T Parker - L. A. Outlaws

It was July and I know it was hot because I spent a July up near Coloma camping with Bradley a few years ago, just to pay my respects to Joaquin, and to get the feel of the place where his life was shaped. I told Bradley a little about Joaquin, but not too much. The sky was a beautiful turquoise blue and most afternoons we saw wispy cirrus clouds blowing toward the mountains.

This is how it went down: six young Anglos rode into Joaquin’s camp with their guns drawn, yelling that Jesús’s horse belonged to them. They were drunk. Joaquin writes in simple, clear Spanish about being held at rifle point and tied to a tree, then watching Jesús “struggle and strangle” (my translation) at the end of a rope slung over an oak branch and pulled taut by all six of the men. They lowered his boot toes to the ground then yanked him up, lowered him to the ground again then yanked him up again. They laughed. Finally they hoisted him up and watched him die. Joaquin wrote about the horsewhip that “drove fire” into his back-six powerful lashes that would bleed and fester for weeks-and how the men “obliterated” the camp and found their tiny bags of gold flakes taken from the stream. And he wrote finally of the sounds of Rosa’s screams against the bandana she was gagged with, the grunting of the men, and the bucking and whinnying of his tethered horse, Jorge, “as if he could understand.”

I’ve stood on that ground. I’ve slept there. It’s a quiet place, mostly pine trees. But the oak tree where they hanged Jesús is easy to find-it’s the only oak tree by that stretch of the stream-and it’s got plenty of good stout horizontal branches. You don’t hear much but jays during the day and crickets at night. You might see a squirrel or a lizard, maybe a deer flitting between the trees. It’s like nothing ever happened. Nature forgets history just like we do-something I often tell my students. Bradley and I panned the stream and got some trace, but that was all.

By the time I get to the Hapkido Federation studio in L.A. my nerves have settled and I feel focused. I’m in time for sparring with Quinn and some other black belts. Quinn was the one who taught me this method way back in Bakersfield before he moved south to the city.

In case you don’t know, hapkido is a deeply vicious martial art-you break bones and dislocate joints and gouge eyes and crush windpipes and smash testicles in about the time it takes to unlock a car with a key fob.

Of course for sparring at the black-belt level you have to control yourself, and your whole body is padded to the max-head protector, mouthpiece, cups for the guys, even pads for your feet and hands.

You can’t believe the adrenaline-driven clarity that settles over you as a six-foot, 190-pound hapkido warrior bows to you, then flows into his fighting position and waits for you to attack. You see every shift in his balance, every tiny feint, every flicker in his eye. You know when his breathing changes. Then all hell breaks loose. A two-minute round never seems to end. And the second you get tired is the second that someone lands a fist to your solar plexus or a foot to your head.

I go six rounds. At the end of the session I’m bent over and breathing hard and I can hardly hold myself upright to bow to Quinn before I head for the locker room.

An hour later I’m standing in Angel’s shop up in Phelan. Phelan is in the desert north of L.A., not far from Interstate 15. Angel is the man who taught me how to steal cars and what to do with them once they’re mine.

Here in Phelan they’ve got black sky and nice stars but not much else. The shop is made of metal and has no windows, which defeats the popular LoJack device. I can hear the wind knocking against the panels. Angel is doing a walk-around on the Mustang, nodding, clicking and sending pictures and text messages with his phone. Demand is high. Angel is always selling. He might have sold the thing already for all I know.

“Thirteen,” he says.

“Fifteen.”

“Thirteen seven fifty, and no higher, Suzie.”

“Fourteen.”

“Fine, fine, fine.”

“Where will you send her?” I ask.

“Mexico. I have a buyer waiting. Someone who prefers American. You’ve always had good instincts for the right car.”

A loaded Mustang GT is a thirty-two-thousand-dollar car new-drops to twenty-five if you sell it low-mileage to a private party. Angel will take it from here: pay me, replace the VIN with a clean one, forge counterfeit title and registration, remove LoJack or any other antitheft devices and transport it by truck to a Tijuana leather shop for custom upgrades, where it will change trucks and be taken south to Mexico City, maybe Sinaloa, maybe Puerto Vallarta or Cartagena or Bogotá. Angel will be paid in dollars. Since the airlines got tough after 9/11, roughly one million American drug dollars a day journey by car through Tijuana to points south. A day.

So the narcotraficantes have plenty of cash on hand. For the Mustang Angel will get about twenty-two grand. The cartel guys who buy them aren’t getting a steal, but they’re getting something they can’t buy legally in the United States. One reason that Angel’s stolen cars are so popular in Mexico is that suspected drug heavies are banned from spending money here in the States, a law originally passed to keep them from financing “dream teams” of lawyers for their defense in U.S. courts. What narcotraficantes get now is a court-appointed defender. But they can always get a VIN-switched Beemer, Benz, Porsche, Jag, Ford, Chevy or Chrysler from Angel. In most corners of the world, money talks.

Angel pours us each a shot of reposado tequila, offers it to me on a varnished wooden tray. It’s a ritual of ours.

We sip and I stare at the Ford. It’s a bitchin’ ride-honestly aggressive, capable, fun just to look at.

“Angel, I might want to move some diamonds.”

“Oh.” He frowns. He studies the car, then me. “There’s Jason.”

“I won’t deal with him.”

Angel nods. One of the many things I like about Latin men is that they understand that many things in life are fated and final and beyond discussion.

“They’re beautiful, Angel. Gem quality-the best. One is two carats and close to perfect. They’re unbelievable. Retail is four hundred and fifty. I’ll take forty and there’s five in it for you.”

“Ten percent is top dollar. But let me see.”

I thank Angel but I don’t like the look on his face. He’s a strong man with broad shoulders and chest, a lion’s gut and a high, back-sloping head blessed with thick silver hair. He dresses beautifully. His face is all crags and he’s got a smile like a sunrise. We were us for a while, but we both knew that wouldn’t last long. Mostly we were business. Angel charged me five hundred dollars to show me how to steal my first car. Later, when I’d learned the craft, he had a custom slide-hammer made just for me, a little shorter than the usual ones and the handle a little thinner for hands my size. I rarely sell a car to anyone else.

But I see no sunrise in Angel’s face right now.

“Does this relate to the diamond broker in the body shop?”

“Directly.”

“A terrible thing.”

“I wasn’t involved. I was lucky.”

“I’ve never had good luck with diamonds,” he says. “They seem to have minds of their own. But an automobile, it always goes where you steer it. Speaking of this, come with me.”

We walk past some very choice American cars-two loaded Escalades with twenty-inch shoes and big meat, two Suburbans with more of the same, a Mustang GT, a black-on-black GM Yukon and a genuinely beautiful custom cobalt blue Denali XL that actually makes certain parts of me tingle. The paint and chrome gleam in the fluorescent lights and each one seems smug with its own secret behind the heavily tinted glass. Customers love heavily tinted glass.