House of Smoke

by JF Freedman

  “Another example of why we’re paying through the nose on taxes,” Losario groused.

  They could hear the whap-whap-whapping sounds of the helicopters hovering overhead outside the house. One belonged to her people, its powerful light shining up and down the street, lighting up the windows like a sudden lightning storm. The others were the media’s; by now this could be on CNN, live from coast to coast.

  Dead or alive, they were going to be celebrities.

  To Losario’s chagrin, the Domino’s delivery truck pulled up in front of the house exactly twenty-eight minutes and forty seconds later, accompanied by a lights-flashing-sirens-wailing police escort. As she watched this on the television set—they were all watching the tube, prisoners at their own spectacle—Kate knew this image would be the lead story on every TV news show tonight and tomorrow morning. What a revoltin’ mess you’ve landed us in this time, she thought, not knowing if she was more angry, frightened, or embarrassed.

  On the screen the camera was panning the delivery man—a boy, no older than eighteen—up the front walk. He was alone; the shot was wide enough to reveal that, which had been her major demand when she’d spoken to Albright to relay the pizza request.

  “No funny stuff with the pizza man,” she’d told him with trembling voice.

  “Not to worry,” he’d assured her. Reading her thoughts: “He’ll be a real pizza delivery man, and it’ll be pizza in the boxes, not scatter guns.”

  “Get the door,” Losario commanded Kate with a wave of his gun, “and no funny stuff. Open it and step back.”

  Kate crossed to the door, her eyes darting back and forth between the room and the television set, and as she opened the door it was like passing through a solid wall that becomes a hologram, and suddenly the force of the lights shining down on the house hit her full in the face and she was stunned. She jerked back reflexively, covering her face with a forearm.

  “Here’s your pizzas, ma’am,” the boy told her, extending his arms towards her, two large pizza boxes balanced on his palms. His voice was shaking with fear. He stood a good three steps back from the door, as if he could get sucked in if he got too close. “The Pepsis and salad are in this bag.”

  They were taking her picture. The faceless mob. She’d be plastered all over the press tomorrow. She could see the cover of Time magazine: a disarmed woman police officer awkwardly juggling two Domino’s pizza boxes in the glare of a hundred police car lights and five hundred pairs of eyes.

  “How much do I owe you?” was all she could think to say

  “That’s okay, ma’am, I mean officer, it’s on Domino’s.”

  “Enough of the jabbering,” Losario called from inside. “Get your butt back in here.”

  Slowly, making no sudden movements, she backed into the house, her arms laden with food. Losario slammed the door behind her, and they were in the box again.

  Mrs. Losario put dishes on the table. The salad sat in its container in the middle of the table. Kate recognized the utensils from Crate and Barrel; she had an identical set in her own kitchen. That specific irony raised the level of bile sloshing around in her stomach.

  Everybody helped themselves to slices; despite the tension, they were all starving.

  “I’m going to have a glass of wine,” Losario stated. “There’s an open bottle of chablis” (he pronounced the s, Kate noticed) “in the refrigerator,” he informed his daughter. “Pour me out a glass.”

  “Please, don’t,” Kate implored him. That’s all they needed, a lunatic with booze in his system.

  He ignored her.

  “Get it yourself,” Loretta spat at him. Then she mouthed, “fuck you.”

  The pistol cold-cocked her across her jaw. She fell off her chair onto the floor.

  “Jesus, man.” Ray had found his voice, albeit involuntarily.

  Losario spun on him. “You get it, houseboy. A nice tall glass.”

  Loretta was lying on the linoleum floor, curled up in a ball, holding her jaw, whimpering.

  “You broke it! You bastard. Mean, cruel bastard!” Her legs started kicking of their own accord, like a dog scratching fleas in his sleep.

  “In the cabinet above the sink,” Mrs. Losario told Ray, her hand fluttering a direction, her jaw moving in opposition to her lips while her eyes were focused pityingly on her daughter.

  This could be my daughter, Kate flashed, sick at the thought of it. This could be my life.

