L. A. Outlaws

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Hood used his flashlight hand to slip the phone off his belt, punch it on and dial the Bakersfield PD number they’d given Marlon.

  He gave the sergeant Madeline’s address and his location, said he had reason to believe a violent felon was in the vicinity. He asked for the car to run with no color, no sirens. The sergeant sounded skeptical and he took Hood’s cell number.

  Five minutes went by.

  Protect me, Hood thought.

  He rose and hopped off the top onto the slope, leaning back and stepping big down the flank of the hill, his heels sliding through the loose sand and sending the gravel down with a hissing sound that he could not prevent.

  He jumped onto the dirt road and used his momentum to jog toward the car.

  His flashlight was in his left hand, his .38 Mustang in his right, wrist on wrist for control. Hood sighted down the barrel of the pistol. Up close to the car the flashlight beam passed through the windshield and diffused. Through it Hood could see inside the car—rearview mirror and empty front seats and the dome light and the glistening buckles of the shoulder restraints that were folded neatly as bat wings beside the rear seats.

  Crouching, he shuffled counterclockwise around the car. Empty, no alarm lights flashing on the dash, door locks down, the driver’s seat positioned up close to the wheel for a short man. When he came back to where he’d started, Hood lowered the gun and swung the flashlight beam up to the top of the nearest dune. Then the dune on the other side of the road. Nothing moved except what was moved by the wind.

  Hood sensed something behind him. He spun around and aimed the beam into the empty desert, his gun steady and his chest knocking against his shirt. Then he swung hard right where the pale flash at the edge of his vision was only the darkness pulling an owl back in.

  Be still, he thought: still.

  He turned off the light and lowered both it and the gun and stood in the road in the bare moonlight. He turned slowly in a circle, moving his head to keep the wind from blowing straight into his ears.

  Owls have wings and men have feet.

  With the beam pointed down to the road, the tracks were easy to see and distinguish from his own. They were boot prints, small—like the ones Hood had seen by the stream in Valley Center, where Lupercio had talked with Jordan Jones and surrendered his precious identity.

  The prints led away from the car then down the road toward Madeline’s house then disappeared where Lupercio had given up road for desert.

  It took Hood a while to find the trail again but when he did the footprints were easy to follow.

  He was halfway back to the house when he saw the cruiser coming up the road from the signal. A moment later it bounced onto the driveway and started up the hill toward the house.

  He turned on his cell phone and it rang almost immediately.

  “Hood? This is Officer Jackson, Bakersfield PD, here at the Jones residence. Talk to me.”

  “He’s there. He’s close.”

  “Whoa, podner—what are you talking about?”

  “Lupercio Maygar. Ex-Mara Salvatrucha. We like him for two murders down in San Diego four days ago.”

  “What’s your ten-twenty?”

  “The middle of the desert about two hundred yards north of the driveway you’re coming up. His car is out here but he isn’t. His footprints are aimed straight at the house. He’s armed and extremely dangerous.”

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “He’s after the Jones daughter. She’s a possible witness. The house off to your right belongs to the mother.”

  “We’ll have a look. Maybe you should get back here.”

  “If he gets around you, he’ll head back to his car.”

  “I’ve got a good partner and a twelve-gauge. He’s not getting around us.”

  “Get backup.”

  Hood saw the cruiser stop outside the Jones house. A spotlight blasted on, bleaching the adobe wall white. He turned and looked back in the direction of the Lincoln. He couldn’t see it, but he could see the two sand hills that it was parked between.

  “It’s Friday night in Bakersfield, Hood—we’re thin. We’ve got a spot on the place right now. We’ll look around. If we see anything interesting, we’ll get backup. If you want to stand out in that desert and watch a car go nowhere, be my guest.”

  Hood punched off as he watched the spotlight roam the wall, and the garage outside the wall, then the courtyard entryway.

