The Renegades

2

Hood tried to talk to the homicide detectives at the scene, but two men emerged from the darkness, badged the dicks and said they were part of the Internal Affairs “shoot unit” and this was theirs.

The detectives cursed and the IA men cursed back. But the bald black IA man in a sharp suit guided Hood away from the detectives, and the other, a white man in a beaten bomber jacket, fell in behind them. Half a block down the street, in a dark patch midway between two street lamps, a black plainwrap Mercury waited by the curb.

Sharp Suit got into the driver’s seat and Bomber held open the rear driver’s-side door. In the faint dome light Hood saw a big craggy-faced man with a graying buzz cut and round, wire-rimmed glasses. Late fifties, high mileage, thought Hood. He wore cowboy boots and jeans and a white shirt with a leather vest.

“I’m Warren,” he said. “Get in.”

Hood sat and Bomber shut the door then went around and got in the front passenger seat.

No one spoke until they were out on Twentieth Street, headed toward Edwards Air Force Base. The air conditioner was turned up high and Hood felt his muscles shuddering against the cold. He thought of his duty jacket, soon to be riding away in the coroner’s van with Terry.

“Talk to me,” said Warren. His voice was rough and low. He set a small recorder on the seat and turned it on.

It took Hood twenty minutes. By then they were north of the city limits, paralleling the base on Avenue E. Through the cold air Hood could still smell the faint sweet odor of coming snow. The Joshua trees flickered in the wind.

“Describe the shooter again. Carefully. Everything about him.”

“Black male, six feet tall, medium-to-slender build. Sunglasses and a red bandana worn pirate-style. His face was narrow, not wide. His nose and mouth were unremarkable. His skin was very dark. His hoodie was black with the Detroit Tigers logo on it. He used an M249 squad assault weapon. He fired it right-handed, with the butt jammed into his middle and his left hand pushing down on the stock to keep the muzzle down. I recognized the gunner’s stance from my months in Iraq. Then he was gone. He could have been sixteen years old or forty. I’d guess young, by how easily he jumped the fence.”

Warren nodded but Hood saw that he was looking past him. “Not bad, Hood, for a guy with a machine gun firing at him.”

“I think it jammed.”

“God and his mysterious ways?”

“I don’t know anything about God. But my life was on his finger and I don’t know why I’m alive.”

“Tell me if you get any ideas about that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How long have you been up here in the desert?”

“Six months.”

“L.A. Internal Affairs speaks highly of you. I think highly of them. Some of them.”

“That’s good to hear.”

Bomber turned and looked at Hood, then back at the road.

“Do you know who I am?”

“No, sir. IA is all I know.”

They turned south on 110th Street, back toward Lancaster.

“What did you promise Laws, Hood?” asked Warren. “Before he died.”

“He was dead by the time I could form a thought.”

“Then what did you promise him when you saw he was dead?”

“That I’d find who killed him.”

“Do you believe that, Hood?”

“Without question.”

“Good. You are assigned to this case as an officer of Internal Affairs. The fewer who know that, the better for everyone. Your superiors will be advised and tomorrow someone will e-mail you an IA charge number for your time card.”

Hood thought about this. From his tours in Iraq assigned to NCIS he knew what it was to be hated. And not just by the enemy, but by his own men. “Mr. Warren, I don’t want to work for Internal Affairs.”

“You made a promise and this is the only way for you to keep it.”

“You have more experienced investigators.”

“None with his partner’s blood on his shirt.”

Someone in front pushed a button, and an overhead light came on. Hood looked at the front of his winter-weight wool-blend shirt and at his shield and he knew it was more blood than could have come from the shrapnel still caught in his cheek.

“I respect what you did in L.A.,” said Warren.

“The last thing I wanted to do was take down a fellow deputy.”

“It was unavoidable for anyone with a functioning moral compass. Hood, I want you with us. I want you watching the watchers, protecting the protectors. There’s no higher calling in law enforcement-you will learn this with time. I’ll have Laws’s package on your desk tomorrow morning.”

“I don’t have a desk,” said Hood.

“You do now. It’s at the prison. In a place we unjokingly call the Hole. Report to the warden’s office at seven a.m. His secretary is named Yolanda.”

Hood watched the dark desert march past the windows, sand blowing upon sand, Joshua trees stiff against the wind.

“You can say no, Hood. But you can only say it once, and that time is now.”

Hood was not a planner. He was a man of the present, used to following his heart, which had gotten him mixed results.

“I’m in.”

“Know the target and you’ll find the shooter. They meet-beach and wave. I want you to bring me the beach. Bring me Terry Laws. Bring me everything he ever did at this department. He’s ours. He’s mine.”

Ia dropped Hood off at the substation, where two of the homicide detectives were waiting at the main entrance. One was big and white and the other was big and black.

“I’m Craig Orr and this is Oliver Bentley,” said Big White. “We’ve got lots of questions and a fresh pot on.”

“Lead the way, Bulldogs.” Hood used the nickname for LASD homicide because he’d worked with them in L.A. for a few weeks, and he had wanted badly to be a Bulldog.

“Want to clean up that face, Hood? Looks nasty.”

“Later.”

Sitting in a small conference room he told them what happened, then told them again. Orr used a digital recorder and Bentley wrote notes. The coffee was bad and they drank a lot of it.

“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.