13 Under the Wire

by Gil Reavill

  Fall blended into winter, in L.A. a transition more theoretical than real. The sun shone just the same. Remington’s leave of absence at the police academy stretched to the end of the session. She would have to start all over next year.

  Chuck Tester assured Remington that the LAPD still looked kindly on her and she could anticipate a sterling career in law enforcement. But who was she, really? The girl mixed up in that funny business south of the border. She represented just one more bit of collateral damage from the Loushane affair.

  Sergeant Tester tracked her down at the academy’s pistol range in Elysian Park. Remington found herself going there a lot, more times than the academy requirements mandated. It soothed her to ping away at paper targets. With ear protectors on and goggles in place, she could enter her own world. The only thing that broke the rhythm was stopping to change magazines.

  Her marksmanship had deteriorated. One of the legacies of the Jucumba Mountains was a minor hand tremor. The sun had crisped her nerves. The doctors were equivocal about whether it would be a permanent condition. The more she tried to calm her shakes, the more they threw off her aim.

  After one particularly lousy spread, Remington turned away, disgusted. She saw Tester standing in the alley behind the booths, watching her, pity in his eyes. They adjourned to the range café.

  He presented her with an envelope bearing an official FBI letterhead. Inside was a signed message from Louis Freeh, the director of the bureau himself, commending her work identifying the suspect in the Geneva Lake killings.

  Remington was stunned. “Really? Are you conning me?”

  “You are a hero, Cadet Remington. Your career is made, and you’re hardly out of the academy.”

  “It’s official?”

  “I’m proud to know you, girl. It turns out the popular musical ensemble and crime-glorification unit known as the Devil Dogs is no more. You know, it’s an occupational hazard. All these narcocorrido singers get murdered sooner or later.”

  “What is that, like music criticism? Or because they know too much?”

  “It kind of reminds me of Bob Dylan’s song about Rubin Carter, the boxer who was convicted of murder. Turns out the lyrics included facts that only the killer could know, so they arrested Dylan for the crime.”

  “Who’s Bob Dylan?” Remington asked, pulling Tester’s chain a bit.

  “Yeah, and what I just said was supposed to be a joke, too. You young folks need a personal air-traffic controller to keep track of all the things that go over your head.”

  “So I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop here.”

  “Shoes, plural, shoes multiple, many pairs. The Fibbies track down a relative of dos Santos, a sister, and convince her to give them a DNA sample. They compare it to the samples at the crime lab in Wisconsin and, sure enough, it’s a match.”

  “So our killer is finally ID’d, and it only took a couple of months after the fact.”

  “Dos Santos had already been buried, as a John Doe in a pauper’s grave,” Tester said. “The sister says it doesn’t matter that big brother was a murdering SOB, she still wants his remains repatriated. But when they go to look, the body is gone.” Tester did the doo-doo-doo-doo thing with the Twilight Zone theme song.

  “Which means Santería,” Remington said.

  “Or something darker,” Tester responded.

  “That evidence taken in the Atzlándia raid? Any chance I can take a look at it?”

  “Funny you should ask. Who told you?”

  “What do you mean? Who told me what?”

  He looked around them to make sure there was no one within earshot. “That stuff may be turning to utter dreck.”

  “What does that mean? I thought—I heard there was fingerprint evidence and everything. When it first came out the public-information officers were all, you know, game, set and match.”

  “We have this hotshot assistant district attorney handling the case. Janiece Baez—you ever heard of her? Ambitious as hell.”

  “So?”

  “So she turned up discrepancies.”

  “Don’t tell me the case is falling apart. I haven’t heard a whisper.”

  “Oh, and you’re Miss Ultra Connected, are you? Anyway, there’s various forensic analysts both for and against.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “The subcomandante could have been given a blank sheet of paper to handle.”

  “Eh, no way. For what possible purpose?”

