13 Under the Wire

by Gil Reavill

  “You was the one asking about me in Rosarito. Inheritance, my ass.” The Stag slammed the door in Remington’s face.

  The words “Val Duran” hadn’t seemed to mean anything to him, but when Remington called out “Tino Zaldivar” through the closed door, Callens had opened it again, reluctantly. She managed to talk her way inside. They sat at the back of the house, on a patio that gave out directly on to national forest land.

  The Stag was into wind chimes. It looked as though he had fabricated them himself out of repurposed automobile parts. The spectacle of his backyard had Remington flashing back to her hallucinations in the desert.

  “What do I call you—Mister Stag?”

  “Jordy is fine—that’s how everybody knows me around here. That Stag business was for when I was doing large-form metalwork sculpture.”

  “Yeah, I saw some of your stuff.” Remington recalled the junkyard vibe of Jordan Callens’s former residence in Rosarito. “I didn’t realize that such epic art could exist.”

  The Stag took it as a compliment. “The rust is all part of the process, you know? I work in small form now. Jewelry—or, really, personal adornment.”

  He was warming to her. His suspicions had prevented him from offering Remington refreshment when they first sat down, but now he went into his kitchen and returned with a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon.

  “Straight?” he asked.

  “I’m game if you are,” Remington responded.

  He took a long silent moment to let the whiskey go down. “So, Tino,” he said. “Only he was calling himself Valdo back then. But I suppose Tino is as good as anything.”

  “You keep in touch?”

  “No. You looking for him?”

  Remington shrugged.

  “Knocked up by him?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “He always tore through the ladies like poo through a goose, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  Remington asked if Callens had taught the boy English, and he said that he had, that Valdo had been a real quick study. “Smart as anything—too smart, maybe.”

  “What about the rest of the family? Did you teach them, too?”

  “The mother only had the money for him.”

  “Nina, but they called her Ninny.”

  “That’s right.” Callens nodded. “He had some sisters and a deformed brother, a cripple who was like a midget or something. Valdo used to tell me he had to find a way to take care of the whole family.”

  “How about the dad?”

  “Guerrero. He wasn’t hardly ever around. A lot older than she was—I think he first had her when she was, like, twelve or something. That’s how they do it sometimes, down Mexico way.”

  “Valdo—I knew him as Val—told me he grew up in a wealthy family.”

  Callens laughed dismissively. “They was poor as the dead is what they were. And after the father abandoned them the shit slid downhill a lot faster. The household, like, exploded. Poverty kills. That’s when I lost track. I heard the sisters got sold off and the brothers—I don’t know, maybe them, too.”

  “Sold off?”

  “It’s a cruel world.” Callens swept his arm toward the panorama of the ocean, the mountains. “You wouldn’t think so, not living around here, but I wouldn’t be poor in Mexico for nothing.”

  He took up a battered guitar that leaned against the back wall of the house. Without retuning the instrument, he picked out a passable version of “Layla,” the Derek and the Dominos song after which Remington was named. The bourbon must have been working on her, because it sounded pretty good.

  “Wrote it for his friend’s wife,” Callens said when he finished.

  “His friend George Harrison. And then Clapton stole her away.”

  “Two men and one woman—that ain’t going to work, not like two women and one man.”

  “I might argue with you there,” Remington said.

  “Old George didn’t hold it against his buddy Eric. Had Clapton sit in to play when he couldn’t get the solo right on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps.’ That weeping geet was Mr. Eric Clapton.”

  “My mother always liked it,” Remington said. “I mean ‘Layla,’ not the other one.”

  The wind chimes jingled. “You want I should play it again?” Callens asked.

  “Please don’t,” Remington said. “I might cry.”

  She and the Stag parted friends. She respected him for not pestering her with questions about why she was asking about Valdo Zaldivar, or Tino Guerrero, or Val Duran—or whatever his name truly was.

