13 Under the Wire

by Gil Reavill

  Tester got to see it happen. A SAM, a surface-to-air missile—the investigation later determined that it was a personal, portable, shoulder-mounted FIM-92E Stinger—streaked up from somewhere on the Wildermanse grounds and blasted the LAPD helicopter amidships. An explosive black-and-orange fireball burst through the air.

  A communal shout of dismay rose from the law-enforcement personnel. Groans, curses, a flurry of meaningless activity. Pieces of flaming wreckage plummeted out of the sky.

  “These people are goddamned serious,” commented an awed Chuck Tester, again speaking to no one in particular.

  In response to the SAM hit, the FAA immediately grounded all aircraft at area airports, all media helicopters and anything else that could possibly give the police eyes in the sky.

  —

  For a fight in tight quarters, an assault rifle like the Bushmaster, especially an empty one, wasn’t the ideal weapon. Remington wished she had a sidearm, her old man’s Colt, for example, or one of the Glocks that were standard issue for the LAPD. But it couldn’t be helped, and she eased into the basement rooms at Wildermanse on high alert.

  The mansion, or at least the oldest part of it, had been constructed in the 1920s, when Granada Hills was just called Granada and was an agricultural community on the far edge of the San Fernando Valley. The central section of the house had the lower level, while the two wings that had been added later did not. The layout of the basement didn’t yield to logic. It was just a jumble of rooms, designed for mysterious purposes that didn’t have any application in the present day. There was a coal chute, long unused.

  The Battle of Granada Hills continued up top, rataplan bangs and screaming male voices. The thump of some sort of large explosion reached Remington, shaking the whole house—down to the foundations, as it were, which was exactly where she found herself.

  She tried to concentrate on the job at hand. Neutralize Tino Zaldivar. Save Victor Loushane’s worthless hide. Do it all on a bluff, pointing an empty assault rifle at whoever stood in her way.

  She passed quickly through three successive rooms, clearing each one. The faint light from window wells faded as she progressed deeper in. The premises smelled of fuel oil, dirt, mold. She passed a doorway that led to a space stacked with cardboard boxes, another with a Ping-Pong table that, judging from a surface cluttered with random junk, hadn’t been used for a while. She had to painstakingly enter each room and make sure there weren’t any boogeymen crouching in the corners.

  Her mind kept up a steady torrent of thoughts. What we have here is a hostage situation, she reminded herself. Tino Zaldivar, aka Val Duran, was holding his father hostage in order to force him to admit his paternity. The son nursed the hurt of his abandonment. That’s what this foul business was all about—the attacks, the murders, the insanity. Remington would delve deep into the basement interior and discover the two of them, Tino holding a pistol to his daddy’s head. She would talk him down, and the whole affair would come to a happy end.

  She didn’t think so. The fury of the past few weeks would be visited upon the eighty-six-year-old carcass of Victor Loushane, Remington felt sure. What she was doing down in the nether regions of Wildermanse was attempting to prevent one last death in a string of killings that had begun with Simon Loushane, continued with Cindy and Caroline, and was going to end with Victor. Plus Val had tried to kill her, Remington, more than once. She wondered how much of this was personal for her but had no time to debate the point.

  Her shoes crunched across some kind of sand or dirt on the cellar floor. She knelt to investigate and failed to figure it. The basement was otherwise clean enough—dusty and musty, yes, but at least kept swept out. From the subterranean bowels of the house, Remington heard a sound that she couldn’t place, a loud dragging noise. It ended as soon as it began.

  Tino was there, she felt certain. For no other reason than that it was a way to go, she followed the faint trail of sand and dirt on the floor. It led her in twists and turns deep into Freddy Krueger territory, a utility room where the boiler, water heater and various elements of plumbing apparatus snaked through the darkness.

  Dead end. The sand had been sprinkled across the floor to absorb spilled fuel oil. Nothing sinister or meaningful about it. Remington’s certainty that Tino was in the vicinity turned out to be wrong. He and Victor were elsewhere, probably hiding somewhere above, on the first or second story of the house. It was just her and Freddy down in the empty boiler room.

