I come up behind him, stepping loudly so he knows where I am.
“I have the diamonds,” I say.
“Jacket,” he says. “All three pockets. Forty-five grand takes up some space.”
“Throw the coat away from you, to your left.”
It lands on the channel bottom with a puff of dust. I keep the gun on Wyte as I step to it. The four-by-six manila clasp envelope in the left pocket is taut with used hundred-dollar bills. So is the envelope on the right. And the envelope in the buttoned inside pocket. Two go into my coat pocket and the other into the waistband of my jeans.
From my own jacket I take the twenty-carat parcel of near colorless SI2-clarity round-cut parking lot gravel and toss it on the ground up ahead of him where he can see it.
“You have my number,” he says, looking over his shoulder again.
“Stand right there until I make the railroad tracks.”
“I believe you’ll call me.”
“Believe what you want. Turn back around and stay that way.”
I climb the embankment and jog along the river. The graffiti on the concrete caissons glows softly in the darkness. The last I see of Guy he’s standing down there by the little trickle of the water.
I hop the tracks, cut through the side streets and head for my car, cradled in the night.
I’m just about to put the car key in the door when I hear the sound of a double-action revolver being cocked.
“Don’t move,” says the voice behind me. “Do not move. Do not turn around.”
“I’m LAPD, dumb-ass.”
“There’s a problem with your product, Suzanne. It’s the wrong kind of rock.”
I hear motion behind me then I feel cold steel against the back of my skull.
“To your knees, hands on the ground. Now.”
I do as he says. Rorke. I can smell him, that get-laid cologne he wears. The gun leaves my head. He quickly removes the bulky envelopes. I hear the rattle of a plastic bag.
“Look straight ahead. Do not move.”
The gun pokes the back of my head again. Rorke palms my ass. I feel the bag of money, looped over his wrist, nudging the back of my thigh.
“Sweet.”
I hear footsteps, long and padded, then nothing but the high-voltage thrum in the power lines and the cars out on First Street.
40
I’m back at Franklin Intermediate on Wednesday, a week before the students arrive. It’s good to see the other teachers, meet the new ones, drink a cup of the bad coffee in the lounge. The teachers are fascinated by what I’ve been through-my brush with Allison Murrieta, my bad arrest. But they’re cool about it, too. They cut me a slightly wider swath than usual and I like it.
Even my principal, a hazy and short-tempered alcoholic, seems slightly respectful. He says he likes me with the cropped blond hair, which I take differently than liking the hairstyle. He is an odd man, a bachelor, and he keeps his job because no one can anticipate him.
I’ve got my old classroom back, and I like it. I hang my matted copies of the Preamble and the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address up on the walls.
I set up my 9/11 display, which is mostly before and after photographs of the World Trade Center. I bought them right there in 2004 when I was one of the teacher chaperones for an L.A. Unified eighth-grade pilgrimage to Ground Zero. Some of my students wept as they read the posted notes saying good-bye to loved ones in the rubble. It made me proud that they could feel beyond themselves.
I also set up my usual display on the history of baseball in America, since September is the playoffs and lead-up to the World Series. I’ll show the students part of Ken Burns’s PBS documentary, though to be frank, eighth-graders are more into hoops and extreme sports than guys spitting tobacco juice on the dugout floor. And black-and-white footage tends to put them to sleep.
Luckily, Franklin is a closed and fenced campus and all visitors have to come and go through the office. The office secretary is Wanda and she can be very unwelcoming. By the end of my first Thursday she’s turned away four TV news crews, the Los Angeles Times, KNX and KFWB radio and a freelancer hoping to land a Good Housekeeping assignment. I’m willing to be temporarily famous but you can’t have reporters dropping in on you whenever they want. Ruth is arranging the really big stuff anyway.
By Friday morning the classroom is ready but I still have meetings with the principal and the district and the PTA and the school board and even an LAPD presentation here on gang activity and what to do about it. They claim these meetings are necessary but they’re agonizing beyond description. I wear my sunglasses and stare out the windows and think of Hood under me on the cushions at the Persian restaurant or sprawled on the bed in the Hotel Laguna looking out at the ocean and muttering something about his world being turned upside down. On a notepad I make a short list of the new cars I’d like to boost, which includes the new Chevrolet Silverado with the six-liter V-8 and 10,500-pound towing capacity, Porsche’s naturally aspirated 415-hp GT3 and a Shelby GT-500, which is only a Mustang but with five hundred horses it’s the fastest pony-155 mph-ever built. There are others.
After the last exhausting presentation by an L.A. Unified risk management team-your best defense against on-site accidents is AWARENESS-I make it to my car and screech out of the lot before any reporters spot me.
It’s ninety-two degrees out. My AC needs a freon charge. Driving the Sentra to and from work every day is spiritual punishment for me but that’s the way it’ll be for the next nine months. On my salary I can’t show up at Franklin Intermediate in a Maybach. The Friday traffic on the surface streets is awful. It takes twenty minutes to go three blocks. Ahead I can see the freeway overpass and it is clogged with cars that do not move.
I can’t do it.
I have my needs.
I call home and tell Ernest I’m staying up in L.A. for the night.
I do an hour of hapkido with Quinn downtown, trying to focus but still a little uptight, a little distracted by the last week. I imagine Guy receiving every punch and kick. I’m furious at him for stealing my money but I haven’t figured out how to get it back. Yet. Quinn kicks my ass and sends me out with a throbbing shin, sore ribs and a ringing in my head where he caught me with an elbow. Of course I had my headgear on and my mouthpiece in, but I actually felt my brain hit my skull. Quinn sat me in lotus position and worked my neck and temples until my focus came back, pointing out to me that it won’t go down like this on the street.
I check into the Mondrian on Sunset and call Hood.
“Charlie.” There’s a pause. I figure there might be a few of them.
“Hi, Suzanne.”
“How much do you miss me?”
“More than a little.”
“Catch any bad guys?”
“Only you.”
“You’ve got me all wrong, Charlie.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“They kicked me off homicide. I’m back on patrol until I get auto theft. So if Allison keeps up her high jinks I might get a shot at her.”
“I hope you don’t mean with a gun.”
“No, I mean give her a shot at due process and getting her life back together.”
“What makes you think she needs to get her life back together?”
“She needs her life period.”
“She does take some risks.”
“If you just came in and spilled it, hired Ruth to represent you, you might do pretty well.”
“I’m innocent.”
Hood is silent.
“What if Allison disappeared?” I ask.
Another pause. The money pause.
“I wondered about that,” he says.