A familiar security person walked past and said hello. Blythe smiled, asked if he could do her a tiny favor.
When the Staff Only door clicked shut behind them, Blythe lingered in the long bright tunnel. The left tunnel branch, she remembered, led to the men’s locker room. To the right, the arena.
Propping Logan against the wall, she lowered her face down to his. “I want you to wait for me right here.”
“No! You said we were going!”
“Stop it, right now. Give me one minute. And while I’m gone you do not move from this spot, understand?”
Logan’s eyes went wide over her shoulder, toward the sound of shuffling footsteps. Blythe turned, and there was Sandro, head hung down, limping along with one arm slung across Franco’s shoulders.
Sandro’s head lifted. His dusky eyes gleamed at the sight of her. He spoke Spanish to Franco, who then retreated down the tunnel.
Then it was just the three of them again, like the family they’d almost become. Blythe saw it up close now, the damage of Sandro’s self-punishment, his face like a cubist portrait, nostrils stuffed with cotton. A butterfly bandage sealed a cut over his right eye.
He limped to within a few feet of Blythe and dropped to his knees.
Bawling, he sputtered, “Lo siento mucho … so sorry I hurt you … and Logan …”
Blythe’s own tears came, and she went to him. Sandro threw his arms around her legs and buried his face in her stomach.
“Shhhh, it’s okay.” Blythe stroked his sweaty hair. “It’s okay, baby.”
From her right side, Logan’s hand swung down sharply and rapped Sandro on the head. The fighter grunted. His face turned to find Logan standing with the butt end of the .38 raised to strike again. The hatred in the boy’s eyes was far beyond his years.
“Logan, no!” Blythe said. Before she could reach for the gun, Sandro’s left hand lashed out and knocked it away. The gun skittered along the tunnel floor. Snatching the boy by the throat, Sandro rose from his knees, fresh blood dripping from his hairline. He pushed Logan backward until the boy was pinned against the opposite wall, then began to lift him until his toes left the ground. Logan, choking, clutched at the fighter’s hands, unable to budge them.
Sandro’s growl rose, more lupine than human.
A contained explosion flashed in the tunnel, Sandro thrown sideways to the ground. Released, gasping for breath, Logan ran down-tunnel to his mother, who stood with the Diamondback hanging at her side. She hugged him tight. Fifteen feet from them, Sandro pushed himself off the floor. A hole in his left shoulder spewed blood down his arm.
Blythe moved in front of the boy and pointed the .38 at the wounded mess lurching toward them. She cocked the hammer, and exhaled.
THE LOOP TRAIL
BY KEN LAYNE
Joshua Tree
The Mojave Desert eats a couple of tourists every summer. It’s the nature of the place. More people die around Joshua Tree from car crashes and pill overdoses and trying to run across Highway 62 in the dark than will ever die from a day hike, even in the oppressive heat of monsoon season, but it’s the amateur hikers who make the headlines.
A couple of years ago, Joshua Tree became a destination. Not just as a weird desert wilderness a couple of hours from LA, but a weird desert wilderness that had become very popular on Instagram. You see it in music videos, in fashion shoots, the twisted arms of our signature yucca trees turned into backdrops for various celebrities and social media influencers. If everybody is coming out here, it must be all right.
A place with decent cell service and well-stocked grocery stores and stylish Airbnb cabins on every sandy road seems pretty safe to the modern visitor. And if you’re used to the easy green paradise of Yosemite, you probably think national parks are all like that: woodsy campgrounds and friendly rangers in Smokey Bear hats.
But the campgrounds in Joshua Tree National Park are just sand, hard-packed sand surrounded by boulders and cactus and scrub brush. There are rattlesnakes coiled on the trails and cholla lying in wait for bare ankles and suburban dog snouts. Most of the campsites close for summer because it’s just too hot, but people come anyway and feel lucky to be there at all.
Three seasons of the year, you can walk around in relative comfort. Summer is not one of those seasons. Summer is hard in the desert, even the high desert, where it’s fifteen degrees cooler than Palm Springs—and that’s still a hundred-plus in July and August.
