13 Under the Wire

by Gil Reavill

  Caroline didn’t look too good. Her lips were cracked and the skin of her face had blackened. The shirt she had wrapped around her head as a turban fell every which way. Her hole-digging did not seem to progress. The most her crabbed hands could manage was to shovel out a tablespoon of dirt from beneath her. A tablespoon at a time, a teaspoon, another tablespoon. At that rate, she would never be able to bury herself.

  Remington crawled over to her. Come. We have to walk.

  The idea of water held such dominance in Remington’s mind that all other thoughts were feeble and easily excluded. The Chinese auto-parts people had moved on, disappeared. Their votive offerings made the trees appear like strange sculptures. One far-spreading oak was almost completely festooned with side mirrors, radio antennas and deer antlers.

  Remington’s mind went like this: thought, misfire, thought, misfire.

  Earlier in the day—or perhaps it had been yesterday—in an effort to wet her lips Caroline had already sampled some of her own urine. The pee was dark yellow, almost brown. Remington didn’t think she herself would ever come to that.

  Val would…

  The sun…

  Misfire.

  Val! He was here! He had gone away and now he was back. They would be saved.

  There was something wrong with Val.

  His face hovered over Caroline. Only he of all the walkers managed to look cool. His skin was un-sunburned, healthy-looking. No black lips. No cracked fissures that didn’t even bleed, since the blood of the walkers had turned to sludge under the relentless sun. The sun…

  “Caroline,” murmured Val. “Here, look at me.” His words came out smoothly, like a lounge singer’s, oily and soft. He wore sunglasses and a straw hat. His shirt blazed white-white, eye-hurting white, as if he had managed to find a laundry in the middle of the Sonora.

  “Caroline, look,” he repeated. Somehow Val had gotten his hands on a mirror, a small one the size of a paperback book. He held it in front of Caroline’s face, so that she could see what bad shape she was in.

  “You’re going to die out here,” he told her.

  Caroline was at first too busy with her hole-digging to pay Val any mind. But she glanced up and caught a glimpse of herself. She halted in place, mesmerized. Her hand trembling, she reached out to touch her reflection. She missed and pawed pathetically at the air.

  Val steadied the mirror. Caroline gazed into it as if she were Narcissus at the pond. Then he snapped the glass away from her as if it were a dangerous toy that he was keeping from a baby. Caroline would have wept, if only she could summon up tears. As it was, her eyes, and Remington’s, too, were gritty and parched.

  Opening his trousers arrogantly in front of the two women, Val displayed his member. Remington thought—well, it turned out she didn’t know what to think. But he merely took a long, leisurely pee into Caroline’s half-dug hole. Caroline looked up at him, his features haloed by the sun. She attempted a flirty, come-hither look. When she tried to smile, her mouth twisted into a horrible grimace.

  “Doesn’t my girl have the cutest chin?” Val simpered out the words, parodying himself.

  Fresh as a daisy among all the walkers, Val Duran took a blade from his pocket, bent down and did something horrible to Caroline. Remington did not trust her own mind to comprehend what it was. She filed away what her eyes saw for later processing. When your blood dries up, it no longer courses through your body. You can be cut and not bleed. It’s the damnedest thing.

  Val disappeared just as the Chinese people had done. The dark stain of his piss wet the sand, the only memento of his presence. Remington crawled forward. She smeared the dank muck on her mouth. It did no good at all.

  Remington tried to remember how they had arrived at this point. She had no grasp of what day it was. The idea of a tiny Mexican village flashed across her thoughts like a will-o’-the-wisp. A shed crowded with alambristas. Julieta, Rafael, María de Jesús, the others. Then the first day…Misfire, misfire, misfire. Then the next…The sun…

  The thought wouldn’t quit: there was something wrong with Val. The walk had turned ugly so quickly that it took everyone by surprise. The water ran out. No one had any water. Twip proved not to know his way through the maze of mountains. His fellow guide vanished. The days were furnaces, the nights ovens. Remington tried to number them and failed. Count the days I’m gone, as in the old blues song.

  She looked around her now. There were other walkers, other bodies scattered across the desert floor nearby. Some of them jerked with brief, spastic movements. Others lay dead. The scene resembled the aftermath of a battle.

  “Darling,” said a soothing woman’s voice.

  Remington’s mother. Mona Seeger Remington. Gone from her daughter’s life early, when Remington was age four, now here. Remington couldn’t see her, but she knew she was present.

  “Mommy?”

  “You have to try, honey.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can. I know you can.”

  A miracle occurred. A tiny shred of a cloud passed in front of the sun. A blessing lay upon the land. Remington decided that she didn’t want to die in this precise spot. There might be a better place to collapse and perish a little farther on. Die there, not here.

  She struggled to stand. Her skin felt as if it were on fire. Every contact with clothing was agony. She stripped off her filthy man-clothes, everything, down to her sandals. The top of her feet had blistered and swollen with the sun, so the flesh had puffed up around the straps, making the sandals impossible to remove.

  Caroline snuggled into her piss pit. Ten yards away, Julieta lay stiff beneath a scrap of brush she had pulled over herself.