  “Get the one that has the golfer on it,” Losario said. “I got it down at Pebble Beach, the day I went down there to watch the golf tournament last February. You remember that?” he asked his wife. “It was crowded as hell. I saw Clint Eastwood and Bill Murray. That Murray was something, wasn’t he? That guy cracks me up.”

  Ray doled out a healthy pour, put the glass down next to Losario’s plate. Kate tried to catch his eye not to, but he deliberately wasn’t looking at her.

  “He was funny,” his wife agreed. She was in her own time zone. That’s how she’s learned to cope, Kate realized. “He pulled some old lady right out of the gallery. She was standing practically right next to me. It was almost me instead.”

  “You would’ve been on TV,” her husband chimed in, taking a pull from the glass. “A goddamn TV star.” He scratched his forehead with the fingernails of one hand. The other hand held the gun. He was eating one-handed. “Well, you’re a TV star now. I hope you appreciate what I’m doing for you.” Another har-har-har. “You, too,” he commented to Loretta, who had picked herself up off the floor and was slumped in her seat.

  She glared at him but kept her mouth shut.

  Losario drained his glass of wine and held it up. “Once again, if you please,” he said to Ray.

  “Please don’t,” Kate pleaded with him. “It’s too dangerous drinking with all this happening.”

  “If you please, kind sir,” Losario sang out, smiling at her. Clumps of pepperoni and melted cheese were stuck in the cracks of his teeth.

  Ray refilled the glass, avoiding the daggers Kate was staring at him.

  Losario ate another slice, drank down half his second glass of wine. All the while making sure he kept eye contact with Kate, so she wouldn’t make a move on him. He’d figured out almost immediately that she was the dangerous one.

  After the first surge of appetite, no one else was eating. The pizza sat coagulating on the plates.

  “How come nobody’s eating? This is good.” He glanced over at his wife. “Eat it, you ordered it.”

  “I can’t. My jaw hurts too much.”

  “For pizza? You can gum pizza.” He turned to Loretta. “What’s your problem with your dinner?”

  “Three guesses,” she shot back. “The first two don’t count.”

  “You got a mouth on you, girl, you know that? Since when do you mouth off to me in my own house?”

  “Since you went crazy, Daddy, that’s when!”

  He threw the glass of wine against the wall. Everyone except him ducked from the shattering shards; luckily, no one took a hit from the splinters, because the glass had no liquid in it—he’d drained it. Two eight-ounce glasses of wine in fifteen minutes, Kate thought—.12 on the Breathalyzer, maybe higher. One more drink and she could possibly make a move on him; the flip side was that the drunker he got, the more dangerous he might become.

  “You see what you made me do?” he yelled at his daughter. He had come to his feet and was weaving slightly, one hand resting on the table for balance. “You made me break my favorite glass!”

  “I’ll get you another one,” Kate volunteered, a bit hastily.

  He shook his head, his eyes narrowing as he looked her over.

  “Two’s my limit. You wouldn’t want me to get drink, drunk, would you?”

  He herded them back into the living room. The curtains on the front window were bathed in light.

  “Lie down on the floor,” Losario commanded them. “Everybody, down. So I can see you easier.”

  There was a wide shot of the house
on the television. It looked eerie, bathed in spotlights.

  “On your stomachs, arms spread out above your heads.”

  Kate fell to her knees. Until that moment she hadn’t realized how exhausted she was.

  The phone rang, so loud it sounded like a bomb exploding.

  “Oh, shit,” she groaned.

  “Godfuckingdamnit!” Losario cursed behind clenched teeth. “I told them not to call anymore!”

  It kept ringing. The sound rang painfully in her ears, like a dentist drilling without Novocain.

  “They won’t stop until I answer it,” Kate explained in a self-conscious whimper, as furious at the ringing as Losario was. Without waiting for his approval she crawled across the floor and picked it up. The others, Ray included, remained lying facedown on the floor.

  “What?” she whispered hoarsely, wanting to scream, but afraid of freaking Losario out even more.

