13 Under the Wire

by Gil Reavill

  “Do I…?”

  “Are you a good shot?”

  —

  “What’d you tell him?” Rick Stills demanded. “I mean, when he wanted to know why you shot Mateo Guzmán?”

  Guzmán was the citizen with the shotgun whom Remington had killed. He was a local homeowner, a father of three.

  “I told them that my brain misfired but that my weapon didn’t.”

  “My God, you didn’t really say that in there, did you?”

  “Relax. We went through the whole thing. Singh asked me what was going through my mind when I shot Mateo Guzmán. At that point, I bailed to come out to you.”

  Rick Stills and Remington were again huddled in the hallway outside the grand-jury chambers. Under relentless pounding from AUSA Singh, Remington had requested a chance to confer with counsel and fled the courtroom.

  “It was bad?” Stills asked. “Are you a target?”

  “Oh, yeah, I get the definite feeling Singh wouldn’t mind seeing me indicted. You know what the mood is nowadays about officer-involved shootings. Police fires on innocent bystander. That’s all anyone needs to know.”

  “He was hardly innocent. He had a twelve-gauge shotgun in his hands.”

  “Defending his home and hearth against looters.”

  “Hey, whose side are you on?”

  Remington told Stills that AUSA Singh had a diagram of the alleyway in question, printed on a pasteboard and placed on an easel displayed to the jury. He had a pointer, too, not a laser one but the old-fashioned wooden kind, which he used to trace the actions of all those involved in the incident.

  “So what’d you say? I mean, to the fundamental question, why did you shot Guzmán?”

  “I didn’t answer. I asked to be excused to speak to my lawyer.”

  “Dammit! You realize that move makes you look guilty, don’t you? Next time, request a break not at the climax but, you know, when he asks something innocuous, like the color of the victim’s hair.”

  “It was black.”

  Stills refused to smile at her wan wit. “What are you going to say? Because he’ll be right back on top of you as soon as you get back in there.”

  “I’ll tell him I was feeling under threat of my life.”

  “According to crime-scene analysis, Mateo Guzmán might already have dropped his shotgun.”

  “Rick, we’ve been through all this. A million times.”

  “And you know what? I’ve never been satisfied. You’re holding back. And if I can sense it so can Vernal Singh. He’s a smart guy.”

  “Rick, please. I’m beat.”

  “Any second now the bailiff is going to summon you back in. As soon as you return to chambers, Singh is going to pick up where he left off. Why did you shoot him? I’ve told you and told you, you have to be able to give a credible answer to that question.”

  “Let’s not do this again, not here, not now.”

  “Why’d you do it, Layla?”

  She sighed. “I experienced a clear threat of physical harm.”

  “You emptied your Ruger into him! The only three bullets you had left!”

  “The situation was confused. I had just pulled a stretch of thirty-six hours on duty.”

  “Why did you shoot him, Layla?”

  “Because I’m a fucking cop, and I can shoot anyone I damn want, okay?”

  “Why’d you shoot him?”

  Because I mistook him for someone I used to know.

  Why?

  Because I’ve been haunted by this person for ten years.

  Why?

  Because I am unwell of mind.

  She had shot Mateo Guzmán three times because at that precise moment her exhausted brain had misfired, and the person she saw in front of her was Val Duran.

  Part 2

  Ten Years Before

  Chapter 14

  Remington did not immediately reunite with Ellis Loushane. She was laid up in the hospital for a week, recovering from getting cooked in the desert, being nursed by her dad. Hyperthermia had wreaked havoc with her body chemistry. Death had missed her by hours, maybe by minutes.

  Gene Remington threw a protective cocoon around his only child. The media—the national media, from the morning shows to the evening news—were rabid to interview her. So were her superiors.

  “I told you to get what you could on the Loushanes,” Sergeant Chuck Tester said. He was another early visitor to the medical center in Imperial Valley. “I didn’t tell you to die doing it.”

  “You came all the way down here just to bust my chops?”

  “Jesus, you look terrible. Your face is all lopsided.”

