13 Under the Wire Read online

  13 Under the Wire is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Alibi Ebook Original

  Copyright © 2016 by Gil Reavill

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States of America by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  ALIBI is a registered trademark and the ALIBI colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to Hal Leonard Corporation for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Lake Marie,” words and music by John Prine, copyright © 1995 Weona Music. All rights administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

  ebook ISBN 9780553395075

  Cover design: Tatiana Sayig

  Cover images: Shutterstock

  randomhousebooks.com

  v4.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part 1: Ten Years Before

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Interlude

  Part 2: Ten Years Before

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  13 Under the Wire…

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Gil Reavill

  About the Author

  You are the memories.

  —Marlon Brando

  You know what blood looks like in a black and white video? Shadows. Shadows!

  —John Prine

  Aztlán, n. (from Nahuatl: Aztlān): The legendary ancestral home of the Aztec peoples. Aztecah is the Nahuatl word for “people from Aztlán.”

  Prologue

  PRESENT DAY

  L.A. was on fire.

  On the second day of the riots, after she had been on keep-the-peace duty for thirty-six hours straight, Detective Layla Remington of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department watched an overweight figure wearing a police flak jacket take off running. He peeled away from the flaming chaos along San Fernando Road and hit an unlit alleyway a half block to Remington’s left. The reflective lettering on his body armor read “LAPD.” Thinking the officer could use some help, she took a step in that direction.

  “Don’t,” Deputy Johnny Velske said. Just the single word, with the sound of a random far-off gunshot putting a period after it.

  Stick together was the cardinal rule of the crisis. Backed off fifty yards from the main drag, Remington’s small contingent of sheriff’s department personnel were outgunned and outnumbered, but they hadn’t yet lost anyone.

  Torched businesses illuminated the night along the major commercial strip in San Fernando, a heavily Hispanic community in the Valley. Looters raced to do their work before arsonists completed theirs. Pharmacies and gun shops got hit first, then liquor stores. A spectacular series of explosions in a sales lot of brand-new cars had mostly quieted, but every once in a while the air shook as another gas tank blew.

  Whenever and wherever police or fire units showed, the rioters routed them with barrages of bricks, rocks and salvos of gunfire. Plumes of coal-colored smoke choked the skies over the neighborhood. The infamous Los Angeles smog, so much better of late, returned with a vengeance as a sooty gray cloud.

  The unrest had erupted in the early evening two days before. That afternoon, an LAPD anti-gang task force shot up the wrong house. The raid was a disaster, with police killing six innocent residents, including a pregnant teenager. All the cops were white. The dead were Hispanic. In a heartbeat, the incident went wide on social media.

  With no sleep and thirty-six hours of constant, grinding tension, Remington couldn’t judge whether her brain was working right. Everyone was exhausted, everyone was on edge. Despite her best instincts, she loped off toward a residential driveway that would give her access to the alley where the cop had disappeared.

  Deputy Velske shouted after her, trying to call her back. Remington hurdled a pair of waist-high chain-links and cut across a small yard leading to the darkened alleyway. As soon as her boots cleared a last fence and crunched down on gravel, she propelled herself into the middle of a confrontation.

  Seeing a cop in an all-out sprint, she had naturally concluded that he was running down some offender, a looter or an arsonist. Now Remington realized that she had made a serious error. The overweight cop wasn’t chasing anyone. He was fleeing for his life. A gaunt stickman dressed all in black pounded down the alley after him.

  The husky cop tripped and sprawled forward. He turned back toward his pursuer, raising his arms in a defensive posture.

  “Police!” Remington’s shouted warning was drowned out by gunshots to the immediate east. They resembled a string of firecrackers going off.

  The stickman raised his right hand and pointed at the cop. In the smoky gloom, Remington couldn’t be sure the guy held a weapon until she saw the muzzle flash. She heard the snap of the round as it took the downed cop in the neck. She leveled her own sidearm, a seven-shot Ruger that was down to three loads because she had been firing warning shots into the air all day.

  The cop in the LAPD flak jacket clutched his throat. At ten yards, Remington could hear him choking on his own blood. Stickman fired again. Remington had had enough. She put the rioter in her sights.

  A citizen with a shotgun stepped out of the shadows of the yard across the alley. He aimed and fired. The blast twisted the stickman a half-turn around. With an odd buckling movement, as if he were merely settling in for a nap, the rioter lay down beside the wounded cop. He stayed where he fell, not moving.

  “Drop your weapon!” Remington shouted, shifting her Ruger onto the newcomer. The citizen wore a dumbfounded expression, as if he couldn’t believe what happened when you pulled the trigger on a twelve-gauge that was aimed in the general direction of a flesh-and-blood human being.

  For a split second in the dim light, Remington thought she recognized the guy as a vile criminal she had encountered before. She reacted immediately, reflexively, advancing with her pistol leveled and firing until her magazine emptied. The citizen was breathing when she ran up on him. Then he sighed and went quiet.

