America Libre

by Raul Ramos y Sanchez

  “If they’ve got the balls to mix it up with us, then I say, bring it on. But believe me, Gary, the greasers will never know what hit ’em.”

  As Wally disconnected, Gary Putnam adjusted his thick horn-rimmed glasses and turned to the driver of the SUV. “Wally says we go,” he said, his mouth suddenly dry.

  Mano’s pulse was racing. Lying near the edge of the roof, he focused his binoculars on the three approaching vehicles. Nesto and his men had already been alerted and were poised to strike on his signal. Mano would have to decide in the next few seconds.

  “Do you think it’s them?” Jo asked, lying next to him.

  “We have to be sure,” he said softly.

  The vehicles were two blocks away, traveling at a normal speed, but staying suspiciously close together. A Chevy Suburban led the pack, followed by a Camry sedan and a ragged Chrysler minivan.

  “We’re running out of time,” Jo said through gritted teeth.

  Mano’s heartbeat was now thundering in his ears. If he made the wrong choice, innocent people would die. Then he saw the proof he’d been waiting for. As the convoy gained speed, gun barrels emerged from the windows of the vehicles.

  “Signal the trucks,” Mano said with a calm that belied his pounding heart.

  “Go, Go, GO! HURRY!” Jo yelled into her vu-phone.

  The vigilante vehicles were now racing past Mano’s position near the middle of the block, bearing down on the crowd outside El Lobo. On the cross street just ahead of the convoy, two Mack trucks trundled into the intersection from opposite directions and stopped, forming a roadblock. The neat line of the convoy became a swirl of vehicles fishtailing wildly as they slammed on their brakes.

  “Open fire,” Mano said into his walkie-talkie.

  The syncopated barking of assault rifles erupted in the concrete gorge. Mano heard Jo’s AK-47 firing beside him in short, controlled bursts as the pockmarks of bullets began to cover the vehicles.

  The driver of the Suburban floored the SUV in reverse and succeeded in ramming a utility pole. The Camry, its windshield shattered, rolled to a stop. The minivan managed a U-turn and began retreating from the ambush, a panicked shooter firing wildly into the night from its rear window.

  Mano’s fire plan for the RPGs was devastatingly simple. Holding the battery-powered spotlight by its pistol grip, Mano directed a thirteen-million-candlepower beacon onto the roof of the minivan. Two seconds later, a rocket-propelled grenade struck the front of the minivan on the passenger’s side. A second shot missed, striking the pavement behind the vehicle, but it didn’t matter; the minivan, still rolling, burst into flames.

  Mano then turned his spotlight on the Suburban, which was pulling forward for another try at an escape. The first grenade struck near the rear wheel of the vehicle, destroying its axle and leaving the SUV foundering. The second hit the vehicle dead center on the driver’s side, sending a shower of flying metal whirling over Mano’s head. All three vehicles had been neutralized.

  “Keep them pinned down,” Mano said into his walkie-talkie. “We’re headed for the ground.”

  With the chatter of AK-47s echoing below, Mano and Jo donned black masks and scrambled down the fire escape at the building’s west end. After reaching Agnes Street, Mano peered carefully around the corner of the building. The minivan was engulfed in flames—no chance of survivors there. But there was still movement inside the sedan and the SUV.

  “Cease fire,” Mano said into the walkie-talkie.

  The shooting died away, leaving a stillness broken only by the crackle of flames from the minivan. “Come out with your hands up,” Mano yelled.

  A man wearing thick glasses emerged from the Suburban, stumbling on a wounded leg, frantically waving his hands in the air. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! I’m not armed, see?”

  Then the door of the Camry opened slowly and a tall, rangy man stepped silently into the street, his hands above his head.

  Less than six minutes after the first shots were fired, La Defensa del Pueblo had taken its first prisoners.

  The slam of the massive door echoed throughout the vacant building.

  “They’re on ice,” Nesto announced after locking up the prisoners. “I say we start with the big one. He’s gonna be a lot more fun to mess up.”