Besides, it’s a haunted land. Desert wilderness is like that.
When the young couple vanished on the Loop Trail at the end of July, it was the Airbnb owner who reported it. They hadn’t checked out; their luggage was still in the vacation rental, beer in the fridge, toothbrushes on the sink. And their car was gone.
It was easy to assume they’d been dumb about things. Got lost, got confused, wandered the wrong way, hit one of those canyons without a phone signal, and that was that. The annual human sacrifice to the Mojave. Take them, oh desert gods, so that the rest of us might be spared.
Search & Rescue was out the morning after the pair had been reported missing.
I heard the helicopter rumbling over my little house up near the national park entrance and figured it was a Marine Corps chopper, because those noisemakers liked to fly low right over my dirt-road neighborhood, going back and forth between Camp Pendleton and Twentynine Palms. Always practicing for invading some unlucky country in the Middle East. But this one was making circles just inside the park boundary, maybe two miles away. That had happened a couple of times in recent years, when some amateur rock climber had learned about the reality of gravity and had to be flown out on a stretcher. The chopper would set down and take the injured party to the local hospital. Or to a better hospital if the situation was dire.
Making circles meant lost tourists.
It seemed ridiculous—lost tourists in sight of houses and cell phone towers and the highway—but it was the hottest time of year, when the humidity gets sucked up from the Gulf of California, producing a few good thunderstorms and flash floods once in a while. People get confused in the heat.
Out at Amboy Crater, an hour north of Joshua Tree alongside Route 66, there were a couple of deaths every year. People parked their cars and followed the sandy trail through the lava rock and maybe hiked up to the rim of the old volcano and snapped some pictures of each other. And then they became disoriented on the way back, a way back that is much more treacherous in the midday sun. Even in late springtime. There’s no shade. The path that seemed so clear on the way in becomes confusing. Soft bodies and weak hearts don’t know how to respond, so they overreact, overheat. With pounding pulses and sweaty faces, the frightened tourists become distraught. Which look-alike sandy path between look-alike piles of black lava rock leads to the rental sedan with the air-conditioning? So many day hikers have died at Amboy Crater that the federal Bureau of Land Management had to put up some big colorful flags to show people the way back to the parking lot.
Just as I was making coffee, I got a call from the little radio station where I work. Nighttime, mostly, although I fill in a daytime shift when necessary. But nighttime is the good time, just me and the airwaves and whatever souls might be listening. Community radio is a different animal than the sounda-like FM and AM corporate channels still around at this point in the fractured media environment.
It was Gary, the news editor. “You see the Search & Rescue over there?”
I did. Would I maybe go over and check it out? I said I would. Not my regular duty but I’d done enough of it. Enough to know I preferred the late shift, taking calls from Landers and Sunfair and Yucca Mesa and Pipes Canyon and the base, wherever people listened. Lots of calls about UFOs and meth shacks. Desert stuff. I played a little music between the calls. If you’ve got a community radio station in your town, you know what I’m talking about.
Professionally equipped with my one necktie and a travel mug, I got in the truck and drove down Quail Springs to the ticket booth of the pa
rk’s entrance. Marla was in there, scowling out at the world. I nodded hello and showed my annual pass.
“They’re at the Loop Trail parking lot,” she offered. “Couple of kids.”
“Little kids?”
“Young people.” She rolled her eyes. I said thanks and drove off before she could get started on the superintendent, or the RVs, or how many months until she could get full retirement. They must’ve put her in the booth to discourage people from visiting at all.
It was weeks before Labor Day, so the road was mostly empty. I hardly ever drove into the national park. The road was really just a loop that came out at Twentynine Palms, although you could keep going south and eventually come out at the 10, in the low desert. From October to June it was mostly a traffic jam. The people in my rural neighborhood just walked in, when they bothered at all. I loved the park best as my backyard view. It stopped Palm Springs from crawling up the hill, stopped the Inland Empire from spilling all the way up from the San Gorgonio Pass. And it was still full of mountain lions and coyotes and bobcats.
