by Don Shift
“Cease fire!” Tran yelled. “Cease fire, cease fire, cease fire.”
The soldier did on the final command, but only because he had emptied his magazine.
“Sorry First Sergeant, you told me to shoot him.”
“Yes, on semi-auto like you were briefed.” Tran looked down at the crowd. Virtually everyone was running away now, and the LAPD SUVs could be seen. Only one body lay where the soldier was shooting. “You’re good.”
In the Humvee, Huerta turned to the officer and said, “Tell your guys to get the hell out of there.”
The cops jumped into their vehicles and pulled out of the intersection to follow the Strykers to safety. One by one, the six Ford Police Interceptors drove past Huerta. His eyes followed the one with the charred hood whose driver was running the windshield washers like crazy. Huerta was first in and last out, right behind the MPs vehicle.
“That’s a wrap.”
“Wait!” the officer in back said, pointing at a blue-suited figure running towards them with his hands in the air.
“Don’t you people know how to count?” the major snapped. “Pulido, go get him.”
Pulido did what he was told and met the officer halfway. The officer, who had caramel-colored skin, dove into the back seat next to his fellow navy-blue centurion.
“Thanks. Those losers forgot about me.” The cop held out his hand to Huerta.
The major shook it. “What’s your name, Officer?”
“Marco.”
The deputies who remained at the Todd Road Jail were all the deputies with the least seniority and no patrol experience. Quite a few deputies had deserted, as far as the commander knew, and he didn’t care anymore. Mika her and partner Rybals were the only two female deputies left. The other two claimed hardship as single mothers and left.
The problems at the jail were mounting. The one saving grace was a diesel pump had been installed to force water through the jail. Maintenance had closed off the valves in all but the muster building, the kitchen, and Section A to help conserve and supply maximum pressure. The solar field was generating with minimal degradation, but since the charge controllers were damaged it was a hollow win.
Security was a mess. The cell doors didn’t have pass throughs like at Main Jail, so doors had to be opened twice for feeding, which only happened in the morning and at night. This took two deputies. Many doors were left unlocked or propped open since there were only so many sets of the skeleton keys and half of the doors were one-way only without electricity. The air was so hot and foul inside that inmates were allowed outside for most of the morning and in the evenings until dark. The mixture of various high-risk inmates and the uncomfortable, austere conditions was a powder keg waiting for a spark.
Only the head cook had shown up this morning. To make matters worse, staff had been stealing food from the warehouse. Oatmeal, rice, beans, flour, canned foods—you name it—had all been taken. If it kept up, in a few days the inmates would be eating lemons and avocados pulled from the nearby orchards. No one cared about the grievances the inmates wanted to file. It was cold, soggy oatmeal or you starve. The rapist who had thrown his breakfast against the window in his door would be licking the dried mess up by dinnertime.
The inmates themselves had become unmanageable. Yesterday afternoon, one of the seniors broke up a fight in the yard with a less-lethal shotgun. Without TV, fighting was the only entertainment that the inmates had now, aside from seeing the attractive Mika and Rybals walk by. Senior McKenny had opted to use Mika and Rybals primarily for non-contact duties, such as cell checks, which suited them just fine, but exposed them to more penis flashing than they needed to see.
Mika felt absolutely miserable. She had never caught up from her sleep deprivation on Friday night. The heat was just too intense. Once the air stopped working in her south facing apartment, the insulation merely retained the heat. At night, the temperature never dropped out of the eighties either. Her last shower was more of a sponge bath Sunday morning and she felt dirty. The stench she attributed to herself was a product of her imagination, coupled with the ever-present reek of the jail. Even so, without the all-important ritual of showering away the invisible evils of the now reeking jail after every shift, she couldn’t help herself from thinking there was a layer of scum all over her.
