by Don Shift
Huerta looked to Garcia. “Can you figure out a way to get us moving?”
Garcia nodded. “I’ll try.”
A Wrong Turn
The Churches and Mrs. Levine spent a miserable night in Parker, Arizona. If Arizona had an armpit, Parker would be just an ingrown hair in it. Harold refused to cross the desert in the dark on a two-lane highway that time and Caltrans forgot in the dead of night. During the day, the heat was intolerable and all three of them had to seek relief by dunking themselves in the Colorado River. Mrs. Levine was not especially pleased by having to walk down to the embankment and get wet, but she accepted it as a necessary part of survival. At least here drinking water was not an issue. After an uneventful night in the car, when the first light of dawn broke, Mr. Church started the car and began their journey to the coast. If all went well, they should be in Redondo Beach by 10 AM.
In Vidal Junction, a blip of buildings in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, a cone pattern and detour sign sent most traffic back south on US 95 towards the interstate. Mr. Church had access to a paper atlas and decided to sojourn down SR-62 west towards the Joshua Tree area. Traffic was much lighter, worryingly so, on this road. His worries were unfounded when they safely intersected I-10 again and drove into the Los Angeles Metropolitan area.
Downtown LA looked to be its normal self. Instead of smog, smoke from fires hung in the air. Once they got into the city and the westbound traffic had dispersed, there were hardly any running vehicles on the road. Just like in Phoenix, damaged cars were stopped on the shoulders of the freeway where their owners walked away from them several days ago. Harold took the 405 south towards Redondo Beach. Unfortunately, he did not turn on the radio to see if he could catch any LA radio stations, nor did he stop and listen to what was going on around him.
The Los Angeles area had lost most water pressure sometime during the night. This coincided with widespread burglaries to countless businesses all over the sprawling urban area. The businesses that were broken into then became targets for looting as the sun came up. On Saturday, the police presence surge had deterred most instances of looting especially once the National Guard from Los Alamitos and the local armories mobilized. Sporadic appearances of the heavily armed troops at scenes of developing disturbances sent troublemakers running. This was not going to be a repeat of the stand-by and watch attitude of the 1992 riots.
As the radio broadcasts began to panic the public, the areas with the least in the way of food and supplies, the low-income neighborhoods, began to loot. A group of panicked shoppers would descend on a store and clean it out down to the tile on the floor. Police and the military responded and scattered whoever was left. Few of the looters were willing to challenge such an overtly powerful response yet. For those who were looking to use the circumstances to their advantage, they preferred to wait and see how things developed. Smash-and-grab or mad free-for-alls were not what they wanted to get involved in. The characteristics of the incidents on the second day were no worse than flash mobs or the occasional riots after the Lakers lost or won and important game. The only difference was that it was city-wide.
Officials had made a mistake when they assumed Friday night’s unusual calm would continue. On Friday night, even the gang members weren’t sure what was happening. Many were dealing with local problems like fires and dying relatives. Being busy, confused, and seeing the largest police presence ever on that first night kept criminal mischief to a minimum. Unfortunately, the crooks listened to the radio too and learned on Saturday that this wasn’t just a power outage. When they saw a less-aggressive nighttime police force, depleted by immediate desertions and not enough military on the streets, the criminals began striking their marks.
Gun stores were hit. Sporting goods stores were cleaned out. Drugstores, grocery stores, department stores, local retailers, and simple businesses were burglarized between midnight and dawn. The lack of water reinforced the tangible “every man for himself” vibe that had slowly been growing. The tipping point for looting and vandalism was the stores that had been broken into overnight, in many cases by throwing something through the glass windows or doors. Those who had remained calm the last two days went for broke and helped themselves, fearing they might not get a chance to get what they needed later on.
The remaining police and the military responded to the looting. Mostly they watched and tried not to get involved. Once arson and vandalism began, a line was crossed, and a reaction was required. However, riot control was viewed as “oppression” and the crowds fought back, almost exclusively minorities. Rumors rapidly spread through the black and Hispanic community that this was part of a “final solution” to get rid of their people once and for all. On more than one street corner, police officers were fired on by a sniper and they fired back, with deadly effect.