  Nesto, Jo, Ramon, and Mano were gathered outside their makeshift jail—the steel-lined impeller test chamber at an abandoned jet engine plant. This was the moment Mano had been waiting for. He was face to face with the men who had slaughtered so many innocent people—the Jimenez twins, his neighbors, his niece—people he’d known and loved. Still, there were some things Mano could not bring himself to do.

  “We’re not going to torture the prisoners,” Mano said.

  Nesto laughed in derision. “Are you shittin’ me, man? You’re not gonna get anything out of these guys without some major pain.”

  “Mano, this has been your operation from the start,” Ramon said. “In my opinion, you should decide how to interrogate these men.”

  “I agree,” Jo added.

  Mano stared at the floor. The time to help his people was here. Just as in Afghanistan, the speeches and patriotic words were gone. All that remained was the raw truth of life and death. He was beyond hatred and vengeance now. These men were a cancer, a sick cluster of cells that had to be removed. Turn them over to the police and they would alert the others, the ones who really pulled the strings. It was up to him to put an end to this. As he’d been trained in the Rangers, he had to put aside his feelings and act with the cold swiftness of a surgeon. “I think we can make the one with the glasses talk,” he said finally.

  The vigilantes were seated on the floor in opposite corners of the test chamber when Mano and Nesto entered the steel-lined room.

  Mano approached the tall vigilante holding his Glock-32. “I want to know who organized these raids.”

  The vigilante spit at Mano’s feet. “Go to hell, greaser. If I’d known it was you that attacked us instead of the cops, you’d never have taken me alive.”

  Mano pulled the man to his feet and pressed the gun under the man’s chin. “I’m going to count to three,” he said with ice in his voice. “If you don’t tell me who organized these raids, you’re dead.”

  The tall man quivered but maintained a defiant look. In a soft voice, Mano began a slow count. “One… two… three—”

  He squeezed the trigger.

  Blood and tissue from the man’s head splattered the steel wall and sprayed the others in the room.

  Mano turned to the other vigilante, his thick glasses now spotted with blood.

  “Oh my God, please don’t shoot!” the man shrieked, holding his hands up and turning his face away.

  Mano pulled the vigilante to his feet and gently held him against the wall, keeping the gun pointed toward the ground.

  “Who is responsible for organizing these raids?” Mano asked him softly.

  “O’Connor… Wally O’Connor,” the vigilante replied in a hoarse whisper, tears streaming from his eyes. Mano released him, and the man slid slowly down the wall until he lay, sobbing, on the floor.

  Mano crouched beside him. “Are you telling me the truth?”

  “I swear it. I swear it,” he whimpered. “Wally’s a real estate agent—got an office in El Segundo. He brought us all together and bankrolled the whole deal.”

  Mano, Nesto, and Ramon huddled around the Volvo while Jo sat inside navigating through the touch-screen Internet feed on the dashboard.

  “It checks out,” Jo said. “Walter O’Connor is a Realtor, affiliated with Hopewell. Rather successful, too. He grossed over sixty million in sales last year. Not bad for an ex-con. He spent three years in San Quentin for armed robbery and was paroled in ’98.”

  “I did some time in San Quentin,” Nesto said. “The place is lousy with guys from the Aryan Fatherland. Sounds like we know where this dude went to school.”

  “It all fits,” Ramon agreed. “A group like the Aryan Fatherland wou
ld do anything to incite a race war.”

  “Are we sure this is our man?” Mano asked.

  “That dude with the glasses looked too terrified to lie, ese,” Nesto said. Then he turned to Mano. “You’re one bad motherfucker, man.”

  Mano’s face was expressionless. “The tall one was never going to talk. Executing him in front of the other one served its purpose. That’s all.”

  Ramon pointed to O’Connor’s address on the display. “It’s too bad this guy’s house isn’t on a Green Planet pickup route. We could learn a lot from his garbage.”

  “He don’t seem like the type that recycles his Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets, you know what I mean?” Nesto said with a sneer.

  “Even if O’Connor isn’t their top leader, he could lead us to the others,” Mano said.

  Jo nodded in agreement. “I say we move on O’Connor.”

