Luckily, Franklin is a closed and fenced campus and all visitors have to come and go through the office. The office secretary is Wanda and she can be very unwelcoming. By the end of my first Thursday she’s turned away four TV news crews, the Los Angeles Times, KNX and KFWB radio and a freelancer hoping to land a Good Housekeeping assignment. I’m willing to be temporarily famous but you can’t have reporters dropping in on you whenever they want. Ruth is arranging the really big stuff anyway.
By Friday morning the classroom is ready but I still have meetings with the principal and the district and the PTA and the school board and even an LAPD presentation here on gang activity and what to do about it. They claim these meetings are necessary but they’re agonizing beyond description. I wear my sunglasses and stare out the windows and think of Hood under me on the cushions at the Persian restaurant or sprawled on the bed in the Hotel Laguna looking out at the ocean and muttering something about his world being turned upside down. On a notepad I make a short list of the new cars I’d like to boost, which includes the new Chevrolet Silverado with the six-liter V-8 and 10,500-pound towing capacity, Porsche’s naturally aspirated 415-hp GT3 and a Shelby GT-500, which is only a Mustang but with five hundred horses it’s the fastest pony-155 mph-ever built. There are others.
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.”