While the inmates were being fed, Mika got to eat her own dinner. The deputies had it slightly better as they were allowed to heat their own food over the propane stoves. She boiled up hot water and poured it over a Cup Noodles. It wasn’t anything she would eat under normal circumstances, but she was grateful for the food. Her apartment came with electric stoves so even this basic of a task was impossible at home. This morning, she ate a cold can of her favorite comfort food, Chef Boyardee cheese ravioli, and hauled a trash bag full of frozen dinners to the dumpster, a month of food wasted.
When she was finished with her lackluster supper, she consoled herself with the thought of one hour to go until shift change. The commander had promised an end to the continuous shifts in a few days. It wasn’t a promise anything that Mika was going to hang her hat on. No more so than thinking her date from Friday night was still interested. Sushi sounds good, she thought. A phantom taste she would never again experience filled her mouth.
Back in cluster, Rybals handed her the cell check sheet. “Your turn.”
“Enjoy your soup, dear. All the spicy ones are gone,” Mika said.
“Food is food. All I got to look forward to at home is my grandma making rice and beans out on the barbecue.”
At the half-hour, Mika began the official count before the shift change. There was no wand, just a Parker Jotter and names printed neatly on lined paper. She herself had made up the form on Saturday because everyone agreed that she had the neatest handwriting. The one benefit to doing the count during feeding was that the inmates didn’t masturbate or flash their dicks at her. Instead, they mostly shouted or threw part of their meal at the door.
Someone was banging on a cell door. Normally, this was just part and parcel of Ventura County’s worst inhabitants being their usual asshole selves, but it sounded a little too urgent to just be another way to annoy the deputies. Mika looked in the window and saw the inmate inside grabbing his neck with both hands in the universal sign for choking. He was also coughing violently and pounding on his chest. Mika fumbled with the keys to the cell door and began unlocking it. Had she not been exhausted, she would have realized that if the inmate was able to make noise, he wasn’t really choking.
The inmate in question, a twice-deported gang member suspected of attempted murder, didn’t know that choking victims made no noise and in fact if you could cough, you were encouraged to try and hack up whatever was caught. He had been watching the short and petite blonde puta who always seemed distracted and far away.
With nothing to do all day except suffer in the heat, he carefully noted the procedures over the past days. The girls were running the counts and the men were bringing the food. They would deliver the meals, wait an hour and a half to two hours, and the next shift would collect the leftovers. It was the perfect time for him to spring, he thought, so he choked himself until his face started to turn red, then beat on the door to get the female deps attention.
Mika unlocked the door and opened it wide. The inmate let go of his neck and rushed forward, hands out. He knocked Mika to the ground, her head smacking into the concrete floor. The intense pain sent a flash of bright light across her field of vision. Deputy Fischer may not have had good situational awareness, but she was a very athletic young woman and excelled at martial arts. She flipped the inmate over on to his back. He was as unprepared for her counterattack as she was for the inmate’s lunge, but his strength was greater.
The inmate quickly scrambled to his feet and decked Mika. He pounced on her as she lay on her back, driving his knee into her stomach and the wind from her lungs. One, two, three blows to her face and the darkness was closing in around her. She didn’t panic. She felt no fe
ar, no shame, no anger. Mika threw a knee at the inmate’s groin, but it didn’t have any effect. He grabbed her by her hair bun and slammed her head onto the floor. The last thing she felt before she succumbed to unconsciousness was the inmate struggling to rip off her Sam Browne belt.
The SST manning the booth saw the attack as it happened and immediately put out the alarm. The deputies who were filling out their paperwork ran from the office to the section door. Horrified, they realized that Mika had one of the few sets of keys. Senior McKenny heard “10-33, staff alarm, Section A. Fischer’s down,” and sprinted from the senior’s office. When he arrived less than a minute later, he was upset to find the two deputies watching helplessly outside the door while the inmate was removing Mika’s belt.
“Your keys!” one of the deputies yelled, breaking McKenny’s mental vapor lock. It felt like forever trying to get through both doors.
