Free L. A. Outlaws by T. Jefferson Parker Page A

control in one hand and a laser pointer in the other. There were cops and deputies from all over Southern California, FBI, even a popular Channel 4 reporter. It was Monday morning and already ninety degrees.
    Hood sat in the back of the room holding a cup of coffee on his knee. Marlon had put him on the task force because they needed bodies and Hood could take the hours out of his patrol schedule. Overtime was always good. Marlon seemed fascinated by the masked robber.
    Patmore cued up a series of stills of Allison’s face, taken from a video of her robbing a Taco Bell up in Van Nuys.
    The first thing Hood thought was that Allison seemed to be hamming it up for the camera, then when Patmore rolled the whole video clip Hood realized she really was hamming it up. She was enjoying herself, pointing a big barreled derringer at the video shooter, who backed up squealing like a teenager on a thrill ride. Then Allison whipped the gun back at the clerk, who smiled big-eyed as he stuffed the bills into a plastic Taco Bell bag. The other clerk looked uncertain how she should react to all this, then she grinned. Christ, thought Hood, is this what it takes to entertain people anymore?
    The second thing Hood thought was that Allison Murrieta looked like Suzanne Jones.
    He lifted his coffee and sat back. He studied the shape of her body and her face, comparing it to what he’d seen the day before down in Valley Center. I caught you checking out my legs and just about everything else. True enough, Hood thought, which gave him some pretty clear images to work with. He wondered if Allison’s hair might be a wig. He tried to imagine her with Suzanne’s brown waves and no mask. Look at the jawline, he thought, and the forehead and the tip of her chin—what do you see?
    Well, he wasn’t sure what he saw.
    He remembered that Suzanne Jones had pretty hands, but Allison Murrieta wore gloves.
    Patmore was saying that she was suspected of thirty-four armed robberies of various southland retail businesses in the last eighteen months, good for over twenty-five thousand dollars. In addition she was suspected of four Auto Trader scams where she set up marks dumb enough to bring cash to buy used high-end cars, such as the one up on Laurel Canyon over the weekend. These jobs had gotten her another ninety-six thousand dollars. Patmore said that Allison Murrieta had also stolen at least twenty-two high-end vehicles for the so-called export market, which meant the cars were sold whole—usually out of country—instead of chopped for parts.
    “We know this because she’s left her card in place of twenty-two very fine automobiles,” Patmore said. “And God knows how many more of her cards blew away, or maybe she just ran out and had to get more printed up. In our estimation those vehicles have gotten her something in the ballpark of one million dollars. So she’s doing okay for herself. We’ve got reason to believe she’s lifting plenty of Toyotas and Fords, too, but she only brags about the high-end stuff. Oh, here’s the card she leaves.”
    He clicked the remote, and the screen almost filled with an enlargement of Allison Murrieta’s card. It looked like a standard rectangular business card, but the paper was pale pink and the writing was a graceful black cursive:
    YOU’VE BEEN ROBBED BY
ALLISON MURRIETA
HAVE A NICE DAY
    “Ten years ago, we’d have been all over the print shops, but now anybody can make these with a PC and a printer,” said Patmore. “The card stock you can get at the big office stores.”
    Next he ran another cell-phone video, of Allison Murrieta holding up a Huntington Beach Blockbuster. This time the clerk—a big boy with a bad complexion and his hands in the air—froze and backed away from the cash register. Allison Murrieta jumped the counter and bagged the money herself. The boy was backed against the far side of the employee pen, and when Allison turned her attention and gun to him, he slumped unconscious in a