“An LASD deputy was murdered earlier this month,” he said.
“Terry Laws. Lancaster.”
“I got the nod from IA to look at him, see if there was some good reason why a deputy would get gunned down in cold blood. Well, I found out some interesting things about Terry Laws. He had a lot more money than he was supposed to have. Cash money-seven or eight grand a week coming in from somewhere. I still don’t know if it came from a hole in the ground or if he was earning it as he went. I’m doing the same thing you did with the burned-out house in Jacumba. I’m asking questions, doing the legwork. And I’m coming up with a bad arrest by Laws, a large amount of missing drug money and a dead-cold murder of two cartel couriers. And guess who keeps coming up?”
“Coleman Draper.”
“He’s a reservist. Gun, badge and a dollar a year to play cops and robbers. He and Laws arrested the suspect in the courier killings, but they beat his brains so bad the court sent him to a mental hospital. When the bust started looking bad I started looking at Draper. That brought me to Child Welfare Services, who thinks Coleman was a charming and innocent boy, and to you, who has a different story to tell.”
“I saw the way he talked to those people,” said Sallis. “Very different from how he talked to me. He told them what they wanted to hear. Have you ever come across a dog that doesn’t like you? Somebody’s pet, a family dog, loves everyone around him but you? He wants to chew your balls off and you know it and he knows it, too. That’s how it was with Coleman. First I thought it was me-like he knew something about me, or I gave off some smell only he could detect. Then I thought, naw, it isn’t me. It’s him.”
The cat came walking across the patio and jumped into Sallis’s lap.
“Well, you got the cat fooled,” said Hood.
“Israel Castro still lives in Jacumba, last I heard. Bought the old Draper house. He’s a mover out in East County. Big fish, little pond. But his name comes up now and then. I don’t know. Maybe he could help.”
“I don’t want Coleman to know I’m looking.”
“Oh, yes, of course not.”
“Why would he kill his entire family?”
“I thought about that a lot. Talked to some people. It happens occasionally, extremely disturbed children-almost always a young male adolescent, almost always by fire. The doctors say these boys have a psychotic break. Sometimes there’s a family history of mental illness. Sometimes it seems to come out of nowhere. There’s usually problems with the parents and siblings. They’re usually isolated boys, loners. They pee the bed and torture animals, really. On a PET scan, their brains give off different charges than normal people, different levels of activity. They become paranoid schizophrenics, hallucinators, pyromaniacs. I’m no doctor but I didn’t see that in Coleman Draper. I saw a boy with blackness in him. Cruelty. Malice. Those words don’t accurately describe what I saw. But I don’t know any words that do.”
“Can I take a couple of those pictures?”
“Take the whole bag. I told my story. I’m done with it now.”
Hood parked down the street from the former Draper home in Jacumba. The new house was modern and proud and looked nothing like the burning hulk in the newspaper picture of fourteen years ago. A skinny boy clanged down the street past Hood’s car, rolling a hubcap in front of him with a stick. There was a chain-link fence around the property and an electric gate. There were cottonwood trees in the front but they were leafless and still. The boy guided the hubcap around the corner ahead of Hood and was gone.
Hood cruised by Amigos restaurant. It looked quiet but it was late afternoon by then, between lunch and dinner.
He drove around Jacumba the same way he drove around L.A.-attentive and curious but not looking for anything in particular. The town was sullen and bleak, Hood thought, even for a person who enjoyed the desert and its rough land and hard weather and tough people. Hood saw a Border Patrol SUV spitting up gravel on a dirt road. He saw a Homeland Security jeep parked off in the brush. Two dust-covered Suburbans with blacked-out windows made their way along a ridgeline. Above them five vultures glided in a ragged circle. High above the birds a helicopter hovered, a tiny black spider fixed in a vast blue web. An older, low-slung Impala came toward Hood, bling swinging from the rearview mirror, catching sunlight, the four men inside staring at him as they rolled past. Two boys on quads sped along an invisible trail on a very steep hillside. Smugglers of the future, Hood thought, getting the lay of the land. He heard a familiar clanging sound and saw the skinny boy guiding his hubcap along another dusty street.
He pulled onto a sandy shoulder and made a U-turn but an oncoming black SUV veered into the middle of the road, pulled broadside and stopped. Another one pulled up behind him. The men who spilled from them carried automatic weapons and combat shotguns and they were dressed in helmets and tan desert camo. They surrounded the Camaro before Hood could open the door.
He got out with his hands up, to the metallic ring of safeties coming off and slides being racked. Neither SUV had visible emblems, just black paint and bodies bristling with antennae.
A stocky man with a drum-fed combat shotgun strode toward Hood, gun pointed at his middle. He came closer than Hood thought he would, then stopped.
“United States Department of Homeland Security, Southwest Border Detachment, Patrol Unit Sergeant Dan Sims. Who the fuck are you?”
Hood told him.
“Deputy Hood, I want you to lower one hand very slowly and show me your shield.”
Hood handed him the badge and holder. Sims read it, then studied him.
“What are you doing here?”
“Background. The Terry Laws case.”
Hood could see he’d never heard of Terry Laws, which was what he was hoping.
“Finding what you need?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Nice IROC.”
“Thank you. It’s an ’86.”
“Watch yourself around here. On the border, anything that can go wrong does go wrong.”
He handed Hood back his shield.
Hood drove around Jacumba for a little while longer, then aimed his nice IROC north for L.A.
20
Of course the boy wants to hear more of the story but his reasons are different now. His face is different now, too. A man’s face looks back at me through the smoke-laced darkness. The change is small but the difference is everything.
“Move forward to May of last year,” I say. “We’re heading south on I-5 for Mexico with $338,000 in the trunk of the car. We’ve made a run every Friday for nine months. Seven grand a week. Sometimes more, sometimes a little less. Out of nowhere, Terry tells me he’s met someone. He’s been divorced for a couple of years, doing okay with the ladies. But this new one is everything he’s ever dreamed of in a woman. She has unbelievable legs. Terry Laws is drinking from his stainless steel flask. He’s been hitting it since Cudahy and if tonight is like the last several Friday nights, he’ll fill it up again in Orange County and be done with the whole damned bottle by the time we hit El Dorado.
– Good for you, I say.
– Laurel, says Terry.
– There’s a coffee place on this next street, I say to Terry. You can tell me all about Laurel.
“So I park the car at the Coffee Stop in San Ysidro. Laws wobbles as he gets out of the car. We sit at a window table to see the car and make sure nobody takes the money. The night is hot and Laws takes off his jacket, and of course everybody in the coffee bar looks at him, Mr. Wonderful, with a shoulder holster and a forty-cal autoloader inside it.
– I made Laurel laugh on our first date, he tells me. I did my Arnold, and my Jack, and my George Bush. She was dying the whole time.