“Doing what, parked early in the morning in the middle of the desert?”
“Good question. Waiting for someone? Waiting for Eichrodt? We don’t know. Your helo spotted luggage strewn on a dirt road about two miles from the murder scene. The dead men’s prints were all over it. At one time that luggage almost certainly contained seventy-two hundred dollars in pressed five-dollar bills. Eichrodt had forty-eight hundred of it in a plastic bag in his toolbox. There was another twenty-four hundred down in one of the suitcases left by the road, in a zipping plastic pouch for toiletries or wet items. Apparently he’d missed it.”
Ariel showed Hood pictures of the van and the dead men and the luggage thrown into the desert.
“You guys have more pictures,” she said. “The lead detective was Dave Freeman. He worked hard. Brought us a very strong case.”
Hood noted the name. Freeman was big on the LASD softball team. When Hood looked up from his notepad, he caught Ariel Reed looking at him.
Hood smiled and looked out at the city-office lights and streetlights and headlights and taillights and brake lights and traffic lights all sparkling in the cool wake of the storm. The eternal parade. He thought how death can be so slight, barely registering, just a small event that is momentarily considered before we march on. He shifted his gaze and saw Ariel’s reflection in the glass, looking at his reflection. They held each other’s image.
“I’m racing out at Pomona a week from Saturday,” she said to the glass. “Get yourself a pit pass and I’ll sign a picture for you.”
Hood smiled and nodded, then they broke the moment and stood.
10
Hood drove around L.A. for a few hours, listening to music, James McMurtry and the Heartless Bastards, hard guitars and hard lyrics, country music less by way of Nashville than Hood’s own beloved Bakersfield. He liked to drive and look. He liked to see. Hood’s uncorrected vision was twenty/ten, a rare blessing, he knew.
All of this driving had started six months ago, on the night that Allison Murrieta had died. Later that night, he had felt something inside him escape. It felt physical, not spiritual or sentimental, but a tactile object taking leave of its place, like a leaf detaching from a tree or a bird flying off a branch. He had weighed himself and found he’d lost a pound and a half according to his bathroom scale. Then he went for a drive, trying to figure out what it was that had left him, and that drive had never really ended.
Hood stopped at the Voodoo up on Sunset because Erin McKenna was set to perform with her band, the Cheater Slicks. It was nice seeing her name on the marquee. She played guitar and keyboards and sang and wrote the songs. She was an acquaintance of Hood’s, but mainly he wanted to see her boyfriend, Bradley Jones. Jones was seventeen and headed for trouble and proud of it. Erin was nineteen. They were in love. Hood thought of them as children. And he thought he should help them with their lives because Allison Murrieta had been Bradley Jones’s mother.
The Voodoo was dark and muffled, the walls tacked with black carpet, the acoustics good. Hood entered the percussive darkness. Erin was onstage with her band, skin pale, eyes blue, and her straight red hair shining in the overhead floods. She was startlingly beautiful and her voice was strong but delicate, like glass.
Hood saw that Bradley had a table off to the side, with his usual gang of two. The two men were older than Bradley, but Hood knew that Bradley led the gang because he had the brains and the gumption and what LASD Human Resources would call “leadership qualities.” One of the men was a car thief and the other a document forger, and Hood knew that they both had dealt in computer fraud and stolen goods. Both had done time. They were sharp dressers and fast talkers and they attracted desirable, acquisitive women.
Hood took a stool at the bar. Bradley saw but didn’t acknowledge him. Instead, he signaled the cocktail waitress for three more. Hood knew he had a fake ID, courtesy of one of the creeps at his table, but Hood also knew that Bradley didn’t have to use it very often. He was six feet tall, weighed probably one-eighty, wore his hair long and a neatly trimmed goatee, like Robin Hood or a poet. He loved clothes and wore them well. Allison had adored Bradley and he had adored her back. Hood understood that Bradley would never fully forgive him for being with Bradley’s mother in the days before she died. Things could have unfolded differently, and Hood believed that he owed the boy something.
Hood got a beer and swiveled on his bar stool and watched Erin sing an X cover. Bradley stared at him from across the room. Months ago Hood had seen that there was something genuinely wild in Bradley, something not always controlled. He was emotional and reckless and occasionally violent. Like his mother.
When the song was over, Erin looked out and smiled at Hood, then Bradley ambled over and took a stool beside him.
“The long arm of the law,” he said.
“She sounds great tonight.”
“She sounds great every night. They charge cops extra to get in?”
“Watch it or I’ll tell them you’re still a child. How’s tricks, Bradley?”
“Fifteen units, all A’s and B’s. Solid units. No wood shop. No auto shop. No criminal psychology or whatever it was that you studied.”
Erin moved to the piano and the Cheaters started in on one of her songs that Hood had heard before. It was about a junkie walking on the water at Malibu and Hood thought it was funny and haunting.
Allison had told Hood that Bradley had a high IQ. His arrogance was high also. Hood knew that last year, as a high school junior down in Valley Center, Bradley had played varsity football, starting both ways, and maintained a 4.25 GPA by not studying and by cutting class often. When his mother died he left Valley Center and came to L.A. Two months ago he told Hood that he’d quit high school and enrolled at Cal State L.A., taking five solids, and joined the football team for off-season workouts.
“Funny,” Hood said. “Because Cal State L.A. told me there was no Bradley Jones enrolled there.”
“Long Beach, Hood. I transferred.”
“I talked to Long Beach, too. And eleven other colleges and junior colleges. You don’t attend any of them, in case you were wondering.”
“Buy you a beer?”
“I’ll buy my own.”
Bradley motioned to the bartender and two beers arrived, lime wedges on the side. “I’m taking some time off from school, Hood. But I’ve got a job at the hapkido studio where Mom used to work out. I’m a first dan black belt, so I drill the kids and keep the books and answer the phone.”
“Okay.”
“What do you mean, okay?”
“You can submit that Sheriff’s Department application when you’re nineteen and a half. That gives you two years to get some college. Don’t waste them.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“Sheriff’s is a good gig. You’d start at forty-nine a year once you’re sworn. With your grades and sports, and a letter from me-”
“You’ve told me a million times.”
“I’m trying to keep your bratty white ass out of trouble.”
“I don’t want your help. I’m cool. Kick is cool.”
What Bradley meant by this, Hood knew, was that he had not yet killed the boy who killed his mother. He had told Hood that someday, he would. The shooter’s name was Deon Miller and his street name was Kick. He was a sixteen-year-old Southside Compton Crip when he shot Allison during an armed robbery last year.
A few weeks later Bradley told Hood he was going to kill Kick. Hood believed him. The look on his face and the tone of his voice were unmistakable and true.
So Hood had come to see Bradley as a rope: vengeance pulling him one way, and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department-Deputy Charles Robert Hood-pulling him the other.
“And Kick is cool?”