Once inside the section, McKenny led the charge. The inmate looked up at the new threat and tugged harder at the Taser holster, trying to figure out how to draw the weapon. When he had closed the distance, McKenny delivered a roundhouse kick to the inmate’s head. His boot connected with the scumbag’s jaw, sending a spray of blood and several teeth across the floor. The inmate crumpled limply on the floor, but the two deputies dropped their full bodyweight on the prone figure and cuffed him up. They tossed the inmate back in his cell and shut the door. Mika’s medical needs were important, not his.
McKenny knelt over Mika’s unconscious body and tried for a pulse. Mika’s pretty face was gashed open and covered in blood. It had already soaked into her golden blonde hair giving it an abnormal strawberry tint. One of the deputies took over first aid and determined that Mika did have a pulse and was breathing weakly.
“Mika, Mika, it’s McKenny. Can you hear me? Stay with us.” He looked up at the SST. “Tell someone to get in here with a neck brace and get me an ambulance Code 3!” he yelled. The SST gave him a thumbs up.
Villareal was sipping a revolting cocktail of Pepto-Bismol, baking soda and water that the Public Health chief, Dr. Foret, insisted was his secret remedy for indigestion. All Villareal cared was that the pain stop. For the past few months, his physician had him on a strict low-carb diet to keep pre-diabetes from becoming Type 2. As a result, every time he ate a large portion of carbohydrate rich food, he suffered from intense heartburn. Being overweight didn’t help, but it wasn’t fair that the only food anyone had left was carbs. Oatmeal, bread, pasta, rice; the end of the world would not be good for his health.
A sergeant walked over to the chief. “Hey Tino, Captain Wright at the Air Unit requested that you swing by immediately.”
“What’s wrong?”
“He didn’t say, he just requested you come over there immediately and that it was urgent.”
“Can you ask him to advise?”
“Negative, we did, and he refused.”
“Hmm, odd. Well, let me finish my medicine and I’ll go over there. Never get fat, you’ll just—.” Someone ran over from the dispatching tent and interrupted, explaining that an ambulance had been sent to Todd Road. A deputy had been attacked and beaten. They didn’t know if she was alive or dead. Villareal tossed the pink sludge on to the grass and stood up. “Tell Wright it’ll have to wait.”
At VCMC, Villareal found McKenny waiting nervously outside the room. The chief’s blood boiled when he heard what happened. He agreed that it sounded like the inmates were getting out of hand. Villareal was going to rip Ostrander and the sheriff a new one for letting the jail staff get so low and exhausted.
Just today, a deputy came up to him and said “Chief, I got a family to worry about. If this keeps up, I’m gonna have to go home.” That attitude was prevalent throughout the department. Patrol deputies only remained through force of habit and the fear they would be fired like the police officers who deserted after Hurricane Katrina. Some deputies chafed at the boredom and others complained about the excitement. At least no one had been seriously hurt, until now. Bruises like Palmer’s shiner were about as bad as things had gotten. A parked patrol car had the windows broken out of it overnight, but there had been no real challenges to police authority anywhere in the county, yet. Thank God we aren’t in LA, he thought.
When Mika was stabilized, the doctor came out. “Good news, it’s not as bad as it looks. She regained consciousness, but we sedated her. Moderate concussion, but from what we can tell there are no overt signs of swelling of her brain. Her skull and jaw do not appear to be fractured, but there may be a hairline break in her cheekbones. Unfortunately, we can’t take x-rays. I’d love to get a CT scan, but I would also like eight hours sleep. Sorry.”
“No problem. We’re all in the same boat.”
“Her face was lacerated pretty bad but stitched up nicely. Nothing that won’t heal in a few months. We did have to shave some hair in the back of her head, so she’s going to have to wear a hat. We’ll admit her and keep her under observation until we can be sure there are no complications, maybe a day or two.”
Villareal and McKenny thanked the doctor profusely. McKenny would stay behind until a team of volunteers could stay with her through the night. Rybals would take the first night. The chief explained he was urgently needed at the Air Unit across the county, he explained with obvious annoyance in his voice.
