T Parker - The Renegades

The laptop on the seat beside him in the Camaro had a large monitor with a brilliant picture. The color maps of the locator program had five levels, from a one-block close-up to a five-hundred-square-mile overview. In any setting, Draper’s car was marked by a flashing red X. If his car moved so did the arrow, at a proportionally corresponding rate. The nearest address and cross-streets were listed in a window on the right of the screen, when applicable. When Draper had hit sixty on a Cudahy boulevard, the window was a blur of letters and numbers, like a slot machine in midwhirl. The locator program even had a beeper, so Hood could estimate distances by the frequency of the tone.

An hour and a half later the black M5 came rumbling out of the warehouse and bounced onto the street. Hood let Draper get around the first corner, then pulled away from the curb.

Southbound traffic was light until they hit Santa Ana, where a new-car transport trailer had jackknifed and closed all lanes of Interstate 5. New Toyotas were littered across the asphalt, some on their sides, some upside down, all with the protective white tape still wrapped around them. Hood winced at the sight of the battered new cars. The heavy traffic was detoured off at Seventeenth Street, then through Santa Ana and Tustin and finally back onto the interstate again at Red Hill. It took forty minutes.

In San Clemente Draper exited suddenly at Palizada. Hood wondered if he suspected he was being followed, but he couldn’t see how or why. Hood stayed well behind the Beemer. Draper drove directly to a fast-food place, pulled into the drive-through line, ordered, paid, got his bags and was back on the freeway in less than ten minutes.

An hour after that he pulled into the passenger vehicle entry lane to Mexico at the border crossing in San Ysidro.

Hood glassed Draper’s car from a parking lot of a Mexican insurance office. His Steiner Night Hunter binoculars brought him in very close to the M5, and the special lens coatings allowed in a remarkable amount of light. There were four cars in front of Draper. When it came his turn Hood could see him handing identification to the Customs man. Soldiers walked around the M5, inspecting it with a lazy curiosity. Then the official handed back Draper’s ID and waved him through.

The flashing red X vanished, as Hood had known it would. The virtual world ends at the border-Mexico is as free from the digital net as the United States is clutched by it. Which left Hood with the task of following someone who didn’t want to be followed. He knew that Draper would spot him.

So he put down the binoculars and sat in the lot for a while, then drove to a market and loaded up on food and drinks with lots of caffeine in them, and a cooler and ice to keep them. He bought a plastic beverage bottle in case he got stuck away from a bathroom for too long a time. He found a restaurant lot and parked away from the building, facing the incoming border traffic. He was only about one hundred yards from the U.S. Customs booths.

He ate and drank and listened to the radio. He turned on the beeper full volume, walked around the car a few times, then dozed and ate and drank more. It was midnight, then it was two, then it was two-ten. He moved to another lot with a worse view. He dozed and waited for the beeper to sound.

It went off just after three-thirty. Hood followed the black M5 through San Ysidro and onto the northbound 5, headed for L.A. He stayed six or seven cars back and both cars made good time in the light predawn traffic.

Then Draper cut northeast on the 57, took it all the way up to the 210 and exited in Azusa. He drove up Azusa Avenue to where it changed to San Gabriel Canyon, and rounded the bend. The road was almost deserted so Hood pulled over and watched the screen. Draper exited San Gabriel Canyon at Mirador, drove three short blocks and stopped moving at 122 Clearwater. Hood waited ten minutes for the red X to start up again but it didn’t.

Hood drove to Mirador and started across a bridge over the San Gabriel River. The river was whitecapped and high from the recent rain and he rolled down his windows to hear it. When he reached the peak of the bridge at the halfway point he saw the community guardhouse on the far side, still faintly lit in the dawn. Behind it he saw the nice new houses, gated and huddled up against the steep San Gabriel Mountains. As he approached he saw that the entrance barrier was down and the booth light was on and a guard was inside, hunched in a heavy black jacket. Hood stopped in the pull-out short of the booth, U-turned and headed back across the river.

Back in the hole at the prison, Hood did a title search of 122 Clearwater in Azusa and came up with the Ronald Draper Trust. He thought about that for a minute, then did title searches on units 18, 29 and 45 at the Laguna Royale.

And just as he had figured, one of them was owned by the Roxanne Draper Trust.

Both properties had been purchased in the last year and a half. Hood called the county to confirm what he suspected: Coleman Draper was the sole trustee for both trusts.

Because it was Saturday, it took Hood a long time to track down an official with the Azusa Water District, but when he finally found someone she was able to tell him that the water bills for 122 Clearwater were paid by Alexia Rivas. Another half hour of phone calls got him a Laguna-Moulton Water District assistant manager who said that water service charges to unit 18 of the Laguna Royale were paid by Juliet Brown.

Hood met Jim Warren at a Palmdale bar one hour later. It was strictly a drinker’s place: a TV, a country-only jukebox, a shrunken old bartender wearing jeans, a red cowboy shirt, and a belt with a buckle the size of his head. There was a pool table in the middle of the room but no players.

They carried their drinks to an empty booth in the back. In the dim overhead light Warren looked old and weathered.

Hood told him about Draper’s run to Mexico and back. He told him about the Friday nights that Terry Laws had invariably taken off work since the murders of Vasquez and Lopes, and the Friday night fishing trips that Draper had talked about with Deputy Sherry Seborn. Hood told him about the valuable properties in Laguna and Azusa that Draper had bought in the last year and a half.

Warren sipped his beer. “Did you see any containers in Draper’s car?”

“I never got close enough.”

“So he could have been fishing down there.”

“Could have been.”

“Charlie, if we show ourselves at the wrong time, it’s over. If we move and he’s not carrying the money, the whole thing dries up and blows away.”

Hood thought about the four-plus-hour drive he’d recently made from Venice to Cudahy to the border, following the flashing red X on the screen of the laptop.

“What are the chances he made you, Charlie?”

“I only got close enough once to see his face clearly. He was looking ahead, so he didn’t see me. The rest of the time I was far enough away to use the binoculars. It was busy everywhere and I never pressed him.”

“You’re positive it was him?”

“Positive.”

“Did he use any unusual routes, stop and wait, backtrack, anything evasive?”

“One stop for food in San Clemente. The rest was a straight shot.”

Hood pictured Draper’s M5 idling at the border crossing, the casual way he handed his ID-his shield, no doubt-to the authorities on both his way in and his way out.

“We could tip Customs and let them do their thing at the border,” said Warren. “If he’s transporting cash, then down he goes. If he’s not, a border stop might just seem to him like bad luck. A random check-no harm done-and we’re a hundred and thirty miles north, minding our own business.”

“He wouldn’t believe it was random,” Hood said.