Hard Favored Rage

by Don Shift

Jaime didn’t back off. “We gotta plan. We’re building something and we need guns.”

  “What are you building?” Miguel growled.

  “An army.”

  Miguel began to laugh. “You serious?”

  “Por cierto.”

  The gun/drug dealer thought for a few seconds. “You plan to arm a raggedy band of putas? Why don’t you just wait a couple weeks until people start dying and killing each other, then picking up the guns? Gonna be lots of houses ripe for the taking. Just bust in there with your arsenal over there on the bed and help yourself once the shooting’s over.”

  “It ain’t gonna be like that. Enough bad guys out there already, we’re just looking out for ours and that’s gonna take protection, except we’re gonna have to arm some guy who ain’t got any.”

  “You got enough for now. Just wait and pick some old, fat guy’s house once he starves to death.”

  Andres stepped in. “Why don’t you hit some drugstores yourself? Oh wait, that’s right. Why you were busy sleeping all day, esés from the hood were busy looting. All those places cleaned out. Guess Jaime and I thought ahead. We pulled off the score you could only dream of. You’ve been busy stealing pills, prescription pads, and getting homies’ nurse girlfriends to lift stuff. Piecemeal. We took advantage of the situation and came out on top.”

  That stumped Miguel. “Okay, okay. You’re right. But I still can’t let you clean me out. Tell you what, take those rifles you picked out. I’ll give you a shorty shotgun, that revolver that you like Andres, and two of the Glocks. Plus the ammo.”

  He had them over a barrel. Jaime reached out his hand. “Well then, I think we got ourselves a deal.”

  Monday, Monday

  Deputy Church drug himself out of bed around noon Monday morning. His introduction back to SED was a welcoming one. Most of his military career had been spent stateside analyzing videos, documents, social media, and reports, but it had a very useful carry-over to detective work with SED, short as his stint was. Many of the military intelligence billets were filled with police officers who used the exact same techniques in combating gangs that they used against insurgents overseas. The world over, the principles were the same, although drones were very helpful tools to have.

  Sunday afternoon and evening had been spent visiting the local dirtbags and reminding them that the police were still in charge. Some knew the balance of power had shifted and treated the deputies accordingly. On their way out of a house, one “former” drug smuggler mimed cocking and shooting a revolver with his hand. Church caught it and mimicked shooting at sniper rifle back at him. The general consensus was that had it been possible, every single one of those guys should have been locked up for the duration, guilty or not, for the good of society.

  Sam flushed the toilet. It gurgled but did not refill. Last night, it had taken ten minutes for the tank to refill, but he had dismissed it as a running toilet he was too tired to deal with. He sighed and turned the knob on the sink faucet. Nothing came out and he lived directly downhill from a large reservoir several hundred yards away. Now Sam cursed and coated his hands with sanitizer. He needed a shower to shake away the late night. The transition to a new shift was always difficult, but a hot shower always made a difference.

  Marco’s swearing filtered into Sam’s bedroom. “Sewage is coming out my toilet, dude!”

  Sam ran across the house and sure enough, sewage was bubbling out of the toilet. The backflow preventer had failed. Great timing. “I’ll get some water out of the hot tub and we’ll see if we can flush it.” He filled a five-gallon bucket with water and ran back upstairs. They filled the tank and flushed the toilet twice just to make sure they dealt with the problem and then checked the other toilets.

  “What’s the deal Sam? I have to be at work in 45 minutes. Ain’t my landlord supposed to have working plumbing?”

  “Not the time for jokes. The water pressure is gone. Everyone’s crap is just sitting in the pipes.” Sam’s house was at the bottom of the tract, so gravity was carrying sewage to the lowest point. “We gotta seal the toilets up with something. We can pack rags and shop towels in there for now. That will help keep down the smell.”

  “You gotta be kidding me! Can’t we close off a valve at the street?”

  “Doesn’t work like that.” Sewage systems were entirely gravity fed and putting a valve on the house-side of the collector pipe made no sense. That was the job of backflow preventer. In Sam’s old top-floor Monterey apartment, there wouldn’t be a problem, except for his downstairs neighbors, who he’d literally be pooping on top of.

