The Renegades (35 page)

“I guess I should thank you.”

“And I’m gonna beat that machine gun rap,” he said. “I have no idea how it got there. I got no idea how to even use it. None of my prints are on it. No prints at all—wiped clean, right? My belief is the shooter framed me.”

“That’s not as ridiculous as it sounds.”

“It’s not ridiculous at all. What’s ridiculous is how beautiful Delilah is. Don’t she make you happy, just looking at her?”

“Well, she’s a good dog, Londell. Didn’t give me any trouble at all.”

“See you around the ’hood, Hood. Me and Patrice are going to get married soon as it’s legal. I’ll be a union man by then.”

THAT EVE NING after dark, Hood and Stekol got a beat-up Taurus from the motor pool and drove to the Laguna Royale. They made Laguna in a little over an hour. They followed a resident into the parking lot and cruised the place but there was no M5 in sight.

But Juliet was working at Del Mar again.

“Hello, Rick.”

“I changed it to Charlie. But this really is Brian.”

She looked at them with accustomed doubt. She wore a black sleeveless dress and a string of pearls. “Still in security, or did you change your business, too?”

“It’s similar to security.”

“I hear a lot of lines.” She shook her head and escorted them to the bar.

“You’re moving kind of slow tonight, Charlie-Rick.”

“Dinged myself.”

“I’m reluctant to ask how.”

“Coleman knows.”

Hood opened his badge wallet and let her read the shield. She studied him more closely now. “Is he dead?”

“I doubt it.”

“You’re like him.”

“Not really.”

“I can’t talk until later.”

“Is he coming in tonight, Juliet? I need to know.”

“There’s a chance. He usually calls.”

“You tell me when he does. No reason for a scene here at work.”

“You’re like him.”

AFTER JULIET’S WORK they sat at a corner table in the Marine Room. It was late and the evening was cool and downtown Laguna was quiet. Juliet had put on a black faux fox-collar coat that Hood found to be striking.

He told her they were IA, and what that meant within their department, and some of what he knew about Reserve LASD Deputy Coleman Draper. He told her about Draper’s home and business in Venice, his probable connection to the deaths of two men in Los Angeles County, his apparent affiliations with recently murdered Hector Avalos, and with Carlos Herredia’s North Baja. He told her that Draper was manipulative and potentially violent. He didn’t tell her about Alexia Rivas or the warrant for Draper’s arrest.

She looked at him and Stekol with genuine bewilderment but said nothing when Hood was finished. She sipped her wine and stared out the window.

Then she turned back to them with a skeptical rebuke on her face. “What do you mean by Coleman’s ‘probable connection’ to the deaths of two men? Did you see him kill them?”

“No.”

“Did anyone?”

“We have evidence. We have no witness.”

“It’s very hard for me to imagine him doing such a thing. What do you mean, ‘affiliation’? Did you see Coleman with known criminals?”

“In the vicinity of. Coming from and going to.”

“Then he could be undercover, working for a different law enforcement organization than yours. Maybe a state one, or even federal.”

Hood guessed that Coleman himself had planted this seed. “He isn’t working for another department, Juliet. He and his partner framed and beat a man almost to death to cover up a double murder that they committed. It was one of the most brutal things I’ve ever seen done.”

“And you know this as a fact?”

“I have some of it from the man himself. The rest is half buried but I’m digging it up.”

“How can a man that brutal be tender?”

“To get what he wants.”

“I’ve known him for a year and you for ten minutes. You arrive and accuse him of things but he’s not here to defend himself. You come here and give me vapors, smoke. I want facts.”

Stekol leaned toward her with a glitter of cuff links, impressive in his suit. “Do you know Alexia Rivas?” he asked.

“No. Why?”

“She’s a young woman your boyfriend lives with when he’s not living with you. This is a fact.”

She winced and colored and looked out the window again.

“He owns a home in Azusa, same as he owns your condo,” said Hood. “Alexia pays the bills, same as you do here in Laguna. Apparently they have a young daughter.”

“Would you lie to me to get what you want?”

“I won’t lie to you,” he said.

“I know cops do that all the time.”