  The cruiser headlights went out and the doors opened. In the interior lights Hood watched the two officers climb out, flashlights on, one patrolman carrying a combat shotgun, the other with his sidearm drawn. Their beams searched the wall and together they disappeared around one side of it. A minute later they had come full circle. No Lupercio scattering into the night. The shotgun cop turned and looked into the desert in Hood’s direction.

  The one with the pistol swung open the wooden gate to the courtyard, backing up and using it for cover. The cop with the shotgun stood with his back to the adobe, and when the opening was wide, he crouched low and followed his light inside. It looked like the pistol cop was trying to secure the gate open, but he gave up and followed his partner in.

  The gate slammed shut in the wind.

  Hood saw the dull explosion of light behind the courtyard wall, then another. A second later came the muffled reports of the shotgun.

  He ran for the house, gun still drawn, flashlight still in his left hand.

  They got him, he thought. Two shots from the riot gun at close range.

  He heaved across the desert and the driveway and swung open the gate. The shotgun cop lay on his back just inside the entrance. His head was intact but his face and everything behind it was gone, and through this crude tunnel Hood saw the gravel of the courtyard floor wet and red. The dead man’s finger was still inside the Remington’s trigger guard.

  His partner was sprawled faceup over the chair that Hood had been sitting on with the cat half an hour earlier. He was breathing fast, his upper chest and neck in ribbons, eyes staring out at Hood from behind a mask of blood. He reminded Hood of someone but Hood had no presence of mind now for memory. The cop breathed faster and tried to stand but the chair began to topple. Hood caught him and eased him to the floor but by the time he did this the cop had stopped breathing and Hood could hardly get a pulse.

  He pulled back the man’s head and closed his nose and breathed for him twice, then straddled him and continued the CPR with twenty stiff-armed, flat-palmed compressions against the sternum. He ventilated again, the compressed. And again. Hood lost count. His mouth filled with liquid copper and his throat clenched to keep the bile down. His face and hands and thighs were sticky and warm, and he thought, Jesus, this guy isn’t going to make it but he talked to him anyway, saying stay alive, stay alive, man, open those eyes and come back here right now, man, you come back here.

  Hood fumbled out his cell phone, punched 911 and speaker and set the phone beside the cop as he did the cardio thrusts. Through the wind and his own grunting breaths he heard the operator come on, and he gave her the address and said officers down, two officers down but that was all he managed before it was time to breathe again for the cop. Hood got himself off the man and pinched his nose and breathed into him again while the operator assured him in a distant voice that police and medical were on their way.

  Immeasurably later the medics pulled Hood away midthrust and took over with the oxygen machine.

  Hood sat panting in a corner of the courtyard. He wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his sleeve and stared wide-eyed and straight ahead. He saw Lupercio’s small boot prints in the gravel and the gore on the gate above the shotgun cop as the paramedics swung it open and took the gurney out.

  A while later Hood and two BPD officers were standing atop the sand hill above Lupercio’s car, but the car was gone. He saw the flashlights of two more cops on the dune across the road and two more lights down where the car had been. A helicopter crossed overhead and a spotlight
raked the ground below it.

  Hood didn’t remember trudging through the desert to get here.

  He turned and took a knee and looked out at the chaos of vehicles and flashing lights backed up for what seemed like miles down the driveway of Madeline Jones’s house.

  24

  Hood’s first and only crime spree, and his first thoughts of becoming a cop someday, both occurred when he was sixteen.

  He’d gotten his driver’s license and the world was open to him through the ancient Chevrolet that he had bought from a neighbor with saved money.

  His father had shown him how to pull the block and pistons to be ground at an auto shop, had helped him rebuild the carburetor and put in the new oil pump, radiator, solenoid assembly and brakes.

  As they worked, his father asked Hood what he wanted to do with his life, and Hood said be a cop, maybe, because he liked the TV shows about them and the idea that you joined a department of people who became your friends. His father, as a municipal employee himself, praised the medical benefits and retirement packages offered to Bakersfield policemen and agreed that there was plenty of “camaraderie” in law enforcement.

