13 Under the Wire

by Gil Reavill

  As she approached, she had a flash that the guard looked like Val Duran.

  Not even close. The sentry turned out to be a gawky kid dressed in an ill-fitting suit. “May I visit?” Remington asked.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but it’s parishioners only,” he said. Polite enough, trying to be official.

  “I’m supposed to meet someone here, a young man. He’d probably be driving a gray SUV. Ellis Loushane?”

  A flicker of interest passed over the kid’s eyes at the sound of the magic last name. “No one unfamiliar has been by today.”

  Remington sat motionless for a beat. She thought of trying the Zuma Beach place, over the Malibu Hills, but decided that she didn’t have the heart. She felt lost. Her emotions had been raw and uncontrollable since the desert. Anything could set her off. She swallowed back a sob.

  “Are you sad?” the kid asked, leaning in, his spotty face looming in the driver’s-side window. “The Lord is with you.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.” Remington had seen things. She had done things.

  The kid looked puzzled. “Well, it’s right to fear the Lord, ma’am.”

  Her thoughts were elsewhere. “This town…” she said, trailing off.

  The kid took a moment to come up with an applicable Bible verse. “Destructive forces are at work in the city, threats and lies never leave its streets.”

  Remington looked up at him. “That’s nice. Where is that from, Psalms?”

  He nodded. “Fifty-five eleven.”

  Remington realized that the kid was right, or King David was right, or whoever it was that wrote fifty-five eleven. It wasn’t over. Threats and lies still stalked the land.

  “Thanks,” she said, putting the Honda into gear.

  “The Lord be with you, ma’am,” the kid said.

  Scott Sullivan, her stalwart protector, remained at his post in front of her Los Feliz apartment. Vigilant as he was, Remington didn’t think he had detected her absence. She told him she was ready to return to Wildermanse. It was time for her to beard the lion in his den. She needed to speak to Victor Loushane.

  On the half-hour ride up the Hollywood Freeway to Granada Hills, she mulled over what she had found out from Señor Ricardo Vega, the most excellent police clerk at Tijuana’s policía municipal. Over the phone on his return call, he had read Remington sections of a local attorney general’s report labeled a “Clasificación de Incidentes,” about the previous death at Hotel Baja California.

  Incident Classification: suicide. Along with the occurrence date and time, the report date and time, the status of the investigation (“closed”) and such details as the lighting at the scene (“good”), the document listed known information on the “Victim Persons.”

  Guerreros Zaldivar Guerrero, age eighteen, a resident of Tijuana. No occupation determined, an address listed in the southwest neighborhood of Macias, a poor quarter. Height, weight, hair and eye color. Other notations included sobriety (“unknown”) and mental-health evaluation (“unknown”).

  A statement of the first responder, an officer of the policía municipal, had been helpful:

  “Victim Guerreros Zaldivar was found deceased on pavement, 1200 block Av. Revolución, proximate to Hotel Baja California. Victim was lying on his left side facing east and had foam discharge around his mouth and nose. Victim was cold to the touch. Victim was wearing a striped green shirt, Prima brand white fútbol-style shorts, Nike Dunk Low Pro brand sports shoes.”

  Remington had never been privy to any of the forensic details of Simon’s death. She knew that the toxicology exam on Simon had turned up drugs. Guerreros died twenty-three weeks and two days before Simon, on the same spot and in the same manner. As she had listened to the report on Guerreros’s death, Remington experienced a déjà-vu-style sense that she was hearing about what had happened to Simon Loushane.

  An attached autopsy report spelled it out: “The cause of death was massive blunt-force trauma to the right arm and to the front of the torso, consistent with high-speed impact. There was transmission of force superiorly through the right arm and shoulder, pelvis and vertebral column into the head. Death was very rapid, within seconds. Loss of consciousness was instantaneous upon impact.”

  As brutal as the facts were, Remington had found some consolation in the words “very rapid” and “instantaneous.” Simon had not suffered.