  “You know what I was thinking before you showed up? I wonder if they’ve got provenance on those two machetes.”

  “What?” Tester gave her a stern look. “What did you just say? You are out of this, Cadet Remington! You are no longer allowed to investigate, cogitate, ruminate about this matter.”

  “Or any of the other ‘-ates,’ ” Remington said.

  “I’m serious, young lady! Serious as a heart attack, which you almost had, since your electrolytes went all haywire in the desert. No more detective work for you.”

  Ever since she’d swum back to reality on a delicious wave of hydration, Remington had been waiting. She knew the whole business would break open sooner or later. Some bull or other, some FBI brown-shoe or stiff drake in a uniform would show up and pronounce the name César Montenegro Sepúlveda. Or a mustached member of the Mexican Policía Federal Preventiva—maybe that was how it would happen.

  But Tester hadn’t said it, and neither did the polite Calexico cops, nor the BORSTAR cowboys from the Border Patrol’s Search, Trauma, and Rescue team. She was beginning to think Montenegro didn’t exist. Much of reality remained mushy for her. Then Remington remembered the thin hands of Señor Bony. She decided he’d be the one to come, appearing next at her hospital bed like a ghost in the middle of the night, garrote at the ready. She got her dad to smuggle in a Colt revolver to her, and kept the weapon in a drawer in her bedside table.

  For all the authorities who arrived to debrief her, Remington put on a foggy-minded weariness that fended off inquiries. She didn’t want to talk. She wanted to think. And thinking wasn’t coming easily, even days after the fact. Her thoughts, such as they were, centered on Val Duran. She’d see a passing hospital orderly and think for a second it was him. He kept slipping out from under her focus, dancing just beyond her reach. Sunglasses. In the middle of the desert, where had he gotten his new hat and sunglasses?

  A lot of what she gleaned was from TV news reports that she watched on a set hung on the wall in her hospital room. Six dead, six survivors in the immigrant catastrophe in the Jucumba Mountains of the borderlands. The two guides had both vanished. The whole mess collided with the Atzlándia raid mess to create a perfect storm of messes.

  The Crossley-Minturn family were proclaimed heroes. They made the Today show, a bickering appearance where the clan talked over one another and each claimed credit for the rescue. Everyone in the whole country, from the media to the water cooler to the Catholic pulpits, seemed to be crazy for the tragic beauty of the late Caroline Loushane. There was a particular photo of her that went wide.

  That night, Remington woke from a dream of Val Duran to find two men in her hospital room. One of them stood at the window, staring out at the black sky—for it was still night, though Remington had expected it to be morning. Swimming groggily awake through a haze of medication, she had a momentary confusion about the time. Eleven-nineteen by the wall-mounted clock. What day was it?

  The other man, larger than the first, stood silently at the foot of her bed. Remington realized that he had just pinched her toe through the bedsheets in order to wake her.

  The man at the window was slightly built. He wore a lightweight tan suit. Having successfully roused Remington from sleep, his larger partner crossed to the opposite side of the room from where she lay in bed. He took a seat in a cheap upholstered chai
r, a ratty orange number that the hospital had probably purchased in lots of a dozen decades ago.

  The man at the window spoke without looking around at her. “You are confused. You’ve given several contradictory accounts of your experiences.”

  “Excuse me? Who are you?” The seated one remained silent.

  “My name is George Sarin. I’m an associate of Mr. Loushane’s. Mr. Loushane asked me to visit and help you get your story straight. The other gentleman here is an investigator formerly attached to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.”

  The two men gave off an air of authority that was difficult for Remington to argue with, not while wearing a hospital gown split up the back to display her ass, should she decide to make a run for it.

  “When you were first brought here, you didn’t make any sense at all,” Sarin continued. “You were babbling about Chinese auto mechanics in the desert. Then there was this male friend of yours, who has disappeared and evidently perished in the mountains.”

  “Valentin Duran.”

  “Yes,” said George Sarin. “No such person exists, not that we can discover.”

