The Renegades Read Online Free PDF Page B

There was one window in the office, vertical, narrow and fortified with chicken wire. Through it Hood saw the concrete retaining wall for the basement level, and above the wall was a peekaboo view of the west prison grounds, the twenty-foot chain-link fences topped by razor wire, and the sun-bleached gun towers.
    Hood looked at the neat, impersonal cubicles.
    “This is your station,” she said. She had a pleasant face and bony hands.
    Hood’s cubicle was smaller than a prison cell. Yolanda gave him one of her cards, with a county number hand-written on the back for charging long-distance calls on this, the state line. The phone on the desk was black and heavy and had a curled cord and looked Hood’s age. Terry Laws’s package—department slang for a personnel record—sat squarely in the middle of Hood’s new world.
    “The state watches every penny,” said Yolanda. “So please turn off the lights when you leave. The thermostat is centrally controlled, so there’s no use trying to turn up the heat.”
    “No heat.”
    “There is heat. But it’s unavailable.”
    On the way out she flicked the lights off, then on again. When the door swung shut behind her, the lock clicked loudly.
     
     
    HOOD SOON DISCOVERED that Terry Laws had been a solid deputy. He’d played football and graduated from Long Beach State at twenty-three, one year after the L.A. riots. A year later he’d completed training at the L.A. Sheriff’s Academy, and begun his sworn duty at the Twin Towers jail in Los Angeles.
     
    Laws had worked his way up to deputy III, leaving the jail after two years for patrol, then warrants, then back to patrol. His base salary was $4,445 a month. He’d been cited for distinguished service for resuscitating a child after a swimming pool accident. He was LASD bodybuilding champion in 2001, when he was thirty-one, and again the next year.
    He had never been cited for excessive use of force and his number of citizens’ complaints was average. He’d fired his weapon only once on duty, at a fleeing assault suspect who had fired at him. Both had missed.
    He and his partner, Coleman Draper, had arrested the killer of two narcotrafficantes back in the summer of 2007. Hood remembered that story. The murderer was an Aryan Brotherhood head-cracker named Shay Eichrodt. He was later committed to Atascadero State Hospital. Both Laws and Draper had been commended for making the arrest.
    Laws had married at twenty-four, had a daughter a year later, and another a year after that. He divorced at age thirty-four and asked to be transferred from L.A. to the desert substation in Lancaster. Just like me, thought Hood. Why the desert? Hood wondered if Laws liked the miles, the motion, the flat, wide-open land, the twisted Joshua trees and the hot orange sunsets. Hood read that Laws had remarried eighteen months ago. For the last four holiday seasons Laws had helped run the sheriff’s Toys for Tots program.
    Hood looked at the pictures. Laws’s department mug showed a square-jawed man with wavy dark hair and a forthright smile. There was a picture of him receiving a bodybuilding trophy, the sleeves of his sport jacket taut with muscle. The Daily News photographed him with two other LASD deputies, all wearing elf caps and standing behind three large boxes overflowing with new toys.
    Hood saw that he would have been forty years old in June.
    He remembered what Laws had said the night before, about helping the Housing Authority shake down Jacquilla Roberts: There’s no profit in this.
    He remembered the sound of bullets going through Terry Laws’s award-winning body.
    He left a message for one of Terry’s regular partners, saying he wanted to talk with him.
    He called another regular partner, the reserve deputy Coleman Draper, who answered on the third ring. Hood told him who he was and what he wanted. Draper said that Terry Laws was one of the finest human beings he’d ever known and there was no time like the present to talk