  She wanted to tell someone. She wanted to tell Ellis. “Did you know that Val Duran’s kid brother killed himself off the fourth floor of Hotel Baja California a half year before Simon did?” But Ellis Loushane was unreachable.

  What could it mean? A mere coincidence, surely. Two swans flew off from the same balcony six months apart. A few weeks after that, the brother of one swan, Tino Zaldivar, had met and romanced the sister of the other, Caroline Loushane. Another coincidence? The parts didn’t fit. Something wasn’t clicking.

  It didn’t come together for her until she returned to Wildermanse. Sully drove her through the security perimeter and deposited her at the front entrance of the house. Despite all the armed guards in the vicinity, the massive residence itself appeared spookily empty. It wasn’t as if Remington could call out, “Hello! I’m home!” or anything. But someone was usually there to take note of her comings and goings.

  It suited Remington not to encounter anyone. She turned left down the central hallway, intending to take the back stairs to the second floor. In the process, she passed a wall hung with photographs and family mementos, an “I love me” arrangement featuring the many high points of Victor Loushane’s illustrious career. She had walked the same hall perhaps a dozen times in her life. But on this pass a particular photo caught her eye.

  A decade-old shot, showing the children of the family. Nothing remarkable about it, except for one thing. While she was at her apartment, Remington had retrieved the photo that she had taken from Ninny Zaldivar’s home in Rosarito. Now the two families, Zaldivar-Guerrero and Loushane, collided in her mind.

  Slipping the stolen photo from her shoulder bag, Remington held it up against the one on Victor’s “I love me” wall.

  Tino Zaldivar, aka Val Duran.

  Ellis Loushane.

  In the two family portraits, both boys were about the same age—around twelve or so. They didn’t resemble each other, not really. One had black hair and the other was blond as blond could be.

  But if you looked only at the eyes…

  Remington stared. She didn’t trust herself to make the call. She pried the Loushane family portrait off the wall and took the two of them up to the guest room. She dropped down onto the bed and compared the photographs side by side. She tried masking off just the eyes with her thumbs and forefingers.

  It was uncanny. With a Photoshop-equipped computer, she could have switched the eyes from one portrait to the other and would still have recognized both boys.

  Remington’s mind raced. It was as if the walls of Jericho were tumbling down. Everything she thought she knew was wrong.

  Of course. The reason they had all been attracted to and charmed by Tino Zaldivar. Because he resembled Ellis.

  The similarity had been elusive, and perhaps there had been a degree of psychological denial about it. For Caroline, and even in some twisted way for Remington, it had to be some sick incest undertow. For Ellis, it must have been like looking in the mirror. It was why she had always thought of Ellis while making love with Val.

  During his revelatory phone call, the Tijuana police clerk had mentioned another odd coincidence. “And I have something else, too, though I don’t know if it would be of interest to you. This Guerreros Zaldivar Guerrero about whom you inquired?”

  “Yes?” The swan who had flown off the fourth floor of the Hotel Baja California, six months before Simon had.

  “Guerreros Zaldivar was possessed of a sister, Laura Zaldivar Guerrero. A little older than her brother. But Madre de Dios, Miss Remington, Laura Zaldivar, too, is passed away, God protect her soul.”

  On the p
hone with Vega—and as she had once before, when she heard of Cindy Loushane’s death—Remington had blurted out the word as if she knew the circumstances ahead of time.

  “Murdered.”

  —

  Hermana loved the Loushane beach house. She could have stayed there very contentedly for the rest of her life, lounging around in the sun, swimming, maybe learning to surf. The Yanquis had stolen all the best places for themselves, and Zuma Beach was very probably on the list of the best places in the world. Better than the pollution-fouled shore at Rosarito, that was for sure, where if you dipped your toe in the water it would emerge with a stinging rash.

  She stood on the deck off the big living room, looking out at the Pacific. The waves advanced like whitecapped soldiers onto the yellow sands. Everything was nice, that was the word for it in English. Bonito. The people on the beach, happy and enjoying themselves. The sand itself, sparkling clean, with no litter that Hermana could see. And the houses all up and down the beach, just like this one, worth one million dollars.

