Free The Renegades by T. Jefferson Parker Page B

and looked down while Hood set his card on her desk and walked out.
    Sitting in his car, Hood thought back to August of 2007. He had been riding patrol in Section I, down in south L.A., glad to be out of Iraq.
    Meanwhile, Terry Laws was riding patrol up here in the desert, making his first big deposit in the charitable trust he had just created.
    After that, seven thousand dollars plus change fell out of his pockets every week, straight into Build a Dream. And when the trust amounted to just over four hundred thousand dollars he paid it to himself and put it down on a horse property in the valley.
    Hood looked up to see Carla Vise coming across the parking lot toward him. She had her arms crossed against the chilling afternoon breeze. He lowered the window and she leaned in and looked at him with tearful, angry eyes.
    “The day he opened the savings account for his new charitable trust, Terry Laws was happy and smiling. Light came from him. He looked like he could carry the world on those big shoulders of his. But two weeks later, when he made that first big deposit, he was pale and he wouldn’t look at me. His face was bruised. He had stitches. I asked him if he was okay and he said he’d made a difficult arrest. But it wasn’t the arrest, because he never got over it. The bruises and stitches went away but he never got his light back. He never looked at me the same. His posture was not the same. I don’t know if other people noticed. I don’t know if his oblivious and condescending wife even noticed. But I noticed every single thing about Terry Laws, Deputy Hood. He was a different man.”
    Hood thought for a moment. He believed that people could be changed immediately and irrevocably by what they chose to do. The mark of true foolishness was to ignore this fact.
    “I was swayed by my own foolish heart,” said Carla. “It’s the story of my life.”
    “It’s everyone’s.”
    Hood drove back to the prison wondering about Terry Laws. The Terry Laws he had known was neither radiant nor haunted. He was a nice guy but Hood had always thought Laws was trying too hard. He was vain about his muscles and proud of his smile. But he had the decency to take sides against the Housing Authority on behalf of Jacquilla Roberts and her imperfect sons.
    Again, Hood remembered what Laws had said that night. There’s no profit in this. He wasn’t sure why it stuck in his head. Maybe the odd application of the word “profit” to a routine citizen interview.
    He wondered what had changed Terry Laws. When he got to the Hole he let himself in with his shiny new key, turned on the lights and took Laws’s package from the locked desk drawer.
    Hood knew that on August 13 Laws had opened his trust with two hundred humble dollars. He was happy and strong. He had the light.
    But less than two weeks later, when he brought that first big cash deposit for the trust, he looked battered and tormented. If you saw him as clearly as Carla Vise had, thought Hood, it was clear that Terry Laws had died a little.
    Hood saw that two things had happened in between.
    One: Laws and Draper had arrested Shay Eichrodt—the kind of high-profile, get-a-killer-off-the-street arrest that any cop would love to make. An arrest that mattered, protected people.
    And two: Laws had come up with seven grand in cash.
    Hood stared out the window at the prison, the razor wire, the cold blue Antelope Valley sky. The sky and the wind and cold reminded him of Anbar. When he thought of Iraq his mind resisted and his heart became heavy.
    Next Hood spent some time on the search engines, but couldn’t come up with Terry Laws’s Build a Dream Foundation. There were plenty of Build a Dreams, but none were charities raising money for poor children in Southern California. He could find no number through Information, no listing in the Antelope Valley phone books, no one at the Antelope Valley Chamber of Commerce or Rotary who had ever heard of it. He called some of his deputy