Kyle looked at him.
“Talk to me,” said Hood. “I can’t put ten dead men out of my mind. I bet you can’t either.”
“He was fifteen years old.”
Hood watched Kyle and listened to the drone of the cars elevated in the night beyond them.
“And he followed you into the gang life even though you told him not to.”
Kyle locked eyes with Hood. “Cohen owed us seventy-five grand. Gambling. He brought us diamonds instead. MS-13 found out about the transaction. Either they took the diamonds or you people did. So Mark died for nothing.”
“There weren’t any diamonds when we got here.”
“There were plenty of diamonds before you got here. Tony called me from the office. Cohen brought them in a red backpack at ten-fifty P.M.”
“We turned this place over more than once. No gems.”
“That’s interesting, then, isn’t it?”
“Where were you?”
“Business or pleasure, you know-what’s the fucking difference?”
One of his Internet cafe beauties, thought Hood. Add some more guilt over his little brother’s death. Of course it was very possible that Kyle was lying and he’d carried off the loot himself.
“Maybe you came by an hour after the call,” said Hood. “You were wondering why Tony hadn’t bothered to update you. You sized it up quick, took the red backpack and split.”
“I wouldn’t be here now.”
“This is exactly where you’d be.”
“Maybe that’s what happened, Deputy. If so, then good for me. I’ll drop twenty thousand on Mark’s funeral, give the rest to the Girl Scouts.”
Then the idea hit Hood that MS-13 was tipped to the payoff either by Barry-who could promise them, say, half the diamonds he owed the Asian Boyz-or by one of the Boyz who knew the score and had a grievance. Gangs had internal problems just like any other organization. Kyle obviously knew the score and was conveniently out with one of his girlfriends.
Kyle was still staring at Hood, mad-dogging him, which was not something a Sheriff’s deputy got very often. Hood wondered if Kyle was hearing his thoughts. But Hood couldn’t see Kyle leading his little brother into a thing like that.
“Don’t stare at me like a damned mule,” said Hood. “I’m trying to help you.”
Kyle looked away and lit another cigarette.
“Cohen was greedy and afraid,” he said. “This is a bad combination. He gambled away most of his money, then came to us. We helped him and he gambled away more. When he had no more cash, he said diamonds came cheaper to him than dollars. He made us the offer. But he invited MS-13 to take half and make sure not a Wilton Street Boy was left alive. That was his idea of friendship and honest business. Salvadorans? They’ll do shit like this. But they didn’t know how tough and smart the Boyz are. Even the fifteen-year-old. It got out of control. But one of them must have survived. He figured the cops were on their way, so he got away with the rocks and his life.”
Hood dropped the cigarette butt and ground it through the metal ramp with the toe of his duty shoe. He looked out at the young gangsters down the catwalk. Kyle had just said out loud what Hood had been thinking since he saw the bloody mess, but it still wasn’t sitting right. The abandoned weapons and the dead men’s full wallets and the five-thousand-dollar watch left on Barry Cohen’s wrist still had him wondering.
“A witness saw an old Lincoln Continental parked off Emberly last night. Black, good condition, driver talking on a cell phone. Sound familiar?”
“Not me. I got that Suburban.”
Hood looked back at the parking area. “Maybe Barry had trouble keeping a secret.”
Kyle shook his head in disgust, blew smoke. “One night at Caesars Palace he tried to tell his girlfriend everything but I stopped him. If you got half an ounce of bourbon inside Barry, you couldn’t shut the guy up. He loved bourbon. Worry out loud. That was his favorite thing to do-worry out loud. No telling what he said to people. Dangerous asshole. Cost me a brother and seventy-five grand and I’ll piss on his grave the first chance I get.”
“I need the girlfriend’s name and number.”
“Melissa something.”
In the office Kyle dug a business card out of the desk and flew it across to Hood.
9
Lupercio walked along the stream that ran behind Suzanne Jones’s property. He had a fishing rod in one hand and a container of worms in the other. A straw cowboy hat shielded him from the sun. The small bass in the stream were easy to catch and toss back, and he did this while he picked his way upstream watching the Jones compound.
Across a small tan meadow there was a main house, a detached garage, a barn and four small casitas. They were all painted soft pink, except for the red barn. There was a grassy swale between the buildings and an enormous oak tree in its center with two rope swings hanging side by side from a low branch and three wooden picnic tables in the shade. The paint on the buildings was fresh, and there were flowers in beds alongside the house and garage.
A teenaged boy in a trucker’s cap roared up a half-pipe on his skateboard, caught air on the free fall and extended his legs at the last minute to crunch down, keep his balance and zoom up the opposite side. The skate run had two half-pipes and a couple of vertical walls and a slalom course. It looked homemade. It was painted putty gray, and it crawled with a snake’s nest of spray-painted graffiti that Lupercio, once fluent in all the languages of the L.A. taggers, couldn’t make much sense of. Over the years, the skateboarders had stolen the old gangland swirls, then the advertisers had stolen them from the boarders. At first it had surprised Lupercio that the style of a full-on, leave-or-die turf tag you might find in Compton could show up a year later on a TV commercial for teenagers’ skateboard shoes. Now the boy flew up the half-pipe for the third time and wiped out. Lupercio watched him hit then roll down the last few feet and sit for a second panting in the ferocious heat. The boy looked at him because he knew he was being watched, then sprung up, fetched his board and started in again.
From the shore of the pond another boy, half the size and age of the first, was fishing. His movements were relaxed but practiced, and when he flung the lure out and up, it sailed through the air and plopped halfway across. Then he stood still for a moment and let the lure sink before reeling it in a few feet at a time. Then he’d wait again. Over and over. Lupercio recognized the patience of the fisherman because he had it, too.
When Lupercio hooked another fish, the little boy looked at him. Lupercio waved and the boy waved back. Lupercio let the fish go, set down his rod and stood for a moment pretending to enjoy the summer day, his back to the Jones property and a hand resting on the long handle of his machete.
A while later he saw the Hawaiian come outside with a baby in his arms. Dad used a hose to put water in a plastic wading pool on a patch of grass, then he turned off the hose and got into the pool with the baby, who screamed with happiness. Lupercio smiled at the big man in the little pool because he looked like an infant.
Lupercio hooked another small bass and played it for a minute, then flipped the rod up and toward him, and the fish sailed through the air and into his hand. He pulled out the hook and dropped the fish back in the water.
Finally the woman came out. She wore a brief brown swimsuit with an open white blouse over it, sandals and a floppy red hat. Lupercio wondered why anyone with such beauty would choose to be a criminal.
Suzanne came down the back deck steps and strode across to the pond. Her face was hard to see at this distance and shielded by the hat. She stopped beside the dock and watched the larger boy ride his board. The boy upped his speed and his bravery to impress and frighten his mother.
She watched, apparently not frightened. Then she walked over to the other boy, knelt down beside him and watched him fish. Suzanne said something to him and the boy said something back, but Lupercio couldn’t hear the words. He could see the similarities in the shapes and shadings of their bodies-the straight shoulders and long limbs and light brown hair. The older boy was black-haired and thickly built. Three sons by three men, thought Lupercio. Araña. Spider.
A minute later she walked back to the plastic pool, took off everything but her swimsuit and climbed in with the Hawaiian and the baby. She took the infant and sat down cross-legged with her back to the man, who ladled up the water in his hands and spilled it onto her shoulders. He kissed her neck.