  Earlier, Fausto had corrected her, saying the houses thereabouts were worth not one but “several” million. She didn’t really believe him. No single building made of stone and wood could be worth as much as that. Hermana couldn’t deny that this particular house, belonging to the Loushanes, just one of their many residences, was really very…nice.

  So she would be truly sorry to burn the place down. What a waste. The whole thing was an enormous waste. She was the only female of the family left. Sofia, dying of thirst in the desert attempting to cross the border. Oiny and Tralla, gone, used up as whores for the narcos. Sweet Laura, a heartbreak of a child, a death so horrible Hermana didn’t even want to think about it.

  The problem, she always thought, was that the Zaldivar-Guerrero family had not been born into the horrors of poverty. Hermana and her brothers and sisters had fine childhoods in Rosarito. Thus they had experienced a tantalizing taste of the good life before they lost it all. If they had grown up as garbage pickers, it would have been different. But they weren’t. Everything went south—that’s how the Yanquis said it, wasn’t that funny?—when their father abandoned them.

  Down below Hermana was the beach house’s enclosed patio, now made over into a hog pen where Fausto kept his sicarios. The strange hitmen were all sick. Hermana could practically feel the heat of their fevers rising up to her. They had undergone her brother’s stupid brain operation that supposedly rendered them invincible. What it rendered them was half dead. Two had died on the journey north from Mirage Ranch, one had been killed in the nosey girl cop’s apartment, so now there were only six left.

  Fausto’s cauldron rested in the middle of the patio, chock-full of palo sticks, gory chunks of dried blood and random bones from several species of animals, one of which walked on two legs. He had la nganga placed amid his zombi army so that they might soak up its evil rays. Hermana could smell the thing from where she stood, twenty feet above it.

  The ocean swallowed the sun. It was almost time. Hermana turned her back on the beach. She went through the sliding glass doors into the living room. Fausto was there, sitting on the sofa with Chupé, with los violadores lounging around on the floor next to them. There were three of them. The sodomizers were bored because the cable in the house had been disconnected. All they could get was shitty broadcast TV, with only a single channel in Spanish.

  “We should go,” Hermana said to her brother. They had been making it a point lately to speak English with each other, without formally agreeing to do so.

  “Soon,” Fausto said. He was distracted. This was what he had always dreamed about. Having the child of his sworn enemy at his mercy.

  In one of the second-floor bedrooms, the Loushane boy was tied up, roped to a mattress on the floor. A section of tape had been pasted over his mouth. Every once in a while one of the three sodomizers would rise lazily to his feet, grunting with the effort, as if he was tired but determined to do his duty. Then he’d head upstairs, unbuckling his belt as he climbed the steps.

  “Raped to death.” As their sisters had been. That was Fausto’s announced intention with the kid. That was his plan. As it had been done to the Zaldivars, so it would be done to the Loushanes.

  Hermana hadn’t wanted any part of it, but she passed through the living room and climbed the stairs to take a peek at what was left of Ellis Loushane.

  He lay on his side, his clothes in shreds, the mattress well bloodied behind him. Surprisingly, though los violadores had been at work on him for a full half day, he still remained conscious. The boy stared at her. Only his eyes were alive. They burned with a terrifying fire. Hermana felt an impulse to help him in his suffering. Bring him a drink of water. Put a bullet into him to end his misery. But she knew that she would catch hell from Fausto if she made a move to do any of those things.

  Speak of the devil…Without her being aware of it, her brother had come up behind her in the hallway. Because he was so small, his step was lighter than anyone’s.

  “Finish him,” Hermana pleaded.

