13 Under the Wire

by Gil Reavill

  “The Comanche, you know the Comanche?” Fausto asked Chupé.

  “Indians?”

  “Badass Indians. They was so fierce, they fucked with people from here all the way to the Rockies. Probably the best horsemen ever in history, except maybe the Mongols. They on a raid, they leave behind them death and destruction, you know, women raped raw and men scalped to the skull, then they take off on their stolen ponies. They ride so long and so fast, the Federales, the U.S. Calvary, it screwed with their heads.”

  Chupé didn’t know what any of this was about. Let the boss talk, he thought.

  “Nobody could believe that the same raiding party showing up, like, down here, could possibly be the ones who did the raid all the way over there. It was like they were magic wind riders or something. Captain says, ‘These are the savages who committed the Parker ranch atrocities.’ Major says, ‘No, no, can’t be, nobody could ride five hundred miles in three days, how could they? So they’s innocent, we got to let ’em go,’ you know?”

  “Let who go?” Chupé asked. “Who’s that talking now, la policía?”

  “Jesus, I don’t know why I even bother speaking to you.” Fausto stared out at the landscape. “It was really the Apache who were around here, anyway,” he said quietly.

  Forty-seven minutes later they hit Route 85 and blew north toward Gila Bend and, beyond it, Phoenix. Everyone riding in the enormous pickup believed that Fausto’s power rendered them invisible to cops, border agents, all kinds of authority. So it proved to be. No one stopped them. No roadblocks by la migra, the border patrol, checking vehicles for smuggled humans.

  David again leaned forward to speak to Fausto. “Where we headed, patrón?”

  “North.”

  “North, where?”

  “Wisconsin.”

  “Jesucristo. Where’s that?”

  “Canada.”

  Marco’s voice came from the back depths of the cab. “Raúl está muerto,” he said, telling them the feverish zombi beside him was dead.

  —

  Remington had had enough of the Loushanes. She told herself she had done her duty to a family in the throes of mourning, done it for the father one way and in another way for the twins. For the week following dinner with the Cardinal, she went on with her life. She ordered herself not to think about them. It was like someone telling you to keep your mind off your thumb, and, of course, your thoughts immediately go to it. The Loushanes would forever be Remington’s sore thumb.

  She had always liked the pistol range on the old police-academy grounds in Elysian Park, near Dodger Stadium. The place had the weight of history behind it, a quality that was normally pretty elusive in Los Angeles. Everything in the city, from buildings to faces, tended toward the newly made over, but the main academy structure was different. It had been disassembled and moved from the site of the 1932 Summer Olympics in Baldwin Hills, to be re-erected in the park. In L.A., 1932 qualified as vintage.

  No one seemed to have thought twice about the idea of locating a gun range near a baseball stadium. Remington could have logged her required practice rounds at the Ahmanson Police Academy, down in Westchester, where she had some classes, or at the other LAPD training facility in Granada Hills. She liked Elysian Park. The open-to-the-public café was tucked away and quiet, one of the hidden gems of the city. Its clientele was made up almost wholly of police. The place sold doughnuts. Remington didn’t think the menu choice was ironic. At times a cliché is just a cliché.

  That afternoon she felt good. Remington lingered over her coffee, the paper targets from her session at the range piled beside her. She had a series of nice, tight spreads and could give the targets to her training officer without apology. She had shot firearms her entire life, from age six on. She was never afraid of not qualifying at the range.

  Her choice of handgun was ironic, at least a little. She fired her dad’s XP-100 bullpup bolt-action pistol, manufactured by the proud, illustrious, historic Remington Arms company of Ilion Gorge, New York. “No relation,” she’d say when people asked about her last name. There was actually some sort of ancient cousinage that could be claimed with the company’s founder, Eliphalet Remington, but Remington had always felt that it was too complicated to get into.

  The XP-100 was a marvel, a handgun that fired rifle cartridges. Remington used .221 Fireballs, the fastest pistol load ever produced commercially. Blowing off her rounds on the range always impressed people, the sound crisp and overwhelming, the muzzle flash significant. Plus the piece looked cool as shit, its magazine mounted to the rear of the grip.