Armed gang members ran to the sounds of gun fire and a full-fledged gunfight began in more than one area. Marines responded and used their overwhelming firepower to utterly decimate the ad-hoc force of instant American urban insurgents, but the damage was done. By late morning, Inglewood and other predominately non-white neighborhoods had turned into a massive cauldron of riots. Racial violence, generally black vs. Hispanic, was breaking out anywhere the groups overlapped. Not knowing any better and isolated from the real picture of the city by being on the freeway, Mr. Church drove headlong into danger.
Harold heard the low fuel warning ding for the fifth time already and the gas pump icon was blinking. “I need to pull off and fill up the gas tank.” He still had a gallon of gas, normally used for powering a lawn mower, in the trunk.
“Pull off the freeway?” Jenny asked.
“That’s right.”
“Why don’t you just pull over on the shoulder and do it?”
“It’s not safe honey.” Harold regarded the freeway as a death trap.
“Okay, but are you sure we won’t make it to the house? Can’t we do it there?”
“Mrs. Levine, how far is it?”
“About half an hour, I think.” It was more like fifteen minutes, but the last time she had driven this way it was in heavy traffic.
Harold looked at Jenny. “It’ll just take a minute.” He flipped his signal up and pulled into the exit lane, descending down the curving off-ramp.
At the bottom of the ramp, a crowd of people were running away from something. Harold braked hard, stopping the vehicle just in time to avoid plowing into the crowd. Many of the rioters looked at the car, filled with three elderly white people, their eyes burning with anger. Several cursed Harold out for nearly running them down. Others slapped the hood of the car. One pulled a gun and briefly pointed it at the car.
“Harold, get us out of here!” Jenny yelled. The road in front of him was full of people. He couldn’t go forward and up the on-ramp.
“I can’t!” he shouted. Rioters began to circle the car yelling and hitting and kicking the car to intimidate the people inside. It was nothing serious in the full scope of things, but now Mrs. Levine was becoming hysterical in the back seat.
“They’re surrounding us Harold. Do something!” Jenny shouted. Harold had packed his boyhood .22 rifle in the trunk, but it was worthless for this kind of situation anyhow. He felt trapped by the crowd. It was simply impossible for him to slowly creep through the flooding mass of people and he couldn’t bring himself to plow through them at high speed. He was out of ideas. “Back up! Back up the ramp!” Jenny urged.
The thought hadn’t even occurred to him. He was still stuck in his ordinary mindset. Not only was backing up the on-ramp illegal, it was usually suicidal. Now it was his only option, or so he thought. Harold put the car in reverse and stepped on the gas. The car sped backwards, hitting two rioters that had gotten behind them. One was run over and the other just knocked down. Feeling the impact and the sickening rise-and-fall of a body passing under the wheels, Harold slammed on the brakes. Trembling violently and instantaneously distrustful of his driving ability, he put the car in park. Because he put t
he car in park, the door automatically unlocked; a big mistake.
The majority of the crowd, which had at first ignored the Church’s vehicle, when they saw what happened, forgot for a moment that police and Marines were chasing them. Several dozen people were outraged at what had just happened and they rushed the car and began to beat it with objects they had been using for burglary or intended to use against the police, shouting death threats and angry curses. Glass broke amid a cacophony of impacts to the car body and windows. Someone tried to crawl in through the shattered back window. Another who knelt on the hood pounded the windshield with his fists. Then one of the rioters tried something elementary. He grabbed Mr. Church’s door handle and to his surprise the driver’s door opened.
Harold looked at his wife, his face white with fear. “I’m sorry honey, I’m so sorry,” he said weakly.
