“I can see that.”
“If they come in, I’ll call. Charlie Hooper. It doesn’t say anything on your card about vintage cars.”
Hood put a finger to his lips, then set the gambler on his head.
She gave him a minor smile, then walked away, waving over one shoulder. Suzanne Jones, he thought, walking across the dining room of her ranch house, Valley Center, California, August 2008.
• • •
Hood was made pensive with this, but the Fuzzy Dice was loud and cheerful with a younger clientele, a mix of Anglo and Latino and even a group of Asians in a booth. Some jocks from San Diego State stood at the bar in their Aztec clothing. There was gangsta rap and banda on the jukebox and a small dance floor crowded with intimate couples. Hood smelled the perfumes and colognes and the hair products and the high-pitched smell of alcohol. He ordered a beer and sat at the far end of the bar, near the bins of cocktail garnishes and napkins.
Just after eight o’clock the three men from Russell County walked in, the beefy Peltz in the lead, followed by thin Clint Wampler. Next came Skull, head shiny and held high, eyes hard. Last came El Centro businessman Israel Castro, a man well-known to Hood.
There was a mirror behind the bar. In it Hood watched as two young couples stood in unison when the Castro party approached their table, swiftly gathering up their drinks to abandon ship. Israel smiled and shook hands with one of the men.
The last time Hood had seen Castro was four years ago, in the dead of night, the rain pouring down on a little border town called Jacumba. Hood had caught a bullet in his back that night. He remembered the cold mule kick of it knocking him into the mud as it went through him. He’d lost consciousness believing he was dying.
But I’m alive, he thought. I am not dead. Neither is the past: It’s swarming all around me.
When Castro went into the restroom, Hood walked out of the Fuzzy Dice and got into his car. He set his hat on the passenger seat, then rolled down the windows and called Yorth. An hour later the four men came out. Castro got into a silver Ford Flex with dealer tags and the three others boarded a red Jeep Commander with Missouri plates. Wampler drove. Hood followed them three cars back to the Pueblo Lodge on the east side of town. It was an older motel with freestanding concrete-block casitas painted pumpkin orange and a sign out front with an arrow that lit up one bulb at a time, drawing customers in. The Commander swung in beside a white F-150, raised with big tires. Hood continued past the entrance and headed for home.
4
Awaiting his grand inquisitor, Deputy Bradley Jones slouched in a conference room chair, legs crossed and boots on the table beside his hat, rounding off his snagged left thumbnail with a pocketknife. He was twenty-two years old, clean-cut and good looking, a second-year patrolman. He had been a rising star with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department but was now a falling one, suspected of involvement in the L.A. drug trade, and more. By all signs that he could gather, LASD was going to eat him alive and enjoy doing it.
Lieutenant Jim Warren, Internal Criminal Investigations Bureau, came through the door, set a laptop on the table, and sat across from the young deputy. He wore pressed jeans and black wingtips and a crisp white shirt. His face was craggy and brown and his hair was a gray buzz cut. Bradley knew that the feared Warren came from a checkered background: Decades ago he had founded the Renegades, a gang of mostly white deputies, some of whom did some bad things to people of color. Warren had turned them over to Internal Affairs, but caught the brunt of the backlash and the hostility of his own department. Years later he became an IA crusader, and Bradley figured it was his atonement. Bradley put him at seventy if a day and wondered why he hadn’t retired over a decade ago as most cops would have. How much did atonement did Warren need?
“Feet on the floor, son.”
“Sir.”
Bradley put his feet down and Jim Warren squared the laptop and opened it. “Tell me about Carlos Herredia.”
“Not again.”
“Why not again?”
“You think if you make me repeat myself enough times I’ll finally say what you want to hear.”
“Just once more, Bradley. I’ll listen better this time.”
Bradley spun through Carlos Herredia’s well-known bio: nicknamed El Tigre, head of the North Baja Cartel, fingers deep in L.A. drug distribution through Eme and the Florencia gangsters. Mota, junk, meth, coke, murder, kidnapping, extortion.
“And enemy of the Gulf Cartel,” said Warren. “Don’t forget that.”
“What’s left of the Gulf Cartel. I’ll tell you this one more time-I’ve never favored Herredia’s cutthroats in L.A. over the Gulf’s cutthroats in L.A. The way I do things here is simple, sir: A gangsta is a creep is a punk is a dirtball. They’re all the same. So I don’t play favorites on patrol. And I resent you self-righteous dinosaurs making me out to be a bad guy. Of course I don’t mean you, personally, Lieutenant Warren. Personally, I respect and like you.”
“My lucky day.”
Bradley folded the blade down and slipped the knife back into his pocket. He gave Warren a flat glance then focused on the repaired thumbnail.
“I’ve got sworn testimony against you, Brad. Octavio Leyal knows Herredia’s organization from the inside. He says Herredia pays you to leave his L.A. distributors alone and focus on the Maras and Eighteenth Street, who are teamed up with the Gulf. He says you’re a courier for the cash runs south, taking Herredia’s money back to him. He says he’s seen you in Baja, at one of Herredia’s compounds known as El Dorado. Quite a place, according to Leyal.”
“I know, sir. But Leyal is a low-level criminal and a liar. You want to believe a prison snitch over a second-year deputy? When did you sell your soul?”
“Easy now.”
“There’s nothing easy about this. Can’t you just figure out what you’re doing, then do it?”
“We’re close. I do appreciate your cooperation.”
“You want me to just walk away from the job? Well, I can’t, because I have a pregnant wife and a son I’d like to feed. Oh, I made your watchers weeks ago. The new ones, the two men so bland looking I’m not supposed to know they’re following me.”
Warren looked over the screen at Jones and shrugged, then tapped something on the keyboard. “You’re friendly with Eme and Florencia people here in L.A. Such as Rocky Carrasco. Whose son you rescued from kidnappers on your first day as a patrol deputy.”
“I should apologize for that?”
Warren studied him. “You knew exactly when and where Herredia’s men would try to buy a hundred machine pistols up in Lancaster. The Love Thirty-twos. One of the runners being Octavio Leyal.”
“I was working an informant, a damned good one. All of it came from him.”
“But you could never deliver your informant to us for questioning.”
“He did what people under pressure do, Jim. He vanished. I’ve told you a hundred times, too.”
Warren tapped the keyboard again. “Tell me about those two weeks you took off last October. Four months ago.”
Bradley sighed and picked up his hat and slouched back down into the chair. The hat was the Corazon Espinado, a shantung Panama designed by Carlos Santana. His wife had given it to him. Bradley loved the graphic of the guitar stabbing through a human heart and considered the ninety-five-dollar cost a bargain. “One last time? I took Erin to Mexico. She was pregnant and exhausted from work and we wanted to relax. You’ve seen my passport with the customs stamps on it, so you know I’m telling the truth.”
“You fished for tarpon and snorkeled.”
Bradley looked at Warren for a long beat, then turned his attention to the hat in his hands. Finally he nodded and closed his eyes. Think up something pleasant, he thought. He imagined Erin, pregnant with his son and lovely. He imagined her onstage, belting one out. He imagined his home in Valley Center, the barn and the big oak tree. He imagined Carlos Herredia’s compound, El Dorado, and its sprawling adobe house and casitas, and the pool that shimmered with cool salt water, and the golf course upon which Herredia happily cheated, and the thoroughbreds and the food and wine and the time Herredia had thrown Bradley’s gift-an expensive fishing reel-into the air and blown it to bits with one round from a.50-caliber Desert Eagle handgun.