  “In that case, there’s one more thing I need to do,” Mano said, walking back toward the test chamber. A few moments later, the trio outside heard the muffled pop of a gunshot. Then Mano emerged from the building.

  Jo and Ramon exchanged glances. In that moment, they both knew Mano had become more than a hired bodyguard. This deed had committed him to their cause in a way no oath of loyalty could have.

  “He would have alerted O’Connor if we’d turned him over to the police,” Mano said, his voice chillingly sober. “The man was a criminal. We have no courts to try him. For now, this is our only choice for justicia.”

  As the others stared at him in stunned silence, Mano realized he’d crossed a threshold from which he could never return.

  Arriving on the scene shortly after the skirmish on Agnes Street, the LAPD found eight bodies amid the charred wreckage of three vehicles. The names of those killed were withheld pending notification of next of kin. No weapons were found, but the police conjectured they’d been carried off by the winning faction.

  The only public record of the event came from an E! Network camera crew shooting a puff piece on Tomas Cruz’s appearance at El Lobo. After hearing gunfire and explosions outside, the E! crew emerged from the club in time to film two masked figures, both in black fatigues and armed with AK-47s, sprinting past the corner of a building. The exclusive footage would be showcased with stunning impact.

  Twenty-four hours after the clash, NBC aired a special report titled Attack on Agnes Street. Using the E! crew’s footage and archival images of urban guerrillas from Belfast to Beirut, the NBC program sensationally documented the new phase in the unrest: a coordinated paramilitary attack by the insurgents.

  THE RIO GRANDE INCIDENT:

  Month 6, Day 5

  Mano’s mind was churning as he entered the DDP conference room. His plan to locate the leader of the vigilantes had gone well enough, but a major hurdle still remained. How would they get to Walter O’Connor? He hoped this meeting would sort that out.

  Ramon, already seated at the oval table, held up a copy of the Los Angeles Times as Mano sat down. “Your attack on the vigilantes has really helped our cause, amigo. This publicity is a godsend.”

  Dominating the paper’s front page was a grainy still-frame image from the E! footage. It showed Mano and Jo in black fatigues peering around the corner of a building, weapons at the ready, faces hidden behind black masks.

  “I’m more concerned with catching O’Connor.”

  “Jo says she’s got a plan in mind. She’ll be here soon.”

  Despite his focus on O’Connor, Mano’s thoughts wandered to Jo. She was unlike any other woman he’d known. Yes, she was achingly beautiful, but it was more than that. Jo’s rare mix of courage and class made her seem raw and silky all at once. He found the contradiction strangely seductive.

  Mano pointed to the newspaper. “I asked Jo why someone with her kind of money would get involved in this stuff, but I didn’t really understand her answer.”

  “This isn’t the first time Jo’s picture has made the front page.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I met Jo’s father in Uruguay a few years back and he told me an interesting story. When Jo was nine, she talked a group of children in her neighborhood into attending a Tupamaro demonstration against the government in Montevideo. It turns out over four hundred thousand people showed up. The next day, a picture of Jo and her friends holding their hand-lettered signs was on the front page of the paper in Montevideo. The photo eventually appeared on TV shows, magazines, and posters. It became a symbol of government resistance. It’s hard to forget that kind of excitement. Jo’s father was a rebel, too. She grew up with revolution in her baby formula. Jo tries hard to look like a rich liberal. But believe me, Mano, that’s a pose. Jo’s got a fire in her belly.”

  “She’s no stranger to guns.”

  The sound of footsteps in the hallway announced Jo’s approach. “Ah, I see the fair damsel from Montevideo has arrived,” Ramon said with a mock bow as she entered the room.

  Jo smiled. “Cut the bullshit, Ray. I’ve got a plan to nab O’Connor that I want to discuss—and we don’t have much time.”

  At the CIA, Hank Evans tossed a copy of the Los Angeles Times toward Maria Prado, a blurry picture of two black-masked guerrillas on the front page. “It looks like we’ve got some commando wannabes in East L.A., Maria. Any idea who they might be?”