  “Probationary Officer Layla Remington with her smoking Remington .22,” said LAPD Sergeant Charles Tester, sliding into a chair across from her and flipping through the half-dozen paper targets. They were competition-style A4 bullseyes, and all had been verified and initialed by the range officer.

  “Nice, nice, nice,” Tester said, judging each spread. “Uh-oh, what’s this?”

  He indicated an outlier on one of the targets, a tiny ragged hole totally outside the rings.

  “Earthquake tremor,” Remington said.

  Tester laughed. “That’s your story and you’re sticking to it.”

  She hadn’t asked him to assume the role, but Chuck Tester had become her informal police-career rabbi. He looked out for Remington, making sure she made the right moves and formed the proper contacts. She thought her dad might have had something to do with it—the two men were old friends—but she liked the mustached, balding sergeant and tolerated his intrusions into her life.

  “I’ve heard you’ve taken up with the Loushanes again,” Tester said.

  Jesus, she couldn’t get away from them. Remington was instantly on guard. How could Tester possibly have known? Gene Remington and Chuck Tester. They meant well, but it still sucked. What do you care who I see, anyway?

  “You had a poker night with my dad, right? Don’t you two have something else to talk about other than me? Like maybe planning for retirement? Comparing brands of adult diapers, something like that?”

  Tester laughed. “I ask my wife’s father what he thinks is the best thing about old age. He answers, ‘Depends.’ ”

  “The Loushanes are family friends, okay?” Remington said. “When I was a kid I went to CYO camp with them, the one in the hills up above Malibu.”

  “I know, I know.” Tester leaned forward conspiratorially. “But a bit of cop gossip has come my way. Just scuttlebutt.”

  “Overheard at the urinal.”

  Tester laughed again. He was always laughing. He had known Remington ever since she was a child, and wasn’t used to her being all grown up. “It’s probably no big deal.”

  “And yet you’re going to make me grovel for it.”

  “Hey, hey, don’t be so snarky, young lady. I give this to you only in the interest of your well-being.”

  Remington stared at him. He reached over and took a sip of her coffee, cold in the cup. Unbelievable. He was going to make her grovel. “Well?”

  “Nothing official, mind you. But a few folks are sort of looking into the kid’s death.”

  “In Tijuana?”

  “You know, reaching out, seeing what was what, what happened down there. The push is coming from the family, I hear.”

  “So?”

  “Okay, here’s the thing. An outfit called Atzlándia, Hispanic radicals, like today’s version of the back-in-the-day Brown Panthers.”

  “They were called the Brown Berets, El Movimiento, La Causa.”

  Tester grinned at her, impressed. “All right, all right. Speak American.”

  “I am.” Remington reached into her pack and fished out the syllabus for her classes at the police academy. She folded a page over and plopped it down in front of Tester. She had a seminar titled “Domestic Security: Sovereign Citizens, Radical Hate Groups and the Jihadist Threat.”

  Atzlándia had come under discussion.

  “Oh, so I guess you already know all about this from school.” Tester made
a show of carefully reading Remington’s course description.

  “Grrrr! What? Just tell me!”

  “It’s only that Victor Loushane made a couple speeches, you know, within the privacy of his circle of Republican friends. You know how they talk when they’re by themselves. Calls Mexicans criminals and terrorists, says the barbarian hordes are at the gates, they’re sending their worst scum north, they’ve come for our daughters, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Preaching to the choir, and definitely not intended for general public consumption, you know?”

  “The speeches got leaked.”

  “That is correct. And they’ve come to the attention of a group of pissed-off young rabble-rousers gathered around Subcomandante G.”

  Everyone knew about Subcomandante G, the most outspoken Chicano radical presently on the scene, head of a Hispanic-rights advocacy organization called Atzlándia. He flavored his rants with a lot of Reconquista rhetoric, calling for the reconquest of the ancient Aztec territory of Atzlán, taking back Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California from Yankee occupation.

