That evening Hood went into the city. He bought food, underwear and shampoo at a Kmart. Then he turned the Bill Woods music down low in the Camaro and drove slowly past the Blackboard and the Corral, where Woods and Owens and Haggard had created the Bakersfield Sound-electric twang, raw and rough, “too country for country” according to the Nashville smoothies.
This had all happened decades before he was even born. But as a boy Hood had loved the sound of their recordings, and their straightforward tales of prison, drinking, working the rigs, truck driving. To teenaged Charlie Hood the music had seemed truthful and moving-dispatches from a pained world of which he caught glimpses in the Bakersfield all around him. And this is what he heard in it still.
He swung by his old high school, home of the Drillers, then the house where he’d grown up. The house hadn’t changed much in ten years. The paint was new and the trees were taller and the campaign signs on the bumper of the pickup in the driveway were for Hillary Clinton instead of Bill.
He was back in Madeline Jones’s home before sunset. He checked the answering machine: Madeline had checked in and that was all.
At dusk he sat for a while in Suzanne’s room. It appeared to have been abandoned about 1994, Suzanne’s senior year of high school, when Suzanne wasn’t really a graduating girl of eighteen but a mother with a small child and a job in a fast-food place and plans for college so she could teach history. There was a small plastic infant’s bed in one corner. There were teenagers’ clothes and infant clothes still hanging in the closet. How had she managed all that?
Hood ate his dinner in the darkness of the courtyard, with the fountain turned off and his.38 next to the cat on the chair beside him, waiting for Lupercio.
An hour later the cat had taken up position on Hood’s lap and he was petting it when he heard a light concussive thud from the desert beyond the driveway.
Hood froze and listened. It might have been a car door opening, or a gate tapping against its post, or an errant foam food container slapping up against a fence, or some other faint event within the play of wind and silence and the purring of the cat. He knew how far sound could travel in clear, dry desert air.
Hood picked up his gun, and when the wind died for a moment, he turned his ear toward the desert and listened.
Opened car doors usually get shut, he thought.
Silence.
The cat slipped away when Hood reached over and picked up his flashlight off the floor.
He stood just inside the entrance to the courtyard, saw the moon low in the west and the glint of the moonlight on the fender of his Camaro and the stars flickering in the canopy of the night like diamonds caught in black mesh, and he thought of Suzanne then dropped her from his mind.
He followed his flashlight beam across the driveway, boots crunching on the gravel, gun in his right hand. At the fence he stopped and aimed the light into the desert, which easily consumed it but revealed little of itself. Within the limited beam the branches of the sage and creosote shivered white.
In the middle distance Hood made out the shapes of sand hills. He had chased lizards through such sand hills when he was a boy. On the dunes their tails left long, straight lines and their feet left pointillist claw dots on either side of the lines. Sometimes Hood would follow a track for hundreds of yards, over hill and dune, until it ended at a hole.
Now in the moonlight the sand hills were pale and dotted with sagebrush, and he remembered that they could be steep-sided and softly packed and treacherous to climb.
He turned off the flashlight and walked toward the hills. Gradually the sand under his boots hardened into a dirt road. He didn’t like the crunch of the road so he moved off to one side of it, and as he got closer to the sand hills, he saw that they were higher than he had thought. The faint dirt road wound into them and vanished.
The road comes out of the sand hills, Hood thought, so it probably comes in on the other side of them. But he also remembered the odd incompletion of man-made things in this desert: a section of fence connected to nothing, a foundation slab poured but never framed, a mine abandoned after eight feet of progress, and everywhere fragments of dirt roads connecting nothing to nothing.
He walked the road between two of the lower sand hills. The moonlight diminished while the shadows deepened, and Hood had trouble clearly seeing the hills ahead. He stumbled in a rut and caught himself but the sound was sudden and loud. He stood for a moment feeling his heart race.
At the foot of the next hill Hood jumped onto the slope, leaned forward and wide-stepped his way up, sand giving way, gun and flashlight out for balance. Thirteen steps. On top the moonlight was stronger, and he clearly saw the old black Lincoln Continental parked on the road between the hills.
