Hood’s first and only crime spree, and his first thoughts of becoming a cop someday, both occurred when he was sixteen.
He’d gotten his driver’s license and the world was open to him through the ancient Chevrolet that he had bought from a neighbor with saved money.
His father had shown him how to pull the block and pistons to be ground at an auto shop, had helped him rebuild the carburetor and put in the new oil pump, radiator, solenoid assembly and brakes.
As they worked, his father asked Hood what he wanted to do with his life, and Hood said be a cop, maybe, because he liked the TV shows about them and the idea that you joined a department of people who became your friends. His father, as a municipal employee himself, praised the medical benefits and retirement packages offered to Bakersfield policemen and agreed that there was plenty of “camaraderie” in law enforcement.
When the car was finished, Hood had not one penny left for paint, but the engine and tranny were sound and the retreads still had some miles on them. It had a radio that pulled local FM stations and the AM news stations out of L.A., and a cassette deck.
He was free.
It was a summer night, a Friday. Hood had a full tank of gas and some metal on, and his parents had given him permission to overnight with a friend.
He drove through downtown with the window open and his elbow on the door and a cigarette in his lips and wondered what he really would do with his life, given that he was sixteen and there was lots of life ahead. He cruised the East Hills Mall parking lot and watched the pretty girls and knew that whatever he did with his life, it was going to include one of them. Girls liked cops, right? He smiled and waved at some, tried to say hello, but his voice stuck high in his throat like something he’d forgotten to chew.
Back on the boulevard Hood realized that the trouble with law enforcement was that he’d always liked outlaws.
He’d always wondered what it would be like to be one, to walk alertly through space and time following his own code and no other. He’d always silently pulled for the bad guys.
When he saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as an eight-year-old, he’d thought it was the most powerful movie he’d ever seen, though his mother said, “The chuckleheads got what they deserved.”
In seventh grade, when the genuinely tough kids began getting expelled from school, he’d secretly admired them.
When a local man had been arrested for stealing horses from a Bakersfield rancher, Hood had recognized him immediately on the news-he was the cool guy who worked at the bike store, the young guy with the old voice who’d talk chicks and liquor while he adjusted the brake cables and chain on Hood’s Schwinn for free. Hood wrote him an anonymous letter, care of the Kern County Jail, telling the bike shop dude to hang tough.
When his father groused about the state of California halting executions, Hood had been secretly glad because the idea of waiting in a cell to be killed terrified him.
A world beyond the law, he thought. Give me freedom to find a code of my own.
So that Friday night Hood walked into the Bakersfield Warehouse, picked out a hundred and twenty dollars’ worth of headbanger tapes because he already owned everything related to the Bakersfield Sound, and ran out of the store.
He was burning rubber out of the parking lot, mud slopped over the Chevy plates to obscure the numbers, before anyone even bothered to follow him out.
He dined and dashed at Coco’s, shoplifted a bottle of vodka and a handful of Slim Jims from a supermarket.
High on fear and heart pounding hard, he strode into a Wal-Mart, then strode back out with a one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar boom box and plenty of D batteries to run it. The pleasant old man who greeted customers at the entrance croaked drily at him as Hood ran out the door.
That night he took all his loot out to a desert camp-ground he’d used over the years. There was a ring of fire-blackened rocks and a plywood lean-to and empty food cans brown with rust. He collected some wood and got a fire going, then set up the boom box, put in a tape, cracked the vodka and opened a meat snack. Two hours later he was very drunk, so he got the sleeping bag from the trunk of the car and curled up in the backseat with nothing but his shoulder for a pillow.
In the morning his head was killing him but he put more wood in the fire ring and got the flames going strong. Then he dropped what was left of what he’d stolen into the fire and watched the plastic soften and writhe and the audiotape curl and vanish. He was ashamed of himself for reasons he could hear in his aching head, specifically enumerated by the voices of his father and mother.
He was hungover the rest of the day and went to bed early that night, complaining to his parents about the weird-tasting chicken he’d gotten for lunch at the Target snack bar.
“Watch the alcohol, son,” said his father as he turned off the light.
Before falling asleep, Hood decided on law enforcement.
Now Hood sat in the trailer in Anza Valley that served as the Growers West office. It was late morning. Through the windows he could see a tan meadow and rocky hills and the greenhouses battered by the desert wind, their white skins hanging in shreds.
