“So,” said Orr. “Did Warren just recruit you to IA?”
“I’m on Terry.”
“Thanks for being square with us,” said Orr. “We all have jobs to do.”
Bentley looked at Hood for a beat, then tapped his fingers on the desk. “Someone cut the battery cables in your cruiser while you and Terry were with Roberts. The door was jimmied to get to the hood latch.”
And I didn’t hear it in the wind, thought Hood.
An hour later Hood put on a canvas jacket with a blanket lining and buttoned it all the way up and got in his old Camaro and drove back to the Legacy development.
It was two in the morning. The investigators were gone and the bullet-riddled cruiser had been towed away. The yellow crime scene tape had torn loose from the peppertree and now it flapped in the wind like it was trying to escape.
Hood circled the area with his flashlight. He picked up a few of the shards of windshield safety glass and rubbed their edges with his thumb, then dropped them into a jacket pocket. He could see where the crime scene investigators had dug into the asphalt to retrieve bullets and bullet fragments.
He shined the light up into the peppertree and watched the loose branches swaying in and out of the beam. He walked across the front yard to the fence that the shooter had so easily cleared, counting his steps: ten. Then he ran the light up the fence, then along the top, wondering if the man might have snagged something on the rough wood. If he had, the investigators had found it first.
He drove around the block to where he’d heard the car start up, and he sat there a minute with the windows down and the heater turned up high.
At home, Hood showered and dressed his wound and scrolled through the LASD enforcement-only Gangfire site. He could picture the familiar face he was looking for, and now, after the great slow settling of his adrenaline, the name came to him. He was an Antelope Valley Blood named Londell Dwayne.
Hood had shaken him down a few times and Dwayne was unpredictable. Once he ran. Once he smiled and offered Hood a Kool. Once he told Hood that if his johnson was as big as his ears then Hood must have happy ladies. Hood had told him his ears were nothing compared to his johnson and Dwayne liked that. On that occasion, Dwayne had been wearing a Detroit Tigers hoodie.
Hood looked at the picture of Dwayne and a chill registered across his shoulders. He wrote down Dwayne’s numbers on a small notebook he carried in his pocket.
Hood thought. L.A. County had fifty thousand gangsters, he knew, and more than two hundred clicks. The killer’s red bandana meant a Blood affiliation, but sometimes shooters flew enemy colors to mislead witnesses and to implicate rivals.
He looked at Keenan Roberts’s picture and saw that he was not the shooter. Kelvin wasn’t either. They were too big and too heavy. And it was hard for Hood to imagine either of them getting their hands on a weapon like the M249 SAW. He had seen their destructive talents in Anbar. A properly working SAW throws a thousand rounds a minute.
He went outside to the deck and looked out at his Silver Lake neighborhood. When Hood had requested a transfer to the desert he had kept this apartment in L.A. because he liked the city, and because it gave him another hour of driving time each way, to and from the substation in Lancaster.
Hood smelled rain. He fingered the sharp pieces of safety glass still in his jacket pocket and for the hundredth time that night he wondered why Terry Laws had been murdered.
It wasn’t done in the heat of the moment. It was an execution. An execution of a sheriff’s deputy known to his friends as Mr. Wonderful.
Beach and wave.
Then he wondered something else for the hundredth time that night. Had the executioner let him live, or had his M249 jammed? They jammed in Iraq all the time from age and dust-it was an untrusted weapon.
If the gun had jammed, then he was lucky.
If the shooter had let him live, why?
The only explanation he could come up with was that Londell Dwayne-or whoever was hidden behind the sunglasses and the bandana-had wanted to be seen.
He’d wanted a witness to tell his tale.
3
“Listen and don’t interrupt. I invited you here to tell you a story. It’s about a friend of mine we called Mr. Wonderful, and the things that happened to him and why they had to happen to him. Your friend Hood plays a role in this story, too. But it’s bigger than both of them. It’s about chaos and opportunity.”
We’re sitting in La Cage, a rooftop cigar bar on Sunset, which puts us at eye level with a billboard of two enormous models posed in a pouty stare-down. Their bodies are painted a gold that glitters in the upturned lights. It’s an ad for a scent that both men and women can wear and, sure enough, you can’t tell if these people are male or female or what. They’re teenagers, just like the boy sitting across from me, though he looks older than they do.
His brow creases skeptically and he looks around as if someone could hear, but we’ve got this corner of the rooftop to ourselves. He leans toward me. I have his undivided attention. Terry Laws is big news in L.A. Everybody knows what happened to him, or thinks they do. The boy across from me starts to say something, but I shake my head and put a finger to my lips.
“Picture a desert night in the Antelope Valley, August, two years ago. I’ll help you get started, my friend-it’s black and hot and windy. The tumbleweeds roll and the Joshua trees look like crucified thieves. Terry Laws and I are on patrol out of Lancaster substation, northern L.A. County. The wind bumps the cruiser, moves it around a little. The sand hisses against the windows and you can’t see a single star. And that’s when we spot the van, parked on the Avenue M off-ramp, halfway between L.A. and nowhere. Right where the tipster said he’d seen it. When I open the door of the cruiser, the wind tries to rip it off, and it takes me both hands to slam it closed before I pop my holster strap and follow Terry to the van. I’m whistling something because that’s what I do when a situation gets tight. Helps settle the nerves, okay? Even walking up to the van I see it’s all wrong-windows open, windshield smeared, liftgate up. Up close, there it is, two men inside shot dead, all sand and blood, sure, we check for life but it’s fucking pointless and we both know it. All this had happened minutes ago. Not hours, minutes-”
“The Baja Cartel couriers, Lopes and Vasquez. This was all in the papers, Draper.”
“We didn’t know who they were. We call it in and wait for the crime scene people and the coroner and the dicks. We set up the detour cones then close the ramp. Hardly any cars using that exit in the middle of the desert at two a.m. An hour later the dicks and sergeants don’t need us anymore so it’s back in the cruiser to finish our shift. Not long after that we see the truck, a red Chevy half-ton, just like the caller said, and he’d gotten most of the plate right, so we flash the truck at the ruins off the Pearblossom Highway, where the utopia used to be.
“The tipster said he’d seen an older red pickup truck speeding away from the Avenue M off-ramp where the van was parked. We figure there’s a good chance that the guy in the truck did the shooting. But the truck driver plays good citizen and pulls right over when we flash him. He parks by the river-rock columns of the old Llano commune. Terry and I get out and put a few yards between us. We both have our flashlights up and our hands on our gun butts.
“The driver gives Terry his license but he looks high, tweak city, shaggy hair and a beard and a black T-shirt. I can see blood spray on his upper left arm and when Laws gives me a look I know he sees it, too. The inside of the Chevy stinks like ammonia, you know, meth sweat. Terry orders him to get out of the vehicle. When he steps out I see he’s about six foot seven or eight-Laws was six-two and this guy made him look small. He’s looking at us like he wants to eat us.