T Parker - The Renegades

He locked up and reset the alarm and called Alexia as he walked home.

“I’m back,” he said.

“Are you all right?”

“Everything is okay.”

“Now I’m happy. I’ve missed you. I only breathe properly when you’re here.”

“I’ll be home in an hour.”

“I’ll be waiting, Coleman. I’ve missed you very much. And Brittany misses you very much, too.”

He packed his clothes-mostly dirty-and stopped at the Mexican market for cut flowers, a bottle of the sweet Riesling that Alexia loved, and a sugary churro for the girl.

Half an hour later Draper pulled into the garage of his Azusa home. Alexia stood in the doorway to the house, backlit by the warm light from the kitchen. She was petite and perfectly proportioned and her black hair shone like that of a groomed racehorse.

Draper stood there with the roses in his hand, just looking at her. She wore a new white dress with red piping, and a red belt and heels, which were beautiful against her young brown skin. He hadn’t seen her in a week and his heart beat hard as she came down the steps into the garage and opened her arms to him. He hugged her and pressed his nose against her luminous, fragrant hair.

“I’ll help you with your luggage,” she said.

“It can wait.”

Alexia brushed his lips with hers then moved away from Draper, and together they looked through the open door into the house, where two-year-old Brittany waddled toward them. She was a pudgy miniature of her mother, sporting a pink satin dress and pink sneakers.

“She has a new dress for you, too.”

“I’m the luckiest man alive.”

Draper had first seen Alexia almost two years ago, exhausted and dirty and sick, carrying her baby daughter across a dusty lot up near Palmdale. She was cutting through the lot on a 109-degree day, Draper had noted, to save a few steps on her way to the bus stop. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. His mind had instantly filled with possibilities, many of which had since been made real.

“Are you okay, Cole?”

“Now I am.”

He handed Alexia the roses then lifted Brittany by the waist and shifted her to the crook of his arm and they all went into the house.

After dinner Draper’s cell phone rang and he checked the caller ID before answering. He walked into the spare bedroom and closed the door. It was Hood, asking more questions about Londell Dwayne and his dog and Terry Laws.

Draper told him what he knew, then returned to the neat little dining room.

He looked at Alexia. Brittany smiled and drooled and banged her pacifier on the table.

“What happened, Cole?”

“A man I work with was shot and killed last night. The shooter got away. That was someone official, with questions.”

She stood behind him and kneaded his shoulders and neck with her small strong hands. Coleman hung his head and wiped a small tear from his eye. He kept wondering what Terry had told Laurel. Nothing? Everything?

“I’m sorry, Cole. I am so sorry for you.”

“I’m all right now.”

“When will you have to go away again? No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ask that. I know. I’m very sorry.”

Alexia’s small knowledge of him bordered the vast, willed expanse of her ignorance of him. To Draper it was better than trust.

“A little to the left. Yes. There.”

Prosecutor Ariel Reed met Hood in the lobby of the downtown District Attorney building. They had talked on the phone several times but had never met. She was petite and fair-skinned, with dark hair squared off just above the eyes and just below her chin. Her shoulders were straight. She was about Hood’s age and she walked fast. She led him down a hallway and into her office and began talking as she closed the door.

“We don’t go easy on bad cops,” she said. “The jury’s been impaneled and we’re ready to rock. We’re on the trial docket for week after next, Superior Courtroom Eight-the honorable William Mabry. I’m going to call you as a witness, which means you’ll need to be available.”

“I’ll be available.”

The defendant was a Sheriff’s Department deputy that Hood had helped bust last year in L.A. He had been running a stolen goods racket out of a Long Beach warehouse. The DA had charged him with ten felony counts of grand theft, and buying and selling stolen property. He was looking at eight to ten years.

Ariel gave Hood a level gaze. Her eyes were hazel. She tapped something onto her computer keyboard.

“I forgot to offer you coffee,” she said.

“No, thank you.”

“I go too fast sometimes.”

“I forget to tie my shoes sometimes,” he said.

“Our caseload is heavy. To think about it directly is to court insanity. But you detectives know all about that.”

“Insanity.”

Her smile was thrifty and brief. “Caseload.”

“Okay, then.”

She gave him another flat gaze. “Deputy Hood, what I want from you in court is two things. One is the straight story of what you saw in the Long Beach warehouse. I’ve got your reports here and they’re very clear and detailed. I’ll let you describe the stolen property. I’ll also want a little emotion to show through. Sometimes it’s hard to get a jury to care about merchandise. This L.A. sheriff’s deputy had eight hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stolen goods. I want our jury to know what that looked like. What it felt like to see it.”

Hood remembered exactly what it felt like to see it and he described it to her. He remembered standing in the warehouse the day IA made the arrest. It was a large, high-ceilinged room full of shelves of pallets containing new electronics, computers and peripherals, building materials, liquor, soft drinks, furniture, tools, toys, clothing-just about anything Hood could imagine. It was all new stuff, most still in the shrink-wrap, and it was stacked almost to the ceiling. It was barely organized. There were rolling platforms and electric forklifts to move it all.

“It looked like a madman’s fantasy Christmas,” Hood said. “It was impressive, the sheer volume.”

She was nodding. “Good.”

She looked at her monitor, then back at Hood. “Now, the defense will introduce into evidence the letter written to you by Allison Murrieta, telling you where to find the warehouse. I need to know why she wrote you that letter.”

“We knew each other from a related case,” said Hood. “She thought she was doing me a favor by handing me a dirty cop.”

“The defense will try to link you to her.”

“That won’t be hard.”

“In order to impugn your character, suggest that you were a dirty cop, too-consorting with a criminal.”

“I’ll tell the truth.”

Reed paused and looked at Hood. “Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

He could feel her gaze as he looked around her office. Her workstation was more than unusual. The walls were painted a pale gold. She had a very handsome desk of bird’s-eye maple, not county-issue. The file cabinets behind her were finished in flame red enamel. On a sidewall were three framed photographs, staggered on a diagonal from high to low. They weren’t easy to see from where Hood sat, but he could make out the general images. The top one was of a dragster doing a wheel stand off the start line. Below it was a photograph of a dragster with flames blasting from the exhaust pipes. Below that was another photograph of a red-and-gold dragster waiting at the Christmas tree. The top photo was in black-and-white. Three generations of dragsters, he thought. But he couldn’t keep his mind on dragsters.

“I wish you could get him on murder-for-hire.”

Reed looked at him sharply. “I can’t prove murder-for-hire. Allison is dead. The guy who was supposed to kill her is dead. It’s Shakespearean. What can I do with a cast like that, Deputy?”