“Yeah.”
“It’s light here now and I’m still in the tree house. I’ve got your shotgun leaned up against the wall. The sun is coming up over the hills and colors are starting to form. The pond is dark shiny gray. It looks like the mercury that Jordan spilled out of the thermometer a couple of weeks ago. There are hills the color of lions and no houses on them. If a herd of wildebeest came down from Betty’s right now it would look perfectly natural.”
“That’s nice.”
“It’s more than nice.”
Hood pictured her. “I wish I could have met you some better way.”
“You get what you take.”
“It’s the other way around.”
“The other way around is bullshit.”
Hood saw Allison Murrieta from the news the night before, nervously clowning around with the surfers and the 7-Eleven clerk just before her gun discharged. The clerk said he thought it was an accident. One of the surfers said he thought she was showing off. She took seven-hundred-plus dollars. The TV reporter said that in the last two days, five Southland charitable organizations had reported cash donations apparently made by Allison Murrieta, one as high as twelve thousand dollars. A San Diego charity said they got five thousand. The L.A. Police Foundation admitted getting an envelope in the mail with an undisclosed amount of cash and a card from Allison Murrieta.
“How should we have met, Hood?”
“Maybe you would have won a big hapkido tournament and I would have won CIF at tennis, and the Bakersfield Sun would have run our pictures on the same page.”
“What’s better about that?”
“It’s better than you being stalked by a killer.”
“Naw. What if we were back-to-back winners on Millionaire? And they’d want our pictures together after the show-you and me and Meredith? And after drinks at a very posh bar our natural-born hotness for each other just took over? And we each took a year off work to do nothing but travel and learn the history of the world and have sex in totally cool hotel rooms?”
“That’s a good one, Suzanne. There should be a great car in there, somewhere, for the U.S. portion of our travels.”
“With a million bucks you can buy a lot of great cars.”
“I like the Camaro, but if I had the money I’d get the Cayenne Turbo.”
“I’d get a Saleen Mustang and a Harley fat-boy and still have more money left over than you.”
“You know how to stretch a dollar.”
Suzanne laughed and Hood laughed, too. He was still sitting in his canvas fold-up chair, back from the window, where he could see the flash of cars coming and going from the Mariposa and hear the slamming doors of travelers and the rising noise of traffic out on Aviation.
“You know, Hood, we could actually do all that without winning a game show. We just take a year off, put our money together and go. Make a perfect world.”
Hood thought about that one. He had eleven grand in the bank but eight of it was an IRA.
“What about your boys?”
“They got this thing called mail. And telephones. Ernest is a very good father and stepfather. They all might like me gone for a year. I’m overcontrolling when I’m home too much. I get fussy about the littlest things. I even drive me crazy, but I can’t help it.”
Hood reached down under the chair and retrieved his last donut. He had the surprising thought that running away with Suzanne for a year would be a good way to keep Allison Murrieta from getting shot.
“I could do it.”
“But you won’t. You’re chicken. You’ll stay straight and narrow, try to get your sergeant’s stripes before you’re eighteen. Or however you deputies prove your greatness.”
Hood laughed again. “You don’t know what I am.”
“I can tell a lot about a man just by being sexually assaulted by him.”
“Assaulted?”
“Yeah,” she said dreamily. He heard her yawn. “The owl just spun his head around and he’s looking at me with one eye. It’s yellow.”
“The parking lot of the Mariposa Motel is hopping.”
“There’s a mockingbird down in the coral tree outside my bedroom. They make such pretty sounds.”
“A bus just pulled in, big black cloud.”
“Smells like damp grass and fresh water here.”
“I got floor cleaner and cigarette smoke.”
“If I go to the edge and look straight down, I see where the trunk goes underground and I know there’s a root ball the size of the tree itself under there.”
“If I look down, I see an empty pack of donuts.”
“I had donuts last night, too. We’re so much alike-great minds, and all that.”
“That’s us.”
“This is us,” she said.
They were quiet for a long minute. Hood watched the cars jostling in and out of the lot and listened to the sound of Suzanne Jones’s breath in his ear. When she spoke again, it was almost a whisper.
“Charlie, back when I was a teenager I had this policy about people moving me around, making me do what they wanted instead of what I wanted. My policy back then was don’t let it happen. Ever. Don’t give in and don’t turn away. Fight until you bleed if you have to. I based it on Roosevelt’s ‘Speak softly but carry a big stick.’ And that’s still my policy today. I won’t let someone move me around. Not your bosses and not Lupercio and not anybody. You should know that.”
“Let me figure out what to do about Lupercio, Suzanne.”
Another silence, another jet. “You figure it out, Hood.”
“Bye, Suzanne.”
“Bye, Charlie.”
Just before nine A.M. Hood pulled up to the Encarnación address in Fontana: The Hosier & Reed Funeral Home.
On the off chance that Consuelo and her daughters actually lived there-perhaps one or more of them acting in an after-hours capacity-Hood walked the building in search of an apartment or guest quarters.
The building was one story and not yet open for business. Around the side Hood walked a chain-link fence that surrounded a healthy green lawn. There was a covered patio with some plastic chairs and an ashtray on a stand. A fountain stood in the middle of the lawn and a raven dug its head into the water then straightened and gave Hood a canny stare.
The building looked too small to accommodate a business and living quarters for three. The rear half of it had few windows, and the rear door was not a residential one but an electric roll-up large enough to accommodate a hearse or a van.
He dialed Consuelo’s number on his cell phone but was told that the call could not be completed as dialed. He tried it twice more with the same results.
Hood felt less foolish for having rousted the woman and girls. They’d fooled him with fake ID but he still wondered if they were somehow connected to Lupercio Maygar. If so, Lupercio would soon know that instead of Suzanne Jones, a young LASD deputy had been waiting for him at the Mariposa. And if that was true, then she had been betrayed by Wyte.
34
Hood doesn’t have to figure out what to do with Lupercio because I already have.
I call Guy and tell him I changed my mind. I’m ready to sell the diamonds. I’ll call back tonight at ten to arrange the meeting.
And I know what he’s going to say when I calclass="underline" I’ll come to you.
Meaning Lupercio will come to me.
Then I call my friend who works for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, a secretary who’s been there twelve years and knows things. I had her son at Franklin five years ago, nice kid, a curious mind. I tell her about my friend Guy. I describe him in some detail. I put him into the department hierarchy above Hood, but not so high up he’s deskbound. She listens, says she’ll think on it. What I think is, she’ll be able to help.
Now I’m at the Sunset Tower Hotel because it used to be the Argyle and I loved being close to the ghosts of movie stars, I loved the stainless steel and the deco mirrors, the cast-iron palms around the pool and the great view of the city. That’s all gone now, except the views, but it’s a five-star property. Hood’s got no idea where I am. I may lure him here later tonight if everything goes right, feed him a couple of room service martinis and give him a bath in the silver tub.