T Parker - The Renegades

Hood got partnered up with Terry Laws that night, another swing shift in the desert, another hundred and fifty miles of motion on asphalt, another Crown Victoria Law Enforcement Interceptor that would feel like home.

They walked to the motor yard without talking. Hood was tall and lanky and Laws had a weight lifter’s body that made his jacket tight across his shoulders. Various sections of the lot were marked by signs bearing the names of fallen deputies, and there were other sections awaiting names.

Hood logged the mileage and checked the tires for pressure and wear while Terry checked the fluid levels. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department patrol fleet was old and worn, so they had to check even the obvious. Two days ago the LASD Lancaster station had lost another prowl car engine, more than 260K miles on it, finally succumbing just half a mile short of the yard with a clanging metallic death rattle. The deputy had pushed it to the curb and called a tow.

Hood drove. He bounced the car from the yard onto the boulevard and felt the comforting sense of motion that connected him with last night’s motion, which connected him with the motion of the night before, and of the week and the months before that. Motion ruled. He believed that it might lead him to what he was looking for. It had to do with a woman who had died, and a piece of something in him, perhaps soul, that had gone missing.

It was windy and getting dark, and the desert cold was sharp and weightless as a razor blade. A tumbleweed skipped across Avenue J. The overhead traffic light at Division Street shivered on its cables. Snow was coming and Hood had not yet seen snow in this desert.

He drove and watched and listened as Terry talked about his young daughters-basketball players, good students. Terry’s friends called him Mr. Wonderful because he was a two-time L.A. Sheriff’s Department bodybuilding champion, a devoted father, and a Toys for Tots warrior each Christmas season. He had a heroic chin and an open face and a quick smile. He’d made a high-profile arrest on a double homicide almost two years back, which gave him good mojo in the department. He was thirty-nine, ten years older than Hood. Hood had patrolled with Laws before and had thought that something was eating the big man, but Hood believed there was something eating most of us.

They drove north on Division, east on Avenue I past the fairgrounds. Tuesday nights in winter were slow.

Hood’s world was the Antelope Valley, north of L.A. The valley is the new frontier, the final part of the county to be heavily developed. It is high desert, ferociously hot and cold, and dry. The cities are booming but not quite prosperous. Thousands of the homes are new. They’re affordable. The cities have nice names, like Palmdale and Rosamond and Pearblossom and Quartz Hill. There were no antelope in the Antelope Valley until the twentieth century, when some were released so the valley could live up to its name, a California thing, to dream big and fill in the details later. Beyond the Antelope Valley is the vast Mojave Desert.

“What do you make of AV after six months?” asked Laws.

“I like that you can see so far.”

“Yeah, you get the wide open spaces. It’s not for everybody. You’ll like the snow.”

Antelope Valley was in fact the Siberia of the Sheriff’s Department, but Hood had asked to be transferred here after some trouble in L.A. He wanted to forget and not be seen. He had been a Bulldog-in-training-LASD homicide-for about four weeks but it didn’t work out. Then he had talked to Internal Affairs about a superior he mistook for an honest man, and who was soon to stand trial for eight felonies. Hood would be called as a witness by the prosecution, which he dreaded.

They got coffee and continued out Avenue I, made the loop around Eastside Park. On the western horizon the last yellow strip of day flattened under the black weight of night. Hood looked out at the new walled neighborhoods stretching for miles, tract upon tract, houses huddled roof-to-roof like they were trying to beat the cold. Hood had thought that he would like Siberia and he did. He was a Bakersfield boy, used to open land, heat and wind, fast cars and good music.

“I hate these Housing Authority raids,” said Terry. “They make me feel like a hired thug.”

“Me, too,” said Hood. At roll call they’d been told to expect an early shift assignment to assist L.A. County Housing Authority at the Legacy in east Lancaster. The Legacy was Section 8, federally subsidized housing. When the owners had a problem with tenants they went to the Housing Authority, but HA officials had no real authority at all-they were not armed, could not make arrests or serve warrants. Tenants were not even required to allow them into their homes. But HA could request assistance from LASD deputies, and fear opens doors. Hood resented these assignments, which played out by class and race: the owners and renters, the landed and the poor, white and black.

Dispatch called a drunk and disorderly out at the Orbit Lounge and a west side cruiser rolled on it. Hood had quickly learned that the AV is flight country-from Edwards Air Force Base and Yeager and the Right Stuff to the Stealth Skunkworks to the huge commercial aircraft plants that once flourished here. He knew that most of that work was done elsewhere now, but the bars still had names like the Orbit or the Firing Range or the Barrier.

“I feel action on tap tonight, Charlie. That’s good. You know Mouse Washington? You seen him? Big, Eight Tray Crip, built like a Hummer? Lives with his mom and a bunch of pit bulls in a Section Eight? He beat the piss out of two Bloods right outside the mall yesterday. Two of his dogs held them, deep puncture wounds all up and down their legs. One of ’em’s still in the hospital.”

Hood, in his six short months up here in the desert, had seen that the gangs were thriving. There had been another killing just last week, a seventeen-year-old clicked up with Eighteenth, standing on a street corner waving a big foam “New Homes” sign shaped like an arrow. Hood had learned that these people were called “human directionals” by the developers who hired them, but most people just called them sign wavers. He’d also noted that some of them got really good at it-twirls and aerials and behind-the-back NBA stuff. They could entertain you at a stoplight. But when the Blood gun car had passed by, the human directional with the “New Homes” sign had six bullets in him and he died later in a hospital.

“Speaking of dog bites,” said Laws. He unbuttoned his long-sleeved uniform shirt and showed Hood his left forearm, discolored and punctured, but healing. “That’s what I got for helping a guy out.” He turned on the dome light for a moment and looked at the wound as if it were a mystery he hadn’t yet solved.

“Dog have shots?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry, I’m not going rabid on you.”

They pulled into the Legacy housing development. Big homes, two stories, peaked roofs with dormers and faux shutters on the windows. The tract was ten years old and some of the houses already looked like they should be condemned. The desert ages buildings and people twice as fast as anywhere else.

Fourteen-eleven Storybook had a dead brown lawn, weeds eating through the driveway concrete and a broken window patched with plywood against the cold. There were signs of effort, too: a couple of shiny kids’ bikes up by the porch and a bird feeder swinging from a lemon tree in the middle of the dead grass, and a bed of wind-lashed rosebushes by the garage.

A Housing Authority van was parked in the driveway, two men standing by the driver’s door. Hood and Laws pulled up to the curb opposite and parked just short of a peppertree thrashing in the wind. Hood heard the crunch and rattle of peppercorns when he stepped out of the car and crossed the street.