by Gil Reavill
Nothing, no way out, nothing. I’ll die here. She knew exactly where George Wold was headed with Manson. Out to tear apart Russell Dorian as the ultimate author of the Odalon massacre. What had Arlene Honeywell told her? That Dorian had taken over the Ro-Co-Co compound? Could that really be the case, or was it just the senile mumblings of a washed-up C-movie actress?
It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
Remington slept.
She woke in near-total darkness. Her mouth was a sandpit.
A small child moved about the room near Wold’s workbench.
“I’m here,” she croaked, and the child ran out of the room chittering in fear.
Another hallucination. Her mind really was going. No child had appeared. Remington was alone. She could not prevent herself from stringing together fantasies of release. Wold might come back from his homicidal errand. She might talk him into freeing her.
Might, might, might. She’d die of exposure long before that. And if Wold was killed in the execution of his last climactic revenge murder? No one ever came to this remote ranch. She would perish along with the rest of the caged animals. A slow, gruesome death of thirst and starvation.
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Remington’s mother used to coo those words to her. It was one of Layla’s few childhood memories of Mona. Later on, she found out that Julian of Norwich, the Anglican anchoress saint, had quoted the phrase as the very words of the Almighty. The nun claimed that she heard God murmur the soothing sentiment directly into her ear.
Remington listened for the whisper of God now, but she could hear nothing but the faint swish of wind in the pines outside her prison.
The child returned. It wasn’t a human child after all. It was a young chimpanzee.
“Hello,” Remington said cautiously.
Again, the creature spooked.
“No, no!” pleaded Remington. “Come back!”
After a while, it did. A sweet little soul, big-eyed and wide-grinned. It approached Remington’s cage.
“Water,” Remington croaked.
The darling child crossed dutifully to the workbench and brought back the squeeze bottle. It fed a stream of the delicious liquid into Remington’s mouth. She glugged and glugged and couldn’t get enough. The child patiently continued until the water ran out. The bottle made a funny wheeze as it did, and the little chimp laughed.
Can an animal laugh? But it really had—it wasn’t just Remington’s scrambled mind. Laughter from a nonhuman creature! Her heart, in a vulnerable state as it was, swelled with the wonder of the world.
The chimp child wandered away.
“Oh, oh, don’t go!” Remington cried.
It came back. She? He? Remington couldn’t tell. The animal wore a small diaper, sagging and a little worse for wear, but nonetheless covering all the gender bits.
A boy, Remington decided. Prince Charming, her knight in shining diapers come to rescue the damsel in distress.
She would call him Prince.
“Can you, Prince?” Remington crooned, rattling the door of the isolette. “Please? Open?”
The animal rattled the cage along with her. Great fun.
Then he stopped, looked Remington directly in the eye, and curled his hand, opened it wide and splayed his fingers, then pumped his arm up and down.
Could it be? Could this young thing be trained in ASL?
But Remington was wholly ignorant of American Sign Language.
The chimp made the same motions: curled hand, splayed fingers, arm pump.
What was he trying to say?
“Prince, honey?” Remington said. “What? What is it?”
Remington thought back to the evening when she, Stills, and Sedgewick had visited Angle after their drunken night at Whitey’s.
Fumbling her stiff and half-frozen fingers, she made the sign she had seen Angle make many times.
“Key, out,” she said, forming the ASL signs. “Key, out. Key, out.” Repeating it over and over as Angle had done.
Prince, the darling genius chimpanzee child, gazed up at Remington with what she hoped was loving understanding. He padded out of the room.
She despaired.
He returned with a huge batch of keys collected on a steel ring.
She gasped with relief.
Cocking her wrist through the front bars of the isolette, Remington tried them all, all sixteen keys, one after another. It was an arduous process. She feared dropping the key ring, but she kept at it.
None of the keys worked. She went through the whole ring again. Nothing.
Prince watched her, occasionally making hand signs himself.