  When the car was finished, Hood had not one penny left for paint, but the engine and tranny were sound and the retreads still had some miles on them. It had a radio that pulled local FM stations and the AM news stations out of L.A., and a cassette deck.

  He was free.

  It was a summer night, a Friday. Hood had a full tank of gas and some metal on, and his parents had given him permission to overnight with a friend.

  He drove through downtown with the window open and his elbow on the door and a cigarette in his lips and wondered what he really would do with his life, given that he was sixteen and there was lots of life ahead. He cruised the East Hills Mall parking lot and watched the pretty girls and knew that whatever he did with his life, it was going to include one of them. Girls liked cops, right? He smiled and waved at some, tried to say hello, but his voice stuck high in his throat like something he’d forgotten to chew.

  Back on the boulevard Hood realized that the trouble with law enforcement was that he’d always liked outlaws.

  He’d always wondered what it would be like to be one, to walk alertly through space and time following his own code and no other. He’d always silently pulled for the bad guys.

  When he saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as an eight-year-old, he’d thought it was the most powerful movie he’d ever seen, though his mother said, “The chuckleheads got what they deserved.”

  In seventh grade, when the genuinely tough kids began getting expelled from school, he’d secretly admired them.

  When a local man had been arrested for stealing horses from a Bakersfield rancher, Hood had recognized him immediately on the news—he was the cool guy who worked at the bike store, the young guy with the old voice who’d talk chicks and liquor while he adjusted the brake cables and chain on Hood’s Schwinn for free. Hood wrote him an anonymous letter, care of the Kern County Jail, telling the bike shop dude to hang tough.

  When his father groused about the state of California halting executions, Hood had been secretly glad because the idea of waiting in a cell to be killed terrified him.

  A world beyond the law, he thought. Give me freedom to find a code of my own.

  So that Friday night Hood walked into the Bakersfield Warehouse, picked out a hundred and twenty dollars’ worth of headbanger tapes because he already owned everything related to the Bakersfield Sound, and ran out of the store.

  He was burning rubber out of the parking lot, mud slopped over the Chevy plates to obscure the numbers, before anyone even bothered to follow him out.

  He dined and dashed at Coco’s, shoplifted a bottle of vodka and a handful of Slim Jims from a supermarket.

  High on fear and heart pounding hard, he strode into a Wal-Mart, then strode back out with a one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar boom box and plenty of D batteries to run it. The pleasant old man who greeted customers at the entrance croaked drily at him as Hood ran out the door.

  That night he took all his loot out to a desert camp-ground he’d used over the years. There was a ring of fire-blackened rocks and a plywood lean-to and empty food cans brown with rust. He collected some wood and got a fire going, then set up the boom box, put in a tape, cracked the vodka and opened a meat snack. Two hours later he was very drunk, so he got the sleeping bag from the trunk of the car and curled up in the backseat with nothing but his shoulder for a pillow.

  In the morning his head was killing him but he put more wood in the fire ring and got the flames going strong. Then he dropped what was left of what he’d stolen into the fire and watched the plastic soften and writhe and the audiotape curl and vanish. He was ashamed of himself for reasons he could hear in his aching head, specifically enumerated by the voices of his father and mother.

  He was hungover the rest of the day and went to bed early that night, complaining to his parents about the weird-tasting chicken he’d gotten for lunch at the Target snack bar.

  “Watch the alcohol, son,” said his father as he turned off the light.

  Before falling asleep, Hood decided on law enforcement.

  Now Hood sat in the trailer in Anza Valley that served as the Growers West office. It was late morning. Through the windows he could see a tan meadow and rocky hills and the greenhouses battered by the desert wind, their white skins hanging in shreds.