  “I can’t let you depart without a piece of advice,” Callens said to Remington as he walked her out to her car. “Or maybe I shouldn’t.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Have you ever noticed, pretty much all advice boils down to the advice-giver saying, ‘Be like me’?”

  Remington laughed.

  “In this case, I can’t say be like me because I’m not a woman. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Yow. I’m not twenty-two, either, so take all this with a grain of salt, or a huge pillar of salt. That boy is unnecessary to your happiness. In fact, he might be fatal to it. You don’t need him. Hurt people hurt people, and Valdo was hurt as bad as anyone when he was a kid. I’d hate to see him pass the hurt along to you. If you can’t forget him, at least leave off trying to find him.”

  Remington thanked Callens for the advice, which they both understood that she wasn’t going to follow.

  —

  El Norte.

  It was difficult for outsiders to understand how the term floated in the imagination of so many people. Not a place, really, but an ideal, not a reality but a dream. Those sophisticated souls who considered themselves wise in the ways of the world knew what happened to ideals and dreams when they rub up against the cold, hard truth. But hope proved more durable than some might think.

  Julieta yearned to find a refuge, an enclave, a sanctuary where the weak were protected against the strong. She believed that the U.S. offered such a haven. The longer she stayed in Los Angeles, the more she came to realize that the situation there was more complex than she had first thought, that in the States men took advantage of women just as they did back at home. The ways in which they did so were a little different, that was all.

  She had taken a job at the tortilla shop on Eagle Rock Boulevard, the product of which she had formerly disdained. She liked her co-workers. The American government had elevated her legal status to that of a documented immigrant. She would be getting her green card soon. She loved Layla Remington more than anyone in the world—her savior, her sister, her best friend.

  All that had to be weighed against Julieta’s growing understanding that there existed no safe refuge in L.A. The candle flame that had flared in her heart when she first arrived in California had slowly guttered. It proved impossible to leave the past behind. Violent visions plagued her. She had nightmares of the desert. The multiple rapes and assaults she had endured over a lifetime replayed endlessly in her mind.

  She got up early and left for work in the wee hours of the morning, when the streets were still dark. As she walked through the sleeping L.A. neighborhoods, fear trailed behind her, its footsteps echoing Julieta’s own. She sometimes panicked and couldn’t get her breath when she passed through the underpass beneath the freeway.

  The knife she took along wherever she went was one of Remington’s—a flat, double-bladed, odd-looking military weapon that came in its own hard plastic sheath. The handle was not wood but steel cut through with a series of perfectly round holes. Julieta found it in a drawer in the apartment.

  Julieta had often fantasized about possessing a knife with a rapist on top of her, slipping the blade into her attacker’s heart. Penetrate him before he penetrated her. On her walk to work in the morning dark, she kept the knife unsheathed.

  The assault came not on the street but in Julieta’s safe harbor, Remington’s apartment. The monster forced th
e door a little after ten o’clock at night. Remington was gone, up in Santa Barbara on business. She didn’t tell Julieta what it was about, only that she wouldn’t be home until late. So when the assailant broke in, Julieta was alone. The apartment was a single room, a studio. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

  But there was the knife.

  Julieta screamed for help, shouting “¡Auxilio!” as loud as she could. The monster charged at her, lumbering across the little space like a human tank. He was big, bigger than the men of Julieta’s nightmares. He filled her vision. She tried to dodge around him and run for the door. The apartment was too small. It was like trying to escape an attack in a closet.

  With a sweep of his arm he flung her against the wall next to the dining table. Dishes and random clutter crashed to the floor. Julieta lost her breath and her voice. She wanted to scream but couldn’t. They banged around the apartment together, the big man grunting and growling like a beast.

  There was something wrong with him, something alien and subhuman. He was huge, but he moved slowly. An image of the Frankenstein creature from the movies flashed in Julieta’s mind. During the fight she caught glimpses of the monster’s face. Both of his eyes were surrounded by deep blue-black bruises, like dark halos. His gaze was blank, dead.