  Alternately styling himself Subcomandante Insurgente, G employed the old Black Panther trick of appearing at press conferences armed to the teeth, scaring the hell out of Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary Citizen. Atzlándia had generated a hit list of anti-immigrant crusaders.

  “Victor Loushane has made himself into a big, fat target,” Tester said. “Subcomandante G came right out and threatened the man’s life.”

  “Yeah, sure, he threatened Loushane, plus every other white Republican figure in the local power establishment.”

  “This gets into deep conspiracy.” Tester leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Loushane’s wife dies, and then five years later now his kid takes a swan dive.”

  “The wife was an accident,” Remington said. “Witnesses.”

  “Two deaths by misadventure in one family over the course of a half decade? What do you think the actuarial tables would say about something like that?”

  “I have to go.” Remington rose to her feet. “I’m expected back in reality any minute now.”

  “I’m just saying that other people are just sayin’, Layla.”

  “What people? Brown radicals are targeting the family?”

  “The sins of the father have been visited upon Simon the son, courtesy of some bad men.”

  “Come on, Sarge. What am I supposed to do with any of this?”

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Knowledge is power, is all.”

  “And I thank you for it.” Remington laid her hand on Tester’s shoulder as she left. “Help yourself to the rest of my coffee.”

  “Let me know if you turn up anything, will you? About the Loushanes?”

  Walking out into the sunlit afternoon, Remington decided that it probably was nothing. She would be the first to admit that some sort of cloud of doom hung over the Loushane family. A tragic mood could only be expected, she told herself, when a young member of the clan had just died. She resisted thinking that it was a curse, something Scottish, maybe, or Calvinist, like what had afflicted the Kennedys.

  She didn’t admit to herself that a sense of tragedy had burnished the Loushane twins even way back when she first met them. Too beautiful for the world. That wasn’t quite it. Too separate, too arrogant, too rich for the world—that was more like it. Ellis had always solemnly predicted that he would die before he was twenty-five. Caroline told him that if he kept talking that way she’d kill him herself.

  Remington floated the faces of Simon, Ellis and Caroline in her mind. Was it there? Was it real? Did doom come wrapped in their charisma? Did tragedy run in their veins?

  It was all romantic claptrap. She had loved a Loushane boy, and nothing came of it. Now she was mooning like a silly little girl.

  But there was something else, something more concrete. In fact, in this case it was literally spray-painted upon concrete. Once in a while the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power shut down the cascade at the back of the Wildermanse estate. It was odd not to hear the constant undertone of white noise. The shoosh shushed. Everyone in the family reported having trouble sleeping whenever it happened.

  The Water and Power closure didn’t seem to be seasonal, or predictable. Only a couple of times could Remington remember hanging out at the cascade when it was dry. With Simon, she thought, or maybe it was with Ellis, perhaps both. This was soon after Evelyn Loushane had died at the place.

  Revealed on the concrete bed of the empty cascade, like a message turned up in secret ink, was a single Spanish word, a radical motto, invisible when the watercourse was full.

  Reconquista. Reconquest. The Atzlándia rallying cry.

  Chapter 5

  “Hey, it’s you,” Ellis Loushane said.

  A blush like a Pacific sunset came up on Remington’s face. Ellis had caught her out. She jogged along the west end of Zuma Beach, near Trancas. She sometimes liked to swim after her sessions at the gun range, wash off the powder residue and the random lead particles. Run a couple of miles, work up a sweat, dive in. Usually she went to Santa Monica, dipping into the water at Ocean Park or Venice. This time around, for some reason, she had driven up to Zuma.

  Right at the moment, the sun was indeed painting the western sky with gaudy sunset colors. Remington had a guilty thought. If she was so through with the Loushanes, as she had vowed, why was she skulking around on their turf? But she had never imagined running into a family member.

  Keep telling yourself that, girl.

  “What are you doing here?” Ellis asked.