“Less than you think.”

She took a long sip of the wine, then another, then set the glass back on the table.

“Okay,” she said. “Then I won’t lie to you. I’ve never been sure if Coleman is what he said he was. Once I saw a gun. I think he wanted me to see it. He told me he was part of a federal law enforcement organization that required secrecy of fact.
Secrecy of fact.
He said nothing about any other kind of business, or another home. Of course, I knew he had to live somewhere when he wasn’t living with me. Our foundation is that I ask no questions about his work. That was our first rule. That was
our
secrecy of fact. And I’ll tell you right now that he showed no inclination to violence with me, ever. He was…is…very empathetic to me. He listens closely and he understands. He is a gentleman. He asks. He doesn’t take. He’s courteous and generous. He’s passionate. His attention is absolute. He lost his entire family to a fire when he was fifteen years old. Sometimes—often—when we’re not talking or touching or doing something together, he’s quite simply not there. I think he’s back with his family.”

Hood thought for a moment about how a person can be one way to some people and the complete opposite to others. Nature. Training. Necessity. Juliet was not a fool, but she had been fooled by Coleman Draper.

“Juliet,” he said. “Coleman Draper is alone in his own world. The rest of us are only in it to be used. He would explain himself to you with different words. But that’s what he does.”

She took another long draw on the wine, then held up her glass and rocked it at the waitress.

“When was the last time you saw him?” Hood asked.

“He was home last Tuesday and Wednesday.”

“Do you know when he’ll come home to you again?”

“There is no plan. There is never a plan.”

“That just changed,” Hood said. “We’re going to make a plan to arrest him. He’s dangerous—to you, to everyone. You do the right thing and nobody else will get hurt. Will you help us do that?”

“You strip my illusions and break my heart, then demand civic responsibility?”

“That’s right,” said Stekol with a smile. “Same thing that happens to us cops every day we show up for work.”

The waitress set a glass of wine on the table. Juliet looked at it but didn’t drink. “I wondered if he had other women. I convinced myself that it didn’t matter. Coleman and I are an arrangement. But I didn’t simply fall into it. I jumped. I closed my eyes and jumped.”

“You don’t owe him anything,” said Hood.

“I still don’t believe that I’ve been making love to a murderer. I truly felt it in him at times—love.”

“You’re not the only one he fooled, Ms. Brown,” said Stekol. “He fooled our whole force. There’s hundreds and hundreds of us.”

“Can you help us?” Hood asked.

“I will help you.”

“No,” he said. “
Can
you? Can you fool him? Can you lie to him convincingly? He’ll be alert to anything different because now he knows that we know.”

She took another long sip of the wine. “I’ve never been a good liar.”

“I’m going to make it easy. If he tells you he’s coming, call me before he gets there. If he arrives unannounced, wait until it’s safe to call me. Wait an hour. Wait a day.”

“And act as if everything is the same.”

“He already knows that nothing is the same. So you can’t give him any reason to suspect you. If you can’t do this, Juliet, say no. It’s dangerous—it can come down to a word, a moment, a look. I won’t ask you to and you don’t have to.”

Juliet looked at the men. Having interviewed so many suspects and dealt with so many crooks, Hood had a good sense for the lie. But he also had a good sense for the truth, and some people are not capable of duplicity.

“We never talked,” said Stekol. “Erase us from your mind. And put Coleman back in. Put him back in just like he was before—cute and full of love for you and so intuitive when it comes to your feelings.”

“Don’t mock me.”

“No mockery at all,” he said. “If a woman was as good to me as Coleman is to you, I’d be with her every minute I could.”

She swirled her wine and frowned down into it. “How sure are you about what he’s done?”

“I took a bullet in the back four nights ago because of him,” said Hood. “That’s how sure I am.”

“But what if you’re wrong?”

“Then he’ll walk and sue us and I’ll still have a nice scar to talk about. And you and Coleman can stay together and be happy and look back on what fools we cops were.”

“I don’t think that that is impossible.”

“He betrayed you,” said Stekol.

She finished her wine and set down the glass. She didn’t look at either of them. “I can do it.”