  When she slashed at him with the knife, the monster seemed to take no notice. He was not maddened as an ordinary mortal might be by a wound. He ignored the sprays of blood coming out of him, ropy spirals of the stuff that covered the floor, the walls, the furniture. The room went red. Julieta couldn’t kill him.

  With meaty hands the size of bear paws, the monster took her by the throat. All the blood saved her. His grip was too slippery to gain much purchase. With a lunge, Julieta stabbed at the rapist’s eyes.

  She missed. Instead, the double-edged blade slammed into the middle of the monster’s forehead. Terror lent Julieta strength. The blow split open the man’s skull and the knife struck deep into his brain. Her attacker collapsed, crashing to the floor with the blade still embedded in his head. Julieta extracted the knife and plunged it in again. She gripped the handle with both hands and pounded away, destroying the man’s eyes, face and brow.

  Bathed in blood, her chest heaving with the effort, she kept at it until her efforts became too feeble to have much effect. She finally left off. Straddling the dead body, she sagged downward against it, weeping.

  No one came. No one heard the struggle, her cries, the monster’s terrible, piglike grunting.

  After a long while, Julieta rose. She stripped off her clothes and entered the shower stall in the bathroom. She didn’t close the curtain, letting the water splash where it would. The blood swirled down the drain. It took a long time before the water ran clear.

  A certain feeling of grimness seized her. When she left the shower, she didn’t hesitate. Working in the nude, she dragged the battered corpse of the monster into the bathroom. He was immense. She could tug him forward only a few inches at a time. Getting him into the shower stall was more difficult. Julieta got herself bloodied all over again.

  Her plan was to cut the man’s body apart with the knife, a miraculous weapon she now considered her samurai sword. Put the pieces into a garbage bag, dump them beside the freeway. But as she sat on the toilet and considered the job ahead of her, she realized that she didn’t have the heart for it. Instead, she cleaned herself off as best she could, once again standing in the shower with the dead man’s hulk at her feet.

  The apartment was destroyed. While she had been in the shower, the biomatter on the walls had slowly dried to a sticky consistency. Careful not to re-bloody herself, Julieta dressed and packed what few possessions she had. She had no thoughts. The assault had driven all considerations out of her mind. She worked robotically.

  Midnight approached as Julieta left the apartment. She attempted to close the door behind her, but the monster had ruined the latch when he broke in. She pushed it shut and left it loose. The night air was cool. She headed down the little front walk to Los Feliz Boulevard. In the shadows lurked demons, violators, evil dwarves. She carried with her the blade, her talisman, now cleansed, dried and made newly bright.

  Where was she going? The nighttime streets of L.A. were as dark and threatening as they always were. She had a little money from her last paycheck. It would be a hike, up and over the foothills, but there was a Greyhound station in North Hollywood.

  And where from there?

  El Norte. Canada. Alaska. The North Pole, if she had to. Anywhere that the cold froze all the fire out of the veins of men.

  Chapter 18

  Roused from sleep, Sergeant Charles Tester made it to Layla Remington’s Los Feliz apartment in record time, employing his lighting array as he sped through the darkened city. That time of night, the freeways were reasonably empty. The call had come in from Gene Remington, showing up on Tester’s cell at 3:14 A.M. Hurrying on with his clothes, he checked with LAPD dispatch, which had logged the incident at Layla Remington’s apartment as a 10-54 (possible dead body recovered), with a 10-55 added for good measure (coroner’s case).

  Tester counted eight black-and-whites parked in front of the building, along with an emergency command vehicle and a pair of EMT ambulances. No media presence had declared itself. Reporters hadn’t yet made the Remington-Loushane connection. The Times would soon enough figure it out. And then all hell would break loose.

