“She said let you in. But I ain’t sure.”
“Open the door. You’re free to go.”
“She needs help.”
“Go.”
“Deputy, you can’t throw me out of my own house.”
He turned and walked away, and Hood followed him inside and shut the door. He was taller than Hood by a head and almost twice as thick.
“It’s the teacher,” Rachman said. “Crazy. The teacher is Allison. That’s something. But she won’t let the paramedics in. I can’t talk any sense into her.”
Suzanne lay on her back on the living room sofa. She was wrapped in what looked like bedsheets and a brightly colored purple-and-blue afghan. Her wig and gun and mask were on the floor beside her. Her face was pale and he heard her teeth chattering and saw the rapid rise and fall of the covers that she had pulled up tight to her chin. Her knuckles were hard and white.
“Charlie.”
“Don’t talk-listen. The medics can keep you from dying, Suzanne, but I can’t.”
She shivered and coughed red. Hood touched her forehead, which was cool and damp. When he’d worked the covers free of her grip, he lifted them and saw the blood and smelled it.
“I’m getting the medics, Suzanne.”
“Okay.”
Hood slid the derringer far under the couch, then crossed the room and threw open the front door. He called out from the porch. Rachman joined him, waving them in.
Back inside, Hood knelt beside her. He took Suzanne’s hand. Her fingers were strong and her nails dug into him and her voice was thin and wet.
“Like your diamonds, Charlie?”
“They’re beautiful.”
“It took that kid forever to get his gun up. I just couldn’t shoot him.”
“That’s okay, Suzanne.”
“Bradley’s age.”
“You did the right thing.”
“Tell the boys I love them.”
“You can tell them that yourself.”
“This isn’t right. So much to do. So much you don’t know.”
“Right now you think about good things, and you keep breathing in and out. You’re going to be okay, Suzanne. They’re almost here. These guys are good.”
Hood leaned over her and put his face next to hers, felt the coolness of her skin against his, smelled the faint aroma of her perfume and the strong metallic odor of the life draining out of her.
“Oh, I like you,” she whispered.
“I love you. Be strong.”
He heard Rachman’s voice, then the deputy with the shotgun burst into the house, then more uniforms with their weapons drawn. Last were two firemen carrying medical equipment, and two paramedics angling a back-board through the doorway.
Suzanne coughed again. Hood rose up, and he felt her nails digging deeper into his hand.
“Call me later,” she said.
She looked at the men, then back at Hood. Her throat rattled and the light retreated from her eyes and her face relaxed.
“I will.”
He stared at her a moment. The paramedics pushed Hood aside, and threw back the covers and lifted Suzanne to the floor. One of them strapped an Ambu bag to her head then started an IV in each arm. A fireman cut away her blouse and pressed a big defibrillator patch to her chest while the other started CPR. A moment later the EKG monitor showed only a small, occasional blip.
“She’s in PEA,” said one of the medics. “Epinephrine and atropine, run the IVs wide open. I’m going to needle her.”
He stabbed a large IV needle between her ribs. Hood heard the trapped air hissing out but the EKG line had gone flat.
He turned away.
A minute later he stopped for Marlon on the front walkway. “Suzanne was Murrieta. A kid shot her.”
Marlon nodded.
“I’ll notify her family,” Hood said. “If that’s okay with you.”
“It’s okay. I’m sorry, Charlie. I know she meant something to you.”
“Her gun is under the couch.”
Back at the Denny’s Hood talked to the shooter for a few minutes, found out his gang name was Kick because he took kung fu once, and his gun was a.38-caliber. A South Side Crip. Kick asked about the reward and Hood told him there was no reward and Kick said too bad, his mama needed money for an operation. Hood had no idea what they’d do with him-just carrying a concealed piece was a crime, and it was probably stolen property anyway-but when a woman in a mask is brandishing her own handgun, you’ve got a good start on self-defense.
He walked back through the parking lot and down the cul-de-sac. He lingered outside the house until the coroner’s team wheeled her out, wondering how to tell Ernest and the boys.
Two hours later when he pulled up, Ernest was standing on the Valley Center porch in the glow of a yellow bug light with a mug of coffee in his hand and the dogs alert at his feet.
42
The next afternoon Hood stood in the Valley Center barn while the sunlight slanted through the old boards and the pigeons cooed up in the eaves.
He felt that he owed Suzanne a good-faith search for the head and effects of Joaquin Murrieta, though he knew what he would find. Two hours in the house had yielded nothing and neither had the garage. The barn would be Joaquin’s last stand.
Ernest and the boys were up in L.A. Hood had explained that an autopsy was required by law after violent death, and Ernest and the boys had left at first light, wanting to be closer to her.
Hood understood. In his imagination he sheltered her body from the terrible saws and blades used for autopsy.
Ernest had wept openly when Hood told him-he’d known something was wrong.
Ernest had told Bradley and Jordan himself. A few hours later, when they left, Hood saw in Bradley a withering rage that reminded him of Suzanne on the night he betrayed her into arrest. Bradley was taller and fuller than Hood had remembered and there was something both controlled and wild in him.
Hood listened to the pigeons.
He looked down at the unmistakable stain left by Harold and Gerald Little Chief.
All this for forty-five thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds.
He sized up the big industrial shelves along one side of the building, the way they were filled with clear stacking plastic boxes, each labeled. She could hide things in plain sight, thought Hood, but it wasn’t likely.
Still, he carried over an extension ladder and searched the highest and most remote boxes. Old children’s clothing. Years of Mexican TV soap opera magazines, some of them with her mother on the cover. Old quilts and comforters redolent of naphthalene. He sneezed from the dust as he slid them back into place, moved the ladder, then opened more.
He poked through the cardboard boxes behind the bicycles, but they were all filled with outgrown toys. He walked the perimeter of the barn tapping for a false wall but found none.
Ditto the floor for some kind of basement, but the concrete slab was continuous and gave up nothing.
Suzanne would be laughing, wouldn’t she?
He sat on a hay bale and looked through the open door at the bright barnyard and the towering oak in which she had sat waiting for Lupercio.
The sun is coming up over the hills and colors are starting to form.
No more hills for you, he thought, no colors. He felt the diamond H against his chest.
Hood had never lost a lover to death before. His feelings were deep and clear-sorrow, regret, blame, anger, helplessness-all taking their separate turns to advance and retreat and then advance again, holding hands in varying combinations. But the most powerful feeling of all was one without a name and therefore unspeakable-a recognition of having lost forever someone singular and irreplaceable and beyond valuation.
There was a recently added bathroom built into one corner of the old barn, and Hood used it and drank from the tap and splashed water in his face and looked up at the too-noisy ceiling fan before he pulled the chain to turn it off.
He saw the access hatch. He walked out of the bathroom and across the barn enough to get a good perspective, and when he turned, he saw what he thought he might: the roof of the bathroom was a good seven feet higher than its ceiling. An attic.