13 Stolen Girls (24 page)

The author gratefully recognizes the help provided by Richard Jaccoma, Rich Procter, John Bowman, Eric Saks, Pat Tierney and Leslie Dunham Hyde in the writing of this book or with background about Los Angeles. Kate Miciak, Julia Maguire and the rest of the team at Alibi/Random House deserve my gratitude, too. As always, my love goes out to Jean Zimmerman and Maud Reavill.

13 Hollywood Apes

13 Stolen Girls

G
IL
R
EAVILL
is an author, screenwriter, and playwright. His debut crime novel,
13 Hollywood Apes
, was nominated for a Thriller Award by the International Thriller Writers. Reavill's crime journalism has been widely featured in magazines. He is also the author of two nonfiction crime books,
Mafia Summit: J. Edgar Hoover, the Kennedy Brothers, and the Meeting That Unmasked the Mob
and
Aftermath, Inc.: Cleaning Up After CSI Goes Home,
as well as the pseudonymous co-author of the bestselling
Beyond All Reason: My Life with Susan Smith
. Reavill co-wrote the screenplay that became the 2005 film
Dirty,
starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. He lives in Westchester County, New York, with his wife, the writer Jean Zimmerman.

gilreavill.com

Facebook.com/​GilReavill

@greavill

L.A. was on fire.

On the second night of the riots, after she had been on keep-the-peace duty for thirty-six hours straight, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Detective Investigator Layla Remington 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 a darkened 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 Sergeant 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.

After no sleep and a day and a half of constant, grinding tension, Remington couldn't judge whether she was thinking straight. 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.

Torched businesses lit up the night along the main commercial strip in San Fernando, a heavily Hispanic community in the Valley. Looters raced to do their work before arsonists completed theirs. Whenever police or fire units showed, they were routed by barrages of bricks, rocks and ripping salvos of gunfire. Gouts of coal-colored smoke choked the skies over the neighborhood. The infamous Los Angeles smog gradually turned from dirty brown to sooty gray.

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

Deputy Velske shouted after Remington, trying to call her back. She 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, Remington propelled herself into the middle of a confrontation.

Seeing a cop in an all-out sprint, she 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 begging posture.

“Police!” Remington's shouted warning got drowned by gunshots to the immediate north. They sounded like a string of firecrackers going off.

The gaunt stickman raised his right hand and gestured 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 LC9 that was down to three loads because she had been firing warning shots all day.

The entire Valley was engulfed in chaos. No one had been able to get through an ammunition resupply to the stranded group of sheriff's personnel. Remington was going into the scene at a distinct disadvantage.

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 enough and 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 rest, 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 puzzled expression on his face, 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.

With a slow, agonizing movement, he pivoted toward Remington. She watched the shotgun muzzle swing in her direction. Glints of arson light reflected along the barrel's blued steel. The citizen seemed intent on training his weapon on her.

“Police! Hands behind your head! Drop your weapon!” Screaming it. Pandemonium is an old Greek name for hell. Riot noise from the avenue fifty yards away—strangled shouts, the roar of flames, gas-tank explosions, staccato gunfire—combined to make it difficult for Remington to tell if her commands were being heard.

The scattergun boomed. A sharp pepper of what was later determined to be No. 4 steel shotgun pellets took Remington in a pattern that barely grazed her left side. She felt the hit on her body armor and a cutting sting on her cheek.

She nailed the citizen with a single shot to the torso. He was breathing when she ran up on him. Then he sighed and went quiet.

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

Cautiously turning the rioter over with her foot, she felt sick. The left side of his torso and neck had been pulped by the shotgun blast. Stuck amid the mess was a wallet on a short length of beaded chain. Reaching in with an ungloved hand, Remington extracted the LAPD badge that hung around stickman's neck, a gold LAPD detective's shield stained with blood and dented by steel pellets.

She tried to make sense of it. Some sort of friendly-fire incident, a horrible mistake, two cops facing off in the fog of war. But she took a closer look at the guy in the flak jacket and realized that theory was all wrong, too. He wore a shabby gray tracksuit under the Kevlar vest. Definitely not a police officer.

The cop wasn't a cop. The stickman guy wasn't a rioter.

Everything had gone cockeyed.

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

“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 cursed under his breath.

“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.

“You're bleeding.” Horse stared at her, wide-eyed with fear. The rookie looked as if he might be sick to his stomach.