  “Come on,” Remington called to them. “We’re walkers. We walk.”

  Croak, croak. Nothing intelligible came out of her caked and useless mouth. But she grasped Caroline by her makeshift turban and hauled her upright. Then she crossed to Julieta and kicked her awake, her toes shooting agonies of pain up her leg as she did so.

  Leaning on one another, the three women took a single step.

  The sun emerged from behind its cloud and came down to finish them off.

  —

  Kevin Crossley made the comment that they were a bad-luck family. His mother-in-law told him not to say such things. He drove east along U.S. Route 98 with his wife, Sharon, and her parents. Since they had just come from the funeral of an uncle in San Diego who had died before his fiftieth birthday, Kevin thought the sentiment about bad luck was apt.

  They were headed down the highway to Calexico for lunch at a taqueria Kevin knew. Then back north to Palm Desert. The heat outside was deadly. The digital temperature on the instrument array of the Suburban read an incredible hundred and seven degrees. Inside the truck, it was a delightful seventy-two. Folks up North always talked about how cozy it was to be in front of a fireplace when it was snowing outside. Give Kevin AC and a heat wave any day. Now, that was cozy.

  They passed a large yellow-and-black sign warning against illegals in the area. Right then, sure enough, a collection of them staggered out of the brush beside the highway. They looked in bad shape. One of the creatures—Kevin couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl—was without clothes. He gave an embarrassed chortle.

  Sharon whipped her head around. “Look at that! Did you see them?”

  Kevin continued to drive.

  “We have to stop, Kev. Mom!”

  “What?” Beege said. “I didn’t see, honey.”

  “Kevin!”

  “It’s a trick. We go back and help them, we get carjacked.”

  Remington saw the big white Suburban blast past. It was the first hint that they were anywhere near a highway. She considered that the truck might be a hallucination. She stared up at a mysterious highway sign that seemed to hover in midair.

  What did it mean? She knew that she ought to know, but for the life of her she couldn’t figure it out. It told her to be cautious about something. Beware of families? Given her rec
ent experiences with the Loushane clan, that might be excellent advice.

  She was still pondering the puzzle when a frantic Steve Minturn, Kevin Crossley’s father-in-law, approached on foot and poured a cooler full of ice water over the three heat-struck women.

  Twenty-six minutes after that, EMT first responders loaded them into a pair of ambulances headed for Pioneers Memorial in Calexico.

  Despite the best efforts of the medics, Caroline Loushane died halfway into the journey.

  The hospital staff had Julieta Bautista and Layla Remington airlifted to a regional medical center in Imperial Valley.

  Interlude

  PRESENT DAY

  “I want you to take off all your clothes,” Rick Stills said.

  Remington laughed nervously.

  “I don’t mean literally but figuratively,” the attorney hurried to add. “But, really, imagine you’re going into that courtroom naked. You know I can’t be with you. The prosecutors can ask you anything. There’s no discovery, no reciprocity between prosecution and defense. It’s a free-fire zone.”

  “You’re not helping.”

  “I’m just trying to get you to take this very seriously.”

  “I do! I am. It’s just I have a lot on my mind right now.”

  “I know, I know.” Stills grabbed her hand and held it.

  The two of them sat on a cushioned bench in a hallway of the Foltz Criminal Justice Center, next to City Hall. They were on the eleventh floor, above the rush and hustle of downtown L.A. The corridor was hushed and empty, with the kind of heavily waxed floors in which you could see your own reflection.

  Legal repercussions were in the works about the incident in the San Fernando alleyway during the riots. Impaneled just down the hallway was a grand jury of Los Angeles Superior Court, seeking to tease out the truth of that night when three people were shot dead, one of them an LAPD officer and another a respectable Hispanic citizen, with Detective Layla Remington of the LASD standing nearby holding a smoking gun.

  “You’re going in there as a percipient witness,” Stills told her.

  “And you’re going to be sitting out here by your lonesome.”

  “You know the term for that? They call an attorney waiting in the hall while his client testifies before a grand jury a ‘potted palm.’ ”

  “You’re a potted palm,” Remington said affectionately, tousling his hair.

  Lawyers weren’t allowed to accompany their clients into a grand-jury chamber. Remington could tell that Stills was worried about her, trying to cram all his advice into the short time before she was called.

  “They’ll let you come out and confer with me if you want. Really. You can check in after every question.”

  “I know.”

  “The second you start to answer substantive questions, your Fifth Amendment protection disappears. Then you have to answer. I want you to consider very seriously taking the Fifth. All I see here is land mines. One wrong step and AUSA Singh in there will haul you up on charges of perjury, criminal contempt, civil contempt.”

  “He’s a meanie,” Remington said.

  “Layla, please.”

  “Rick, we’ve gone through all this.” Once she took the Fifth, Remington knew her law-enforcement career would be over.

  “You will not lie.”

  “I will not lie.”

  “You will tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

  “I will tell the truth, the truth and nothing but the truth.”

  Stills scowled at her. “You dropped a word in there. It goes ‘the whole truth.’ ”

  “Rick…”

  “Don’t try to manage this, Layla. No slick maneuvering. You can walk out of there clean. Or you can have them throw the book at you. But you have to play it right.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay?”

