L. A. Outlaws Read Online Free PDF Page B

the bay.
    Hood recognized three of the dead as Wilton Street Crazy Boyz. Another, no more than a boy, the one with the painter’s mask still half-on, looked familiar, but Hood couldn’t place him. The other Asian was new to him. Maybe another Boyz click, he thought. The four Latins were Mara Salvatrucha by the tattoos, but hard to say where they came from because MS-13 wasn’t about turf but about money and violence.
    Hood scrolled back through his almost four years with the Sheriffs trying to remember Mara Salvatrucha and the Crazy Boyz mixing it up, but couldn’t think of one incident.
    “Haven’t seen much of this,” he said to Marlon. “Different gangs fighting it out.”
    “I wonder if anyone walked away,” said Marlon.
    “Funny they’d leave the guns.”
    Marlon nodded. “If there was a winner, I’d put my money on the Salvadorans. I wish this guy could talk.”
    They were standing next to a dead man dressed in a black suit and a white open-collared shirt and a pair of dull black dress shoes splayed out at the end of his thick legs. To Hood, shoes had come to seem irrelevant on dead men, of whom he had seen more than several in his twenty-eight years. The Racks in al Anbar wore sandals or nothing, so to him death was a shoeless thing.
    He looked at the four holes in a diagonal line across the front of the white shirt, automatic fire from the Salvadorans almost for sure. The guy had no gun, apparently. He looked wrong here, like he’d wandered in from another place or time.
    Without turning him over, Marlon worried out the man’s wallet and stood. “Barry Cohen,” he said. “Hollywood. Cohen and Cohen Gemstones in the diamond district, says this business card. What’s a nice Jewish boy doing at this party?”
    Hood had been thinking the same thing. “Maybe it was his party,” he said. “Him and the Asians. This is their turf. Maybe the Salvadorans crashed it.”
    Marlon nodded but didn’t look away from the bodies. “Him and the Asians doing what?”
    “Diamonds come to mind.”
    “I wonder. The Asian Boyz wouldn’t pay him a tenth of what they’re worth retail. Barry’s got a fat markup for engagements and anniversaries.”
    Hood considered. “How much cash did he have?”
    “Eighty . . . three bucks.”
    “Maybe Barry was paying for something with gems instead of money. To a broker, gems are cheaper than cash.”
    “Maybe he was. And if tonight was the night he brought payment to the Boyz, then the diamonds are either here in this mess or went out with the winners. Good you sealed off the parking lot, Charlie. There might be some blood out there if one of these guys got away.”
    “If he was shot, that would explain leaving the guns.”
    Marlon put his hands on his hips and looked down at the bloody heap of dead men. “Looks like Cu Chi.”
    “Or Hamdaniya.”
    “Ten men. Jesus.”
    Marlon had invited Hood one evening after work to a bar where they drank and agreed that war is worse than hell, because hell punishes sinners but war punishes everyone.
     
     
     
    Marlon led the walk-through, and Hood gave way to photographers and videographers, crime scene specialists, coroner’s investigators, more detectives, an assistant district attorney and an LASD commander.
    Hood followed Marlon at an increasing distance but listened and watched carefully. He knew that the proper deployment of personnel at a crime scene was something he’d need to learn. Here it was orderly and systematic, and people knew their jobs. But in Anbar province there had been sullen crowds and sudden lethal chaos, and Hood was hated not only by the people but by the soldiers whose actions he was sometimes called on to investigate. Sometimes it seemed like everybody wanted to kill him.
    Two tours was enough. He had left a good job with the Sheriffs to go over there because his father was navy and his grandfather was navy. They put him in NCIS—Navy Criminal Investigative Service—because of his law enforcement