Rank
To Huerta’s delight, in the early afternoon several large desert tan trucks arrived at the armory laden with ammunition. In addition to the small arms ammunition, there were a variety of grenades, both lethal and less lethal, 30mm cannon shells, and 105mm cannon rounds. With that, the armory was left in the care of two guardsmen recovering from injuries to scare off any intruders. After meeting up on the Antelope Valley Freeway, the now-combined force of Charlie Company and the military police units rendezvoused with 1st Battalion of the 144th Field Artillery Regiment from Burbank and Van Nuys. All combined, there were fewer than five hundred soldiers for an area of over seventy square miles.
Sergeant Major Burke didn’t like it. “During the 1992 Riots, we had 13,000 soldiers and Marines on the street covering an area this big. We don’t even have a tenth of those numbers in the same size area.”
Huerta gestured that there was nothing he could do about it.
By nightfall, Huerta was trying to coordinate the activities of four under-manned platoons. Radio interference was a major problem. VHF radios performed poorly in the urban environment where buildings often blocked signals and the foothills cut units off from one another. Trying to coordinate with the local National Guard commander operating out of the sheriff’s EOC, an archetypical bunker with the large TV screens, was frustrating. It was easier just to grab an LAPD officer or deputy sheriff, who frequently stayed near the soldiers, to ask what was going on or be tasked with a mission.
All through the first night the mission seemed to consist of running up to a crowd of looters or wild bunch of people trying to overwhelm police and drive them off. The sudden arrival of a Stryker with its guns protruding like frightful proboscises always seemed to do the trick. Even the Humvees without machine guns on top were intimidating. Soldiers got respect that the police did not. One of the LAPD cops who was also an MP explained to Huerta that many residents had lost trust in the police and many no longer feared them. It was doubly true after the EMP.
Near dawn, LAPD called for the Guard’s help transporting dozens of mass arrestees to a temporary jail setup in the parking garage of the Mission Division police station. The officers still on duty, one of whom was Marco, was frustrated by having to move their personal vehicles to the lesser-protected streets. The arrestees loaded into the back of open-bed army vehicles yelled, fought, and spat. MPs took to heaving the worst of the fighters in and dumping them out once they were behind the barbed-wire fencing.
“So, what’s the plan? Are you going to transfer them somewhere?” Huerta asked an MP officer.
“I have no idea. That’s LAPD’s problem.”
Huerta shrugged and moved on. He saw a few porta-potties inside the wire, but no supplies of food and water. At least the prisoners are in the shade. He would have put the rowdy arrestees on the roof to let the heat and sun wear them down, but then again, he was an infantryman, not a jailer in camouflage.
Gun Shopping
After his meeting with Miguel, Jaime went to tell Andres, who was sleeping when his friend arrived. They would take separate cars. It was well after dark when Andres pulled up to Miguel’s. He and Jaime had split up the take, just in case something happened to either one of them, and loaded Jaime’s half back into the car, leaving them swimming in pill bottles once again.
At Miguel’s house, they were ushered into the garage, after which Miguel and his friend/partner Derek closed the door.
“You guys weren’t kidding.”
“Of course we weren’t. Where are you gonna put all this stuff?”
“I got a place I usually stash it off premises, but since the cops are busy with other problems, I hope, we can keep it here for now. Derek, grab some of those boxes on top of the workbench. We’ll stack this stuff up and put them in the loft over my daughter’s bedroom.”
It took an hour to remove all the bottles and boxes of drugs, sort them, and lay them up in the flat space above Miguel’s daughter’s closet. When they finished, they all sat wearily on the garage floor in the glow of the Impala’s headlights.
“I gotta hand it to you guys,” Miguel said. “Back in high school, you were pulling on door handles stealing from peoples’ cars. You never wanted to make real money or even ride. But alright, you guys cooked up a good one this time.”
Everyone had a small laugh.
“Want a cold beer?”
“Yeah, that’d be great,” Andres said.
“Ain’t got none. Power’s out. Derek, get us some beer.” Derek stood up and grabbed a six-pack from the mini fridge.
“Warm beer is beer,” Jaime said, shrugging.
