by Gil Reavill
“No.”
“Everything’s nothing.”
Ellis tossed another rock offering into the cascade. He looked like a boy in need of a hug, but Remington was too emotionally drained to give him one. She thought about the radical Chicano Reconquista graffiti hidden beneath the waters.
The Santa Ana winds brought the smell of the big Lopez Canyon Landfill across the pass, six miles to the east. It happened every so often at Wildermanse, the stench of L.A.’s filth wafting into paradise. The dump was supposed to close, but the big trucks still brought the city’s refuse, ton after stinking ton.
“Reeks around here,” Ellis commented. “Smells to high heaven.”
That evening the TV news featured a forensic sculptor’s facial reconstruction of the John Doe in the Kappa Kappa Chi massacre. The actual features of the corpus had been thoroughly destroyed by the barrage of bullets during the standoff in the Lake Geneva Forest Preserve parking lot. But the painstaking efforts of a team of “police anatomy experts” brought the mutilated dead back to life.
Remington watched the segment sitting on her couch in her Los Feliz studio apartment. She ate a supper of carrots and yogurt. For some reason, the John Doe reconstruction displayed on the news had been fabricated out of some kind of yellow-orange modeling clay, so it looked as if the killer had hit the tanning salon. The iris-less eyes stared out, impassive and unreadable. In the 3-D re-creation, the head rotated a quarter way around for the benefit of perspective. Broad lips, expansive forehead.
“Anyone who might recognize…Scientifically created computer rendering…The alleged killer…Contact authorities…” Remington considered it a sign of desperation. Nobody knew who the guy was.
In chat rooms and on the internet bulletin boards later that night, everyone said they thought the yellow-orange bust looked like Donald Trump.
—
“Let me make sure I’m hearing you right,” Sergeant Chuck Tester said to Remington. “The FBI, local and state police from all over the country, the Records and Identification folks here in Los Angeles—I’m thinking all told there’s maybe a couple of hundred law-enforcement personnel putting in the man-hours trying to put a name to the Geneva Lake killer. And you’re telling me you discovered the guy’s name by listening to a CD.”
“Well, man-hours can’t compare with woman-hours. The LAPD hired the first policewoman in the country, did you know that?”
Remington had been intrigued by the line that the maids had given her: “I can’t stand to see you not dead.” It sounded poetic to her, as if it had been written, like it was from a movie. She checked on the internet and turned up nothing. Still, the puzzle dogged her for a full week. She sleepwalked through her academy classes.
She became convinced that she had somehow heard the line before. It might have come from one of the movies in Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado Trilogy. That weekend, she drove out to the Rose Bowl Flea Market.
In typical overblown Los Angeles fashion, the big open-air bazaar in the parking lot of Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena had turned into a see-and-be-seen phenomenon. It started back in the seventies with just a few vendors. Promoters now billed it as “the Flea Market of the Stars.” There were a lot of antiques, collectibles and high-end designer stuff, but funkier, more low-end booths as well. It was a good place to find obscure, off-label entertainment, anything black-market and underground, a lot of it pirated.
Remington searched out one seller in particular. Jammin’ Jimmy’s Movie and Music Emporium offered an almost comical profusion of product: racks and racks of CDs, stacks and stacks of DVDs, as well as collectible vinyl—45s, 78s. The items spilled over tables, into bins and onto the asphalt of the parking lot. It was difficult to believe that Jammin’ Jimmy hauled his huge load of inventory out to the Rose Bowl for a single day of commerce. It had to have taken a semi.
The sprawling booth was jammed with customers. The vendor himself sat on an elevated director’s chair in the middle of the action, resplendent behind his goatee and his sunglasses. Two arm-candy-style females flanked him, both looking pretty and pretty bored. Jimmy held a battery-powered microphone.
“Step inside! Step inside!” he repeated tonelessly. “World’s greatest selection.”
