– I haven’t done nothing wrong tonight, he says.
– For a whole night, says Laws, congratulations.
“Then Terry hands me the guy’s license. Shay Eichrodt, thirty-four, six-eight, three hundred. I’m going to run it for warrants just as soon as we get this guy cuffed and stuffed.
“I look in the truck bed and see four suitcases, the big rolling kind, all lying flat. Like this guy’s headed to the airport for a vacation, right? Terry tells Eichrodt to turn around and put his hands on the truck and spread his legs. Eichrodt turns around. He sways and loses his balance and I can see he’s not just high, but drunk, too. Son of a bitch falls down to his knees then groans and pitches over facedown in the dirt, prones himself right out for us. Terry takes a wrist restraint and goes to lock him but Eichrodt kicks Terry’s shins and knocks him ass over flashlight. Eichrodt is up, fast as a cat, and I’m drawn and yelling but he and Terry are already going at it and there’s no way I can fire, so I holster up and draw my baton and jump right into the fun. I hit him hard on the knee, so he picked me up and threw me against the cruiser. I weigh one-eighty, and none of it’s fat, but he threw me like I was a doll. Even Eichrodt wasn’t strong enough to lift Terry and all of his muscles off the ground, but I could see them in the cruiser lights, Terry with the baton and Eichrodt with his fists, bludgeoning each other like a couple of giants in combat. So I charged back just like I had good sense, working his legs and knees before he could hit or kick or throw me. But that bastard just wouldn’t fall. He was a bloody mess. So were we. For a minute I thought he was going to win.
“When Terry hit Eichrodt over the head with his baton for probably the tenth time, Eichrodt went down hard and he didn’t move.
– He looks dead, says Terry.
– He’s breathing, I say. He’s alive.
“We cuff him with two pairs of restraints on his wrists and two on his ankles. Then Terry and I check our wounds. Terry’s got a deep cut over his eye and a torn ear, and his jaw is swelling up like it’s broken. I have a cut lip and a swollen eye, and my forehead has a lump the size of a baseball from hitting the car. But we’re okay, none of it is that serious. Terry calls in. I kneel down by Eichrodt and check the restraints and I watch the cars going past just a few yards away on the highway, and it dawns on me how close I’ve just come to getting killed by this guy.”
I pause for a moment and sip my tequila. The boy drinks beer. I relight my cigar then pass the lighter to him and he relights his. Down on the Sunset Strip the sidewalks are busy with people. The cars move slowly. Taillights twinkle and brake lights flash. A million hearts, a million hustles.
“I read the papers, Coleman,” he says. He yawns. Like a lot of teenagers, he is eager to be unimpressed. “You and Laws found a handgun and forty-eight hundred dollars in a toolbox in the truck. You found brass that matched the gun, and the bullets that killed the couriers. That would have nailed Eichrodt in court but he never made it to trial.”
“Correct.”
I watch the parade on Sunset. The cops have pulled over a black Suburban and I think of all the black Suburbans I saw in Jacumba, where I grew up. Jacumba squats at the Mexican border down east of San Diego. Noman’sland. Suburbans are the vehicle of choice for soccer moms and Mexican drug traffickers, and there were no soccer moms in Jacumba.
“I’ve already told you one thing that didn’t make the papers,” I say. And I’m sure he knows what it is.
“The suitcases,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Well, what was inside? What did you do with them? How come they didn’t make the news?”
“Before I answer that, I want to tell you something. It’s something that the young don’t understand. It’s the most important thing I’ve learned so far and I want to give it to you now. Listen: Things in life only happen at two speeds-fast, or not at all. That’s why you need to know what you want. Because when you know what you want, you’ll be able to see the difference between chaos and opportunity. They’re twins. People mistake one for the other all the time. You get about half a minute to decide what you’re looking at. Maybe less. Then you have to make a choice.”
“So what was in the suitcases?”
The boy is staring at me now. I’m about to tell him something that I’ve never told another person, something damning and dangerous and unretractable. I’m going to do it because I see big potential in this young man. He’s gifted by history and inspired by his blood. I think he’s what I’m looking for.
I curl a finger at him. He leans in and I whisper in his ear.
“The couriers’ money, Mexico bound. Four suitcases. Three hundred forty-seven thousand and eight hundred dollars.”
He sits back and his brow furrows again and he looks out the window then returns his gaze to me. He wants to smile but he doesn’t want to be caught smiling. Love has a face. So do fear and envy and surprise and every emotion under the sun. His face is joy.
“Incredible.”
“Not really.”
“You and Laws took it.”
“Did we?”
“You had to. It’s the whole point of the story-chaos turning into opportunity.”
“I’m glad you understand that. Because this is where the story begins to get interesting. Another beer and another cigar?”
“Oh, yes.”
I nod to the waitress and she nods back.
4
Yolanda led Hood down a hallway in the rear of the admin building of the Mira Loma Detention Facility, then down a flight of stairs half-hidden behind some vending machines. The door to the IA room had no window, just a plastic shield with the numerals 204 on it. There was no electronic card entry. She opened the door with a bright new key and placed the key in his hand.
Inside, the office was small and cold. Four cubicles shared an empty common area. The carpet was sea green. There was one window in the office, vertical, narrow and fortified with chicken wire. Through it Hood saw the concrete retaining wall for the basement level, and above the wall was a peekaboo view of the west prison grounds, the twenty-foot chain-link fences topped by razor wire, and the sun-bleached gun towers.
Hood looked at the neat, impersonal cubicles.
“This is your station,” she said. She had a pleasant face and bony hands.
Hood’s cubicle was smaller than a prison cell. Yolanda gave him one of her cards, with a county number hand-written on the back for charging long-distance calls on this, the state line. The phone on the desk was black and heavy and had a curled cord and looked Hood’s age. Terry Laws’s package-department slang for a personnel record-sat squarely in the middle of Hood’s new world.
“The state watches every penny,” said Yolanda. “So please turn off the lights when you leave. The thermostat is centrally controlled, so there’s no use trying to turn up the heat.”
“No heat.”
“There is heat. But it’s unavailable.”
On the way out she flicked the lights off, then on again. When the door swung shut behind her, the lock clicked loudly.
Hood soon discovered that Terry Laws had been a solid deputy. He’d played football and graduated from Long Beach State at twenty-three, one year after the L.A. riots. A year later he’d completed training at the L.A. Sheriff’s Academy, and begun his sworn duty at the Twin Towers jail in Los Angeles.
Laws had worked his way up to deputy III, leaving the jail after two years for patrol, then warrants, then back to patrol. His base salary was $4,445 a month. He’d been cited for distinguished service for resuscitating a child after a swimming pool accident. He was LASD bodybuilding champion in 2001, when he was thirty-one, and again the next year.
He had never been cited for excessive use of force and his number of citizens’ complaints was average. He’d fired his weapon only once on duty, at a fleeing assault suspect who had fired at him. Both had missed.