  Hood looked out at the ruined greenhouses. They were difficult to comprehend because he was still back in Madeline’s courtyard. It was two days later and he still hadn’t really come away from it yet. He felt like he had left something important there but he didn’t know if there was a word for it, let alone a way to get it back.

  Ronette West lit a cigarette and looked at him with annoyance. “I already told you I’ve never heard of Suzanne Jones. So you just drove all the way down here to hear it again.”

  “I ran a records-and-warrants check on you before I made the drive,” Hood said.

  “I’m clean.”

  “You’re on work furlough for felony possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. You’ve got a pager on your ankle.”

  She exhaled a mouthful of smoke at him. “I’m not using anymore. Are you threatening me?”

  Hood shook his head and pictured Lupercio’s tiny boot prints in the blood on Madeline Jones’s courtyard.

  “You sure are dreary for someone who grows flowers,” said Hood. “Aren’t they supposed to make you happy?”

  “I am happy. I don’t like cops. You guys badgered me into selling that coke to you. Week after week after week. You literally pressured me into it. To a fucking narc.”

  “You’d have sold it to someone else.”

  “I needed capital to keep my business afloat. But I kicked, I’m clean, and I don’t know Suzanne Jones.”

  “But you knew about Barry Cohen’s problem.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Frank’s a talker and I’m a listener. It was like a soap opera. Melissa blabbed to him and anybody else in earshot. She wanted her ten grand back.”

  Hood had the idea that Suzanne wouldn’t talk to Ronette West about gambling debts and diamonds. But someone else might.

  He took a DMV picture of Suzanne Jones from his wallet and set it on the desk in front of Ronette. She stubbed out her cigarette in a Raiders ashtray.

  “Allison somebody,” said Ronette.

  “Tell me about Allison,” said Hood.

  “She showed up in a new red Kompressor. Said she lived in Valley Center, wanted to grow some tropicals.”

  “Greenhouse flowers?”

  “That’s what I said. She wanted to see how you do it. Which, believe it or not when you look outside, I actually know a lot about. I was in county lockup for a week last winter, worst storm of the year. Worst week of my life. My entire business got blown away and I was sitting in a cell, thanks to you . . . people.”

  Ronette sat back and crossed her arms. She looked out the
windows, and Hood followed her gaze to the ruined screens of the greenhouses, the PVC frames splintered by the storm, the irrigation lines dangling. There were stacks of empty black planting trays everywhere, like tossed poker chips. Only one greenhouse appeared whole and perhaps functional, and Hood figured it was where Frank’s protea had come from.

  “Did you talk to Allison about Barry Cohen?”

  “I mentioned him. She was easy to talk to, you know? We kind of hit it off. She felt bad about how fucked up my greenhouses got and I told her right off how they got that way. I mean, she could see the damned pager on my leg. Then she said something about money solving legal problems and I said unless money is the problem. And she said only lack of money is a problem and I thought about Frank’s story and I made a crack about running out of money and using diamonds instead. It went from there. Barry, the gambling, the Asian gangsters, the pissed-off girlfriend and her ten grand. Allison wanted to know more. So.”

  “So?”

  “So. I put her in touch with Melissa,” said Ronette. “Then I shut my mouth and washed my hands of that whole thing. I was trying to rebuild this business, you know? Next thing I hear Barry’s gunned down up in L.A. somewhere—I read it in the papers.”

  “Give me Allison’s numbers.”

  Ronette came up with a phone number and that was all.

  “Good luck,” said Hood.

  “It’ll start when you get off my property.”

  Melissa met him in the Nordstrom cafe in Beverly Hills. She had come from a manufacturer’s show. Her dark hair was weaved through with faint lavender streaks that matched her nails.

  Hood asked about the woman who Ronette West put in touch with her.

  “Oh,” she said, sipping her coffee drink and blushing beneath her makeup.

  “Start with her name,” said Hood.

  “Allison. I never asked her last name.”

  “Did you meet her?”

  “Never. We only talked on the phone.”