  The intermittent crackle of gunfire had quieted up top. The unnatural silence after a battle descended, heightened by the fact that Remington was alone in the dark. She could hear her own breathing, which sounded ragged and scared.

  The sand trail ended at what looked like an immense cistern, covered with a stone lid. Remington tried to move the thing with her foot, and couldn’t do it. She bent down and shoved it aside. The movement sent up the grinding noise she had heard earlier.

  At her feet loomed the stone bowl of the cistern. In the dim light she could see that the masonry had been busted apart. An opening had been punched into the bottom of the cistern, a dark, gaping hole. From the gap came the sound of faint, whispery voices.

  Come to your death, the ghosts beckoned.

  A tunnel. Of course, thought Remington. She had been racking her brain attempting to explain how Tino could possibly appear at Wildermanse when the house was surrounded by two dozen Graystone security personnel. Was he some kind of ninja warrior, that he could pass effortlessly through their lines? But he hadn’t gone through. He had gone under.

  The complexity of the vendetta against the Loushane family staggered her. Elaborate ruses, disguised identities, an enlisted army. A tunnel! No expense spared.

  What’s more important than money? Tester had asked her.

  Staring at the mouth of a hole that looked as though it led straight to hell, she now knew the true scope of the answer.

  Revenge.

  Remington clambered down into the cistern and entered the tunnel.

  —

  Mutilado, sodomizado, castrado, aporreado, decapitado, el cerebro y el corazón robado.

  In English, please.

  Okay. Mutilated, sodomized, castrated, bludgeoned, decapitated, brain and heart stolen.

  It had become sort of a mantra for Tino, a refrain he had returned to again and again over the years. At some point in the past, one of his numberless lovers informed him that he had been reciting it in his sleep. The original formula had been developed by the gangsters of the notorious Los Zetas cartel—narcos, yes, but heavily into extortion, kidnapping and violent takeover of local government. Fausto, after he had trained himself in the dark lessons of Santería and Palo Mayombe, had added the last bit, the taking of the brain and the heart.

  Mutilado, sodomizado, castrado, aporreado, decapitado.

  It was the ultimate revenge that he would visit upon the father who had abandoned him, who had been the author of so much misery, who had caused the painful deaths of his brother and sisters, the insane sorrow of his mother. Fausto and he had formed a pact over it. Tino would do the father. Fausto reserved for himself their American half brother, the ridiculously named Brockton.

  The tunneler they brought in was the infamous Cochino, aka El Excavador. He had only laughed when Tino challenged him to build a tunnel from the Aliso Canyon house to Wildermanse. The man was an artist. Mexico had developed a corps of superb tunnel builders. Cochino was celebrated for the feat of actually running one beneath the Rio Grande. Under the river itself! There had been a few collapses and more than a few deaths among the diggers, but the deed had been done. A pity that the evil bastards of the DEA had uncovered and destroyed the creation in its first month of operation, but still. It would always be remembered as one of the wonders of the world.

  This? Cochino sneered at the simplicity of the task. This was a half kilometer, if that, burrowing through the loamy soil of the Santa Susanna foothills. Tino hadn’t needed to bring the master all the way up
from Mexico to accomplish the job. A child could have done it. Cochino mapped the subterranean route from Aliso Canyon to Wildermanse for his diggers, Moreno and Ratan. Then he himself took a casino bus to Vegas for the slots.

  Now that Tino actually had Victor Loushane in his grip, he felt the surge of his own power. He had fantasized about the moment so often. In his mind, Tino always imagined the father he knew in childhood as a giant. Victor Guerrero, he called himself back then. A towering hero, a man among men.

  This pathetic soul seemed to partake in absolutely nothing of that former power. Tino herded Victor forward, out of the tunnel and into the Aliso Canyon rental. The old man’s clothes were filthy from the stumbling trip underground. His disheveled hair made him look like some nursing-home patient. This was the father Tino had feared and loved and hated all those years? A weeping, cowardly, weak-willed nothing, so terrified that his nose ran snot in a steady stream?

  “What—what—what?” the old man stammered. Tino wanted to slug him, knock some spine into him.

  “What, what, what,” Tino mimicked. “¡Habla español, viejo!”