When they had finished shooting the breeze and their beers, Andres asked “So what about the guns?”
“Right. I don’t keep that stuff here. Gotta go across town. You can follow me.”
“Where we goin’?”
“My abuela’s house. She lives on a farm in El Rio. I keep some stuff in an old trailer she’s got in the back.”
The two-car convoy drove across Oxnard cautiously. People were out, many up to no good, so they left their headlights on to avoid hitting anyone or anything. Shadowy figures darted along buildings in the distance. Several businesses were in the progress of being looted. Across the freeway, an entire block was lit up by a burning big box store. Dozens of people stood in the parking lot celebrating. For the first time since the event, Jaime saw a police car. Two officers stood holding shotguns or rifles next to their car, which was parked next to a fire truck. The fire fighters were sitting in their dark truck, watching the fire.
“Looks like a movie.”
“I know, right? They come, but they can’t do anything about it.”
“Don’t they have water in the truck?”
“Yeah, but how much you think they got in there? They can’t carry all that much. I bet they used it already.”
Miguel led them to an older ranch style home in a neighborhood that was mostly lots fenced with chainlink. In the backyard sat a dilapidated blue and white single-wide mobile home that was slowly rotting away, its agony compounded by the humidity and a complete lack of any upkeep.
“Y’all want heavy artillery? Then I got it.” Miguel opened up the bedroom closet door and shined his flashlight in, illuminating what looked like fifty rifles. The top shelf was stacked with pistols.
“Man, there’s my AK,” Andres said, grabbing an AK-47 out of the closet. “Hey, look at the clip,” he said as he unlatched the banana-shaped magazine.
Jaime was admiring a shotgun with a flashlight on the slide.
“That came from a police car,” Derek said.
“Sweet! What’s that?” he said, pointing to a short rifle back in the corner.
Derek grabbed it. “This is a Ruger. Shoots the same bullet as the M16, but it’s a different gun. Got a folding stock and it’s real wood.”
Miguel caressed it. Something about the contrast of the wood and the shiny, stainless steel barrel and receiver fascinated him. “Is it automatic?”
“No. Took it off some guy in a burglary in Arizona. You can buy that stuff there. Most of these guns were from burglaries. Lots of people p
ut their padres’ shotgun and rifle in some cheap gun cabinet that’s easier to get into than a chola’s pants. Even if they had a cheap safe, I can get most of those safes open in less than five minutes.”
“Nice.”
“We need pistols.”
“Top shelf.”
Jaime took a Glock in 9mm. Andres decided to go for a stainless-steel Colt Python revolver “Like what Rick uses in ‘The Walking Dead’.”
“Lookin’ good, lookin’ good,” Andres said.
“So, what are you guys gonna take?”
Both Jaime and Andres looked confused. “All that stuff on the bed.”
“All that stuff on the bed?” Miguel said, incredulous.
“Yeah, all that stuff on the bed. Plus three more rifles, the shotgun, the .22s, and three pistols.”
“That’s a lot of guns man. $5,000 day before yesterday.”
“I’m pretty sure we got you lots more than $5,000 worth of drugs, Miguel,” Andres said. “You’d make what, $100 for couple of Oxy pills? How many did we get you? How many jumbo, economy sized, straight-from-the-factory bottles did we get you? What’s that worth, huh?”
“Man, I can’t let you clean out my stash. If hard times are comin’, I’m gonna need some of this stuff.”
“People died for your drugs. I killed for those pills, which kinda means I killed for you. You ain’t gonna leave us hanging.”
Miguel looked at Derek, who gave a shrug as if to suggest Jaime had a point. “Okay, you can have the stuff on the bed.”
“Plus ammo.”
“Plus ammo. Got lots of that, no issue there. But you continue to score and you give it to me to deal. I’ll even kick back some of the cash to you.”
“Cool,” Andres said.
“It’s still not enough,” Jaime said.
Even in the dark, the three could see rage flash into Miguel’s eyes. “Not enough? What the hell man?” He took a few threatening steps forward.