Stekol glanced at Hood. His expression said: But
will
you?

40

Draper walked into
his Laguna Beach condominium a week later, tan and fit. He set his bags in the entry-way but kept the box tucked under his arm. He looked through the sliding glass door at the pale moonlit cove and the glimmering black Pacific and thought of the sliding glass door through which Hood had escaped in Jacume. And he thought of the bad luck of having a U.S. task force apparently mistake his pursuit of lowly deputy Charlie Hood for an upper-level cartel disturbance. Because of that, Hood was still alive, and the tunnel was useless, and extra law enforcement attention was now focused on Jacumba and Jacume, and Draper would never work again as a reserve deputy, at least for the LASD. It was a small consolation that he still had his shield and service sidearm.

He heard the faint sound of the TV from the bedroom, and saw the subtle shift in the light as it played into the hall.

“Coleman?”

Draper stood in the bedroom doorway. “Who else lets himself in here at night?”

“So many. But you’re the one I miss.”

Draper was not used to sincere greetings from Juliet, even humorous ones. This was an Alexia greeting. It put him on alert though he was tired of being alert.

She was sitting up in bed, surrounded by pillows, a glass of wine on her nightstand. She had on red satin pajamas and a black silk robe with a multicolored dragon on it. She tapped the sheet beside her and he came in and sat there. He handed her the long gold box.

“Things did not go well.”

“I tried your number.”

“I have a new one.”

She opened the box and smiled and touched a blossom. “Beautiful.”

He leaned in over the roses and kissed her, just barely touching. He inhaled her breath and gently bit her lip. He took a deep breath of clean cool Laguna air and cut roses and slowly blew it back into her. Her hand was warm on his cheek.

“Disaster, Juliet.”

“Did anyone die?”

“Not that kind. The kind that will multiply and complicate, like a tumor.”

“I’m very sorry, Coleman. But you look good. Did you draw an assignment in Maui?”

He smiled. They had a standing joke that if secretive, world-hopping Coleman were to travel to Maui for work, he would have to take her. She loved the Grand Wailea. In fact he had fled to Honolulu on a forged ID and spent six days lost among the tourists in Waikiki. She parted the lapel of his sport coat just a little, confirming the gun.

“Juliet, I wish it had been Maui.”

“Let’s just go there on our own.”

He looked at her. He instinctively distrusted her eagerness. He had not chosen her for eagerness, but for her stubborn reticence, her pride, her belief that she could fight distance with distance.

He got off the bed and went to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of the wine. The bottle was half full but there was an empty in the wastebasket under the sink and when he touched the opening his finger and thumb came back wet. She drank more when stressed. So far tonight: emotional, eager, stressed. He looked out at the aimless heave of ocean, and the cracking little waves racing up the sand. He thought that everything might really be okay. Juliet might just be happy to see him, and stressed by work, or by her inability to conceive children, or by life itself. Or not at all. Maybe he was reacting poorly.

He still felt some of the raw surprise and insult he had felt upon seeing the GPS transmitter clamped to the chassis of the M5. But it was more than surprise and insult. It was a total questioning of self. Of his intelligence, his abilities, his preparedness and his luck.

Hood: whistle-blowing, skirt-chasing, slow-on-the-draw, Bakersfield hick Charlie Hood. When Draper had seen the transmitter, and later the image of Hood himself sitting in the black Charger in Jacumba—caught by a security camera hidden in a tree—Draper had for the first time in his life felt enmity toward a fellow human. It was a new emotion for him, or at least a sharpening of older ones, and very different in its magnitude. For the first time in his life he truly wanted to kill somebody, rather than simply seeing that it was the easiest and most practical thing to do. Other people had come between him and his desires, but Hood had thrown himself between them. Hood had
seen
him.

She came into the kitchen with her wineglass and hugged him lightly, then went into the living room and turned on the gas fireplace. The flame popped to life behind the ceramic logs. Juliet sat on the leather love seat and crossed her legs under a throw blanket. She looked at the flames.

“Come sit with me,” she said. “We can see a beach without tourists and a flame without fire. I’ll rub your back.”