  “What’s the status?” Captain Albright asked flatly.

  She could hear the impatience in his voice. The frustration.

  Which was too fucking bad. He was going to have to contain it, he should know better. Lives were at stake; including hers.

  “Unchanged. And what is wrong with you?” she railed at him, for a moment losing it. “Have you taken leave of your senses?”

  “We can’t wait forever,” he informed her. “I’ve been given my bottom line. We’ve got to figure this out, come up with a plausible plan.”

  “A plan to get us all killed? Now listen up good. No more calls, comprende? I will let you know when we’re ready to come out.”

  There was silence from his end for a moment.

  “I read you, Officer Blanchard,” he answered finally. He was giving ground; grudgingly, but for the moment at least he was acknowledging the situation, and not the outside pressures.

  “I don’t have a chance otherwise.”

  “You’re the one at ground zero. It’ll be your call from now on, that’s a promise.”

  The line went dead. She guided the receiver back into its cradle; she hadn’t realized until that moment that her hand was visibly shaking.

  Losario was staring at her.

  “My boss,” she explained to this petty, angry man who had lost touch with basic reality, his shaking finger putting them all an accidental sneeze away from oblivion. “He’s just checking in. He wants this to come out okay; like we all do.”.

  “I’m tired, Daddy.” Loretta had rolled over and was sitting up in the lotus position, staring at Losario.

  “So go to sleep. What’s stopping you?”

  “You are. With that gun.”

  “This gun isn’t going to interfere with your sleep. Your precious beauty sleep,” he sneered. “Some sleeping beauty you are.”

  The girl started crying again, from anger and exhaustion.

  “What’s wrong with you, Dad? You’ve gone crazy.”

  “No.” His face flushed. “I might be a lot of things, like angry or pissed off or angry or … a whole bunch of stuff,” his voice started rising as it grew louder, “but I am not crazy! Not!”

  “Then prove it,” Kate said. She was on her feet, across the room from him. This shit had to stop: the time had come, because every minute that went by raised the unpredictability quotient beyond tolerance. If she didn’t take this gun out of his hand real soon he would be forced to use it, by the power of his own warped psychology.

  “Put your gun down and we’ll all walk out of here.” Her voice was surprisingly steady; she’d been trained to do this, and to her surprise it was paying off. “Nothing has happened yet that can’t be fixed. You can walk away from this, Mr. Losario. But you have to do it. Now.”

  She took a step towards him, her legs shaking in her regulation-issue trousers. She hated wearing these pants, they were the most unflattering pants she’d ever worn. She’d been wearing them for over ten years and she still hated putting them on in the morning.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Not any closer.”

  “You can put this all behind you.” One foot in front of the other, treading carefully on the balls of her oxfords, like walking a tightrope in a hurricane.

  “That’s bullshit!” he exclaimed. “Kidnapping’s a capital offense. Even I know that.”

  “Who have you kidnapped?” Another step, a small one. Her gun, lying on the floor, froze her mind. Five seconds of diversion and she’d have him, sewn in a shroud and hand-delivered:

  “You,” he answered. “And him,” pointing to Ray, lying on the floor near his feet. “Two cops. You think they’re going to let me walk away from kidnapping two cops?”

  “If I tell them to,” she said. “If I tell them we weren’t being held here against our will, but that we were trying to stop you from harming your wife and daughter. It happens all the time—you’d be surprised how often incidents exactly like this happen,” the syrup was coming back into her voice now, the ease, the control, this could actually work, she had a chance, “to all kinds of people, doctors and lawyers and businessmen. …”

  “And stupid assholes like him!” Loretta screamed in his face, totally out of control. She had sprung to her feet and was right in his face, shrieking into his ears.

  “Don’t, Loretta!” Kate cried, “for Godsakes, don’t!” Rushing at them, trying to pull her away, the girl was out her mind now, as crazy as her father.

