The riots had started five days before and escalated from an initial peaceful demonstration to the current civil war with the illegal immigrants and disenfranchised minorities in Southern California on one side and the local and Federal authorities on the other.
After the Federal government had promulgated the Immigration Reform Act deportations had begun. Families containing illegals and children born within the United States during the parents’ illegal stay were being ripped apart. The children were allowed to stay as birthright U.S. citizens while their parents were being deported. Underage children of these families were being fed into the various states’ child protection services and farmed out into temporary foster homes.
In California, Children and Family Services had failed miserably due to the sheer volume of children delivered into the system as the Immigration and Naturalization Service began forcefully applying the provisions of the new laws. This failure had culminated in a brother and sister of one such family, age six and five respectively, slipping through the support system and ending up dead in the Puente Hills landfill. An investigation was underway to determine what had happened to the children and how Child Services had failed so completely.
This event had led to the initial demonstration five days prior. Over twenty thousand illegal aliens and another five thousand U.S. citizens supporting them had attended that demonstration.
Local law enforcement, pushed by the Federal Government’s demand to quell any civil disturbance relating to the new laws, had reacted strongly to the unplanned and unlicensed demonstration around the City Hall complex.
Police lines had started at the intersection of 3rd Street and North Main at one end, and Aliso Street and North Main at the other end. They had marched down Main Street using their batons, tear gas, and water cannon to subdue the demonstrators. Over three hundred arrests were made. Twenty-two people were admitted to local hospitals for injuries associated with the police action.
The following day over sixty thousand had begun a demonstration protesting the prior day’s events. Two supposed demonstrators at 3rd and North Main had pulled assault rifles from a panel truck and opened fire on the police line as it was being formed. Three officers were killed and five more wounded. The police were determined to arrest the culprits and moved into the crowd closest to the point of attack. They found the now empty rifles lying on sidewalk, but no one could identify who had dropped the guns. The police became overly aggressive and began arresting anyone who was in the area of the attack. The angry police summarily beat to the ground anyone resisting arrest. The police shot two men, thought to be the shooters, as they attempted to run from the scene. It would later be determined that they were two reporters running to cover a police beating of a young pregnant woman who had spit in the face of a cop.
The situation rapidly deteriorated into open warfare between the illegals and their supporters on one side, and the police on the other.
The violence spread nationally through the entire minority community that, for years, had felt abandoned. Many of the younger disenfranchised hade made ties with overseas terrorist organizations and awaited their order to begin the systematic destruction of the country’s infrastructure.
On the third day of the violence, the terrorist leaders gave the order. Acts of terrorism boiled over across the entire country, but the worst of the situation continued to be in the Los Angeles basin.
The city erupted into sporadic sniper fire, citywide arson, and beatings of anyone felt to be “on the other side”. That night, in two portions of the city, firefights with assault weapons had broken out with high causalities on both sides. Bombs were detonated in almost every public building in the city.
The early morning light illuminated a city in flames, with flashes of automatic weapons fire dotting the rooflines of the districts of South Los Angeles, Hyde Park, Crenshaw, and Echo Park.
The National Guard had been called out, but was now spread thin by pitched battles in Sacramento, Fresno, and all of Southern California. Over thirty percent of the National Guard had deserted in disagreement with the laws that had started the violence.
Rioters had now entered the mob rule phase and all civil order was breaking down. The mob entering the Echo Park district brandished weapons of all sorts. The mob was a now mindless animal seeking destruction, murder, rape, and the infliction of pain for their enemy. The enemy was anyone still sane and civilized.
The girl was running from this animal. She was sobbing between pants of breath as she ran toward the safety of her home.
As she neared the end of the alley, two men entered it from the far end and spotted her. She almost fell as she heard them yelling, “Stop my little Lolita! We have a present for you!” They then laughed as they began chasing her. She turned right at the end of the alley and entered the tree-lined boulevard where her home was located.
She ran for her life as the men closed the distance between them and her. She turned into her driveway and ran to the front door. It stood open but the significance of this did not dawn on her as she ran inside and slammed the door. She turned, threw the door lock, and leaned her back on the door as she caught her breath.
She held her eyes closed as she gasped for air. It was only after her breathing returned to a somewhat normal state that she opened her eyes. What she saw made here stomach heave. On the threshold to stairs leading to the bedrooms above lay her grandfather. The back of his head was partially blown away. He lay in a pool of blood and pieces of brain. His eyes were open with astonishment still registered on his face.
She retched and vomited up the school lunch she had eaten less than an hour ago. A lunch she had eaten before the world, as she knew it, came to an end.
She heard the two men run up the steps of the front porch and bang on the door. Panicked, she ran passed her grandfather’s body up the stairs toward the sanctuary of her bedroom.
