A few minutes later Hood parked off the Pearblossom Highway where Laws and Draper had battled Shay Eichrodt beside the ruins of the Llano del Rio utopia. The stone columns of the old assembly hall rose from the hard ground. The highway was bleached pale gray by the sun and there was a raven blown by the wind onto the nearest Joshua tree, outstretched wings and body crucified on the long spines.
He walked the area where Eichrodt’s truck had been pulled over. Big rigs thundered down the highway and he could feel their vibrations in his chest. Hood sat on an old river-rock wall and read Laws’s arrest report. Laws wrote in the plodding, jargon-heavy style of most cops:… at approx. 4:20 a.m. we observed a pickup truck, red, with plate numbers partially matching…the apparently unconscious suspect then suddenly extended one leg, which caused me to lose balance and fall…the suspect appeared to be under the influence of a stimulant…the suspect was eventually subdued…
Hood imagined the bloody fight between two strong men with batons, and one huge and very strong man who had just taken two lives, jacked up on crystal meth and fighting for his own.
After reading the report, he wondered if that brutal fight had taken something out of Terry Laws, the thing that Carla Vise said had vanished and never returned, even after the stitches were removed and the bruises healed.
Hood left the murder book on the wall and walked among the Llano del Rio ruins. He’d read about this socialist utopia in school. He had always liked stories that began with good intentions, then became complicated. The utopia was founded in 1914 and it survived three years. There were pear orchards and alfalfa fields and a modern dairy-all made possible by a clever irrigation system that distributed water from the snow-fed Llano del Rio. The utopians grew 90 percent of the food they needed. There were workshops for canning fruit, cobbling shoes, cleaning clothes and cutting hair. A Montessori school sprouted up, Southern California’s first. All this was done by cooperation-no one made money. Detailed drawings for the Llano of the future depicted a city of ten thousand people living in craftsman-style apartments with shared laundry and kitchen facilities, surrounded by a road that would double as a drag strip for car races. There would even be grandstands for viewing. Being a car guy, Hood had always liked the racing idea. He wondered what Ariel Reed would think of it. But Llano lost its credit and water rights, and its leaders began to fight. They got no help from powerful Angelenos made uneasy by Llano’s goofy success. Hood looked at it now: no sign or historical marker, just a ruin that the desert bums and migrant workers sometimes used for a temporary shelter in this relentlessly hostile desert.
Looking at these ruins, Hood thought about the utopian ideals of shared labor and shared prosperity. He thought about Terry Laws using the ideals of charity to feather his own impressive nest. The settlers of Llano were partially done in by their own squabbling and the distrust of others. Terry Laws was done in by a man with a machine gun who wanted something that Terry had.
But before that, something good in him had already died-just as Carla Vise had observed.
Hood wondered if it wasn’t the arrest at all, but something else that had changed Terry Laws forever. Something he did. Something Mr. Wonderful couldn’t live with. Something that earned him seven to eight grand a month and cost him his soul.
On his way back to the prison, Hood called an acquaintance in narco and asked him why some drug money was weighed, pressed and stacked, and some wasn’t.
“Transport,” he said. “Big cash takes too much time to count and too much space to pack, so they weigh and press it.” His name was Askew and he’d worked narcotics for his entire career, starting as a baby-faced twenty-two-year-old posing undercover as a high school student/dealer.
“The big dollars go to Mexico,” he said. “Before 9/11 they’d fly it across from Phoenix or San Diego or L.A. After that, airline security got a lot tougher, so now they just drive it in. About a million dollars a day-three hundred and fifty sweet million a year. U.S. Customs intercepts maybe two percent of it. Mexican Customs welcomes it. Even the Colombian money goes through Mexico.”
“What’s big enough for a run south?”
“Who knows? Say a hundred grand.”
“What about seventy-two hundred?”
He laughed. “No.”
“How often?”
“Different cartels, different schedules, different routes. They have to change things up. But at least once a week. Couriers make good money but the price of being late or short is extremely high. You know-wives, children, that kind of high.”
“North Baja Cartel,” said Hood. “What’s an average weekly run?”
“Oh, big stuff. Three, maybe four hundred grand. Since the Arellanos, it’s been Herredia all the way. Are you looking at Vasquez and Lopes?”
“The book’s on the seat beside me.”
“Why?”
“Let’s come back to that,” Hood said.
“Don’t tell me you have problems with Eichrodt.”
Hood thought about that a moment. “I’m starting to.”
“You know why? Because he wasn’t enough. Tweaker, loser. Vasquez and Lopes were pros. They knew what they were doing. They should have made short work of Shay Eichrodt.”
“Talk to me, Lieutenant,” said Hood.
“I think they were starting a run that night. The evidence was there-they were high on amphetamines for the drive. They were armed. They’d hidden cash-weighed and pressed-in suitcases full of clothes. They had a full tank of gas and they were heading south. None of this mattered to the DA, who got fingerprints, blood, stolen cash, and an Aryan Brother with the murder gun. Pretty good chance that Eichrodt did the shooting, but I don’t think he was alone. I didn’t make any waves. I’m narco, you know? Let the Bulldogs and the lawyers do their thing. But if I’m right, you’ve got an accomplice and three hundred something grand unaccounted for. Maybe less; maybe more. What’s your interest, Charlie? Your turn to make nice.”
“Laws busted Eichrodt. I’m looking for enemies.”
Hood didn’t say that he’d also been looking for a way that Terry Laws could have gotten his hands on a few hundred grand, and had just found one.
He got an idea.
Back in the Hole, Hood turned on the lights. In the cold cubicle he put one stack of Terry Laws’s time cards on his desk, and another on the desk that Warren had used. The stack on Hood’s desk were pre-arrest and the cards on Warren’s desk were post-arrest.
Hood examined Terry’s pre-arrest time cards and looked for patterns. He looked for anomalies. He saw his breath condense.
He found nothing.
But at Warren’s desk now, looking through the post-arrest time cards, Hood found a pattern: Terry had not worked a Friday in twenty straight months.
Hood remembered that Terry always made his Build a Dream contributions on Mondays unless the bank was closed.
Fridays, Terry had all day to work a second job, thought Hood. Three days later, he deposited his earnings from it.
After work Hood drove to a Museum Store in an L.A. mall and found what he had seen there last holiday season, a giant-sized plastic H 2 O molecule. It sat on a stand that housed two AAA batteries and when you turned it on, the hydrogen and oxygen atoms careened through clear plastic tubing and changed colors. It was recommended for ages seven and up. Hood bought it and some batteries and had them wrapped. He also bought a card with a close-up picture of a Ferrari grille, and wrote in it: A week from Saturday is a long way off. Will it get here quicker if I drive fast? CH.
Ariel wasn’t in her office but Hood and his sheriff’s badge convinced the lobby guard to deliver it upstairs to her.
He drove L.A. for a few hours before heading home.