  “Who is ‘we’? Who are you?”

  “You joined the group of border-crossers in La Rumarosa.”

  Remington got the idea that none of her questions were going to be answered. She didn’t like the situation. Her hand drifted to the nurse call button.

  George Sarin caught the move. “Oh, the hospital staff has been instructed to leave us alone for a few minutes.”

  “Can I see some identification?”

  “No, you may not. You aren’t in a position to request anything, Cadet Layla Remington of the Los Angeles Police Academy. You have been involved in some extremely nasty business and, frankly, you are in way over your head. What, did you read some Nancy Drew novels when you were a little girl?”

  Remington had read every one, actually. She gauged the mood in her hospital room as one of faint menace. Dispatching shadow creatures to do their dirty work, anonymous men who displayed only the vaguest of credentials—that was definitely the Loushane style. A billion-dollar fortune could afford any number of such functionaries.

  “You’re Mr. Sarin. What do I call him?” Remington nodded at the seated figure across the room.

  “So none of this works for us.” Sarin once again ignored her question. “This alleged incident in Tijuana, very confused from your account of it, and then this mysterious fellow who directed your crossing-the-border shenanigans.”

  “Shenanigans? Six people died. My friend died.”

  “Yes, she did. The tragic outcome of a series of bad decisions. As I mentioned, your spotty recollection of what happened doesn’t work.”

  “It doesn’t work? What does that mean?”

  “You say there were thirteen immigrants who went under the wire in your group. That itself is a lie. I know these polleros. They are unbelievably superstitious. They would never conduct a group made up of thirteen illegals. My partner here is a former U.S. Customs enforcement officer.”

  “I thought you said he was on the staff of the county district attorney.”

  “How about if I told you that Mr. César Montenegro Sepúlveda lives undisturbed in Tijuana? And that he reports nothing similar to your account of what happened last Sunday night?”

  There it was. The first mention of Montenegro. Remington had been guarding that aspect of her story, so as not to incriminate herself if the former Tijuana police chief had in fact been killed. She had another reason for keeping quiet, too. She wanted to see who would be flushed out when the name was finally dropped. Her bet had been on some agent of the Mexican federal police.

  But didn’t the Loushanes make more sense? Ellis had been one of the few people in the world who knew about the Investigaciones Especiales connection. Of course, upon the report of Caroline’s death he had spilled the whole affair to his father. And in due course George Sarin made his visit to Remington’s hospital room.

  The man could very well be lying about César Montenegro’s being alive and unharmed. But Remington didn’t think so. The whole business at the Montenegro compound seemed somehow contrived. The shooting had occurred offstage, as it were, in the next room. If it were so, if Montenegro had not been shot, then it had all been some sort of charade—the night at the compound composed and tricked up, Señor Bony and all the rest. And that, in turn, shifted her focus back upon Val Duran. Who did not exist, according to George Sarin.

  Her memory of the recent past resembled images in a film camera that had been smashed on the ground, its interior mechanism busted open, half the footage exposed and useless, the other half a tangled jumble. Any testimony she gave in court about the night in Tijuana would have to begin with a counting off of all mescal shooters she had poured into her system. There had been enough dope smoke in the air at the villa to give her a contact high. An unreliable witness, to be sure.

  Sarin came over and sat with easy familiarity alongside Remington on the bed. “Shall I tell you what would work for us? A prank. A folly. Some sort of wild hair that you got up your ass, you and Caroline. It wouldn’t be the first time a couple of white girls got liquored up in TJ and things went terribly downhill. In your inebriated state you decided it would be fun to try to slip across the border with all the illegals. It was like a dare, wasn’t it? You two did it for shits and giggles.”

  “And six people wound up dead.”

  “Hey, stuff happens.”

  “That’s supposed to be my story?”

  “Let’s just say that is your story. Any deviation from it would be viewed as a product of your heatstroke-addled mind.”

  “And if I don’t play along?”