The two men at the door stopped their banging and moved to the front windows behind the porch swing. They used the butt of the pistol of one of the men to break the upper glass pane. He reached in, unlocked the lower window and gingerly entered the home avoiding the broken glass scattered around the window opening.
The last thing she saw was the one man’s left foot come through the window as she reached the stop of the stairs and ran down the hall in the direction of her bedroom.
She moved quickly toward her room when she heard the sounds coming from her mother’s room. She stopped at the door and looked in to see two men holding her mother down on the bed while a third man violated her. She heard her mother grunt each time the man shoved forward. She stood frozen as she watched the scene. The two men holding down her mother’s arms saw her at the same time. One of them released her mother’s arm as he sneered. “You want some of this girlie? Come on in, your next!” The man started moving toward her with that same malevolent sneer.
She turned to run and was grabbed by the man with gun that had entered through the window below. He looked into the room at the scene of the three violent men and one struggling woman and spat at the men as he waved his pistol, “You can have the old lady. Me and my partner are going to take care of little Lolita here.”
For the first time she really looked at her captors. The one doing all of the talking was a middle-aged, overweight man of Hispanic origin of about forty years of age. His accomplice was a younger, rail-thin, brown curly haired man appearing to be a Caucasian about twenty years old. If the situation had been different, she may have actually thought the younger man was cute. Now, she wished him death.
Fight as she might, the two intruders carried her to her bedroom at the end of the hall and threw her on the bed. The two men quickly trussed her hands behind her back on the bed and placed an old handkerchief in her mouth as a gag.
The older man looked around her room and picked the pillow with the name, Kim, embroidered in hot pink thread. “So, is that your name, my little one? Kim?”
The girl simply stared at the man with veno
m spewing from her eyes.
The man laughed and looked at his young partner. “Larry, let me introduce you to Kim. Kim, this is Larry. Larry is going to get to know you real well over the next few days.” The older man giggled as he saw her eyes move to his young accomplice. “You like him, don’t you? You want to make him happy, don’t you? Just like your mother is making those other three guys happy.” As if to properly punctuate the older man’s last statement, a loud cry of agony came from the other bedroom.
The younger man held a gun on her and the other began to unbuckle his belt. He chuckled, “Now, my little Kim, lay back and enjoy. Let old Arturo and Larry show you how to be a woman. After we finish with you, if you’re good, we just might let you live. But you see, my little one, I like hurting my conquests if they don’t cooperate. So, I’m afraid you’ll not like some of the pain I plan to put you through if you don’t do what I say.”
The girl’s eyes showed fire as she shook her head and tried to kick the man speaking to her. The man danced back and away from her arching foot. He smiled evilly, danced in and smacked her face hard with his open hand. He grabbed her hair with his other hand, pulled her head up from the bed, and started smacking her repeatedly. The blows were harder and harder with each smack.
After that, she remembered very little other than pain. The continuous attacks of the two men were eventually replaced by the attack of the three men who had ravaged her mother. Then her original two captors used her again. The next day and night became a blur of pain, humiliation, and subjugation.
She was tied to her bed and was drifting in and out of awareness. She heard gunshots but paid no attention in her current state. She had left her body to mentally reside somewhere else while these men abused her.
She heard sounds of crashing plates, shouts, and gunfire as she re-entered her body and fell into a deep pain-wracked sleep.
When she awoke she was wrapped in a clean gown under crisp sheets. A woman, dressed in a white uniform, was staring intently at her with a concerned look on her face. “Are you with us, child? No! Don’t try to say anything. Just nod your head. Your jaw is wired shut. It was broken in two places.”
The girl nodded and slowly turned her head to look around the room. The woman picked up the girl’s hand and gently held it while she talked with the girl.
“Before you try to ask, let me tell you what I know. Okay?”
The girl nodded her head silently. She felt pain all over her body and tears began to form in the corners of her eyes.
“You’re in a hospital in Pasadena. The National Guard found you when they took back your neighborhood from the rioters. The brutes hurt you badly. We know you went through hell. Just relax -- it’s all over. The men are dead. Killed by your liberators.”
“I’m a nurse. The name is Betsy. I’ll try to tend your needs until you are well enough to do for yourself. You’ve been here for eight days and have been kept sedated. The doctors decided that you were healed enough to wake up, so we stopped those drugs last night.”
The woman looked uneasy as she continued, “Your mom didn’t make it. She died of her injuries at the house sometime on the day you were captured. I probably shouldn’t have told you that now, but you really needed to know. Her funeral was four days ago. I’m so sorry. I lost my own mother to violence. From a home burglary gone very wrong. ”
The girl turned her head away from the nurse and quietly cried until she could cry no more. Betsy had been in and out of the room many times checking on her, adjusting IV lines, and giving her medications but had never said anything else of a personal nature to her.
The girl began to look forward to Betsy and the other nurses’ visits with the morphine vial. When she received the painkiller, she became calm and serene. These were the only times she felt that way. She almost couldn’t wait for the next dose that would give her that euphoric feeling.
