L. A. Outlaws

After the flash of white that should have been bone Lupercio saw the foam head rocking to a stop on the cabin floor and the wig caught by his blade in the deep gash in the pillow. He buried the machete in the head, the two halves skittering across the knotty pine floor.

Voices now rose from the unit next door, and he thought he saw movement through the window facing the office.

He saw the index card propped against the lamp on the nightstand.

“I trusted you” was written in a graceful feminine cursive script across it.

Beside it lay some kind of electronic emitter or transponder, likely a vehicle locator.

Lupercio ran back into the forest.

29

Hood knelt beside the bed in Suza

He was bewildered by Lupercio’s supernatural ability to find Suza

A San Bernardino County Sheriff’s detective worked beside him, videotaping the note on the nightstand, the transponder, the wig, the two neatly cleaved halves of the Styrofoam wig stand and the deep, fresh cut in the old wood floor. His name was Pettigrew. Outside a team of investigators waited for the sun to rise.

Pettigrew turned off the recorder and let it hang at his side.

“So this woman is the witness against the badass Salvadoran everybody’s looking for.”

“Lupercio Maygar.”

“Animal.”

“He’s more than that.”

“She’s a schoolteacher, right?”

“Yes, eighth grade.”

“Was that locator on the car out front?”

Hood nodded but said nothing.

“Even with that TV press conference, I still don’t understand how she got mixed up with him,” said Pettigrew. “A schoolteacher and a killer. They have a history?”

“Not that we know.”

Pettigrew shook his head doubtfully. “I don’t see how you do it, day in and day out. I hate going down the hill now. You hit that brown stuff they call air, you just know nothing good can happen.”

Hood said nothing. Lupercio’s black art had left no room in his mind for Pettigrew’s fearful opinions.

“I was L.A. Sheriff’s for eight years,” said Pettigrew. “Mostly East Los Angeles Station. So I know what I’m talking about.”

A few minutes later Hood went down the hallway and looked at the splintered door. Lupercio had used a pry bar. Hood could see where the blade had forced the steel lock assembly through the door frame. By the punky look of the wood, it seemed it wouldn’t have taken great force.

For a moment he stood behind the cabin and watched the sunlit morning vapor drift through the branches of the pine trees. He called Suza

Then he called Assured Surveillance in Worcester, Massachusetts, and talked to an engineer named Schlinger. Schlinger couldn’t explain the solder line on the AS-210, but he was happy to look at the pictures and gave Hood an e-mail address. Schlinger would call back.

Hood stood outside the cabin in the cool dawn as the pictures raced across the continent. Blue jays flitted in the upper branches of a jack pine and Hood could see Pettigrew’s flash unit popping light against the cabin windows.

Five minutes later Schlinger was back.

“It’s been modified,” he said. “We don’t ship them that way.”

“Modified to do what?”

“Open it. Send more pictures. You’ll need a small cross-tip.”

Hood got Pettigrew to dust the transponder but not a single latent came through. Using a screwdriver from the trunk of the Camaro, he opened the housing. The short screws unseated quickly and he set aside the lid.

Hood looked down at the tightly packed microelectronics, which meant little to him. He shot them with his phone camera and sent them through to Massachusetts.

Another five minutes and Schlinger called again.

“It’s been reworked,” he said. “Cleverly. It’s got a signal splitter with a digital arm switch. That switch can be thrown on and off by remote by an operator who knows the frequency.”

“By whoever added the splitter.”

“Correct.”

“So, two signals,” said Hood. “I can turn yours off and leave mine on. You get nothing and I get signal.”

“Right. You should report this to your superiors.”

Hood thanked him and rang off.

My superiors.

He thought of how Lupercio had shown up at Suza

Hood did. Marlon. Wyte almost certainly.

Marlon or Wyte, ru

But no one had known that she’d drive up to the Gray Fox Cabins in Lake Arrowhead.

So someone tracked her electronically. Someone who could kill one signal coming from her car and pick up another frequency.

And guide Lupercio here.

My superiors, Hood thought, who approved and arranged for the transponder on Suza

Hood began to feel the same sense of unreality that he had felt in Anbar, the sense of entering a world that only outwardly resembled the one he knew. After the murders of Jackson and Ruiz his soul had felt like an open wound that he wanted to hide, but now the wound had grown large enough to be seen on his face and heard in his voice. He could feel the new sunshine on it.

He thought about last night, ordering the flow of events, trying to see if there was a flaw in his logic, something that could blow away his suspicions with cold, bright truth: at six o’clock the evening before, the Sentra had been in Oceanside, not moving, apparently content. He’d kept thinking about Suza

Then, at eight o’clock, in the middle of his takeout Mexican di

All they could do was wait. Wyte said he’d stay on Lister. Marlon, who sounded pleasantly drunk, said he’d deal with it in the morning.

Hood had finished his di