  Fausto thought of their sisters Oiny and Tralla, who had spent their lives as fuck meat for the narcos.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  When the time came to leave, they loaded the sicarios into Fausto’s tricked-out dualie for the trip back out to Granada Hills. Chupé managed to move the black cauldron back into its tool-locker nest in the truck. Tino had gone on ahead to the Aliso Canyon rental before them. As much as he relished the humiliation and destruction of Ellis Loushane, he told them, he had many things to attend to before the big night.

  “I trust you,” he said to his brother. Meaning that he could rely on Fausto to finish the job right.

  When they were all loaded up and ready to go, Fausto brought Hermana back into the beach house. She took a MAC-10 machine pistol out of her shoulder bag and brandished it.

  “Please,” she said. “Let me put a couple into him.” She gestured upstairs, where the shell of a human being still lay bound, gagged and raped to ribbons.

  Fausto merely shook his head. “Here,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  Alone among the surviving Zaldivars, Hermana used tobacco. Fausto employed it only for religious purposes. Now he asked his sister to give him a cigarette and a book of matches. Her brand in the States and, when she could get them, in Mexico, too, was always unfiltered Camel Regulars. The matches she turned up out of her pocket were generic, from 7-Eleven.

  Fausto surprised her by lighting up and puffing the cigarette awake. When he coughed, she laughed at him. “You’re out of practice, querido.” Calling him darling.

  “So, watch,” Fausto said. “The cheapest way to make a firebomb, a time bomb.”

  “Which one is it?” Hermana wanted to know.

  “Both,” answered Fausto.

  He threw down a collection of gas-soaked rags that he had brought in from the truck. Instantly, the chemical tang of petroleum rose into the room. Fausto inserted the lit cigarette behind the double rank of paper matches in the book, shoving it down so that it stuck there. Then he laid the cigarette-and-matchbook combo atop the piled rags.

  “Do you see?” Fausto was very proud of himself. With his foot, he moved the whole mess next to the sofa. “El tobaco burns, lights up the matches, whoosh!”

  He splayed out his fingers in imitation of an explosion.

  “I get it.” Hermana kneeled down and adjusted the angle of the cigarette, so that when it burned down the lit end would be sure to come in contact with the match heads.

  “Ticktack, ticktack, tick,” said Fausto. They hurried out. As they were leaving, Hermana took a last lingering look around. They had taken it over for less than a full day, but she would miss this place. She thought she heard a moan from upstairs, but she couldn’t be sure, and believed maybe her mind was deceiving her.

  —

  The offices from which Victor Loushane ran his business and his political empire took up the entire first floor of the eastern wing
at Wildermanse. Densely equipped with TVs—tuned, sound off, to Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN or BBC World—the suite was actually rather modest, given the multimillion-dollar scale of the enterprise. But its computer stations were jacked directly into Pershing International’s offices downtown, so the boss stayed very much in touch. Victor relished the inevitable comparisons to the penthouse of Howard Hughes at the Desert Inn, the control center of a sprawling conglomerate.

  The Loushane patriarch got out in the world a little more than the reclusive Hughes. He also kept another, more modest office at Wildermanse, a study referred to as “the family office,” off the back living room. That’s where Remington found him, coming down from her bedroom at dusk. The door was open, and she entered without Victor’s seeing her at first.

  She was struck by how haggard he looked. Remington’s image of him had been formed in her teens, when Victor was a vigorous, larger-than-life presence. He had scared her then. Now he appeared diminished, sitting at his desk without the inevitable shadow of his oldest son. Billionaires and beautiful women, she knew, were never alone. Bees as well as other insects were attracted to their honey. So this was a rare glimpse.

  “Sir?”

  He startled, craning his head at her. “Car—” he started to say, but then caught himself. Well, an honest mistake. After all, Remington was wearing his dead daughter’s clothes.

  “Layla, please, come in.”

  “Do you have a moment to talk?”

  He hesitated. “Um, surely.” He set aside a sheaf of papers. “What can I do for you?”

  Her heart beat violently. She approached and slid the family photo stolen from Ninny Zaldivar in front of Victor. Then she stepped back and sat in an armchair that faced the desk.