Remington headed for a ghettoized section of Jimmy’s bazaar that offered Spanish-language entertainment. It was like a world within a world, very crowded, its own sound system competing with all the others at the market. A lot of the stuff on sale would never see the inside of a conventional retail store. There were homemade mixed tapes in abundance, plus shock-and-schlock exploitation videos.
She spent a while flipping through the tapes and DVDs, not quite knowing how she should go about making an effective search. Remington was looking for a single phrase among thousands of offerings. She didn’t even know if she was trying to find a song lyric or a line in a screenplay. The needle might or might not be found amid Jammin’ Jimmy’s haystack.
She needed help. Several young staffers roamed the vicinity. She stopped the only female, a short, squat clerk wearing a flowing Mexican peasant-style dress. Remington asked her if she spoke English and earned a look of scorn.
“Of course.”
“I heard a phrase that I’m trying to track down, like it was a line of dialogue in a movie, or perhaps a lyric in a song.”
The clerk gestured around at the incredible profusion of product. “Maybe a película, or maybe a band? You’re going to have to narrow it down for me.”
“Yes, I’m sorry, but I thought someone might recognize it.”
Remington quoted the line.
She watched the clerk’s face freeze up. “ ‘I can’t stand to see you not dead.’ Is that what you want?”
“Yes. Do you know it?”
“Where did you hear this?”
“Someone quoted it to me.”
“That’s really odd, because this CD just came in, like, now. It’s fresh, pressed in the last week, and people are pretty wild for it. This person who told it to you must be really wired in.”
She led Remington through the maze to a table labeled with a handwritten sign that read “Narcocorridos”—drug-smuggler ballads, a ragingly popular genre out of Mexico.
The group was called los Perros del Diablo, the Devil Dogs. The CD—really more of an EP, with only five songs—was titled Las Voces del Rancho, “Voices of the Ranch.” On the crudely printed photocopied cover, the members of the Devil Dogs posed with goat-horn AK-47s.
“Deep cuts,” the clerk said to Remington, looking at her with a little more respect. “You heard it on KMLA, right?”
Remington shook her head, not understanding the reference. But she spent the ten bucks for the album.
She listened to it in her Honda, driving back to her apartment in Los Feliz. The music combined a harsh barrage of Banda with relentless electronic beats. Most of the tracks featured sound effects of explosions and gunfire.
The clerk at the market had directed her to a particular track. “It’s the big hit,” she said.
“El Corrido de la Muerte de Raúl dos Santos,” aka “The Ballad of the Death of Raúl dos Santos.”
Remington’s Spanish was nonexistent, but a single phrase of the song was very clear, chanted repeatedly by the band, in unison and in English: “I can’t stand to see you not dead.”
When she made it back home, she got out a Spanish-language dictionary and tried to puzzle out the translation of the whole ballad:
Su nombre es Raúl dos Santos
Él vive para siempre en mis cantos
“His name is Raúl dos Santos, and he lives forever in my raps.”
A few of the other lyrics came through loud and clear also, giving her the creeps. “No bullet can kill my zombie hitman,” mi zombi sicario. That invoked the scene described by Sergeant Lowell of the Lake Geneva police. And there was one line that sealed the deal for Remington: “Los hijos de mis enemigos murieron por el lago.” She went over it again and again, checking the dictionary to make sure she
understood the words. “The children of my enemies,” the Devil Dogs sang, “died by the lake.”
No one was buying her theory. Not right away, anyway, not when a lonely police-academy cadet first proposed a solution to the puzzle that had been dogging a whole army of law-enforcement personnel. The narcocorrido lyrics of the Devil Dogs didn’t help, packed full, as they were, with references to zombies, invisibility and magic spells:
Like ghosts they go under the wire
They ride the demon road
The warlock burns with dreams of fire
His zombie hitman will explode
It took Remington a while to convince Chuck Tester that she might have ID’d the Lake Geneva killer. It took Tester much longer to send Remington’s theory up the chain of command. When the task force on the Lake Geneva murders eventually decided to check out Remington’s lead, it was too late. The body snatchers had already done their work.