  But his American daddy wouldn’t do it. Maybe he had lost his Spanish during all his years in the States.

  “What are you going to do with me?”

  “El Sur,” Tino snapped. The South. That had been the plan, anyway. Smuggle Daddy scumbag down to Mirage Ranch, where they could take their time with him. But now, mainly due to the interference of the cop whore Layla Remington, whom he should have killed many times over when he had the chance, the situation had blown up a little.

  He pushed Victor up the stairs from the lower level, sending him sprawling into the soaring main entryway of the Aliso Canyon house, with its cathedral ceiling and chandelier. Hermana was there.

  “Here he is,” Tino said. “Our father, who art in hell.”

  Hermana stared down at the man. “Jesus, Tino, what did you do to him?”

  “Nothing. Yet.”

  “Chupé was just here,” Hermana said.

  “Now why would Chupé be here? Are we following the plan, or not?”

  “He says the police are just up the block. They are turning everyone out of the whole neighborhood. And Juan Carlos and them, they shot down a police helicopter.”

  The news, which should have cheered Tino, instead sent a stab of fear into him. As happens with so many plans of mice and men, Tino’s grand strategy revealed its flaws most glaringly in the endgame.

  Simon’s death in Tijuana, yes. Framing the Chicano radical for the killing in Wisconsin, a stroke of brilliance that put the police off their trail. Putting Caroline Loushane under the wire in the desert—that, too, had worked. Then the attack on Wildermanse. Everything had gone down with elegant, spectacular smoothness.

  But if Tino and Fausto had ever spoken about the aftermath of their plan, it was always with a starry-eyed vagueness. Kidnap Victor and Brockton Loushane, take them to Mexico, kill them there. Nothing more detailed than that.

  “Please, please, please,” begged the pathetic scarecrow at Tino’s feet. He stepped on the old man’s throat to silence him.

  “We should do him here,” Tino decided, and he experienced a sudden flashback. Hadn’t he uttered the same phrase about another Loushane, his half brother Simon?

  Hermana nodded. “Slit his throat now and be done with it,” she said. “We have to get out, like, right now.”

  Victor whimpered, gagging and coughing.

  “Let me get the blades.” Hermana turned and headed down the stairs to the lower level, where another set of twin blades was stewing in Fausto’s black cauldron.

  Tino wanted to call her back. Something was happening to him. He had always been so cold, so precise. Now emotions gripped him that he hadn’t experienced in years.

  He let up on the old man. Victor struggled to a sitting position.

  “Valdo,” he whispered.

  Tino hadn’t heard his childhood nickname in years. Father and son gazed helplessly at each other, terror and sadness mixed in both their expressions. Tino fought back the urge, but couldn’t help himself. He sobbed.

  A gunshot exploded on the lower level.

  —

  The tunnel wasn’t tall enough for Remington to walk upright. She had to bend at the waist. All the same, she marveled at the passageway’s engineering. Somebody, some narco tunneler, some former Vietnam tunnel rat, sure knew what he was doing.

  She had heard of drug tunnels that had small railways built into them, space enough for golf carts, lighting arrays and ventilation shafts. This wasn’t one of those. There was no light, and the air was stale, but Remington felt safe moving along the route. Her claustrophobia stayed in check. It helped that the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel gleamed ahead of her almost from the start. The other terminus? A house nearby, she thought. Genius.

  A piece of cloudy plastic sheeting hung across the tunnel’s end. Remington had no clue what waited on the other side. For all she knew, she could be walking straight into the business end of a weapon. She crept forward and listened. Indistinct noise, perhaps voices, but nothing near. Pushing the plastic aside and peering through, she could glimpse the room beyond. Nothing moved. She stepped out of the tunnel.

  Remington found herself in a windowless basement room, like the one she had just left at Wildermanse, but definitely more modern. An enormous fan faced the opening in the wall. Shovels, framing lumber, piles of dirt and a collection of empty pizza boxes revealed the tunneler’s process. A stairway straight ahead led upward, and beside it a hallway gave out to another room, one with windows. A streetlight shone from outside.