  Marco returned with a bunch of rags to stuff in the toilet. He packed them in using a plunger handle until they were tight. “Okay, now that I’ve corked my toilet, what happens when the pressure of everybody’s crap finally blows the rags out?”

  Sam cracked up and yelled “Kaboom!” using his hands to make a fountain motion.

  “Oh, sick dude!” Marco walked out to continue putting on his uniform.

  It took Sam a while to stop laughing. “Guess we’ll dig a hole in the backyard for now.” Sam thought to himself it was time to take the Sibley’s up on their offer to move in.

  Early morning in Los Angeles was calm, if but for a few hours. Huerta was grateful for the lull after being thrown into anarchy last night, ill-briefed. The troublemakers were back in bed and the ordinary folks were waking up. For a Monday, traffic was light during the morning rush hour. Normally the Valley was clogged with cars as people tried to get to work. It was not a holiday atmosphere. LAPD had managed to get some helicopters in the air and they were constantly buzzing overhead, usually as he had just drifted off to sleep.

  Due to fuel consumption concerns, Huerta ordered each platoon to park their Strykers in a central area and mount foot patrols of the problem areas. Humvees provided more immediate transport, usually in response to LAPD requests. Highway Patrol officers were unusually absent from the streets, some appearing only in escort with fire trucks or ambulances.

  Smoke was everywhere from buildings and small fires that smoldered from the energy pulse Friday afternoon. The wind would surely kick up dust and ash, setting off Huerta’s allergies. The smashed doors of the CVS drugstore would make it easy to get Claritin though.

  Late in the morning, a military police M1117 armored car roared down the road.

  “Whoa, did you see that?” Huerta said to his driver, Sergeant Pulido.

  “Sure did. What was that, fifty, sixty miles an hour, sir?”

  “Something like that. Wonder where he’s off to. I didn’t hear anything on the radio.”

  A few minutes later, a police officer ran up to the side of Huerta’s Humvee.

  “Hey, sir! Officer needs help, Foothill Blvd. The cross-street is Sayre. Between the supermarkets.”

  “What’s new?” Huerta asked.

  Different agencies have different words. To the sheriffs, the emergency call was Code 999. To CHP, 11-99. The Army had no such terms. If trouble threatened and if they were overwhelmed, they were accompanied by forward observers trained to request air strikes or artillery fire.

  The officer was huffing. He had jogged some distance. “We need troops over there, right now.”

  “I’ll send a patrol over.” Huerta keyed the mic. “Charlie 1-6, Charlie Six Actual, over.”

  “Go for Charlie 1-6,” someone replied.

  “Charlie 1-6, move squad to Foothill Blvd. and Sayre to assist LAPD, over.”

  “Six, Charlie 1-6, roger.”

  “No!” the officer bellowed, having gotten enough air back in his lungs. “A cop’s been shot. Officer down. There are hundreds of people over there and we think there is a sniper.”

  “Oh crap. Get in,” Huerta ordered.

  With the officer in the backseat, Huerta called for fourth platoon; an ad hoc mixture of his medevac Stryker and the two 105mm mobile guns, which were basically light tanks. Huerta navigated for his element, calling out turns for Pulido. He was using a police officer’s ex
tra map book, an edition dated over ten years earlier. The Guard, having learned in 1992 that the military grid-reference system maps were useless for civil operations, bought paper maps, only to let them go missing or dispose of them once cell phones with GPS mapping became common.

  No one needed a map to tell them they had arrived. Dozens of people were running both towards and away from the intersection that was filled with a sea of humans. The officer in the backseat explained that about a dozen of his partners were caught in the center of the crowd, taking cover and shooting from behind a square made out of their patrol vehicles.

  ***

  The officers, that included Marco, now in the center of the crowd had been investigating a Vons grocery where several semi-truck trailers had been pulled up directly parallel to the entrances blocking them. When one of the cars with four officers stopped to see if the manager had done it to protect the store, the first cop who stepped out was shot. His partners grabbed him and took cover behind a neighboring business. Five other cars, the last five covering both the Mission and Foothill Divisions, raced to the scene.