  “To set him up, to put his pretty picture in a frame,” Tester said. “ADA Baez isn’t going with the new theory, not quite yet. The survivors of the raid are all swearing up and down that none of the documents in that file ever came into the Atzlándia office when they were there.”

  “Right, and they’re all real credible witnesses.”

  “Look, the case is totally soaked in nitroglycerine. One wrong move and it blows up in Baez’s hands. The right move could make her career. She’s angling for the D.A.’s chair, for sure.”

  Remington thought over the implications of the news, Tester waiting for her to come to the obvious conclusion.

  “So that means…”

  “That’s right.” Tester nodded, solemn as a sage, proud of his pupil for understanding.

  “The real killers slagged off Subcomandante G, played him for a patsy,” Remington said. “So the real killers are still out there.”

  Tester shrugged. “Like I said, nothing’s for sure. Everyone, all the brass, are watching this one real close. ADA Baez stumbles, it’s a high-visibility mistake, onstage and in the spotlight. She’ll probably stuff the doubters down a rat hole and go with the accepted scenario. Everyone would be much, much happier that way.”

  “Wow.” Remington’s mind balked. She realized that she had never really accepted the Atzlándia–Geneva Lake connection. It had been just too damned elaborate. “Tell me something, does Victor Loushane know about this?”

  “Hey, you’re the one who’s supposed to be the Loushane-family insider. I was hoping you could tell me.”

  A few days later, Tester managed to get Remington a copy of the final report on the FBI team’s activities in Mexico. A notation on the last known address of Raúl dos Santos made her skin crawl. She could hardly comprehend what she saw. Two worlds crashed into each other, the white-linen world of Val Duran and the spooky-ooky realm of Raúl dos Santos.

  The killer’s last known address, according to the FBI report, was Playa dos Volcanes, Rosarito, Mexico.

  —

  That evening Remington called Ellis. “I was thinking, I have to get away,” she told him. “Maybe us together over Christmas? Is the family doing anything?”

  “Dad’s too paranoid to go anywhere. He’s got a real bunker mentality developing.”

  “His private army still in place?”

  “Yup. He and Brock are convinced we’re under siege.”

  “So will they let you slip out?”

  “Let me?” Ellis asked. “I’m a big boy, Layla.”

  “Uh-huh. Don’t forget I witnessed you cry like a baby at Titanic.”

  She told him that a friend of her father’s had a Catalina Island charter business, and that the guy had forever been bugging her to take a cruise, on the house.

  “Ugh, fishing,” Ellis said.

  “So we don’t fish. We’ll snorkel.”

  “Snorkel. That makes it sound dirty.”

  Remington laughed. “We go out for a couple nights, chase the gray whales, maybe. Extraterritoriality, have you ever heard about that? It means when you head out to sea you’re beyond the laws and cares of the landlubber world. It’s why sailors have such a randy reputation. They’re beyond moral authority. They don’t have the church and cops and spouses looking over their shoulders.”

  “Arrrgh, matey!”

  “Yeah, let’s go be pirates for a few days.” Ellis was feeling better, Remington decided. Maybe the cloud of grief over his twin was beginning to lift.

  Humphrey Brennan ran
a thirty-two-foot trawler named the Island Maiden out of Avalon Marine Center on Catalina. The island floated off the coast twenty miles southwest of L.A. Hump Brennan offered sport-fishing charters, sunset cruises, whale-watching, bed-and-boat sleepovers. “We also do burials at sea,” he told them. He colored as soon as the words were out of his mouth, and later apologized to Remington, thinking the subject of burial might be sensitive to a surviving Loushane child.

  “Don’t worry about it.” Remington had known Hump Brennan since she was a kid. He had been a clerk alongside her father at the LAPD’s Parker Center headquarters. His dream upon retirement had always been this: a trawler, blue marlins, rum-laced drinks on the deck. He was taking a big hit gifting her with a free cruise during the lucrative Christmas season, and she appreciated it.