“What are you saying?” Remington asked him. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”
She tried all the keys once more and then slumped back and cried, not with relief this time.
Prince came and patted the door of the isolette.
Tears gushing, Remington signed key, out over and over.
“Please,” she said. “Key, out.”
Prince, the Gandhi and Einstein of primates all rolled into one, crossed to the workbench. From amid the clutter of tools and metal parts, he plucked up a steel ring with a single key attached and brought it back to the caged human.
Remington inserted the key into the lock. Turned it. And, as the door of the isolette swung suddenly open, she spilled out onto the floor—nude, battered, and filth-stained. She pant-hooted her victory.
Prince screamed in fright and spooked out of the room.
28
Remington tried, during her mad dash south into the city, to mobilize law enforcement against the threat that she felt sure was descending upon Russell Dorian at the Ro-Co-Co estate.
She called Rick Stills, who by now was free from the preliminary hearing.
“I can’t be talking to you,” the ADA said abruptly, without even a hello.
“Rick, please, there’s something terrible—”
“I can’t speak to you!” he repeated, practically shouting. “We have a disciplinary hearing coming up. We’ll do our talking then.” He ended the call.
She dialed her father’s cell. Layla didn’t know how long she had been unconscious, but she assumed that it was still Thursday, Gene’s poker night. He made a point of never answering his phone on poker night, and he stayed true to form. She tried Randy Gosch, but the call went straight to voice mail.
By that time she was over the transverses and descending into the Valley. She punched in 911.
“This is 911 operator 2016. What’s the nature of your emergency?”
Remington tried to explain. The male voice at the other end of the line sounded almost angry.
“Ma’am, the penalty for making a false 911 call is severe.”
“I’m serious, I tell you! I’m—” She realized that she had failed to fully identify herself. “I’m a detective investigator with the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.”
“And I’m a 911 operator. Do you know how many calls we get every night about an emergency at the Mulholland Drive address you’re talking about?”
“This is serious!”
“Ma’am, we already have an officer posted outside the residence in question.”
“You have an officer there?”
“Yes, ma’am. I am flagging this number. If you call again with this complaint, I’m afraid I’ll be forced to report you.”
Remington couldn’t believe it. She was like a voice calling from the bottom of a well. She tried again, reaching out directly to the sheriff’s substation in the South Valley. Her cellphone died mid-call.
Prince the chimp slept beside her on the bench seat of Gene’s truck, his head cradled against Remington’s right thigh.
George Wold’s residence had appeared to lack a landline. She had searched and couldn’t find one. Remington found her clothes, strewn in a trail from the barn to the outbuilding where she had been imprisoned in the isolette. The keys to the F-1
50 were still in her pants pocket, thank God. And her cell.
But there had proved to be no coverage in the mountainous outback.
Prince? Remington hadn’t been able to decide what to do with the animal. It didn’t seem right to leave him wandering loose. She thought briefly of locking him into one of the isolettes but immediately rejected it as cruel. The imp chimp breakout artist must have a pen or a cell around somewhere. There were animals hooting and calling in the night from the line of cages that led off from the barn.
Most imperative was getting the hell away from the ranch. She had a terror of George Wold’s returning with his attack ape Manson. Rationally, Remington knew that it probably wouldn’t happen, since the Chimp Wizard was intent on a darker purpose at the infamous compound on Mulholland Drive. But her fear was so deep-seated that it resisted logic.
Not knowing what else to do, she had bundled Prince into the truck. He happily came along, even tried to fasten the seat belt himself. When she bent over to help him, Remington realized the little guy needed a change of diaper. Too late now. He’d fallen asleep as soon as they left the maze of dirt roads and hit asphalt.
On the drive, her cell coverage had come back and she had embarked on the fruitless effort of organizing a police response. Nothing worked.
