Looking at these ruins, Hood thought about the utopian ideals of shared labor and shared prosperity. He thought about Terry Laws using the ideals of charity to feather his own impressive nest. The settlers of Llano were partially done in by their own squabbling and the distrust of others. Terry Laws was done in by a man with a machine gun who wanted something that Terry had.
But before that, something good in him had already died-just as Carla Vise had observed.
Hood wondered if it wasn’t the arrest at all, but something else that had changed Terry Laws forever. Something he did. Something Mr. Wonderful couldn’t live with. Something that earned him seven to eight grand a month and cost him his soul.
On his way back to the prison, Hood called an acquaintance in narco and asked him why some drug money was weighed, pressed and stacked, and some wasn’t.
“Transport,” he said. “Big cash takes too much time to count and too much space to pack, so they weigh and press it.” His name was Askew and he’d worked narcotics for his entire career, starting as a baby-faced twenty-two-year-old posing undercover as a high school student/dealer.
“The big dollars go to Mexico,” he said. “Before 9/11 they’d fly it across from Phoenix or San Diego or L.A. After that, airline security got a lot tougher, so now they just drive it in. About a million dollars a day-three hundred and fifty sweet million a year. U.S. Customs intercepts maybe two percent of it. Mexican Customs welcomes it. Even the Colombian money goes through Mexico.”
“What’s big enough for a run south?”
“Who knows? Say a hundred grand.”
“What about seventy-two hundred?”
He laughed. “No.”
“How often?”
“Different cartels, different schedules, different routes. They have to change things up. But at least once a week. Couriers make good money but the price of being late or short is extremely high. You know-wives, children, that kind of high.”
“North Baja Cartel,” said Hood. “What’s an average weekly run?”
“Oh, big stuff. Three, maybe four hundred grand. Since the Arellanos, it’s been Herredia all the way. Are you looking at Vasquez and Lopes?”
“The book’s on the seat beside me.”
“Why?”
“Let’s come back to that,” Hood said.
“Don’t tell me you have problems with Eichrodt.”
Hood thought about that a moment. “I’m starting to.”
“You know why? Because he wasn’t enough. Tweaker, loser. Vasquez and Lopes were pros. They knew what they were doing. They should have made short work of Shay Eichrodt.”
“Talk to me, Lieutenant,” said Hood.
“I think they were starting a run that night. The evidence was there-they were high on amphetamines for the drive. They were armed. They’d hidden cash-weighed and pressed-in suitcases full of clothes. They had a full tank of gas and they were heading south. None of this mattered to the DA, who got fingerprints, blood, stolen cash, and an Aryan Brother with the murder gun. Pretty good chance that Eichrodt did the shooting, but I don’t think he was alone. I didn’t make any waves. I’m narco, you know? Let the Bulldogs and the lawyers do their thing. But if I’m right, you’ve got an accomplice and three hundred something grand unaccounted for. Maybe less; maybe more. What’s your interest, Charlie? Your turn to make nice.”
“Laws busted Eichrodt. I’m looking for enemies.”
Hood didn’t say that he’d also been looking for a way that Terry Laws could have gotten his hands on a few hundred grand, and had just found one.
He got an idea.
Back in the Hole, Hood turned on the lights. In the cold cubicle he put one stack of Terry Laws’s time cards on his desk, and another on the desk that Warren had used. The stack on Hood’s desk were pre-arrest and the cards on Warren’s desk were post-arrest.
Hood examined Terry’s pre-arrest time cards and looked for patterns. He looked for anomalies. He saw his breath condense.
He found nothing.
But at Warren’s desk now, looking through the post-arrest time cards, Hood found a pattern: Terry had not worked a Friday in twenty straight months.
Hood remembered that Terry always made his Build a Dream contributions on Mondays unless the bank was closed.
Fridays, Terry had all day to work a second job, thought Hood. Three days later, he deposited his earnings from it.
After work Hood drove to a Museum Store in an L.A. mall and found what he had seen there last holiday season, a giant-sized plastic H 2 O molecule. It sat on a stand that housed two AAA batteries and when you turned it on, the hydrogen and oxygen atoms careened through clear plastic tubing and changed colors. It was recommended for ages seven and up. Hood bought it and some batteries and had them wrapped. He also bought a card with a close-up picture of a Ferrari grille, and wrote in it: A week from Saturday is a long way off. Will it get here quicker if I drive fast? CH.
Ariel wasn’t in her office but Hood and his sheriff’s badge convinced the lobby guard to deliver it upstairs to her.
He drove L.A. for a few hours before heading home.
15
The late dinner arrives and we eat in silence. I can tell that the boy is trying to process my story without seeming to. More than that, he’s trying to process me. But you know how important it is for the young to be cool. I order another round of drinks. He’s plenty high by now and working hard not to show it. He downs the miso soup, eats his way through ten slabs of wild-caught salmon, downs a bowl of rice drenched in soy sauce. Nothing left on his plate, so he relights his second cigar.
“So, Laws and I have a nice arrangement,” I say. “We’re talking roughly seven grand a week each. We drive a few hours to get what we need. We weigh and package it. We drive a few more hours to deliver it. Then we party down with Herredia. Months go by, but trouble is coming. Trouble always comes. Something is going wrong with Terry. The Mexicans have a word for it, gusano, which means worm, but it also means something inside a person that is eating them. So, what is it? What’s eating him?”
I look at the boy and he’s studying me hard. He puffs the cigar and blows out the smoke but I can tell his full attention is on me and the question before him.
“I can’t know,” he says. “Because you’ve left something out of the story. You haven’t given me all the information.”
“What have I left out?”
“Things don’t add up with your story about the couriers and Eichrodt. How can a stoned tweaker execute two veteranos, two tough-ass cartel runners? I don’t see why the couriers pulled over that night and parked on the off-ramp. They were right out in the open. Where were their guns? How could Eichrodt possibly disguise himself as anything but a three-hundred-pound man? Did they know him? The papers never said that. And something else that bothers me-how did you and Laws get so lucky that night? How did you find the van and the truck so easily? How come some other unit didn’t find at least one of them before you did? And also, why didn’t you call for backup when you pulled over Eichrodt? He was cooperative. That doesn’t make a bit of sense to me. And also, what about this tipster? How come he sees everything and calls it all in, but won’t give his name? That’s very convenient. I don’t trust him. I think he’s involved in a big way.”