  With a sick drop to her stomach, Remington realized she had been wrong. The dead man did not even faintly resemble the perp she had mistaken him for. Her extreme exhaustion, her frayed nerves, the confusion of the alleyway had betrayed her.

  In the midst of a riot triggered by a police killing of Hispanic citizens, Detective Layla Remington had herself shot and killed a Hispanic citizen. She braced herself for all the trouble that was about to crash down on her.

  Remington checked the others. The cop had bled out. She approached the stickman guy and felt for a pulse. He was gone, too.

  Velske and a rookie deputy named Billy Horace—predictably nicknamed Horse within the department—came flying through the backyard into the alley, weapons drawn.

  “What the hell!” Velske pointed his pistol in frantic stabs up the alley toward San Fernando Road, down the alley toward a gulf of smoldering
black nothingness, then into the backyards on both sides. Scoping the dead guy in the LAPD flak jacket, Velske swore loudly.

  “Eleven-ninety-nine!” he shouted into his two-way. “Nine-nine-nine!”

  Officer down. Officer needs help.

  “Forget it, Johnny,” Remington said. Sheriff’s Department dispatch had been overwhelmed all night. No one was going to be answering their calls.

  Another round of gunshots exploded up on the commercial strip. From the dark alleyway they could see crowds of looters streaming southeast.

  “We’ve got to move!” Deputy Velske was pumped up and breathing hard. “All they have to do is make a turn down this way and we’ll get run over.”

  Remington didn’t think that was going to happen. The rioters weren’t interested in residential neighborhoods. They liked storefronts, the more plate glass the better.

  “What the hell happened?” Velske asked her. “Never leave the unit! Never leave the goddamn unit!”

  Technically, as a sergeant Velske should have been officer in charge. But chain of command had gone funky during the riot. Comms were spotty. Fatigue had taken its toll. They were like a platoon caught behind the lines, taking a stand with their backs to the freeway. The six-lane interstate was clogged with the hulks of a half-dozen burned-out vehicles. Remington had come to look upon Los Angeles as an abused spouse, repeatedly battered by disasters both natural and human-sourced.

  “We’ve got a deceased officer over here,” Horse called out, stating the obvious. He tried for an official tone but couldn’t keep the shock and awe out of his voice. “Are we in trouble?”

  Remington had an urge to laugh in the rookie’s face. We’re under siege, we have three DOAs at our feet, one of them a cop, we’ve been out on riot patrol for thirty-six hours straight—and Horse is asking if we’re in trouble?

  “What a clusterfuck,” Velske muttered.

  “No, no, clusterfuck is down the road a piece,” Remington said. “This here is more on the order of reamed, steamed and dry-cleaned.”

  She was wrong about the rioters sticking to the main drag. A group of them drained off San Fernando Road and came toward her, lofting rocks, bricks, garbage cans, anything that could be thrown.

  “Get out!” Velske yelled. “Go, go, go!”

  An angry, throaty rumbling rose from the mob. Remington stood her ground, a lone figure at the mouth of the dark alley, facing off the rioters. Stones whizzed past her face, ricocheting like bullets. She would have fired into the air but she had just emptied her sidearm into the fallen citizen who lay dead behind her.

  Remington singled out a long-haired teenager in a black Gap T-shirt and a purple bandanna hiked up around his mouth. He and his comrades skidded to a halt, like a gang of kids in a cartoon. Moving as one, the group scrambled backward, retreating in a rush. She was about to congratulate herself on her command presence when a squad of a dozen military personnel in full combat battle dress double-timed forward and took up support positions around her.

  The cavalry had finally showed.

  —

  Units of the First Marine Division arrived on the scene at 0317, up from Camp Pendleton. It had taken a while to organize the military response. No one seemed to have learned anything from the Rodney King riots in ’92. Or maybe the circumstances were different. There was social media now, and news of the incident that had sparked the riot spread instantly over the internet. In East L.A. and the Valley, the fed-up Hispanic community took to the streets. Keeping the peace couldn’t keep pace.

  “Police in Los Angeles were once again caught flat-footed, so to speak,” one newscaster commented.

  Remington had never been so weary. The troops pushed onward to San Fernando Road. An EMT vehicle pulled into the alleyway to work on the dead. The ambulance had dents in its side from the stones thrown by rioters. Marine support personnel loaded her, Velske, Horse and the rest of the LASD contingent into a military-issued dormitory bus. No one informed them where they were headed.

  She didn’t care. She crawled into one of the bus’s lower racks still in her clothes, the stench of smoke and body funk on her like a shroud. The dorm bus nosed through marines and National Guard troops. Remington’s eyes closed on them all. She bad-dreamed her way into nothingness.