Joshua Tree National Park was mostly lacking in the Joshua tree department. The southern half of the park had none, in fact. Back when it became a national monument—thanks to a well-connected desert-loving Pasadena socialite named Minerva Hamilton Hoyt—it was going to be called “Desert Plants National Monument.” Accurate, if not very poetic. Instead, FDR’s Department of the Interior named it after the yucca brevifolia, or what the Mormon pioneers called the Joshua tree. Imagine having religion so alive in your head that even a raggedy-ass yucca tree full of spikes and spiders reminds you of a biblical hero.
There are a lot more Joshua trees in Mojave National Preserve, another several hours’ drive to the northeast, but it’s too far from Silver Lake and Echo Park to get much visitation. Which makes it my favorite. But there’s no work out there. No radio stations. No listeners. Just a lot of wild and beautiful Mojave Desert.
When I came around the bend, the helicopter was landing in the trailhead parking lot and an NPS cop was standing in the road. There was no place to pull over; so many dimwits had driven off the pavement and into the raw desert that the park service had to build curbs along the whole way. It was like the old Autopia ride in Disneyland. So, I waited until the yellow rescue chopper had lifted off again and the Smokey Bear let me through, although he wasn’t happy about letting me turn into the parking lot.
“Trail’s closed.” He was new. Not young, but new. I fished around the glove compartment for my expired KCDZ press pass and he relented.
A burly retired marine named Miguel was the Search & Rescue captain. He was yelling into a walkie-talkie and pointing at various volunteers with his free hand. They were all volunteers. They all looked like hell.
“The dogs gave out,” he said. The scent-hound handlers were loading a couple of overweight old dogs into a van. “They couldn’t make it back.”
It was just an easy loop, maybe three miles total. But boy was it hot, and sticky. I loosened my tie and wiped the sweat off my sunglasses.
“I just need some basics to bring to the station,” I said. He didn’t have much, but it was enough. I wrote down the names and the ages and then I noticed a cream-colored Acura parked by the pit toilets.
“That’s their car,” Miguel said. “The dude’s car. You can’t touch it.”
“I don’t want to touch it,” I said. “Just show me the registration. Or anything else that’s interesting.”
He shook his head and went back to the dogs and the handlers. What a sorry crew. I took a phone picture of the sedan’s license plate and got back in my truck.
Of course I wound up driving to the station in Joshua Tree and typing up the story and recording it for the afternoon news because the morning crew was already home for the day. By the time I’d finished all this unintended work, it was only a couple of hours until my night show. So I went over to the saloon and had a bad early dinner and sweated some more, because Girard refuses to put in air-conditioning and the swamp coolers don’t work this time of year.
The press loves a missing-hiker story. And our missing Joshua Tree tourists got the full treatment. From a distance, I mean. It’s the kind of police-beat story you throw together in the newsroom back in Los Angeles, mostly taken from our station’s website, with some new bits from the sheriff’s department press release and the usual heartfelt statements from the families.
And this one had the bonus of an Instagram-era cautionary tale: They really were just kids, from suburban Orange County, both barely of drinking age. It was the girl’s twenty-first birthday weekend. Emily Tran, from Irvine. The boy was half a year older, Francis De Leon, from Fullerton. High school senior portraits were printed on the MISSING posters that immediately started showing up in restaurants and tourist shops around town. They looked like nice kids, as people say. Both from second-generation immigrant families, Vietnamese and Filipino, respectively. Her family was wealthy, all doctors and lawyers and bankers. His was middle class, small businesspeople. Both success stories of the kind America doesn’t produce too many of anymore.
That night on my shift, a lot of people called in with theories and ideas. Of course nobody had seen the kids, or knew them, or even knew much about where they’d disappeared. To a lot of the old-timers in the high desert, the ones who washed up here decades ago, the national park was as mysterious and distant as Los Angeles.
“I bet they were on drugs,” one of my regulars said, calling in from a mobile home park in Yucca Valley. “Most of these tourists are on drugs.”
