The one with the pistol swung open the wooden gate to the courtyard, backing up and using it for cover. The cop with the shotgun stood with his back to the adobe, and when the opening was wide, he crouched low and followed his light inside. It looked like the pistol cop was trying to secure the gate open, but he gave up and followed his partner in.
The gate slammed shut in the wind.
Hood saw the dull explosion of light behind the courtyard wall, then another. A second later came the muffled reports of the shotgun.
He ran for the house, gun still drawn, flashlight still in his left hand.
They got him, he thought. Two shots from the riot gun at close range.
He heaved across the desert and the driveway and swung open the gate. The shotgun cop lay on his back just inside the entrance. His head was intact but his face and everything behind it was gone, and through this crude tunnel Hood saw the gravel of the courtyard floor wet and red. The dead man’s finger was still inside the Remington’s trigger guard.
His partner was sprawled faceup over the chair that Hood had been sitting on with the cat half an hour earlier. He was breathing fast, his upper chest and neck in ribbons, eyes staring out at Hood from behind a mask of blood. He reminded Hood of someone but Hood had no presence of mind now for memory. The cop breathed faster and tried to stand but the chair began to topple. Hood caught him and eased him to the floor but by the time he did this the cop had stopped breathing and Hood could hardly get a pulse.
He pulled back the man’s head and closed his nose and breathed for him twice, then straddled him and continued the CPR with twenty stiff-armed, flat-palmed compressions against the sternum. He ventilated again, the compressed. And again. Hood lost count. His mouth filled with liquid copper and his throat clenched to keep the bile down. His face and hands and thighs were sticky and warm, and he thought, Jesus, this guy isn’t going to make it but he talked to him anyway, saying stay alive, stay alive, man, open those eyes and come back here right now, man, you come back here.
Hood fumbled out his cell phone, punched 911 and speaker and set the phone beside the cop as he did the cardio thrusts. Through the wind and his own grunting breaths he heard the operator come on, and he gave her the address and said officers down, two officers down but that was all he managed before it was time to breathe again for the cop. Hood got himself off the man and pinched his nose and breathed into him again while the operator assured him in a distant voice that police and medical were on their way.
Immeasurably later the medics pulled Hood away midthrust and took over with the oxygen machine.
Hood sat panting in a corner of the courtyard. He wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his sleeve and stared wide-eyed and straight ahead. He saw Lupercio’s small boot prints in the gravel and the gore on the gate above the shotgun cop as the paramedics swung it open and took the gurney out.
A while later Hood and two BPD officers were standing atop the sand hill above Lupercio’s car, but the car was gone. He saw the flashlights of two more cops on the dune across the road and two more lights down where the car had been. A helicopter crossed overhead and a spotlight raked the ground below it.
Hood didn’t remember trudging through the desert to get here.
He turned and took a knee and looked out at the chaos of vehicles and flashing lights backed up for what seemed like miles down the driveway of Madeline Jones’s house.
24
Hood’s first and only crime spree, and his first thoughts of becoming a cop someday, both occurred when he was sixteen.
He’d gotten his driver’s license and the world was open to him through the ancient Chevrolet that he had bought from a neighbor with saved money.
His father had shown him how to pull the block and pistons to be ground at an auto shop, had helped him rebuild the carburetor and put in the new oil pump, radiator, solenoid assembly and brakes.
As they worked, his father asked Hood what he wanted to do with his life, and Hood said be a cop, maybe, because he liked the TV shows about them and the idea that you joined a department of people who became your friends. His father, as a municipal employee himself, praised the medical benefits and retirement packages offered to Bakersfield policemen and agreed that there was plenty of “camaraderie” in law enforcement.
When the car was finished, Hood had not one penny left for paint, but the engine and tranny were sound and the retreads still had some miles on them. It had a radio that pulled local FM stations and the AM news stations out of L.A., and a cassette deck.
He was free.
It was a summer night, a Friday. Hood had a full tank of gas and some metal on, and his parents had given him permission to overnight with a friend.
He drove through downtown with the window open and his elbow on the door and a cigarette in his lips and wondered what he really would do with his life, given that he was sixteen and there was lots of life ahead. He cruised the East Hills Mall parking lot and watched the pretty girls and knew that whatever he did with his life, it was going to include one of them. Girls liked cops, right? He smiled and waved at some, tried to say hello, but his voice stuck high in his throat like something he’d forgotten to chew.
Back on the boulevard Hood realized that the trouble with law enforcement was that he’d always liked outlaws.
He’d always wondered what it would be like to be one, to walk alertly through space and time following his own code and no other. He’d always silently pulled for the bad guys.
When he saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as an eight-year-old, he’d thought it was the most powerful movie he’d ever seen, though his mother said, “The chuckleheads got what they deserved.”
In seventh grade, when the genuinely tough kids began getting expelled from school, he’d secretly admired them.
When a local man had been arrested for stealing horses from a Bakersfield rancher, Hood had recognized him immediately on the news-he was the cool guy who worked at the bike store, the young guy with the old voice who’d talk chicks and liquor while he adjusted the brake cables and chain on Hood’s Schwinn for free. Hood wrote him an anonymous letter, care of the Kern County Jail, telling the bike shop dude to hang tough.
When his father groused about the state of California halting executions, Hood had been secretly glad because the idea of waiting in a cell to be killed terrified him.
A world beyond the law, he thought. Give me freedom to find a code of my own.
So that Friday night Hood walked into the Bakersfield Warehouse, picked out a hundred and twenty dollars’ worth of headbanger tapes because he already owned everything related to the Bakersfield Sound, and ran out of the store.
He was burning rubber out of the parking lot, mud slopped over the Chevy plates to obscure the numbers, before anyone even bothered to follow him out.
He dined and dashed at Coco’s, shoplifted a bottle of vodka and a handful of Slim Jims from a supermarket.
High on fear and heart pounding hard, he strode into a Wal-Mart, then strode back out with a one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar boom box and plenty of D batteries to run it. The pleasant old man who greeted customers at the entrance croaked drily at him as Hood ran out the door.
That night he took all his loot out to a desert camp-ground he’d used over the years. There was a ring of fire-blackened rocks and a plywood lean-to and empty food cans brown with rust. He collected some wood and got a fire going, then set up the boom box, put in a tape, cracked the vodka and opened a meat snack. Two hours later he was very drunk, so he got the sleeping bag from the trunk of the car and curled up in the backseat with nothing but his shoulder for a pillow.