  Her superior officers allowed her to sleep for exactly three hours and fourteen minutes. During that time, the incident in the dark alleyway off San Fernando Road hit the early-morning TV reports. News of the police casualty and of the fallen citizen—ID’d as Mateo Guzmán, a homeowner whose residence was immediately adjacent to the scene—heightened the mood of the crisis. The three deaths would become the focus of ferocious media and government attention. During her too-short stretch of sleep, Remington remained unconscious and unknowing.

  A shout woke her. She raised her head, disoriented, and realized that it was daylight. Sort of. Fall fog clouded the air. Someone had written “desire” on the dirty glass of the bus window, the word smudged there like a shadow. For the first time in Remington’s experience of recent days, no gunfire interrupted the silence. Could it finally be over?

  The dorm bus had pulled up beside a bank of withered, odorless bougainvillea. She was in a city park or a landscaped estate of some sort—at any rate, not in riot-plagued L.A. anymore, and not on this earth, evidently, but in a cloud-forest garden somewhere in a universe far away.

  “Yo, Remington!”

  She rose and stumbled down the aisle of the empty bus. The folding door in front gave her a hard time, but she solved it and stepped outside.

  Deputy Johnny Velske stood there, smoking a cigar. “You’ve got people standing in line to crawl up your ass.”

  “Nicely phrased,” Remington coughed out, waving the smoke away. “Jesus, Johnny, let me at least get my land legs under me.

  “Where are we?” she asked. But she didn’t hear Velske’s answer (“Granada Hills”), because the world, for her, went unplugged.

  A disorienting memory seized her mind. She stared across a fogged-in sweep of lawn to a house.

  The house…

  Vast, impressive, a mansion. White clapboards and black trim, with a pair of big bay windows that posted themselves on either side of the elegant front door. All as familiar to her as if the place had been her own childhood home, which, in a sense, it was.

  Command vehicles and military trucks crowded the driveway. The disorder of the morning lay everywhere around her, but it couldn’t compete with the immediacy of memory. Nothing could.

  “You all right?” Velske asked her.

  Now he was going to say, You look like you’ve just seen a ghost. He didn’t understand. Remington hadn’t seen a ghost. She had become one.

  “I know this place…” she murmured.

  “They’ve got coffee and some sort of canteen set up over by the garage. Nothing exactly edible, but my God I was hungry. There’s some portable showers, too. You’ve got a heavy debriefing coming up, Detective. They’re lying in wait for you.”

  Ah, but Deputy Velske, ghosts don’t eat. They don’t shower. They don’t debrief.

  Remington found that she could move without walking, propelled onto the lawn and toward the house as if by some miraculous form of levitation.

  Los Angeles County sheriff Ed Dickerman came up on her left wing. “Detective Remington? We need to speak.”

  “A moment,” Remington said dreamily, insubordinate, still lost.

  Wildermanse. The home of the Loushane family.

  Everything that was supposed to happen to a child growing into adulthood happened to Remington right here.

  She first fell in love.

  “Detective Remington?”

  There had been deaths, also, several and close at hand, so she had come to understand loss, too.

  The heady scent of bougainvillea floated in from the past.

  Ten years and a lifetime ago.

  That was now. This was then.

  Part 1

  Ten Years Before

>   Chapter 1

  Seventeen-year-old Simon Loushane dived into the hotel-room party like a pro, rocking the fourth floor of a balconied, concrete-block-and-stucco building on Avenida Revolución in Tijuana. A sign on the façade identified the place as Hotel Baja California. A thumping Nortec bass line worked itself from the street-level disco down below. Simon could feel the beat deep in his crotch.

  Av. Revolución. The most insane strip in the world. You couldn’t tell by Simon which historical revolution it might be named after. He thought it was the American one and then asked himself why Mexico would be honoring the U.S. with a street sign, concluding that it really didn’t matter.

  Just an hour before, he had mumbled the nickname of the strip (“La Revo”) to a taxi driver at the border crossing. In quick order he had found himself weaving among the jostling crowds, the liquor stores, clubs and souvenir peddlers, the warring sound systems and the striptease dives that did a lot more than just tease. A Malibu friend of Simon’s had a weed connection who worked out of the disco in Hotel Baja California.

  Simon never hooked up with the dealer and instead staggered upstairs to the fourth-floor party.

  He was drunk and high. He had never not been drunk and high in Tijuana. Getting stoned was what everybody did. All the clubs had a shooter, el goleador, who circulated on the dance floor with a bottle of cheap tequila. For a few pesos he poured a shot straight down your throat, then blew a fucking whistle right next to your ear.

  “Tijuas,” Simon and his friends called it with easy familiarity, even though the most they knew of the city was La Revo and a couple of other hard-party streets. Or “Aunt Jane,” off the Spanish, Tía Juana. So linked was Aunt Jane with drunkenness that in Simon’s mind the town seemed to spin on its axis like some massive carnival fun ride.