By September, the Search & Rescue missions were a Saturday-only affair, at the insistence of Francis De Leon’s father. He owned a couple of restaurants in the OC. But every Saturday he was back in Joshua Tree, with a dwindling supply of volunteer searchers. And like my night callers, most people around town had just forgotten about it. Which is only natural, when the missing people are abstractions.
By then I had a weird feeling about the whole thing. And it became a lot weirder when a college friend of Emily Tran’s sent the radio station an e-mail that wound up being forwarded to me. She didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to use her name. But she had an angle nobody else seemed to know: Emily Tran and Francis De Leon had broken up three months before her birthday trip to Joshua Tree. Emily had broken it off, put Francis in the friend zone.
They had dated in high school, fell in love it seems. But then she got accepted to UC-Irvine and he sort of drifted. Some community college classes, a fight with his father over the family business. Nothing sinister, on its own. Still, you could sense a narrative: She was on her way up in the world. He wasn’t. Her life was expanding. His was shrinking. When Emily broke it off, Francis took it hard.
Sometimes a story gets inside you and then you have to see it through. Because nobody else is bothering with it. I started to feel like maybe Emily Tran got a raw deal.
The radio station is not the kind of enterprise that could afford to send its nighttime host on goose chases to Irvine and Fullerton and wherever else the trail might lead, so I did it the cheap way: by phone, on the Internet, collecting names and information from cached web pages and those sleaze-ball operations that sell public records to nervous spouses for thirty-five dollars. I figured out that Francis was training to become a rent-a-cop. That he’d qualified for a concealed-carry permit, as part of this training. And that he didn’t have a whole lot of friends—but he did have one friend in particular who still had a presence on social media, as they say on the cable news. Danny Mendoza. And Danny Mendoza still had a Facebook account.
There was a picture of Danny and Francis on the Loop Trail in Joshua Tree National Park, in a post dated two weeks before Francis and Emily vanished. I knew that trailhead pretty well; it was an easy mile-long walk from my cabin. No caption or location data necessary. It felt weird though it wasn’t terribly suspicious on its own. Three million people visit the park every year, most from Southern California.
But there was an in
teresting fact about Danny Mendoza that I learned about on his Facebook page—he had apparently enrolled in nursing school in Manila, at the beginning of September. He’d flown the coop.
By the time October rolled around, I had a pile of information. None of it compelling enough to bring to the sheriff, or to NPS law enforcement. The National Park Service has its own federal police, but in our present national dystopia it is underfunded and understaffed and mostly embarrassed to exist. The county sheriff’s department is, at best, indifferent to both the national park and the high desert. Which makes a kind of sense, as it’s based in the faraway city of San Bernardino. Another world from Joshua Tree. The kids had vanished barely a mile from the entrance station where millions of cars entered and exited every year, where scores of federal employees roamed on a regular basis, and where search teams had put in hundreds of hours specifically looking for these kids. People vanish in national parks. It’s a thing. And the National Park Service would rather not discuss such things.
The final search took place on the last Saturday in October. The weather was nearly crisp, the days short and the shadows long. Only two volunteers made the loop with Mr. De Leon, but this time they wandered behind a big desert willow that had shed most of its leaves and dried flowers. There was a narrow path behind it, no more than a jackrabbit trail. I’ve been there since and it’s a surprise anyone ever followed it, because it clearly didn’t go anywhere. But just before the wall of granite boulders, the searchers spotted the faded wrapper of a granola bar and the lid of a plastic water bottle. A few steps beyond, in a nook that barely fit them both, lay the baked remains of Emily Tran and Francis De Leon.
Francis was on top of her, his pants around his knees. His Heckler & Koch .40-caliber pistol was loosely covered in sand and dead leaves. Emily’s shorts were pulled down. The Search & Rescue volunteers—unidentified to this day—immediately backed out and radioed the sheriff’s department. They had to physically restrain Mr. De Leon, who was weeping and moaning and seemed determined to correct the crime scene.
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