Another string of gunshots exploded up on the avenue. From their post in the dark alleyway they could see crowds of looters streaming southeast in a pack-like formation, heading to where Truman Street merged into San Fernando Road.

“We have 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.

“We need to get you medical help,” Velske said to her.

“I'm okay.” She reached up and touched her cheek. Her hand came away wet. Now that it was all over, she did feel a little light-headed. She imagined writing the incident report on this one. No one was going to believe it.

“What the hell happened? Never leave the unit! Never leave the unit!”

Technically, as a detective investigator, Remington outranked the deputy sergeant. Velske shouldn't be yelling at her. 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 Golden State Freeway. The six-lane interstate was clogged with hulks of a half-dozen burned-out vehicles. Remington had come to look upon Los Angeles as an abused spouse, battered repeatedly 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.

“That one isn't a police,” Remington said. “He must have stolen the flak jacket somewhere.” The black canvas body armor had “LAPD” emblazoned across it in silver letters, so it had been easy to mistake him for a cop.

She nudged the dead stickman guy with her foot. “This one here is plainclothes LAPD. You recognize him, Johnny?”

“What? Hell, no! For Pete's sake,
he's
police?”

“Which? You're saying what, now?” Horse was confused.

Remington laid out how she read the scene. “The dead dirtbag in the LAPD flak jacket isn't a real police, he's just a looter. Okay?”

Velske and Horse both stared at her.

“Then the other dead guy, who
is
a plainclothes cop, he goes after the dirtbag in hot pursuit. The real cop shoots the fake flak-jacket cop. And then he's shot by the citizen who mistakes the plainclothes LAPD officer for a cop-killing rioter.”

“After which…that one here?” Velske pointed at the dead citizen with the shotgun lying beside him.

“At first I had him pegged as just a homeowner protecting his property, but now I think we're going to find out differently. Like maybe he's got a couple flat-screen TVs in his ranchero that he didn't have before all the looting started.”

“My head hurts, Remington, and I'm tired,” Velske complained.

“Check his ink.”

The downed shotgunner sported some serious tattoos. “Marabunta, it looks like,” Remington noted, naming a particularly lethal brand of El Salvadoran street gang. “
La vida por las maras,
and, I guess,
la meurte por las maras,
too.” Live by the gang, die by the gang.

Velske knelt next to the gangbanger, then looked back up at her. “He took a piece out of you….”

Remington nodded.

“And you shot him dead with a department-issued weapon.”

Remington nodded again. Beneath her Kevlar body armor, her shoulder and the left side of her rib cage felt tender. Blood from the facial cut was now trickling down beneath the collar of her jersey. But her real wound was weariness. She couldn't bring herself to care that a stray shotgun pellet had torn her cheek open.

“Are we in trouble?” Horse asked.

Remington had an urge to laugh in the rookie's face.
We're under siege, we have three DOAs at our feet, 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.”

At 0317 the following morning, the cavalry finally showed. Or, actually, units of the First Marine Division, up from Camp Pendleton. It had taken a while to organize the military response to the unrest. 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 sparked the riot spread almost instantly over the Internet. In East L.A. and the Valley, the fed-up Hispanic community poured into 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 tired in her life. She got her cheek bandaged by EMTs working out of an ambulance dented and dinged from bricks thrown in the riot. The medics loaded her, Velske, Horse and the rest of the LASD contingent into a military-issued dormitory bus. No one told them where they were headed. Some sort of nearby marshaling point, across the freeway to the west.

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

No one woke her, but she came out of sleep all at once. She raised her head, disoriented, and realized that it was daylight. Sort of. Remington peered through the dirty windows of the bus. Someone had written “desire” on the glass with a finger, the word remaining smeared there like a shadow.

Outside, a maritime air inversion had brought down a thick curtain of fog over the surroundings. That, combined with the smoke from the riot fires to the east, muffled both sight and hearing. For the first time in her experience of recent days, no gunfire punctuated the silence. Could it finally be over?

The dorm bus had pulled up beside a bank of withered hydrangeas. She was in a 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.

Remington 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.

Johnny Velske stood there, smoking a cigar.

“Where are we?” But she didn't hear his answer (“Grenada Hills”), because the world, for her, went unplugged. A disorienting memory seized her mind. She stared across a green sweep of lawn to the house.

The house…

White brick 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.

Remington stood unmoored from the moment, caught between two periods of time, the present day and a dream of her much younger self, a decade ago, post-high school, just before the police academy. Phantoms from the past screamed down on her like a horde of vengeful warriors.