  Once again, with rifles drawn, they approached to see if they could flush out the shooter. They took fire and returned it, destroying a small car the assailant was hiding behind. The officers went and peeked over the wall of a neighboring business to see a dead man behind the car, a rifle by his side. None of them knew what to do about it, so they stood and waited for the nearest lieutenant to respond. On day one, shootings required the full-stop investigation from Force Investigation Division. Today photographs would be taken, interviews recorded, and statements written. Only the shooters might get the day off.

  While they waited, more and more area residents congregated. This was not unusual in any time before this, but given the circumstances it made the officers nervous, even though the crowd was calm. It wasn’t long before the officers noticed that a trailer was being manually pushed away from the entrance. That’s when the looting began. LAPD didn’t care anymore about looting. Its only interest, as a matter of command policy and the officer’s own choices, was to make sure no one got hurt.

  Two men stepped to the front of the crowd. One of them waved what appeared to be a handgun. There was a shot. Marco got startled, tripped, and fell. His partners assumed he was shot and opened fire on the two men. Four people in the crowd fell to the ground. Much of the crowd that hadn’t begun looking self-dispersed with the gunshots, but several more ran forward towards the horrified and stunned officers. It became a hand-to-hand fight with fists, feet, batons, and the butts of shotguns. Inaccurate gun fire peppered the alley. The officers decided to withdraw to the street.

  On their way out, many of the looters and those who had come out just for entertainment’s sake saw the fleeing people, saw the bodies on the ground, and saw the escaping police cars. As the officers re-formed in the middle of the intersection of Foothill and Sayre, the crowd re-formed in the street. Word had spread that “something” was up and that there was a fully stocked grocery store newly opened, so the streets began to teem with people. Ordered to remain on scene, the officers had no choice but to wait for the lieutenant.

  “Sarge, I don’t like this,” one of the senior officers told the sergeant.

  “What do you want me to do about it?” he replied.

  One to two hundred people were now moving freely across the road between the LAPD units. The officers were separated from each other as the vehicles blocked off one approach of the intersection each. “I think we should get two cars moving, in a circle. Keep them out of the intersection.”

  “Good idea.”

  Instead, it looked ridiculous. The two cars were chasing each other nose-to-tail like two dogs playing with one another. The center of the intersection was too small for it to work, so the sergeant ordered the cars to box together.

  Marco fumed as he crouched behind the front fender of the Ford SUV. He cradled his shotgun and wondered if they got in trouble, who would come save them? There wasn’t a cop for two whole divisions. West Valley would have to rush over from their cushy details guarding the gates to celebrities gated communities if the units needed to put out a mayday. Marco mentally thought to curse Sam for inspiring him to come back into work. Screw this, I’m going home tonight and staying home.

  Without warning a Molotov cocktail broke on the hood of a unit spreading flame all across the engine compartment. Thinking quickly, Marco grabbed a fire extinguisher from his unit and doused the flames. Not much alcohol or gasoline had been in the bottle. The paint on the whole top and passenger side of the front end was scorched and the window was blackened with soot. For a moment, he thought about dropping the empty five-pound extinguisher on the ground as he would for an ordinary vehicle fire, but put it away, fearing what the booing crowd might do with it.

  As Marco stowed the empty canister, the sergeant was hit by a rock or something. Another officer fired a bean bag at the thrower. More rocks, bottles, and random objects came flying. “Officers need help, we’re getting rocks and bottles, Foothill and Sayre,” someone radioed.

  Next the angry crowd started to rock several of the units to flip them over. Pepper spray to the eyes was a quick remedy for that situation, but as quickly as the rioters with burning eyes and skin stepped away, they were replaced. Soon the small ounce and a half canisters were empty. Normally, the sergeant carried a sprayer that was riot-sized, but it had been used yesterday and not replenished overnight. As the attempt to overturn the cars began again, the officers fought back with the one less-lethal tool they had plenty of: bean bags. Hundreds of shells had been collected from shotguns that were pulled from cars and put into the armory.