Okay, Remington thought. She would just have to do this all herself. Head to the Ro-Co-Co place. Check in with the cop stationed there. She would not be too late. It was only, what, 2300 hours? Wold would want to operate later than that, wouldn’t he? He would wait until the dead of night. Plus, there was probably all sorts of rent-a-cop personnel hired by Russell Dorian. Private security would stop Wold.
She repeated her private litany. All shall be well…and all manner of thing shall be . . . The prayer of the desperate optimist. How strange, Remington thought, that the memories of childhood stick with us so stubbornly.
All manner of thing did indeed look well and quiet and orderly as she approached the estate from the south on Mulholland. She had come up Laurel Canyon Drive. The Valley was a vast trough of light below her. She passed Dead Man Overlook, its small parking turnoff empty this time of night. The Ro-Co-Co property perched on a crest of the foothills in such a way that it had views of the San Fernando Valley to the north as well as the Los Angeles Basin to the south.
An LAPD black-and-white, parked with its engine running and interior lights on dim, blocked the front entrance of the estate. Exhalations from the vehicle’s tailpipe plumed briefly and vanished. Beyond the cruiser loomed the famous wrought-iron gate, shut tight, backdrop to a thousand TV news broadcasts. Remington pulled up to the rear of the patrol car. Moving quietly so as not to wake Prince, she slipped out of the truck.
The cop in the car looked to be sleeping. Not a bad duty posting, Remington considered, as far as third-watch details went. Gaze out at the Valley at night. Once in a while hustle along the tourists. Nothing to see here, folks, private residence. She tried to think of how best to approach the dozing sentry without some kind of discharged-weapon incident. Make no sudden moves.
“Officer?” Remington called out.
She went up to the cruiser cautiously. The female cop in the driver’s seat slumped against her computer console, a ragged bullet hole in her left temple big enough to fit a thimble in.
Remington tried to jerk open the cruiser’s door, but it was locked. A neat circle through the safety glass marked a high-velocity shot’s trajectory to its target. An assault rifle, most probably, much like the one George Wold fooled with as he lectured Remington about winter mind. Cocking her left elbow, she smashed the car window and reached in for the radio headset, but it had been torn loose from its socket.
She checked her surroundings and examined every landscaped shadow on both sides of the driveway entrance. No one around. Mulholland Drive, which ran by the estate entrance, remained empty.
Remington turned back to the police cruiser, her heart pounding. Once again, she reached her hand through the shattered window glass. She shut off the engine. Gingerly, she removed the dead officer’s sidearm, struggling a little with its holster snap until it came free. She searched for a cellphone but was unable to find one.
Car headlights suddenly appeared out of nowhere, sweeping south on Mulholland Drive, ten yards away. Remington ran back down the driveway and into the street to halt the vehicle. The speeding Mercedes sedan swept by her almost soundlessly, moving onto the dirt shoulder with a spray of gravel in order to avoid her panicked one-person roadblock.
“Hey!”
Garnet taillights disappeared into the dark.
A cry, far off, coming from the Ro-Co-Co estate’s interior. The victory whoop of an ape.
Remington ran back to the F-150, jumped in, and roared after the Mercedes. She realized the picture she had made to the citizen driver of the car, a madwoman looming up out of the darkness with a pistol in her hand. She might not have stopped, either. She just hoped someone had the sense to call in a report.
She found herself back at the Laurel Canyon intersection. The Mercedes was nowhere in sight. On impulse, Remington decided to turn south toward Hollywood and try to approach the Ro-Co-Co estate from the back way.
The streets off Coldwater Canyon resembled the maze of roads around Wold’s ranch, only these were lined not with stands of pine but with the pricey, hidden houses of the rich. Remington got lost in the Bird Streets, backtracked, and finally found what she thought was the dead-end lane below the Mulholland compound. She cursed her Luddite of a father for not installing a GPS in his truck.
She nosed forward and parked, switching off the ignition. Darkness. No sound apart from the tick of the cooling engine. Through the windshield Remington saw a collection of wilted flower bouquets, cellophane-wrapped roses, teddy bears, and handmade signs. WE ♥ YOU, DONNY COLL!!! read one. A shrine to the dearly departed action star. Well, at least Remington knew she was on the right path.
