. When the leader never showed, the courier had called the Bull and the Bull had called in his lone wolf—Lupercio. He’d told Lupercio that half of what he recovered would be his to keep.

  By the time Lupercio had counted ten bodies, he knew that everyone who was supposed to be there was dead and three men who weren’t supposed to be there were dead, too, which meant that the diamonds could also still be there.

  “I knew something was wrong,” he said. “Because of the lights.”

  “And this yellow Corvette, what did you think when you saw it parked away from the others, facing out?”

  “That it was part of what had gone wrong.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not a gangster’s car. There’s not enough room for men and guns and products.”

  The Bull looked down at Lupercio. Lit from above, the Bull’s face was cleaved by shadows, so his expressions were unreadable. His face was tanned and his nose was wide and formidable. His hair was light and thin and combed straight back and the scalp beneath it was tanned, too. He was barrel-chested—built like a bull, thought Lupercio. A bull who spends time outdoors in the sun.

  “Was one of the Asians very young?”

  This was the second time that the Bull had asked this same question. He hadn’t asked the ages of any of the other nine men, so Lupercio believed the young car painter had been the Bull’s snitch within the Wilton Street Boyz. Lupercio wondered again if the Bull’s other life—whatever it was and whenever he had lived it—had been that of the interrogator or the interrogated.

  “One was a teenager. A car painter. I walked quick
ly. Then I heard the Corvette start up outside.”

  “Continue.”

  Lupercio told of his momentary indecision when he heard the car start up. He knew it was the Corvette by the sound of it. It would be faster for him to use the front door of the office, but only if that door was open. If it was locked, he’d need to locate a key and that could take seconds, minutes. So he jumped back through the window and ran down the steel catwalk to the parking area. The yellow Corvette was halfway down the access road by the time he got his car keys out.

  But he got a good look at her when the Sheriff ’s deputy stopped her—because her interior light was on—and another good look at her at the signal at Eastern.

  “Describe her.”

  “Light brown hair, dark eyes. Bonita. Unafraid. She looked directly at me both times.”

  “Age?”

  “Middle twenties, thirty maybe.”

  “How far were you able to follow her?”

  “I never even caught up with her tire smoke.”

  The Bull rolled to the left side of his desk, appeared to be using a computer mouse. The casters rumbled on the hardwood dais. Then he rolled back to the right and pulled up a sheet of paper.

  Lupercio watched him study the sheet, set it facedown on the desk, then pull up a handful more. The Bull took a long time flipping through these. Lupercio heard the air-conditioning click on, then felt a faint gust of cool air on his face.

  “Here,” said the Bull, holding the sheets out to Lupercio.

  Lupercio stepped forward and took them. Up this close he guessed the Bull to be fifty years old and strong. His neck was thick and his eyes were blue. There was something unusual about his legs.

  The top sheet showed a blown-up California driver’s license in color.

  “Suzanne Elizabeth Jones,” read Lupercio. “This is her.”

  “Of course it’s her.”

  The second sheet was a photograph, apparently from a high school yearbook, in which Suzanne Jones looked years younger, naive, and pointedly bored. Sheets three through thirteen were dense paragraphs of information: DOB; Social Security number; credit rating—very good; driving history—no accidents, no traffic citations; arrests—none; interviews with law enforcement—none. There was a ten-year residence history listing addresses in Bakersfield, Los Angeles, Torrance, Norwalk, Santa Ana and Valley Center. Also, school files from elementary through high school, abbreviated college transcripts and medical records. There was an employment history—Kentucky Fried Chicken (ages fifteen and sixteen), Taco Bell and Subway (ages sixteen and seventeen), Dominguez Hills State University (cafeteria food server while a student, ages eighteen through twenty-two), then the Los Angeles Unified School District as a teacher from age twenty-two through “current.” She taught history. There was an immediate family tree that was thorough enough to list Suzanne Jones’s two brothers and two sisters and their young children. Apparently she had not married.

  “What grade education did you complete?” asked the Bull.

  Lupercio looked up at the heavy face faceted by the recessed low-voltage lamps.

  “High school.”

  The Bull glanced at the pages. “Is it difficult for you to read and retain information?”

  “No. I read slowly and I remember everything.”

  “How did it feel to you, looking down at the dead Mara Salvatrucha?”

  “I knew them.”

  “But that doesn’t answer my question.”

  “I am no longer a part of them. My business and my heart are not there.”

  “Do you miss the structure, the friendship, the power of being a leader in the most feared street gang on Earth? Do you miss the respect?”

  “Those were a child’s comforts.”

  “And now you are grown.”

  “Childhood ends.”

  The Bull was nodding, the black shadows in his eye sockets elongating with each downward tilt of his head.

  “If there was ever a time for you to be honest, this is it. I can work with honesty. Did you steal my diamonds, Lupercio?”

  “I did not.”

  “And why should I believe you?”

  “Because I don’t lie.”

  The Bull smiled, his open lips and the lines of his face catching the downward light at new angles. “Find the woman. Find the diamonds. One-half of what you recover is yours. I remind you that several men have stolen from me. But each only once.”

  “This is simple and clear.”