  When the barrel of the shotguns first came up, many of the people in the crowd had no way of knowing that the guns with blue-green furniture would not kill them, and they shrunk back. The first shots from the volley of bean bags knocked down and drove off the car flippers. For emphasis, a few more were shot, to encourage the others. A gunman who had arrived at the scene did not know that the gunfire and screams he heard were not lethal.

  The gunman took his shot from a building that overlooked the intersection. It missed Marco but struck his forearm with bullet fragments that stung his skin. The sergeant saw Marco go down and put out an “officer down” call. Two of the officers with AR-15s saw the gunman and shot at him, driving him back inside.

  Something went through the crowd like a flash. One section of the square broke and rushed forward. Marco rolled over and stood up. He saw that Sarge was relieved that Marco was okay. “Shoot!” the sergeant yelled, looking Marco directly in the eye.

  Marco fired his shotgun at a point a few feet in front of the rioters. He was loaded with buckshot instead of the standard slugs and the pellets bounced off the asphalt, sending bits of the pavement along with the lead into the legs of the advancing crowd. He fired two shells, paused, jacked two more into the tube, and fired twice again.

  Half-a-dozen rioters were hit below the waist and the crowd once more backed off beyond the cars. Something other than Marco’s shotgun had made many turn around. It was smoke.

  ***

  Huerta looked at disapproval at the scene in front of him. What a mess. The MPs armored car was trying to bully its way through the crowd, but they refused to move and instead surrounded it, beating and kicking on the sides, daring the soldiers within to run down the crowd. Huerta gave the order to fire tear gas into the crowd. The first grenade was fired from an underslung M203 grenade launcher and the projectile bounced of the pavement and struck a rioter in the chest. The man collapsed to the ground.

  “Aim higher, in an arc. Don’t skip them,” Huerta yelled. He had no way to know if the skipping grenade was deliberate or not.

  “Major, I don’t like using weapons against American citizens,” a lieutenant radioed.

  “Don’t worry, most of them aren’t citizens,” Huerta replied cynically.

  More grenades began bursting in the crowd and tendrils of white smoke rose
into the air. His options were limited. The tear gas would drive off the crowd, eventually, but only out of range of the gas. This wasn’t a problem if he extracted the officers as soon as the sea of bodies parted. If his men were properly equipped with riot gear and he had a platoon, he could force a phalanx of soldiers through and escort the officers out. If the soldiers hadn’t ditched their bayonets as useless a long time ago, he could mount a charge through the crowd. Fixed bayonets were a bluff that always worked with rioters.

  Huerta was confused. He had very little crowd control training, but spent his time waiting at the armory reading the lessons of the 1992 riots. According to accounts, the public was appreciative, and gangsters and troublemakers terrified of the troops. Something had changed and the major couldn’t put his finger on it.

  In the back seat, the LAPD officer was yelling into his portable radio. “I can’t hear you; I can’t hear you. Take off your mask, I can’t hear you.”

  A wheezing, panicked voice came over the air. “They’ve broken through again, we’re shooting them.”

  Sure enough, Huerta could hear gunfire coming from the square. Heaven almighty. Then there was louder gun fire. As his mind registered seeing it, the army radio net screamed “Sniper on the roof of the two-story.”

  Huerta turned around in his seat and slapped legs of the machine gunner who dangled them from the roof turret. “Engage the sniper, one o’clock!”

  The huge M2 .50 caliber machine gun barked off a long burst, killing the sniper in a spray of red blood and dust as the stucco shattered around him. “Got him!”

  “Cease fire!” Huerta ordered.

  “Roger.”

  A man with a rifle stepped out in the street and began shooting at the soldiers. The windshield on the Humvee spiderwebbed as a shot connected and was deflected by the bullet resistant glass.

  “Want me to engage, sir?” the gunner asked.

  “No.” Huerta keyed his mic. “Tran, have a rifleman shoot that guy.”

  A soldier stepped out from behind a Stryker and fired his M4 on full auto.