She flicked the safety off the sidearm that she had taken from the dead officer, a Glock 9mm. She racked a round into the chamber and stepped out of the truck. Her boots crunched on gravel. The asphalt of the street was half covered in dirt that had eroded off the hills above.
Beyond the shrine stood a formidable police barricade: some Jersey barriers, an orange-and-black–striped traffic obstacle, a huge, well-graffitied no trespassing sign. Remnants of ripped-apart crime-scene tape, much of it taken for souvenirs, snaked through the brush at the foot of the little ravine leading up the slope.
Slipping past the barricade, Remington found herself sightless in the dark. She was a very poor police officer. Most of her tribe had Maglites surgically attached to their hands. She had nothing to light her way. She plunged blindly forward. The sides of the ravine became steeper as she went. She could hear Los Angeles breathing in the flats below her, a soft unsteady whisper.
Remington heard something else, too. Footsteps following her. The dead officer’s Glock rose in her hand almost unbidden. Silhouetted in the faint glow of the city, a figure approached.
“Police officer!” Remington shouted.
Prince emerged out of the darkness. The young chimp greeted her with a little pant-hoot, then walked past her up the ravine without stopping. Remington had made sure to lock the truck before leaving the sleeping animal. But Prince was an escape artist. He had probably broken out of his cage at the Wold ranch to appear like some elfin vision in front of Remington’s isolette.
Alternately knuckle-walking and swinging effortlessly into the low oaks that lined the ravine, Prince moved forward. Remington followed.
They found themselves on the infamous set of wooden steps, which, like the crime-scene tape, had been torn apart by souvenir seekers. When they emerged from the ravine at the bottom of the landscaped Ro-Co-Co estate, Remington heard a sudden crescendo of human and ape screams sounding together. A frightened Prince scrambled into her arms.
The teak-and-mahogany balcony of the estate’s main residence soared like a ship’s prow. All Los Angel
es rolled out to the south, a jeweled carpet now, at night. On a clear day you could see forever, as the song said, or, at least, all the way to the South Bay. But there were no clear days anymore.
The elaborate fencing protecting the estate had been cut through. Carrying Prince with one arm and the dead cop’s sidearm in her other hand, Remington moved to a stairway leading from the lawn up to the immense balcony. She counted the steps as she took them. Thirteen. She had always read that there were supposed to be thirteen steps to a gallows platform, but she had tallied them in various movies and historical photographs and that turned out not to be true.
Remington held her gun arm extended. She told herself that she was well prepared. If the crazed ape charged her, she would aim for a single shot right through the swastika.
As soon as she came up onto the balcony, Remington balked. Nothing could have prepared her for the scene she encountered. The tableau visible through the huge expanse of the residence’s windows seemed to have been constructed out of horror elements from another universe, one even more violent than ours.
A bellowing Manson bent over a screaming human figure, who Remington assumed was Russell Dorian. George Wold stood by, an industrial-strength cattle prod pointed upward like a sword. The animal trainer had the reassembled assault rifle cocked on his hip.
Manson appeared intent on harvesting every single appendage from Dorian’s mutilated body. The ape flung into the air behind him a shower of gory bits and random anatomical parts. Fingers, ears, and what looked like a penis splattered against the interior of the plate-glass windows and slid toward the floor. Russell’s screams went hoarse.
“Police officer!” Remington shouted, yelling to be heard above the mayhem inside the residence.
Wold looked startled. He had posted himself next to an open double door. Remington realized that she was a perfect target, backlit by the lights of nighttime L.A. She watched the man swing the assault rifle off his hip and direct it toward her.
“Never could keep that little fucker caged,” Wold said in a matter-of-fact way, jutting his chin at the cowering Prince. Wold’s forefinger was already inserting itself into the trigger guard when Remington fired.