—
Meticulously planned though it was, the SWAT raid on the offices of Atzlándia, the firebrand Hispanic-rights organization, went off the rails almost from the start. The target site should have been straightforward enough. The offices were in a commercial building on Whittier, near the Seven-Ten freeway, on a block that was situated between a couple of cemeteries.
A tip from a credible informant indicated that members of Atzlándia planned and executed the multiple homicides at Geneva Lake. Police would discover documents in the offices, the informant said, that would serve as evidence of the group’s involvement in the infamous sorority massacre.
A search warrant for the Atzlándia offices, issued by Judge Charlane Olmos of the Superior Court, was designated high-risk. The LAPD brass authorized a SWAT mobilization. The incident commander notified LAPD officer Dale Armatrading of the SWAT callout midweek, for a scheduled Sunday-morning raid.
“In this neighborhood, unknown factors are going to include the community response, most definitely,” said the I.C., Captain Randy Hamish. He stood before a printout of the site map, spread out on a table in the ready room at the LAPD’s Parker Center HQ. “We don’t want an angry mob blocking egress on Whittier Boulevard. I’m scheduling a four A.M. jump-out.”
The team members groaned. “There goes the weekend,” somebody muttered.
The incident commander had already listed the known factors for the raid: hostile elements at the target site, armed response possible, second-floor access limited to two narrow stairways at either end of the building.
Hamish then said the words Dale had been waiting to hear. “Armatrading, you’re primary. We’re going to want you on point this time.”
Primary. Pride of place, at the head of the snake. The point man in any SWAT raid led the single-file line of officers, aka “the snake,” that threaded its way to the target. Dale Armatrading had taken part in a SWAT-team snake many times before, but never as the point man. It was an honor. Plus he had put together some new ceramic body armor that he wanted to try out.
The marshaling point was the parking lot of a pet store on Whittier Boulevard. They had eyes on the Atzlándia offices, which at that time in the early morning gave every appearance of being unoccupied. The arrival of the twenty-member SWAT team unleashed a chorus of barks, yowls and squawks from the caged residents of the Aztec Pet Store. It was almost funny, the way this threatened the element of surprise. But the lights stayed off in the second-floor offices they were hitting across the way, so no harm, no foul.
Armatrading led the snake up the north stairwell. The lights in the second-floor hallway were dim. Posters and graffiti covered every available inch of wall. He couldn’t read Spanish, so he didn’t understand the fuss all the art was making. As he advanced his column down the hallway, he heard phones begin to ring inside the Atzlándia offices. Someone on the outside, warning the occupants of what was coming down.
The ringing phones became constant. What bothered Armatrading more was the fact that, judging by the muffled sound of voices, a few of the calls were being answered. The offices were supposed to be empty at this time of night, but evidently they were occupied. He decided to move.
Employing a breach shotgun, Armatrading blew off the door-lock mechanism on the main access point to the offices. The boom reverberated within the tight confines of the hallway.
Screaming “Police!” and “Down on the floor!” the SWAT team poured into the Atzlándia offices.
Several myths, lies and stories grew up around the raid. One had it that the radicals in the offices were waiting in ambush. The truth was that five individuals were gathered in a windowless interior conference room, engaged in an all-night strategy session centered around upcoming Hispanic Heritage Month activities. In keeping with the group’s militant philosophy, they freely exercised their Second Amendment right to bear arms.
The phone-call tip-offs that flooded into the offices as the SWAT team approached led to a frenzy of locking and loading.
An M84 flash-bang grenade got things started. As soon as he penetrated the Atzlándia office itself, Armatrading’s self-assigned area of responsibility, his AOR, covered the far-left sector of the premises. A rip of assault weapons fire opened up. Again employing his breach shotgun, Armatrading repeatedly bounced rounds off the concrete floor and under the conference-room door, advancing as he did so.
It was a neat, effective tactical strategy, taught to him by an old-timer on the force. Armatrading practiced it on the range. He felt like Kobe banging shots off the boards at the Staples Center. That night, the ricocheting pellets chewed up the conference room, quelling whatever armed response was coming from inside.