Villareal saw the sheriff’s car parked at the end of the alley in front of the Air Unit’s hangar. He was mentally thinking of something sharp and insubordinate to say to his boss who had better things to do than check on a deputy who was viciously assaulted. The moment the chief walked into the office, Captain Wright said: “You’re not going to believe this.”
“What?”
“The sheriff got in his plane and flew off two hours ago.”
Villareal’s mouth dropped open. “He did what?!”
“He had his plane moved over to the corner of our tarmac this weekend. Today, he and his wife showed up. He was dressed in his civvies. He said that he was going to be doing an aerial recon of the county.”
“Maybe he is.”
Wright gave him a doubtful look. “Yeah, I don’t think he’s going to do that with all the luggage they brought with them and Mrs. Tennant’s little rat dog too.”
“How can his plane still fly? I mean, the helicopters went down, his plane should too.”
“Not quite. His plane was a vintage model. He was very proud of it being as stock as possible, you know, the way a car collector will go to the ends of the Earth to find an original part instead of aftermarket.”
Villareal had stopped paying attention. The sheriff went AWOL, deserting his post as the one man expected to have it all under control in the darkest of hours. A soldier would have been shot for doing something like that under the circumstances, but the only way to get a sheriff out of office was to recall him. There was no impeachment process. A judge could declare the office of sheriff vacant eventually, but that solved nothing immediately.
By default, Villareal had once again assumed the role of “acting sheriff.” Well, I’ve been in charge the whole time anyway, he thought. “Acting sheriff” sounded like he was pretending to be the sheriff. If anyone was pretending to be the sheriff, it was Tennant. Tennant was the guy who found himself being promoted because he passed each promotion and was a friendly person. By the time he got promoted to Chief Deputy, he figured he might as well try for one last promotion to the director of the whole show.
Villareal cursed himself for supporting Tennant as sheriff, not like it mattered a tinker’s damn at that stage in his career whether or not he would continue to serve at the sheriff’s pleasure. Boy, how Tennant had repaid him for his support.
Soldier of Fortune
Usually on a Monday afternoon, the widened intersection of Lewis Road and Los Angeles Avenue, a convergence of two-lane highways used daily by commuters, was a congested mess. No one in their right mind would go that way if they could avoid it. Church found the small corner of Somis to be a ghost town. Christm
as Day traffic was heavier. He continued a few more miles and turned down an agricultural road. He was looking for a mailbox with 4914 stenciled on it. A hundred feet past the mailbox, Sam turned right and drove over a bridge that crossed the culvert. A gravel road descended downhill until it was about ten feet below grade.
He was surrounded by lemon orchards. On his right was a row of windbreak eucalyptus trees and a chainlink fence topped with barbed wire. A large “No Trespassing” sign warned him off. Sam parked in front of the gate and got out of his Jeep. Next to the gate on a post was a metal box with an old military field phone inside. A sticker with “UDT Lemon & Avocado Company” was stuck to it. Sam gave the phone several cranks and waited for an answer. I hope I don’t get shot.
“Speak,” answered a gruff male voice.
“Yeah hi Mr. Sibley. It’s Sam Church. Can I come in?”
“Oh yeah, sure.” The line disconnected.
Sam got back in the Jeep and was surprised when the gate opened itself, instead of someone walking down to open it. He expected the ranch to be without power as well. He drove through and followed the road back uphill for a couple hundred yards through more lemon and avocado trees and parked just shy of the cobblestone driveway up to the house complex.
“Sam! I was in the shop. Why’d you park in the gravel? Park in the driveway like normal people.” Mr. Sibley yelled. The tall and fit, but graying man walked across the courtyard with his arms wide open and smiled widely. Sam always thought he looked a bit like John Malkovich.
“You heard me from inside the shop?” Tires on gravel was loud, but not loud enough to be heard inside.
“Aye. Got a wireless vehicle sensor rigged up.” They hugged. “Man, we were worried about you. Thought you’d re-up over this. Sean was saying you were out at Twentynine Palms when this went down?”
“Close, Fort Irwin. And you know I bleed blue.”
“Teaching your dirka dirka stuff to those trench monkeys, still?”