T Parker - L. A. Outlaws

Suzanne Jones stopped walking and took his arm, turning him to face her. The river of tourists parted around them, and Hood heard Japanese and French and Tagalog trailing past him.

“I’ve never even seen this body shop,” she said. “And I don’t take things that don’t belong to me. I’m a schoolteacher who saw a man. I didn’t even know about your crime scene until you came to my home on Sunday. Now my neighbors are being murdered and my son is finding butchered bodies in my barn.”

A kid with a skimboard stared at her big-eyed as he walked past.

“Let’s find a better place to talk,” said Hood. “Maybe along the water.”

They stepped off the boardwalk and trudged across the sand toward the ocean. Hood watched the sand flies scatter as he crunched through a patch of seaweed drying in the sun.

“Give me the name and number of the relative you were visiting when I pulled you over Saturday night. Don’t say it’s none of my business.”

He punched in the number as they walked. Mary Jones picked up on the third ring and confirmed that her sister-in-law Suzanne had visited her last Saturday night, left around one-thirty in the morning and had not been drinking. Hood thanked her.

“Alibi confirmed?”

“Did you coach her?”

She shook her head and said nothing.

“You’re telling me the truth, right, Ms. Jones?”

“You’re the most distrustful man I’ve ever met.”

He thought of Anbar and the price of trust. “It’s part of the job, Ms. Jones.”

“I’ve told you nothing but the truth, Charles Robert.”

“How much of it?”

“Everything. Christ, you’re difficult.”

Hood stared down at her as she said this, and he weighed her words and the tone of her words against everything he knew, and he believed them. Unrelated to the fact that she rattled and skinned him, he believed them.

“Tell Ernest to keep moving,” he said. “One place-one night. No ground-floor rooms. Use public places. The more people around the better.”

“Okay.”

“The same goes for you.”

“Yes.”

“I can offer you protective custody.”

“You’d have to kill me first.”

“What I figured. When you left your Valley Center home, did you take your personal phone and address book?”

“I left it in the computer room.”

“It’s gone.”

They looked at each other, midstep. Near the shoreline they continued north. The sand was hard-packed here, and Hood watched the white water chase a sandpiper up the berm. Ahead the tide pools shimmered in the sun and a tall outcropping of black rock stood out against the sky.

“Lupercio must think you have the diamonds.”

“I have no diamonds.”

“Why are you running?”

“To protect my family. When Jordan drew the picture, I knew that man was after me. Because of the night before. He wasn’t after Harold and Gerald.”

“He was looking for something in your barn.”

“Believe me, I know what’s in my barn. I’m sorry my word isn’t good enough for you, Charlie.”

“Help us set him up,” said Hood.

She looked up at him. He couldn’t see behind the reflective glasses but her mouth was set firm.

“Be the bait?” she asked.

“Yes. Listen.”

Hood stopped but Jones kept walking, swinging the tote in a carefree arc, then looking back at him. She turned and climbed the rocks then crossed a spit of sand and ducked into an archway and disappeared.

Hood trotted after her, scrambling up the rocks and across the sand then ducking through the same arch and finding himself in a small enclosure with rock walls and a wet sand floor.

The white water flooded in and soaked them to their ankles.

“What would I have to do?” she asked.

“We’ll want you up our way, for jurisdictional reasons. We’ll pick the place, but you’ll register yourself and pay the charges, just like you did here. We’ll set up outside, in the lobby, in the room next door. We’ll use cameras, mikes, whatever we need. We’d be fluid and lean. The moment he shows, we swarm him.”

“Who picks up the room charges?”

“We’re trying to save your life for cryin’ out loud, but we’ll pay for the room, too.”

“Good. How’s he going to find me?”

“I don’t know, but I think he will. He’s got help-a network, old gangster friends, maybe a DMV connection. If he found you in Valley Center, we figure he’ll find you again in L.A.”

She studied him from behind the glasses then sloshed forward through the receding suds and took his face in her hands and kissed him. Hood stared point-blank at her forehead and the light brown hair curling out from under the cap, and he felt the bill of it touching his own head up near the hairline. He heard the rush of the water up the sand and against his ankles. Hood had never been kissed with such generosity.

“I need your help checking out of the hotel, Hood. Due to heightened security.”

“I understand.”

In room 302 he took off his coat and hung it on a chair and sat. She showered and came out in a black slip and stood in front of him, and Hood lost most of what reason he had left. He carried her to the bed. It was like two tornadoes competing for the same trailer park. When they were done he lay on his back with his head over the edge of the bed breathing hard and looking out the curtained window to the upside-down Pacific. He wondered at the path that had led him here but he couldn’t see any path at all. Then he was up and herding her back into the bed and truly believing that at this moment he ruled the known world.

“Oh, Hood. Charles Robert. Let’s hear it for Bakersfield.”

Lupercio stood on his back patio and watched the tumbleweeds shiver against the chain-link fence. Beyond the fence a dirt devil augured across the desert floor then spun itself out. The sun hung red and wavering and his outdoor thermometer read 104 degrees. It was good to be home.

Adelanto lay around him, a struggling city in the desert north of L.A. It was poor and dirty but had just enough Latin Americans to make Lupercio more or less invisible. There was hardly a window in the city that wasn’t protected by iron, and although some of it was decoratively wrought, the rest was the straight vertical bars of jail cells around the world. Up until a few years ago the police were running a casino and a brothel, the streets flowed with drugs, and the civic leaders were pocketing public money as fast as they could grab it. In this it was like the El Salvador of Lupercio’s youth.

But Lupercio knew the true difference between the norte and the centro, because nowhere in Adelanto or anywhere else in the Estado Unidos did freshly murdered bodies appear each morning as they did at Puerta del Diablo-unexplained and uninvestigated. Piles of them, thrown from the verdant heights above-decapitated, dismembered, hacked, beaten, burned. News would spread through the village each morning, how many new bodies were found “on top.” When his brother disappeared, Lupercio had climbed over the piled bodies at the Devil’s Door many mornings, turning over the fresh ones on top in search of him. When his father disappeared, Lupercio had done it again.

And he had found them.

Thousands of times Lupercio had driven by the sign welcoming drivers on Highway 395. It said: “Welcome to Adelanto: City of Unlimited Possibilities.”

He understood what the sign meant but he saw another side to the words. When you came from San Salvador and your youth was death squads and the disappeared and mysterious piles of bodies at Puerta del Diablo, or El Playón , or bodies in the jungle or on the roadside or in the barrancas -you didn’t want to live in a city of unlimited possibilities.