Armatrading’s fellow officers spilled in behind him, covering their own AORs and screaming “Clear” as they fanned out through the premises. With two wingmen on either side of him, Armatrading kicked in what was left of the door to the conference room.
Inside, a bloodbath. The big tri-ball pellets from the breach gun had worked their terrible magic. Three wounded individuals sprawled bloody and dazed against the back wall. Two others were pronounced dead at the scene. Subcomandante G, for one, and a napping ten-year-old boy, the son of one of the wounded, killed in his sleep.
And one last fatality. As Dale Armatrading stood at the crashed-down door of the bloody conference room, he and his fellow officers allowed his six to go briefly unchecked. An Atzlándia activist who went by the single name of Corky, after movement founder Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, stepped out of an alcove behind the SWAT team. He stuffed a magnum-load .357 handgun beneath Armatrading’s dorsal body armor and blew off a round that shattered the officer’s spine.
All the catastrophes Commander Randy Hamish had been trying to prevent came to pass. Three dead at the scene, including a child, a SWAT-team officer and a high-visibility activist. By noon, a huge crowd of angry Angelinos had flooded into the neighborhood of the Atzlándia offices. The area teetered on the edge of riot. Because of the chaotic situation on the ground, the emergency medical response, the post-incident mop-up and the SWAT team’s withdrawal all proved enormously complicated.
In the aftermath, media briefings indicated that the SWAT team was after evidence that the Atzlándia radicals had been the force behind the Kappa Kappa Chi killings. Commentators suggested that a sorority massacre halfway across the country had reached out and claimed more victims in the raid. The late Subcomandante G had targeted the daughter of the most outspoken anti-immigrant figure in Los Angles, Victor Loushane, murdering the girl and her cabinmates in their sleep to make a political point.
Outlandish as the idea of such a conspiracy was, it turned out to be true. Recovered from the Atzlándia offices was a file folder with maps, photographs and diagrams of the Geneva Lake lodge where the massacre occurred. Also in the file was a picture of the targeted victim taken off the Web, a Kappa Kappa Chi newsletter promoting the retreat and a listing of Lake Geneva motels.
The discovery of the incriminating documents in the Atzlándia offices served two ends. One, it effectively “solved�
�� the case of the sorority-retreat massacre. The assailant remained unidentified. But the real hand behind the killings had been clearly established. It belonged to Subcomandante G.
Second, the discovery muted community response to the botched raid. The SWAT team had entered the premises on a warrant seeking evidence in the Kappa Kappa Chi killings. It had recovered same. The warrant was thus successful. For many, the ends justified the means. Screams of outrage from the anti-immigrant right wing drowned out all other responses.
A host of people remained unconvinced, though. The tornado of doubt swept up a few media outlets. Members of the local activist community very vocally embraced the theory that the recovered materials had been planted. LAPD sources responded to the accusation with fingerprint proof, lifted off the file folder that contained photos of the Geneva Lake lodge and grounds, demonstrating that Subcomandante G had indeed handled the documents prior to its recovery in the raid.
South American–style political assassination had reared its ugly head in the U.S. Cherished young innocents had been targeted. The clamor to seal the borders rose to a whole new level.
Chapter 11
“No threesomes, pig,” Caroline said to Val Duran. To Remington, she added, “Am I right? Like, yuck.”
The three of them were poolside at the Tijuana villa.
“I didn’t ask,” Val said. “In fact, I didn’t say a word.”
“Layla and I, we’re like, like, sisters,” Caroline explained. “I’m not hopping into bed with her just to cater to your perv fantasies. Ewww, you know?”
“She’s inebriated,” Val explained to Remington, wrapping his arms around Caroline. “Don’t pay her any mind.”
It was always an impossible task not to give full attention to Caroline Loushane. Remington had just arrived back at the villa that evening. She was under orders from Ellis, first of all, with his suggestion vigorously seconded by Caroline’s older brother and father, to retrieve the prodigal daughter from her dissolute sojourn in Tijuana.
