“Say she went away, Charlie. Adios. The public wonders, then they get interested in someone else. You spend some time with me and the boys. Come down to Valley Center on weekends and holidays-you’ll love it there. We have a pond with bass and the neighbors have horses we can ride, just like you used to do in Bakersfield. Ernest is going to be okay with how things are. I’m going to set him up with a dressage rider who needs to experience a real ride. So here’s the deal, Charlie: the deputy and the teacher, who met by chance on the night of one of L.A.’s worst crimes, fall in love.”
Hood chuckles. “Yeah. I thought of all that. Except the dressage rider.”
“What do you think?”
“I won’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“It has to do with what I believe in.”
“Tell me what you believe in.”
“I’d like to.”
“Can I come over?”
Hood’s apartment in Silver Lake is like Hood: tall and narrow and neat. It’s an older place, with wainscoting, wall cornices and a high, stamped-aluminum ceiling. The furniture looks cheap and new. He’s got a few books and a bunch of music and Ansel Adams pictures on the walls.
He follows my eye and says that’s Yosemite in winter and I try very hard not to but I step across the room and put my arms around him. Next thing I’m on the floor looking up at Hood’s face above me haloed by the ceiling lamp. His expression is serious. We’re slightly slower about it than before, there’s some acknowledgment in it, some awareness of a shared history, and it’s good, fantastically good.
Later he brings a bottle of wine and two glasses back to the bedroom. I pull up with the sheet around me and he tells me about the Iraqi man and his three boys shot to death by seven soldiers and Lenny Overbrook trying to take the blame for all of them, just like they told him to. Hood was a NCIS detective and it was his job to figure out what happened, but he was also right there after this shoot-out and he saw six guys running away and this simpleton Lenny wiping down a Russian gun after putting it on the dead Iraqi’s lap. And it came down to Lenny’s word that he’d shot up these four men himself, against Hood’s that he saw six more running away from the house, but Hood couldn’t ID anybody. So he could either take Lenny’s mostly false confession and send him to prison for four murders he couldn’t have committed, or he could let four innocent people get murdered and watch everyone walk away from it. He set the kid free and tried to keep the case open but he got no cooperation up the chain of command and when his tour was done he came home. A sniper’s bullet hit a wall right next to him one day, broad daylight in a controlled zone, and Hood wasn’t sure if it was an Iraqi or a fellow soldier. Hood tells me that that bullet revealed a truth about himself that he wasn’t prepared to face-that he was feared and hated. I think the idea that his own men wanted him dead broke part of his heart, though he didn’t use those words. He couldn’t sleep and he couldn’t eat and by the time he got back to Pendleton he weighed fifteen pounds less than at the start of his second tour, and he was pretty much skin and bones even then.
When Hood is done with the story, or I think he’s done with it, he takes a Bible from the drawer of his nightstand and opens it up where there’s a folded piece of paper to hold the place and I figure it’s time for Psalms or maybe Job, but he hands me the paper and sets the Bible down.
I unfold it and he explains it’s a list that Lenny gave him of the six others-names and ranks all written out in handwriting that quite frankly looks like a third-grader in a hurry.
“I think about that piece of paper sometimes,” says Hood. “Some days I think I’ll call the navy and tell them what I’ve learned. Other days, not.”
“Let it go, Hood. You did the right thing. Our soldiers should never have been there in the first place.”
“That’s not the point.”
“It’s the whole point-it should never have happened.”
“All that matters is what happens. I never thought we should have gone in there either but rules don’t get suspended because of what you think. Murder is the same thing in Anbar as it is in L.A. I know those soldiers were furious and scared. You can’t even believe the pressure that builds up. You’re surrounded by betrayal and ugliness and hatred. The heat and the dust and the blood. It gets into you and you have to do something. For those guys, the four dead Iraqis were that something.”
“That’s why you did the right thing, Charlie. Those soldiers were put into an unwinnable situation and they did the best they could. Your letting them go is your part, Hood. It’s your duty and you’re guilty of doing it, just like they are. It’s the guilt that earns your forgiveness.”
He looks at me. “No. If you make murder okay you make everything okay. And you tilt the world to an angle where you can’t build anything. Nothing.”
“You are not God and you are not your own judge.”
“I am very much my own judge, Suzanne.”
Hood refolds the list of names and sets it back in his Bible. I watch his upper body, the indentation of his backbone and the rounded straps of muscle that run alongside it. He’s got a cool mole and I touch it.
He turns off the light and gets into bed beside me and pulls the sheet up and we’re alone in the near darkness. His voice is just a whisper.
“I’m sorry,” says Hood.
I know there’s no reason to argue with him. Or to deny what he knows. He has seen me. Seen. Hood is Hood and he’s got the Man Thing. Nothing sneaky about him. It’s my turn to whisper now but the words sound so loud to me.
“You can’t prove anything. And your sheriff buddies can’t. And the DA can’t.”
His heart beats faster and harder. I set my cheek against his chest. “Suzanne, there’s guys like Lenny and guys better than Lenny getting killed every day. While you boost cars and stick up minimum-wage workers. That’s disrespect.”
“The war used up all your forgiveness?”
“It used up all my something.”
Hood’s heart is going strong. I put my nose next to his ear, the same place I put it down in Valley Center.
It’s an empty feeling when your love isn’t enough. It’s supposed to be but sometimes it’s not. I know that Hood’s past has shaped him, and that my past has shaped me. These are powerful things. You can enlist in them or rebel against them but in your heart you always know the truth of who you are and you cannot escape it.
I begin to dress in the darkness. I can see Hood’s eyes shining down there, stars in the universe. There have been many needs inside me, some all self and others not all self. Some that take, some that honor and make strength, some simple and some imponderable. But not like this. This is his, mine and ours.
“Charlie.”
“Yes.”
“It’s Wyte.”
“I thought so. Talk to me.”
I tell him almost everything I know-the building in Long Beach with the swank computers, Wyte’s arrangements with the ports, Rorke, Wyte’s offer of partnership. He says nothing while I talk.
“It’s all in the notebook in my purse,” I say. “His address in Long Beach, a phone number. Descriptions of his place, every detail I can remember, which is a lot. I’m going to leave it on the counter out there. It’s more than enough to get you started. And, Charlie, Wyte doesn’t know that I know. You can surprise him.”
“Did you sell him the diamonds?”
“Not exactly.”
I’m finished dressing. Seems like with Hood I’m always dressing and undressing.
There’s a moment in the near dark when I can just barely make out his shape. I know he’s watching me. I can see the glimmer in his eyes. They look like lights across a vast ocean.
“Good-bye, Charlie. I’m leaving something for you. I’ll put it on top of the notebook.”