  “I’m just…here.” Lame, Layla, lame.

  He gave her an odd look. “I’m sorry. I know Simon meant a lot to you.”

  She looked away, letting the comment pass.

  “Come along up to the house,” he said. “We’ve just been talking about you.”

  “I’m on a run.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  He loped off along the wet tide-line sand. She had no choice but to follow. They ran easily together. After a quarter mile, Ellis began to cough. He stopped and bent over at the waist, hacking.

  “Jesus!” he gasped. “Out of shape.”

  Abruptly, he angled into the waves. She sprinted in after him. Ellis cleared his lungs by bellowing, ducking under so that the sound became muted, coming back up still yelling like a fool. The sea always sloughs off years. They were a couple of teenagers again. No one could have been happier than they were then.

  Remington always felt sorry for people who couldn’t give up the old days, the old circle of friends, the old frame of mind. She figured if you hung out with the same people when you were twenty-two as you did when you were sixteen you weren’t exactly moving forward. She thought that about Ellis, as if perhaps he had peaked early, as if it was forever back then for him. For all his cooler-than-cool running buddies and celebrity girlfriends, he struck her as something of a lost boy.

  They swam parallel to the shore for a few hundred yards. A southwest swell, peaky in the sandbar hollows. Ahead of them, a dozen surfers muddled along the Point Dume break, but the wind was onshore and the ride was washing-machine lousy. On the beach, the Zuma zoom was zooming. People from the Valley had come out. The volleyball nets were busy. It didn’t matter that there was no moon on the rise, folks were howling anyway. The beach closed at ten, so in a few hours the rangers would come by and clear everyone off.

  Ellis angled into shore. Remington followed, then stood shivering in the shallows.

  “Well, come on.”

  She didn’t move. “I’m parked up by Trancas.”

  “Layla.”

  Together they crossed the white sand to the Loushane beach house. The lower story featured an enclosed stone patio with a fire pit. It was one of Remington’s favorite places in the world. The Zuma circus could be in full swing just a few yards away and there you’d feel removed and safe.

  “Look who I turned up,” Ellis said, ducking through the gated entrance to the patio.

  Remington g
ot a jolt when she followed him in. Caroline Loushane lay on a chaise and didn’t bother to rise. She was folded in the embrace of someone Remington recognized.

  The Wayfarer guy, the Frisbee tosser, the languid friend of Simon’s.

  Ellis gave Remington a towel and made the introduction. “This is Layla.”

  With Caroline practically lying atop him, the Wayfarer couldn’t get up, either. “Hey there!” he said, raising the glass in his hand in Remington’s direction. “The family friend, right? Police officer, policewoman.”

  “Not quite yet,” Remington said. She understood immediately that neither he nor she was going to mention the fact that they had run into each other before.

  “Val Duran,” Ellis said. “He lives up the beach.”

  “Layla is our good little housecleaner,” Caroline said. “Did you miss something, sister, is that why you’re here? I thought you ransacked the place pretty well. It looks like a rental in there, all nice and sterilized of every fucking bit of my dear brother’s personality.”

  Caroline was angry at her, Remington realized. She got like this, stiff and Waspy, when she was miffed. She was also a little drunk. A collection of glassware cluttered the small wrought-iron table beside the chaise. A bottle of vodka sweated, encased in a solid block of ice. A mirror lay sprinkled with a leaving of cocaine.

  “What are we drinking?” Ellis asked.

  Remington hesitated, then crossed the terrace to take a beach chair. “If you want, Caroline, I’ll put everything back the way it was.”

  “I do want,” Caroline retorted, petulant, knowing Remington was mocking her.

  “I like it cleared out better,” Ellis said. He poured himself a drink and brought one over to Remington. “It’s not quite so painful, is it?”

  “That was Brock’s reasoning,” Remington said. “I was just doing what he and your dad asked.”

  The vodka was so damned icy it had become thick, like syrup. “Ah, vitamin V,” Ellis said, flopping down on a second chaise.