He swung around as fast as he could, gun first.
A bad taste rushed into his throat-of hot spoiled antacid pooled on top of fear-the taste of Hamdaniya and Miracle Auto Body and the Valley Center barn.
But all he saw was darkness and the way he had come and in the near distance the lights of Madeline Jones’s driveway.
Hood turned back and looked again at the car. Then he crouched and scuttled across the hilltop. From the far side he could look almost straight down on the Lincoln. The windows were darkly smoked and revealed nothing, but through the windshield he could see the glint of moonlight on the dashboard and on the upper circumference of the steering wheel.
He knelt with the unlit flashlight braced in the sand for balance and let his eyes wander the desert around the car. He thought of the carnage that Lupercio had left behind in the barn, and of the dozen men he’d killed before the most violent gang in L.A. had sued him for peace, and how Lupercio seemed to be prescient and ubiquitous.
Hood used his flashlight hand to slip the phone off his belt, punch it on and dial the Bakersfield PD number they’d given Marlon.
He gave the sergeant Madeline’s address and his location, said he had reason to believe a violent felon was in the vicinity. He asked for the car to run with no color, no sirens. The sergeant sounded skeptical and he took Hood’s cell number.
Five minutes went by.
Protect me, Hood thought.
He rose and hopped off the top onto the slope, leaning back and stepping big down the flank of the hill, his heels sliding through the loose sand and sending the gravel down with a hissing sound that he could not prevent.
He jumped onto the dirt road and used his momentum to jog toward the car.
His flashlight was in his left hand, his.38 Mustang in his right, wrist on wrist for control. Hood sighted down the barrel of the pistol. Up close to the car the flashlight beam passed through the windshield and diffused. Through it Hood could see inside the car-rearview mirror and empty front seats and the dome light and the glistening buckles of the shoulder restraints that were folded neatly as bat wings beside the rear seats.
Crouching, he shuffled counterclockwise around the car. Empty, no alarm lights flashing on the dash, door locks down, the driver’s seat positioned up close to the wheel for a short man. When he came back to where he’d started, Hood lowered the gun and swung the flashlight beam up to the top of the nearest dune. Then the dune on the other side of the road. Nothing moved except what was moved by the wind.
Hood sensed something behind him. He spun around and aimed the beam into the empty desert, his gun steady and his chest knocking against his shirt. Then he swung hard right where the pale flash at the edge of his vision was only the darkness pulling an owl back in.
Be still, he thought: still.
He turned off the light and lowered both it and the gun and stood in the road in the bare moonlight. He turned slowly in a circle, moving his head to keep the wind from blowing straight into his ears.
Owls have wings and men have feet.
With the beam pointed down to the road, the tracks were easy to see and distinguish from his own. They were boot prints, small-like the ones Hood had seen by the stream in Valley Center, where Lupercio had talked with Jordan Jones and surrendered his precious identity.
The prints led away from the car then down the road toward Madeline’s house then disappeared where Lupercio had given up road for desert.
It took Hood a while to find the trail again but when he did the footprints were easy to follow.
He was halfway back to the house when he saw the cruiser coming up the road from the signal. A moment later it bounced onto the driveway and started up the hill toward the house.
He turned on his cell phone and it rang almost immediately.
“Hood? This is Officer Jackson, Bakersfield PD, here at the Jones residence. Talk to me.”
“He’s there. He’s close.”
“Whoa, podner-what are you talking about?”
“Lupercio Maygar. Ex-Mara Salvatrucha. We like him for two murders down in San Diego four days ago.”
“What’s your ten-twenty?”
“The middle of the desert about two hundred yards north of the driveway you’re coming up. His car is out here but he isn’t. His footprints are aimed straight at the house. He’s armed and extremely dangerous.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“He’s after the Jones daughter. She’s a possible witness. The house off to your right belongs to the mother.”
“We’ll have a look. Maybe you should get back here.”