Hood looked out at the ruined greenhouses. They were difficult to comprehend because he was still back in Madeline’s courtyard. It was two days later and he still hadn’t really come away from it yet. He felt like he had left something important there but he didn’t know if there was a word for it, let alone a way to get it back.
Ronette West lit a cigarette and looked at him with annoyance. “I already told you I’ve never heard of Suzanne Jones. So you just drove all the way down here to hear it again.”
“I ran a records-and-warrants check on you before I made the drive,” Hood said.
“I’m clean.”
“You’re on work furlough for felony possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. You’ve got a pager on your ankle.”
She exhaled a mouthful of smoke at him. “I’m not using anymore. Are you threatening me?”
Hood shook his head and pictured Lupercio’s tiny boot prints in the blood on Madeline Jones’s courtyard.
“You sure are dreary for someone who grows flowers,” said Hood. “Aren’t they supposed to make you happy?”
“I am happy. I don’t like cops. You guys badgered me into selling that coke to you. Week after week after week. You literally pressured me into it. To a fucking narc.”
“You’d have sold it to someone else.”
“I needed capital to keep my business afloat. But I kicked, I’m clean, and I don’t know Suzanne Jones.”
“But you knew about Barry Cohen’s problem.”
She nodded. “Yeah. Frank’s a talker and I’m a listener. It was like a soap opera. Melissa blabbed to him and anybody else in earshot. She wanted her ten grand back.”
Hood had the idea that Suzanne wouldn’t talk to Ronette West about gambling debts and diamonds. But someone else might.
He took a DMV picture of Suzanne Jones from his wallet and set it on the desk in front of Ronette. She stubbed out her cigarette in a Raiders ashtray.
“Allison somebody,” said Ronette.
“Tell me about Allison,” said Hood.
“She showed up in a new red Kompressor. Said she lived in Valley Center, wanted to grow some tropicals.”
“Greenhouse flowers?”
“That’s what I said. She wanted to see how you do it. Which, believe it or not when you look outside, I actually know a lot about. I was in county lockup for a week last winter, worst storm of the year. Worst week of my life. My entire business got blown away and I was sitting in a cell, thanks to you… people.”
Ronette sat back and crossed her arms. She looked out the windows, and Hood followed her gaze to the ruined screens of the greenhouses, the PVC frames splintered by the storm, the irrigation lines dangling. There were stacks of empty black planting trays everywhere, like tossed poker chips. Only one greenhouse appeared whole and perhaps functional, and Hood figured it was where Frank’s protea had come from.
“Did you talk to Allison about Barry Cohen?”
“I mentioned him. She was easy to talk to, you know? We kind of hit it off. She felt bad about how fucked up my greenhouses got and I told her right off how they got that way. I mean, she could see the damned pager on my leg. Then she said something about money solving legal problems and I said unless money is the problem. And she said only lack of money is a problem and I thought about Frank’s story and I made a crack about running out of money and using diamonds instead. It went from there. Barry, the gambling, the Asian gangsters, the pissed-off girlfriend and her ten grand. Allison wanted to know more. So.”
“So?”
“So. I put her in touch with Melissa,” said Ronette. “Then I shut my mouth and washed my hands of that whole thing. I was trying to rebuild this business, you know? Next thing I hear Barry’s gunned down up in L.A. somewhere-I read it in the papers.”
“Give me Allison’s numbers.”
Ronette came up with a phone number and that was all.
“Good luck,” said Hood.
“It’ll start when you get off my property.”
Melissa met him in the Nordstrom cafe in Beverly Hills. She had come from a manufacturer’s show. Her dark hair was weaved through with faint lavender streaks that matched her nails.
Hood asked about the woman who Ronette West put in touch with her.
“Oh,” she said, sipping her coffee drink and blushing beneath her makeup.
“Start with her name,” said Hood.
“Allison. I never asked her last name.”
“Did you meet her?”
“Never. We only talked on the phone.”
“How much did you tell her?”
“Hardly anything.”
“Melissa, if you lie to me again I’ll arrest you right here. This is a promise.”
“I told her everything.”
“Did you meet her?”
“No. That’s the truth.”
“She knew the time, the place?”
“Yeah. Everything.”
“How long did it take Allison to get your ten grand back?”
“A few days.”
“Cash?”
“In a market bag. She called and left it on my driveway.”