  Prado leaned back, thrusting her chin in the air. “If I recall,” she said, “you felt my investigation of the Eslos wasn’t a high priority.”

  “OK, Maria, maybe I was wrong.”

  “Maybe?”

  “All right. I admit it. You warned me and I blew it off. Now, help me out here. This is starting to look serious.”

  Satisfied by his admission, Prado began briefing her boss. “Well, as always, I think it comes down to means and motive. The gangs certainly have the means—but I can’t see their motive here. A number of the gangs are extremely well-armed, but this operation seems out of character,” Prado said, tapping the newspaper photo. “The gangs are driven mostly by profit. Some call them the barrios’ best entrepreneurs. And everybody knows the gangs fight each other for turf. But what most people overlook is that the turf they fight over is an exclusive franchise to traffic in drugs, prostitution, gambling, and extortion. That produces some serious cash. But there’s no money in taking out a bunch of rednecks,” Prado said, her enthusiasm growing.

  “Then there are the radical groups—and there’s a lot of them, too. Student groups, union groups, community groups—they’re coming out of the woodwork in East L.A. They’ve got the motive but not the means—most of them are just hot air. They prefer to fight in the courts and in the media. La Defensa del Pueblo is probably the most visible of these radical groups right now.”

  Hank nodded. “Yes, I remember your report on them.”

  “If a group like the DDP could somehow enlist the help of the gangs, that could be real trouble. You’d have a hybrid group with both means and motive. I think that’s what we’re seeing here, Hank.”

  “You still want to get a mole into La Defensa del Pueblo?”

  “I do,” she replied quickly. “The DDP seems the logical place to start. But I’m not certain they’re the ones behind this violence. The leaders of the DDP appear way too effete for wet work. At the very least, a mole at La Defensa del Pueblo will help us rule them out, and maybe lead us to the real troublemakers.”

  “You have my authorization. Get on it, Maria, and keep me posted.”

  Pedro made sure his mother was busy in the kitchen, then carefully unfolded the cover page from the Los Angeles Times stashed in his math book. “Here, Julio. Lamp this,” he said, passing the torn-off page to his brother.

  “Tight!” Julio replied excitedly, staring at the photograph of the guerrillas.

  Pedro pointed to the weapons held by the pair in the photo. “Those are AK-47s,” he said, trying to impress his sibling.

  “I know that,” Julio said indignantly. “Everybody in school was talking about Agnes Street.”

 
; “Yeah, that was way tight.”

  “The big guy in the picture sorta looks like Papi.”

  Pedro sneered. “Papi? He was probably with his guerra again.”

  “Where did you hear—” Julio stopped in midsentence as Rosa entered the living room.

  Pedro hurriedly folded the newspaper page and tucked it back in his book. The furtive gesture caught Rosa’s attention.

  “What have you got there, Pedro?” she said, drawing closer.

  “Just something from school.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing, Mami.”

  Rosa held out her hand. “Let me see.”

  His head bowed, the boy gave her the newspaper page.

  Rosa unfolded the sheet and scanned the front-page article. At the bodega, she’d overheard people talking about the gunfight on Agnes Street, but this was the first time she had seen any news coverage on the event. She crumpled the paper and held it away from her like something rotten.

  “These men are not heroes, do you understand?” Rosa said sternly. “They’re fools—and they’re going to get more people killed in the barrios. This is why I won’t let you bring any newspapers into this house. The people who write this don’t care how it affects kids like you.”

  “But, Mami, the gabachos had it coming,” Pedro protested.

  Rosa’s face hardened. “Pedro! You will never use that word again, do you hear me? You’re insulting yourself when you use words like that. How can you expect to be treated with dignity if you don’t do the same?”

  Pedro stood silently for a moment, then sulked into the bedroom. Julio quickly followed him.

  Rosa sighed heavily. Mano’s example was hurting their sons. Staying out late at night was not how a decent man behaved. Even if Mano was doing nothing wrong, everyone gossiped and assumed the worst. She could see Pedro’s respect for his father fade more each day—and the influence of the streets grow in its place.