  “It isn’t quite a question of that, Cadet Remington. We can have you saying pretty much anything at all. We’ll get you quoted in the press saying that a white dog named Son of Sam spoke to you. It’s more a question of—well, does Nancy Drew dream of a future in law enforcement? Did you tell your guidance counselor at Covina High that you always wanted to be in the LAPD?”

  “We didn’t have a guidance counselor at Covina High,” Remington said. “Laid off because of cuts to the public-school budget.” Meanwhile, she was thinking, Jesus Christ, they know what high school I went to?

  She reached into the drawer in her bedside table and got out the Colt revolver that Gene Remington had given her for protection. She didn’t aim it at anyone, just held it on her lap. Sarin looked impassively down at the weapon.

  “Damn, George,” said his anonymous partner. “What did I tell you?”

  Sarin moved off the bed. He shook his head, as if saddened by the turn of events. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll do as I say.”

  “Get the fuck out of my hospital room,” Remington said.

  —

  “First of all,” said Chupé, “it ain’t a morgue, it’s a forensics laboratory, like they got on CSI.”

  Marco and David were acting like scared children. They didn’t want to go into a morgue. Chupé thought the CSI reference might calm their nerves, but it did the opposite.

  “They got the freaky shit in the CSI places, too, maybe more than the morgue,” David said. “They got, like, SIDA-infected blood and shit.”

  “We are criminals, cabrón, right?” Chupé knew that the other two thought of themselves as gangsters, though at best they were a pair of wannabes. “It’s a crime lab, we’re criminals, so that means it’s, like, our turf, right?”

  Marco stared at him blankly, but David laughed.

  The three of them sat in the Linger-Long Cocktail Lounge on the South Side of Milwaukee, trying to drink some courage into themselves. Chupé didn’t want to go out mucking around with dead bodies in the middle of the night, either, but he wanted even less to run afoul of Fausto. He and Hermana had gone back home to the ranch and left this unwieldy job to them.

  In Wisconsin all the bars closed at 2:30 A.M., only they didn’t call them bars, they called them taverns, like las taber
nas in Spanish. Sam Yanolinski, the bartender Chupé thought he had made friends with, turned them out into the chill night. Lake Michigan was, like, a dozen blocks to the east, and the wind that came off it was brisk as fuck. What had Fausto said? The hawk is out.

  Fausto had procured them a brown utility van somewhere and they drove that, Chupé at the wheel and the other two crammed together on the passenger side. The crime lab was a one-story redbrick building with blue railings lining the entrance. Chupé didn’t plan on going in through the front door. He had scoped the place out earlier.

  He pulled down the block and parked. They needed to wait for Fausto’s designated hour of 4 A.M., when he promised they would be invisible to the police. Nothing moved in the neighborhood. No traffic.

  “Este lugar está muerto,” Marco said. This place is dead. When he realized what he had said and what they were doing, he laughed and pretended that he had intentionally made a joke.

  Much of what Fausto commanded Chupé to do didn’t make sense, at least not in the ordinary meaning of the word. Why allow the sicario to be killed by the policía only to steal his body back from them? Chupé knew what Fausto would answer without even asking him the question. The mortal remains of a murderer possess much power. The mortal remains of a murderer killed in a face-off with the police have twice as much power.

  Chupé broke into the crime lab by climbing up on a Dumpster and forcing a window. At first blush, the place felt not so mysterious at all. Just a lot of science equipment, like they didn’t have in the Mexican schools he didn’t go to, microscopes and stuff. There was a big metal tub full of water in the ballistics part of the lab. Chupé told the other two that the tub was where the gringos shot their weapons so they could fish the bullets out for comparison. He had watched it happen on TV—not CSI but the Navy one, NCIS.

  They could follow their noses to where the dead were kept. Formaldehyde. There were only six of the big refrigerated morgue drawers set into the wall of the white-tiled room. The first one they pulled contained an Anglo chica, pristine and untouched, not a cut on her. The boys wanted to explore the prepubescent body, but Chupé closed the little girl back in her drawer. Raúl was in the next one. They pulled out the drawer and there he was.