As Kim slowly mended she could set up and communicate with the nurse and visitors by written note. Her father had visited her several times. He was divorced from her mother for many years and had married a woman in Long Beach. They had a boy two years younger than she that was her half-brother. Her father had sired this son while still married to her mother.
Kim had never held her father or his new wife responsible for the breakup of her family. Her mother, at best of times, had been a shrew. Her mother had relentlessly denigrated her father. It really didn’t surprise Kim when her father announced he was seeking a divorce. Nor did it really surprise her to know that she had a half-brother. Her father had mellowed the last few years of the marriage in a way that always made Kim feel he had another woman. Another woman who treated him like the wonderful person Kim knew her father truly was.
One day, as Betsy was changing Kim’s bandages, the girl had gotten up her courage to ask questions about her attackers. She wrote her questions out and Betsy answered what she could. She had been shocked to learn that authorities thought the three men still in house when they arrived were all of her attackers.
She wrote a note to Betsy:
But what about the other two men? The ones that first captured me?
Betsy had gotten the police to come and interview the girl about these men but things were still so chaotic in Los Angeles, and nothing was ever found of these men. Even knowing the first names and having police artist sketches of the two perpetrators weren’t sufficient clues to give the police any leads. The investigation was now a cold case in a box on a shelf in a file room somewhere.
As the girl recovered and learned that the two men had apparently gotten away with their crimes against her, she became resolute in her life’s goal. She would become a police investigator and run down the evil men of the world. Hopefully, someday, she could open that cold case box and solve the mystery of the two men’s identity and bring them to justice for their brutal crimes. She needed experience and skills in detective work first.
As the girl was about to fall asleep in the spare room of her father’s home on the first night of her release from the hospital, she vowed to her self, I’ll find you someday. You’ll pay for what you did to my mother and me. Until then, I dedicate my life to finding villains like you.
5
Enemies
The two men in business suits slowly walked up hill toward Emperor Maximilian’s castle at the top of the hill in Chapultepec Park. The castle was once the palatial home to the Emperor Maximilian and his wife, Empress Carlota. Now, it was home the National Museum of History.
The park, a well-known tourist attraction, was located in the outskirts of Mexico City. The well-dressed men seemed out of place among all the gaudily clad tourists.
It was obvious that the men were not there as tourists. They looked neither left nor right as they moved up the walkway. They took no notice of the wonderful smells and noises emanating from the street vendors scattered on the sides of the walkway hawking their carts’ delicacies. Nor did the men seem to notice the lunch hour crowd gathered to purchase their mid-day meals from these vendors.
They appeared to be in a heated debate as they weaved their way through the crowd. Their waving arms and hand gestures showed a serious disagreement was underway.
They were about the same height but the older, dark-skinned, gray-haired man was a good seventy pounds heavier than the younger dark-haired man. It was obvious from his trim build and light step that the younger man belonged to a gym and attended on a regular basis. The older man walked in a fast, but ponderous flat-footed step in his attempt to keep pace with the younger man.
“If we must, we will have our operatives destroy the damned thing. We’ll end its operation almost as soon as it starts,” the older man emphatically spoke to his companion.
“No, sir. We should only disable the beast. It may prove useful sometime in the future, once the technology is proven,” the younger, lighter-skinned man replied in a heated voice.
“Proven technology? Proven how? That thing will never be allowed to threaten our shores! We stoppe
d them in the nineteen fifties and we will stop them now!” the older man spat.
“Please talk with your associates in the other countries before committing to its destruction,” pled the younger man, as he grabbed the older man by the arm, stopping him in the middle of the walkway.
The older man pulled away in apparent disdain and leveled a stare at the younger man.
“What do you think you’re doing, Antonio? How dare you touch my person! You take far too many liberties for an assistant!” the older man roared at the now petrified younger man.
As soon as he had touched his employer’s arm, he knew he had crossed a line. While he was a close advisor to his employer, he was neither a friend nor family member.
“Pardon me, sir. I was overcome with emotion and forgot my place,” Antonio apologized as he slightly bowed to his employer, Mexico’s Federal Senator Carlos Gutierrez of the Caribbean coast Mexican state of Quintana Roo. Quintana Roo, on the Yucatan peninsula, contained the resorts of Cozumel and Cancun.
These resort areas were hard hit by hurricanes on a frequent basis. Any experiments that could cause these storms to change, for good or bad, was a high priority for Quintana Roo’s elected representative.
Quintana Roo’s senatorial representative, in the nineteen fifties, had led the charge to have the United States cease hurricane cloud seeding experiments because of the possibilities that the experiment would make the storm worse and that it would strike the Yucatan.
That Quintana Roo senatorial representative was Carlos Gutierrez’s father.
Storm Killer Page 2
