T Parker - L. A. Outlaws

After the last exhausting presentation by an L.A. Unified risk management team- your best defense against on-site accidents is AWARENESS -I make it to my car and screech out of the lot before any reporters spot me.

It’s ninety-two degrees out. My AC needs a freon charge. Driving the Sentra to and from work every day is spiritual punishment for me but that’s the way it’ll be for the next nine months. On my salary I can’t show up at Franklin Intermediate in a Maybach. The Friday traffic on the surface streets is awful. It takes twenty minutes to go three blocks. Ahead I can see the freeway overpass and it is clogged with cars that do not move.

I can’t do it.

I have my needs.

I call home and tell Ernest I’m staying up in L.A. for the night.

I do an hour of hapkido with Quinn downtown, trying to focus but still a little uptight, a little distracted by the last week. I imagine Guy receiving every punch and kick. I’m furious at him for stealing my money but I haven’t figured out how to get it back. Yet. Quinn kicks my ass and sends me out with a throbbing shin, sore ribs and a ringing in my head where he caught me with an elbow. Of course I had my headgear on and my mouthpiece in, but I actually felt my brain hit my skull. Quinn sat me in lotus position and worked my neck and temples until my focus came back, pointing out to me that it won’t go down like this on the street.

I check into the Mondrian on Sunset and call Hood.

“Charlie.” There’s a pause. I figure there might be a few of them.

“Hi, Suzanne.”

“How much do you miss me?”

“More than a little.”

“Catch any bad guys?”

“Only you.”

“You’ve got me all wrong, Charlie.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“They kicked me off homicide. I’m back on patrol until I get auto theft. So if Allison keeps up her high jinks I might get a shot at her.”

“I hope you don’t mean with a gun.”

“No, I mean give her a shot at due process and getting her life back together.”

“What makes you think she needs to get her life back together?”

“She needs her life period.”

“She does take some risks.”

“If you just came in and spilled it, hired Ruth to represent you, you might do pretty well.”

“I’m innocent.”

Hood is silent.

“What if Allison disappeared?” I ask.

Another pause. The money pause.

“I wondered about that,” he says.

“Say she went away, Charlie. Adios. The public wonders, then they get interested in someone else. You spend some time with me and the boys. Come down to Valley Center on weekends and holidays-you’ll love it there. We have a pond with bass and the neighbors have horses we can ride, just like you used to do in Bakersfield. Ernest is going to be okay with how things are. I’m going to set him up with a dressage rider who needs to experience a real ride. So here’s the deal, Charlie: the deputy and the teacher, who met by chance on the night of one of L.A.’s worst crimes, fall in love.”

Hood chuckles. “Yeah. I thought of all that. Except the dressage rider.”

“What do you think?”

“I won’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“It has to do with what I believe in.”

“Tell me what you believe in.”

“I’d like to.”

“Can I come over?”

Hood’s apartment in Silver Lake is like Hood: tall and narrow and neat. It’s an older place, with wainscoting, wall cornices and a high, stamped-aluminum ceiling. The furniture looks cheap and new. He’s got a few books and a bunch of music and Ansel Adams pictures on the walls.

He follows my eye and says that’s Yosemite in winter and I try very hard not to but I step across the room and put my arms around him. Next thing I’m on the floor looking up at Hood’s face above me haloed by the ceiling lamp. His expression is serious. We’re slightly slower about it than before, there’s some acknowledgment in it, some awareness of a shared history, and it’s good, fantastically good.

Later he brings a bottle of wine and two glasses back to the bedroom. I pull up with the sheet around me and he tells me about the Iraqi man and his three boys shot to death by seven soldiers and Lenny Overbrook trying to take the blame for all of them, just like they told him to. Hood was a NCIS detective and it was his job to figure out what happened, but he was also right there after this shoot-out and he saw six guys running away and this simpleton Lenny wiping down a Russian gun after putting it on the dead Iraqi’s lap. And it came down to Lenny’s word that he’d shot up these four men himself, against Hood’s that he saw six more running away from the house, but Hood couldn’t ID anybody. So he could either take Lenny’s mostly false confession and send him to prison for four murders he couldn’t have committed, or he could let four innocent people get murdered and watch everyone walk away from it. He set the kid free and tried to keep the case open but he got no cooperation up the chain of command and when his tour was done he came home. A sniper’s bullet hit a wall right next to him one day, broad daylight in a controlled zone, and Hood wasn’t sure if it was an Iraqi or a fellow soldier. Hood tells me that that bullet revealed a truth about himself that he wasn’t prepared to face-that he was feared and hated. I think the idea that his own men wanted him dead broke part of his heart, though he didn’t use those words. He couldn’t sleep and he couldn’t eat and by the time he got back to Pendleton he weighed fifteen pounds less than at the start of his second tour, and he was pretty much skin and bones even then.

When Hood is done with the story, or I think he’s done with it, he takes a Bible from the drawer of his nightstand and opens it up where there’s a folded piece of paper to hold the place and I figure it’s time for Psalms or maybe Job, but he hands me the paper and sets the Bible down.

I unfold it and he explains it’s a list that Lenny gave him of the six others-names and ranks all written out in handwriting that quite frankly looks like a third-grader in a hurry.

“I think about that piece of paper sometimes,” says Hood. “Some days I think I’ll call the navy and tell them what I’ve learned. Other days, not.”

“Let it go, Hood. You did the right thing. Our soldiers should never have been there in the first place.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It’s the whole point-it should never have happened.”

“All that matters is what happens. I never thought we should have gone in there either but rules don’t get suspended because of what you think. Murder is the same thing in Anbar as it is in L.A. I know those soldiers were furious and scared. You can’t even believe the pressure that builds up. You’re surrounded by betrayal and ugliness and hatred. The heat and the dust and the blood. It gets into you and you have to do something. For those guys, the four dead Iraqis were that something.”

“That’s why you did the right thing, Charlie. Those soldiers were put into an unwinnable situation and they did the best they could. Your letting them go is your part, Hood. It’s your duty and you’re guilty of doing it, just like they are. It’s the guilt that earns your forgiveness.”

He looks at me. “No. If you make murder okay you make everything okay. And you tilt the world to an angle where you can’t build anything. Nothing.”

“You are not God and you are not your own judge.”

“I am very much my own judge, Suzanne.”

Hood refolds the list of names and sets it back in his Bible. I watch his upper body, the indentation of his backbone and the rounded straps of muscle that run alongside it. He’s got a cool mole and I touch it.