Hood also remembered riding horses with his dad, especially one warm spring day when Douglas trotted past him on a black warmblood and Hood had so thoroughly admired the way he sat that horse that he tried to emulate it on his own, sitting up and squaring his shoulders but trying to look relaxed also and being thankful that this man so good with horses was his father. In Hood’s memory his father trotted by, then trotted by again.
“Look, Dad, remember Taffy?”
“Not one iota.”
“The collie you got us. Remember? And she dug up the yard so bad you took her to the pound and came back with a kitten. We named her Noel because it was Christ mastime. And Mom put little squares of masking tape on her feet and we laughed when she tried to shake them off and she knew we were laughing at her.”
“Sorry to have missed all that.”
“You remember, honey,” said Iris. “The Webster’s boxer got ahold of Noel and you ran him down and got her back out. Christmas Day, 1986. Four stitches in your hand. Charlie and I were in the front yard and we saw the whole thing.”
“Charlie being one of my sons?”
“Yes, hon, the one sitting right next to you.”
“Oh.”
“Look, Dad, here’s my first year of Little League. The Angels. You were the coach.”
Douglas set his finger under the team picture and appeared to give the photograph his complete attention. He leaned away and looked at Hood.
“Charlie. Right?”
“Right, Dad. Charlie. Perfect.”
“I’m hungry.”
They ate in the dining room. For Hood and his mother it was an anguished hour of nonsense piled over sense, of imagined events crowding out the memory of real ones. There were moments of pure lucidity but even in these Hood saw nothing of his father’s once capacious heart. Mostly he complained.
Hood forced down the dinner and thought of what Madeline had said. The past is now… a grave and a birthplace… it’s all one instant…
His father looked at him. “I hate my life.”
Hood drank at a bar in Hollywood, watched the Dodgers beat the Cards, chatted up two nurses from Chicago and came back late to Silver Lake.
His cell rang as he came through his door.
“Talk to me,” said Suzanne.
“Where are you?”
“Far from you and Lupercio.”
Hood toured the little one-bedroom place to make sure everything looked the way he had left it, a habit and nothing more. He turned off the lights and sat in the dark in his living room.
“We shouldn’t talk here, like this,” he said.
“Remember Laguna, before you helped me check out?”
“Hard to forget.”
“Then walk across that sand in exactly two hours. Alone.”
Two hours later he walked alone across the sand north of Laguna’s Main Beach. The sky was close and starless and the moon trailed a river of silver on the water. The waves were small and sharp and they crashed hard. He remembered that the rock archway had been easy to find at low tide but now the tide was high and the beach was smaller and steeper.
He hugged the cliff to stay dry and when he was close enough to make out the shape of the archway Hood heard a crunching sound behind him.
Suzanne skidded down the cliff face and her boots landed quietly in the sand. Her face was mostly hidden under a cowboy hat, and she wore a faded denim jacket against the beach chill.
“Keep going,” she said. “Talk.”
Hood walked, and she almost caught up with him but not quite.
“I’ve got a leak,” he said.
“No shit. A cop. How many lives has he helped rub out?”
“Four for sure.”
“I liked my neighbors, Hood. I liked Gerald and Harold Little Chief. They were men. What were you thinking?”
“That I was working with good people. I am, mostly. I think I am.”
“That’s really damned comforting.”
“It’s a soul killer, woman.”
He stopped and turned, and Suzanne stopped, too. He looked at her and felt the good thrill of having her here, caught in his eyes, unmoving for this moment.
“When I found the transponder on my car I thought it was you.”
“It was not.”
“Prove it.”
“You know me is the only proof I’ve got.”
“You don’t strike me as a chickenshit coward.”
“I care about you.” Hood hadn’t planned to say that, had never quite said it to himself. It was against all the rules, but that list was long by now. The odd part was that he cared about Allison Murrieta, too.
She cocked her head slightly, as if to hear something better.
“All this, because I saw a guy one night.”
Hood knew that the only way to keep her close was to honor her lie. Back in Anbar he’d vowed to never honor a lie again-not after Lenny Overbrook’s false confession on behalf of the men who used him. Now he was doing it again.
“It was bad luck,” he said.
“What are you going to do about it? School starts in a few days and if I don’t work I don’t get paid.”
Past the archway they came to a place where the beach widened and the pitch of the cliff face softened. Hood looked up at a gazebo outlined atop the bluff in the faint moonlight.
Halfway up the stairs to the gazebo they stopped and Hood looked back at the beach below them and the soft black Pacific.
“There’s a way, Suzanne. There are two people other than me who’ve known where I was going, and where you might be. If I give each man a different place to find you, and Lupercio shows up at one of them-we’ll know.”
“Who are these assholes? How high up are they?”
“A sergeant and a captain.”
“Men, women, white, black?”
“It’s better you don’t know.”
“You don’t know what’s better for me. So we find the leak. Then what?”
“There’s internal affairs. There’s feds.”
“More cops. Great.”
They climbed to the top of the bluff and stood in the gazebo and looked down again. They were alone. Up here the breeze was stronger and Hood could hear the cars swooshing along behind them on Coast Highway. Suzanne brushed back her hat and the strap caught her throat. She stood in front of him. Over her shoulder he saw a restaurant long closed for the night and a lamplit patch of highway.
“I saw my boys today. It made me happy.”
“I’ll bet that made them happy, too.”
“I’m a good mother.”
Hood said nothing.
“I’ve raised them on independence and they know they’re loved. I’ve exposed them to good things, a lot of them. I’ve taught them to think for themselves, to be curious about everything and to doubt everything. I’ve never missed a birthday, a holiday or an illness. Well, not many.”
“They seem like good boys. Really. A good look in their eyes.”
“After you arrest Lupercio I’ll let you take me somewhere no one knows us. Somewhere beautiful. We’ll be lazy.”
“Ernest might not be too happy about that.”