  “I wish you good luck, my lone wolf.”

  “I would rather have information on the diamond broker.”

  The Bull crossed his arms. “It will take five minutes. Go outside. Sit in the cool shade and face the great Port of Long Beach. Watch the sunlight on the cranes and the towers of containers. Say a prayer of thanks for your life this fine Sunday morning.”

  Five minutes later Lupercio was back and the Bull was handing down to him another sheaf of papers.

  7

  Home.

  Eight acres of scrub and savannah, a pasture and paddock, a pond, a stream, avocado, lemon and orange trees loaded with fruit.

  The main house is for me and my three sons, and—at least for now—Ernest, father of the third. There is also a barn and four small cottages spread across the property for my friends. I’m never sure exactly who’s here and who’s not, but I’ve got good friends and watchful neighbors so it doesn’t really matter.

  I bought this place six months ago, a year after I committed my first armed robbery—a Starbucks. It’s way off the beaten path. The whole compound was a filthy “fixer” with plywood for windows, insane derelicts cooking meth in the barn and rats nesting in the old mattresses. You could smell it before you got out of your car.

  Across the stream is one Indian reservation and across the road is another, so when you drive in here you see how poor those people are, you see the junked appliances and broken-down cars and the trash and the burn piles and the grubby kids. You just want to keep driving, which is what most people do. Those big casinos you see out here now, they don’t aim much of that slot machine cash down at the poor. No, they sponsor this group and contribute to this cause, and they give lots of money to politicians who can help them; they have swank ads on TV, but how come the rez looks so bad once you leave the casino? Ask them that.

  I like the natives. There’s a couple of big bad braves—they’re brothers, actually—who live across the stream. Gerald and Harold Little Chief, I kid you not. Eighteen and nineteen. They’re bikers. They keep an eye on my place when I’m gone, and I keep an eye on theirs. Once I saw some kids breaking into their garage so I called the rez cops. A week later the brothers brought over a minibike for my boys. They’d made it. It was a beautiful little thing, with a two-and-a-half-hp Briggs & Stratton and chrome shocks and a flame-red-and-yellow paint job. Gerald and Harold looked funny standing there at my back door, these two huge guys with a minibike between them, and Harold takes the bandana off his head and bends down and wipes a smudge off the handlebar then puts the bandana back on and picks up the minibike, must weigh a hundred pounds, and holds it out to me with two steady hands like it’s a puppy or a box of long-stemmed roses.

  So anyway, my place came cheap and we’ve been working our asses off to clean it up ever since.

  Some of the down payment came from my L.A. Unified School District Credit Union, where most of us teachers bank our small paychecks, maintain our checking accounts and, if we can hack our jobs long enough, take out loans for the overpriced and often crummy L.A. homes we can afford. Some of my down payment came from my early stickups: McDonald’s, Carl’s Jr., Blockbuster, Sav-on, Payless Shoes—anybody whose signs I got sick of looking at. But most of it came from the cars I learned to boost and sell: grand theft auto beats armed robbery any day. You can pick up a gun and risk your life for a thousand bucks, or you can steal a good car and make thirty grand without encountering another human being. And the high-end stuff, man, it’s just beautiful material to work
with.

  Valley Center is just an hour and forty minutes from L.A., if you know when to make the drive. I get to school early and stay late, and when I’m home here I’m happy to be an hour and forty minutes away. When I retire, it’s going to be to an even bigger compound, with serious acreage, horse trails everywhere, a giant wall around it and a drawbridge—I’m serious about this bridge—so I can say exactly who gets in and out.

  And when.

  Like right now. The dogs are already barking because here comes C. Hood up the long dirt road. It’s the only road in. I watch him through the Zeiss binoculars I shoplifted from a Big 5 Sporting Goods store. It’s Sunday, I’ve been home for exactly six hours, I’ve had four hours of sleep, two showers, one orgasm, and now dressed in a nightshirt I’ve got to deal with the long arm of the law.

  He’s not in uniform, but his face is unmistakable behind the aviator shades. I thought he’d show, but I didn’t think it would be this soon. I’ve got the hot pickup stashed out in the barn and the gems locked up somewhere that nobody knows about but me.

  I watch him get out, glance at the “No Trespassing—Violators Will Be Prosecuted” sign. He looks at the gate, then in my direction, and I know what he sees is mostly trees.

  “Who is it?” asks Ernest. He’s sitting at the redwood picnic table in my big dining room wearing red swim trunks, bouncing baby Kenny on his knee. Ernest’s big padded Hawaiian hands look like a life preserver around the baby’s middle.

  “The deputy.”

  “You were right.”

  Hood pushes the gate open and starts back to his car. The noon heat comes off it in waves. I wonder why he’s driving this sweet black ’86 IROC Camaro, and I figure they won’t give him a county slickback because he’s too junior. But they’re letting him play plainclothes.

  I walk outside and tell the dogs to shut up. They’re big Dobermans and trained well. I stand on the porch. Hood pulls his car into a parking area marked by sections of some old cottonwoods Ernest felled down by the stream. The nose of the Camaro stops just short of the tree trunk. I can hear Merle Haggard singing behind the windows.