  A powerful smell permeated the air. In the middle of the room sat a black iron pot. The stench seemed to emanate from it. Sticks and knives poked upward from its interior, and a pair of machetes rested on the cauldron’s rim. Whatever the dingus was, it gave off an evil aura.

  On a jury-rigged wooden table off to the side were coils of rope, hand tools and a trio of rifles, a couple of goat-horn Kalashnikovs and one that looked like an M16. Remington heard voices from above, but couldn’t make out the words. One of the speakers, though, she recognized. Tino Zaldivar.

  If she was going to face off with him, she would much prefer to do it with a loaded rifle. She crept over to the table and hefted the M16. Remington knew her way around the weapon and saw that it lacked a magazine. She was pawing through the tabletop mess when she heard footsteps on the stairway from the upper floor.

  Panicked, she worked as fast as she could. She seized one magazine, tried to jam it home, and realized that it was wrong. Remington could see first the feet, then the calves and the thighs of someone heading downstairs. Unless Tino had taken up cross-dressing, the figure was a woman.

  She didn’t have time to load more than a single round into the rifle, feeding it directly into the firing chamber. Remington couldn’t be certain that the cartridge had seated itself properly.

  The woman, when she fully appeared, looked to be about Remington’s age. The resemblance to Tino was unmistakable. Upon seeing Remington, she froze in place.

  “Hermana Zaldivar,” Remington said, taking a wild guess.

  The woman stared. “You are the stupid cop?”

  “No, that’s someone else. I’m the smart one.”

  And she shot Hermana dead.

  —

  It was almost as though Remington could see the future. Before she got there, she visualized what she would encounter at the top of the stairs. Tino Zaldivar, standing over Victor Loushane, holding a gun to the old man’s head.

  As it was in her mind, so it proved to be as she came out of the basement of the tunnel house into an expansive entrance foyer.

  “Come any closer and I’ll blow his head off.”

  Remington stayed where she was, poised at the top of the stairway. “It’s over, Tino.”

  “My life for his,” Tino said. “I’m going to step back and head down that hallway over there. That’s the last you’ll ever see
of me.”

  “I don’t think I can let you do that.”

  “Then he dies.”

  “If he dies, you die.” Remington leveled the now empty M16 at Tino.

  Victor Loushane broke in, pleading. “Let him go, Layla, for the love of Jesus!”

  “Let him go, Layla,” Tino echoed. “For the love of…Ellis.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Still alive, last I saw of him. But if you shoot me he’ll die, too. Pull that trigger, everyone dies. Let me go, everyone lives.”

  “Do you think for a single second that I trust you?”

  “Please, Layla, please!” Victor moaned.

  Tino’s face changed. He gave her a gentle smile. It was the strangest thing. For a moment, he transformed into Val Duran. She now saw the Ellis in him, and couldn’t understand why she hadn’t grasped it before. They were in truth half brothers.

  The Val smile turned back into the Tino smirk. He took his pistol away from his father’s head, turned and stepped away. Remington felt locked in place, incapable of stopping him as he disappeared down the hall. She heard a sliding door open at the back of the house.

  “Oh, God. Oh, God,” the old man pleaded, dissolving into wretched, full-hearted sobs. “Forgive me, Jesus. Oh, God, Father, forgive me.”

  Jesus might, thought Remington. But I don’t.

  Epilogue

  In the wake of the unrest, Los Angeles smoldered, shell-shocked and uneasy. Remington remained in the eye of the hurricane.

  The grand jury had returned a bill of ignoramus (yes, she learned, that was really the legal term) in the shooting of Mateo Guzmán. The prosecutor, AUSA Vernal Singh, duly registered a finding of nolle prosequi, meaning that no criminal charges would be filed. Since the citizen-victim had seen fit to discharge a weapon in the midst of a civil uprising, the jurors were reluctant to indict a cop on the scene. The whole incident was written off as a tragic mistake.

  The legal decision might have been predicted, but it still represented a political nightmare. Since the recent spasm of arson and looting, L.A. had been on a hair trigger. The last time the police were given a free ride in violence against a citizen, the Rodney King riots blew up the entire city. There was a real possibility that protesters who were enraged by the verdict might take the law into their own hands, reigniting the uprising or targeting Remington personally.