  The celebrated Catalina sea lions saw them off as the Island Maiden left Avalon Harbor. The day was sparkling. The town, with its Art Deco touches and its timeless atmosphere, slid by to starboard.

  “Marilyn Monroe lived here,” Brennan commented. “For a year before she went Hollywood.”

  “I’ll bet she wished she had never left,” Remington said. She tried to shake the tone of wistfulness that the trip was taking on. Being with Ellis was like handling a burn victim. Every touch could break open a fresh wound. She wasn’t all that made-whole herself. The trawler’s cabin had separate racks for them, but they would be able to reach across to each other in the night. Not for sex but for comforting each other, in case either of them started weeping.

  “Where are we headed?” Ellis sounded as though he were mining his words out of a deep shaft. Maybe bringing him along on this jaunt had been a mistake after all.

  “The grays and the bottlenose ought to be out,” Hump Brennan said. “You two don’t fish, right? But we could put a line in anyway, see what hits.”

  “I thought we might go down the coast to Rosarito,” Remington suggested.

  “Marilyn Monroe smoked a pipe, did you know that?” Hump asked.

  —

  Captain Hump put in at the new, still-under-construction Rosarito marina. All the big cruise-ship lines deposited their trash at sea in the area, so the Island Maiden had to fight her way through the litter to get to shore.

  Remington announced that she and Ellis would do a walkabout in town. “We’ll just be a few hours,” she told Hump.

  “Take your time,” he said, settling in a deck chair with a beer and a skipjack sandwich.

  They did. Remington guided Ellis through the markets and calles of the oceanfront city. They were relaxed and pretended to be happy. Once in a while, they held hands as they walked. A lot of their conversations started with the phrase “The thing about Caroline is…” They still spoke of her in the present tense, sounding like they were talking about sunlight in some faraway place.

  As they penetrated the southern neighborhood of town they picked up a tail, a short skell of a guy and his partner in crime, looking to take off the gringos. At least, that’s what it felt like to Remington.

  She finally turned around to face them. “Hey, go look for somebody else to rob,” she called out, waving her badge wallet at them and hoping they wouldn’t examine her “Probationary Officer” tin too closely. But she also kept her palm-size Baby Browning automatic in her shoulder bag in case the sharks couldn’t be warned off.

  The night before, as they lay three feet from each other in the darkness of the boat cabin, Ellis had voiced a question, his words disembodied and faint. “What are we doing here, Layla?”

  “You mean, how? Like, life on earth? Are you going all Buddhist on me?”

  “Why are you dragging me down to Mexico?”

  “I didn’t think I was dragging you. Jesus, this was supposed to help.”

  “You forget that I know you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You have an ulterior motive. Tell me, does it have to do with Val Duran?”

  “Who’s that? The name is dead to me, dead.” She meant it to sound fey and theatrical, but the words came out flat.

  Ellis was the kind of sweet, trusting child who would stick around even though he suspected that he was being taken advantage of. Remington didn’t know exactly why she had dragooned him into accompanying her on what was, really, a fishing expedition to Mexico. Only not the kind that involved real fish.

  Thoughts of Val Duran continued to consume her. She dreamed of him often, violent, sexual fantasies. Val Duran. Initials, V.D. Wasn’t that the truth. The guy was a virus. They kept infecting each other. She had once thought going to bed with him was an obliteration, like those new noise-canceling headphones just on the market. But that wasn’t it. They’d had nothing more together than a mucky, sleazy, shared STD, a spiritually transmitted disease. One that they had “communicated” to each other—what a lovely way of putting it.

  Now she marched Ellis through the sandy streets of Playa de los Volcanes, the little village on the southern border of Rosarito. To the green-painted concrete brick house hidden behind a curtain of flowers where Val Duran told Remington he grew up.

  “What’s this?” Ellis asked.

  “A friend of mine.”

  Luzmarie answered when Remington knocked on the screen door. The girl’s face lit up in recognition.

  “Hola!”

  “Layla Remington, remember?”