  “I’m good.”

  Stills switched gears. He caressed Remington’s hand. “So, we’ve decided on the invitations, right?”

  “It was your call, I thought.”

  “Embossed, silver blue, on heavyweight cream stock.”

  “Very traditional. Although I did like the idea of using the ransom-note font.”

  “Not appropriate for a wedding, though, no?”

  “I keep having to remind you that you’re marrying a police.”

  Saying “a police,” not “a police officer.” Insider law-enforcement lingo helped identify the tribe. She had picked up the quirk of speech from her father, a lifelong administrative clerk at the LAPD’s Parker Center.

  The bailiff came out to them and intoned her full name and title, like a courtier presenting a petitioner to a king. “Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Detective Investigator Layla Seeger Remington.”

  “You sure you’re okay?” Stills asked.

  “The law is an ass,” Remington said.

  “Well, I’m an ass man, then.”

  Amid the insane welter of shooting, looting and arson that had exploded during the three days of riots, actionable incidents—that is, crimes that could be tried in a court of law—piled up like garbage at a landfill. Other police officers, LAPD and LASD both, had been wounded. A National Guard soldier accidentally fired on his own fellows. But out of everything that happened in those dark Los Angeles days, the cop that Remington had seen shot was the sole police officer to be killed in the line of duty.

  The ’92 Rodney King riots killed sixty-two people, none of them police. The toll for the latest unrest registered at forty-six, one of them an LAPD patrol officer. Of the others, eleven were officer-related homicides in which the victims were shot by police. That number included the citizen that Remington had killed in the dark alleyway off San Fernando Road.

  She headed into the grand-jury chamber, which was like an ordinary courtroom sliced in half. No spectators were allowed, so no gallery seating section had been installed. There was only the bench, the table for the prosecutor, and a generous jury box. Grand juries were wide-ranging judicial explorations. The AUSA, Assistant United States Attorney Vernal Singh, was the chief explorer.

  “Could you tell the jury members your full name and title, please?” Singh’s tone was one of chilled politeness.

  “Detective Layla Seeger Remington.”

  “And how old are you, Detective Remington?”

  “I’m thirty-two.”

  “And are you married?”

  “I’m engaged to be, yes.”

  “And what is your profession?”

  “I am a detective investigator with the Homicide Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.”

  “And were you serving in that capacity on the night in question?”

  There it was. Decision time. If she answered AUSA Singh’s substantive question—and any query beyond name, rank and serial number was deemed substantive, so this one was—there was no going back. She could not invoke her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. On the other hand, if she pronounced the fatal phrase—“I respectfully exercise my Fifth Amendment right and decline to answer the question”—she could kiss her career as a detective goodbye.

  “Detective Remington?”

  “I was not specifically serving in my capacity as a Homicide Bureau investigator, no.”

  “No? Then why were you there along San Fernando Road that night?

  “Two days before, I had answered an all-available call.”

  “And what is that?”

  “An all-available call goes out requesting all officers so capable to report to their duty stations. I was posted on San Fernando Road with a small contingent of other LASD personnel.”

  “Did the Sheriff’s Department issue that call because of civil unrest occurring in the vicinity of the Los Angeles neighborhood of San Fernando?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Singh was taking his sweet time getting to it. Remington tried to read the faces of the impaneled grand jury. Fourteen women and nine men, given the job of sorting out what
happened during a hectic night of rioting, confusion and gunfire.

  Remington found herself telling her story to them.

  “I witnessed a figure running southwest from San Fernando Road. I visually identified him as male. He wore a body-armor vest printed with the letters ‘L-A-P-D’ in Day-Glo yellow.”

  “What did you conclude?” Singh asked.

  “Sir?”

  “You saw a figure in LAPD body armor sprinting from a riot scene. What was your natural conclusion?”

  “I thought he might be a police officer in pursuit of a suspect.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I proceeded to the vicinity in order to provide assistance.”

  “What happened next?”

  Remington laid it all out, how she came on the scene to find the police officer, a two-year veteran of the LAPD named Facundo Mejia, on the ground begging for his life, with another figure standing over him about to put a bullet into him.

  “Yes, this second figure.”

  “It turned out the second figure was named Anthony Gatagas.”

  “So, I’m trying to follow, here,” Singh said. “The figure in the LAPD body armor was shot by another person.”

  “Yes, sir. Anthony Gatagas was a petty criminal with a record of offenses ranging from assault to criminal mischief and grand theft.”

  “Very, very chaotic,” remarked Singh. “Everything confused.”

  “It was a bewildering night, sir.” At times Remington could almost believe that Singh was on her side.

  “Do we have it all straight now? Officer Mejia, the first figure, wore body armor marked with LAPD insignia. The second figure was an alleged looter, Anthony Gatagas.”

  “That’s it.”

  Singh looked down at his notes, then looked back up at Remington.

  “But there was a third figure present at that time, wasn’t there? Mateo Guzmán?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you consider yourself a marksman, Detective Remington? Or I guess the proper word here would be ‘marksperson.’ ”