  “Who beat up their wife and daughter and play with themselves thinking about it!” The words were cascading out of Loretta’s mouth as she fought Kate off with surprising strength. “And those porno magazines, too, I’ve seen you, Daddy, sitting out there in the garage in your crappy car where you thought nobody could see, some of the times after you beat up Mommy, you look at that garbage and play with yourself, you pervert! You bastard!”

  “Shut up, you liar, you whore!” he screamed, louder than any of them, he was going to wake the dead he was so loud.

  “You’re going to die in hell,” his daughter came back at him in a banshee voice. “Die in hell and rot!”

  “You’ll die before me,” he swore at her, “that’s a guarantee!”

  And at that exact moment the high-pitched warning beeping of a truck backing up invaded their space like a rifle shot echoing in a canyon.

  Losario jerked like he’d been burned, spinning at the sound and squeezing off a round, screaming “Shut up!,” the wild shot shattering the picture window.

  That ripped it. Sirens started wailing, Albright’s voice was coming over a bullhorn, he was yelling they were coming in or something like that, Kate couldn’t hear it, the gun, she had to get to her gun and stop Losario, and Loretta screamed “you bastard!” again, right in his face, her spittle hitting him across the bridge of the nose, and the gun jerked in his hand and Loretta half-twisted-half-fell to the floor, the front of her blouse spreading with blood within one second, and Mrs. Losario screamed and he shot her too, twice, right in the face, and Kate was scrambling on the floor for her revolver, drawing on Losario, Ray had crawled behind the La-Z-Boy, he was useless, she raised her weapon to blow Losario away and he was jamming the barrel of his own gun into his mouth.

  Kate screamed. To make him stop. So she could do it.

  He ate the gun. All of the back and a big piece of the top of his head smashing into the wall, blood, bone, brains, hair, dripping down above the television set which was still broadcasting, live to the world beyond this quiet residential street, the incipient invasion that was about to commence and make everything safe.

  Her gun was in her hand. She hadn’t fired a shot.

  Santa Barbara, California

  1995: TWO YEARS LATER

  1

  THE QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE

  A WOMAN IS STANDING on a porch, looking out at the hills. She is singularly beautiful. She is fifty-one years old, and men openly gawk at her.

  There is a cup of coffee in her hand which has gone cold. She doesn’t notice. She is going over in her mind all the things she has to do in the next few days. She ha
s to be strong, stronger than she has ever been in her entire life.

  It is early morning—precisely dawn. The sun, a rufous shimmering Jell-O, is starting to break through the early-morning fog, a pale nimbus spreading across the low horizon.

  The porch wraps halfway around a small wooden ranch house in the Santa Ynez Valley in Santa Barbara County, California. This house is one hundred fifteen years old. A functional house, no frills. The family the woman married into, her husband’s family, owns all of the land she can see to the horizon, and beyond.

  Their ranch is one of the largest in the county, over 20,000 acres. A working cattle ranch, the real thing, not for show. The people that do the actual work, the cowboys and their families, live in another area of the property, in houses the ranch provides for them, in close proximity to the barns, corrals, and feed pens where the livestock is kept and the tin-roof sheds where the heavy ranch machinery is stored.

  Years ago the woman’s husband’s father had gotten it into his head that this ranch would be an ideal place to grow bananas. The location of this property situates it climatically similar to parts of South America, areas of Ecuador and Colombia; and after reading several books and pamphlets on the subject, sent to him courtesy of the Department of Agriculture, he was convinced of the viability of the idea. There are dozens of varieties of bananas grown in the world, and he was going to grow some of them in his very own backyard. They grow bananas down by the coast, in La Conchita, south of the Rincon, so why shouldn’t they grow here in the valley, a mere thirty miles away as the crow flies?

  His neighbors, those that were venturing into agricultural pursuits other than cattle, the production of choice in these parts for two centuries, were planting vines for table wine or laying out strawberry fields.

  He was going to grow bananas.

  They didn’t grow. The topography was similar to that of other banana-growing regions around the world, but the climate wasn’t lush enough. After ten years of trying different strains and failing with every one, the property was let go back to range.