  “Gentlemen,” Tester said to the uniforms at the scene, flashing his badge and proceeding to the apartment’s front door. Halogen lights blazed inside, which indicated some sort of Crime Analysis Unit presence. Even from the doorway, he could see that it was bad.

  Stupid bad, as Tester’s teenage son would have put it. Someone had slipped a large latex balloon over the spigot of a blood faucet, filled the balloon to bursting, then exploded the resulting creation all over the interior. The whole apartment had been crashed apart, furniture overturned and possessions scattered everywhere.

  A knife fight, Tester thought.

  At first, he didn’t see Remington. The apartment’s resident lounged behind the front door, seated atop a bookcase that had somehow miraculously gone unsmashed, her legs propped up on the back of a chair. Taking it cool, though when Tester caught the look on Remington’s face he adjusted that impression. The girl was traumatized.

  She bent her head almost imperceptibly, wordlessly directing him toward where the action was, in the apartment’s tiny bathroom. Forensics was jammed inside the small space. Tester couldn’t enter, but he poked his head through the door.

  “Sergeant?” called the OIC, the officer in charge at the scene. Warning him away.

  They hadn’t yet moved the body. A big adult male slumped on the floor of the shower stall, some of the blood washed off him to show multiple lacerations to the face and head, deep incised wounds. Someone had really gone to work on him.

  “Came home to it,” Remington said when Tester went back out to her. She had called in the crime herself a little after 1 A.M.

  “They through with you?” Tester asked.

  “For now.”

  The two of them walked outside. “Don’t stray too far,” the OIC told her.

  “Main thing,” Remington told Tester, “I have a roommate and she’s missing.”

  “Heard you were living with a girl.”

  “Not that way.”

  “Did I imply anything? No, I did not.”

  “She was in the desert with me. Julieta Bautista. I’m sick about it.”

  “She do this?” Tester motioned toward the apartment.

  “I’d say the stiff outweighs her by a good hundred-twenty, hundred-fifty pounds. He’s like, what, a linebacker? And Julieta’s a flyweight, if that. He could have eaten her for a light snack.”

  “So there’s a third party?”

  “I don’t know.” She had driven back that night from Santa Barbara, Remington told Tester. Pulled her sidearm when she found the front door of the apartment ajar. Was frantic when she
couldn’t find Julieta.

  “You okay? This your first scene?”

  Remington nodded. She flashed on the photos in the Cindy Loushane forensics file. Everything had gone digital now, printed in glorious color. “I’ve seen pictures, like everyone else at the academy.”

  “Different in 3-D.”

  Times like these, Remington realized she was still at heart a smoker, years after quitting. She would have killed for a Marlboro.

  “They were after me, Chuck.”

  “You don’t know that. Could be random.”

  “Think about my recent history. I’m caught in something I can’t get out of. Now I’ve gotten this poor girl killed.”

  “I say again, you don’t know that.”

  An unmarked sedan pulled up amid the fleet of cop cars parked along Los Feliz Boulevard. Remington couldn’t see who got out, but they were brass, for sure, from the way all the uniforms stiffened to attention. A high-profile case always warranted a visit from the bosses. The newcomers ducked under the perimeter tape and proceeded up the walk.

  “Deputy chief,” Tester murmured to Remington. “Adrian Alvarez.”

  With Alvarez was a whole retinue of a half-dozen command officers. Plus two figures in civilian clothes.

  George Sarin, Vic Loushane’s blade runner. And Ellis Loushane.

  Ellis hung back at the bottom of the walk, a stricken look on his face. He had two Graystone Global security guys with him. Remington realized they were the muscle, acting as the boy’s personal bodyguards.

  “Is this Cadet Remington?” Deputy Chief Alvarez asked.

  Remington saluted. “Cadet,” said one of the commanders with Alvarez, “we don’t salute unless we’re in uniform.”

  “Never mind,” Alvarez interposed. “You’ve been through a lot in the past few weeks, haven’t you?”