The Renegades

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?”

Bradley looked at him, then shrugged and squeezed the lime into his beer. “When Kick stops kicking, you’ll know.”

“Don’t do it. I understand why you want to, but don’t.”

“You cannot and do not understand.”

“I loved her, too.”

“You didn’t even deserve to touch her.”

“Maybe that’s true but if you kill Kick it’s going to change you and everything about your life.”

“Exactly.”

After the song the Cheater Slicks took a break and Erin came over. Bradley gave her his stool, then walked back to his table without a word to her or Hood.

“He’s chipper tonight,” she said.

“You sound terrific. I love that walk on water song.”

“Thanks. I quit smoking. Kinda worried it would wreck my voice but so far so good.”

“You okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Hood nodded toward Bradley.

“He hasn’t said a word about Kick lately. That worries me. Usually, you know, he’s always mumbling something or other about what he has to do.”

“Has to do.”

“Yeah, has to. I’m surprised he’s contained it as well as he has.”

“The college thing was all bullshit.”

“I told him he wouldn’t fool you. He’s looking over here. He’s got the look. I should go.”

Hood listened to the whole next set. Bradley didn’t look his way again. Two beautifully dressed women joined Bradley and his friends at their table.

Hood drove L.A. for a couple of hours, then home to Silver Lake. It was almost two a.m. His apartment was cold. He didn’t sleep well but he looked forward to the drive back up to Lancaster the next day for eight more hours of patrol through Antelope Valley.