  “Sí, sí, por favor, entren.”

  There were the usual language difficulties. Remington tried to make Luzmarie understand that she just happened to be in town and decided to drop by.

  “And Ninny?” she asked

  “Ella estará feliz de verte,” Luzmarie said, repeating the word “feliz” over and over until Remington got the meaning that the old woman would be happy to see them.

  They found her in the back garden, sunning herself, but with a blanket across her lap to ward off any chill. Wordless as always, grimacing sourly, she looked anything but pleased that Remington had shown up. They sat together. Luzmarie served them delicious papaya batidos. Ninny fixed the same searching stare on Remington’s face as the first time she had been there.

  After a moment, Remington excused herself to use the bathroom. Embarrassed, Luzmarie indicated that an outhouse was attached to the main residence. She pointed the way.

  Ellis didn’t mind being parked. He seemed always easy, never awkward or bored, at home within his own skin. Remington left him with the two women. She walked through the cool, deserted house. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, but the place was quickly searched.

  In a room off a back hallway, she found Ninny’s bed and intimate environs. The smell of old age hung heavy in the air. Remington came across a collection of framed photographs, not hung on the wall but laid out flat atop a dresser. Ninny as a younger woman, dark-eyed and strikingly attractive. Several shots of an assembled family. An ancient-looking male. A priest.

  Remington slipped one of the photos into her shoulder bag. Just as she did so, Luzmarie passed in the hall. Remington went out to her, miming confusion over which room was which. The girl guided her back to the garden.

  “Gracias, gracias.” Remington kept murmuring her thanks. She told Ellis that it was time to go. He rose to his feet.

  “Brother y sister?” Luzmarie asked in heavily accented English. Remington hadn’t realized that she understood any words in the language at all.

  “Yes.” Ellis pointed to himself and to Remington. “Brother and sister.”

  Beaming, Remington spilled words at her, wanting to get out of there. Sí, sí, thank you for the visit, it was great, you are very pretty. She kissed Ninny on the cheek and earned a hard stare for her trouble. Trailing their goodbyes, she hustled Ellis out.

  “What the hell was that?” Ellis demanded.

  “Wait.”

  She had one more stop to make, at another house a short way down the little sand trough of a lane. She knocked at the door.

  “What?” Ellis asked.

  “Wait,” Remington said again. There was n
o answer at the bungalow of Val’s former English tutor.

  They walked into the village and ordered a couple of beers at an open-air cantina. Remington struck up a conversation with another customer, a beach-bitten American ex-pat.

  “I’m looking for a guy, hippie kind of guy lived up the way maybe ten years back, could still be here—the red house with all the rusty lawn sculpture.”

  The ex-pat tilted his beer bottle at her. “What do you want him for? You a debt collector?”

  “He’s got an inheritance coming, if I can locate him,” Remington said.

  “We work for a lawyer,” Ellis put in, surprising Remington. She kicked him under the table.

  “The Stag,” said the ex-pat.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s what he called himself. Jordan ‘the Stag’ Callens. He’s the one who did all them funky metal sculptures. Used to teach English to the natives, too, fill them up with his harebrained philosophy.”

  “He around?”

  “I don’t think the Stag’s going to be needing any inheritance money anytime soon. I heard he was dead.”

  Finishing their beers, Ellis and she walked out to the beach and turned north, toward town and the marina, where the Island Maiden was docked. He was getting peeved at being kept in the dark. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  Remington took the photograph filched from Ninny out of her bag and showed it to him. “Who is that?”

  Ellis examined the shot. A collection of seven children in a range of ages, grouped around a mature woman.

  “That’s her.” Ellis pointed to the woman, recognizable as Ninny. “So?”

  “The oldest boy, the tall one. Look at him close.”

  “Val Duran?”

  Remington filled him in on the first visit she had made to the house in Playa de los Volcanes. Val’s tenderness with the old woman, whom he had introduced as his childhood nurse.