“If he gets around you, he’ll head back to his car.”
“I’ve got a good partner and a twelve-gauge. He’s not getting around us.”
“Get backup.”
Hood saw the cruiser stop outside the Jones house. A spotlight blasted on, bleaching the adobe wall white. He turned and looked back in the direction of the Lincoln. He couldn’t see it, but he could see the two sand hills that it was parked between.
“It’s Friday night in Bakersfield, Hood-we’re thin. We’ve got a spot on the place right now. We’ll look around. If we see anything interesting, we’ll get backup. If you want to stand out in that desert and watch a car go nowhere, be my guest.”
Hood punched off as he watched the spotlight roam the wall, and the garage outside the wall, then the courtyard entryway.
The cruiser headlights went out and the doors opened. In the interior lights Hood watched the two officers climb out, flashlights on, one patrolman carrying a combat shotgun, the other with his sidearm drawn. Their beams searched the wall and together they disappeared around one side of it. A minute later they had come full circle. No Lupercio scattering into the night. The shotgun cop turned and looked into the desert in Hood’s direction.
The one with the pistol swung open the wooden gate to the courtyard, backing up and using it for cover. The cop with the shotgun stood with his back to the adobe, and when the opening was wide, he crouched low and followed his light inside. It looked like the pistol cop was trying to secure the gate open, but he gave up and followed his partner in.
The gate slammed shut in the wind.
Hood saw the dull explosion of light behind the courtyard wall, then another. A second later came the muffled reports of the shotgun.
He ran for the house, gun still drawn, flashlight still in his left hand.
They got him, he thought. Two shots from the riot gun at close range.
He heaved across the desert and the driveway and swung open the gate. The shotgun cop lay on his back just inside the entrance. His head was intact but his face and everything behind it was gone, and through this crude tunnel Hood saw the gravel of the courtyard floor wet and red. The dead man’s finger was still inside the Remington’s trigger guard.
His partner was sprawled faceup over the chair that Hood had been sitting on with the cat half an hour earlier. He was breathing fast, his upper chest and neck in ribbons, eyes staring out at Hood from behind a mask of blood. He reminded Hood of someone but Hood had no presence of mind now for memory. The cop breathed faster and tried to stand but the chair began to topple. Hood caught him and eased him to the floor but by the time he did this the cop had stopped breathing and Hood could hardly get a pulse.
He pulled back the man’s head and closed his nose and breathed for him twice, then straddled him and continued the CPR with twenty stiff-armed, flat-palmed compressions against the sternum. He ventilated again, the compressed. And again. Hood lost count. His mouth filled with liquid copper and his throat clenched to keep the bile down. His face and hands and thighs were sticky and warm, and he thought, Jesus, this guy isn’t going to make it but he talked to him anyway, saying stay alive, stay alive, man, open those eyes and come back here right now, man, you come back here.
Hood fumbled out his cell phone, punched 911 and speaker and set the phone beside the cop as he did the cardio thrusts. Through the wind and his own grunting breaths he heard the operator come on, and he gave her the address and said officers down, two officers down but that was all he managed before it was time to breathe again for the cop. Hood got himself off the man and pinched his nose and breathed into him again while the operator assured him in a distant voice that police and medical were on their way.
Immeasurably later the medics pulled Hood away midthrust and took over with the oxygen machine.
Hood sat panting in a corner of the courtyard. He wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his sleeve and stared wide-eyed and straight ahead. He saw Lupercio’s small boot prints in the gravel and the gore on the gate above the shotgun cop as the paramedics swung it open and took the gurney out.
A while later Hood and two BPD officers were standing atop the sand hill above Lupercio’s car, but the car was gone. He saw the flashlights of two more cops on the dune across the road and two more lights down where the car had been. A helicopter crossed overhead and a spotlight raked the ground below it.
Hood didn’t remember trudging through the desert to get here.
He turned and took a knee and looked out at the chaos of vehicles and flashing lights backed up for what seemed like miles down the driveway of Madeline Jones’s house.