“When you see me again I hope that you have been
the kind of person that you really are now.”
Sylvester Stewart
Out on the West Side at night, it’s so flat and desolate you can sometimes find yourself in a kind of isolation therapy. Somewhere between Coalinga and Mendota, my brain had slipped into that elusive theta state where spurts of super learning, creativity, hallucination and problem solving are common occurrences. Tonight’s problem was…familiar.
I was back in my truck heading for Cantua Creek. For some reason, I felt I needed to call Jen. When she answered, I could hear Deep Cover playing a Sly Stone song in the background and people talking loud.
“Hey babe, how you doing?”
“I’m fine. I’m out having a drink with Cheri and Denise”
“Sounds good, you at the Landmark?”
“…Yeah, what time are you getting home?”
“Looks like midnight babe. I better get back to work”
“OK we’ll see you then”
Something about her voice put me on edge. It was too businesslike, almost scripted. As I drove through Cantua Creek, it just kept nibbling at me. My next stop was at a labor camp on San Mateo Ave. The closer I got, I began to realize that I had been there before. The place had been involved in some litigation over living standards a couple years back and I had gone out and taken a bunch of photos to support the Defendant’s case.
I drove by maybe a dozen small shacks, all of them dark except for one. The place was lit up pretty good by the moon and I could see a Lexus SUV parked out back. Something wasn’t right here, I thought the place had been condemned. Maybe this was the caretaker or something, but driving a Lexus? Hell, I’d seen stranger things.
I remembered walking through some of those three-room shacks. Filthy, broken plumbing fixtures and the sub-code 120 volt wiring stapled to the walls. I remembered who the Defendant’s attorney was. Varoosh “Var” Donabedian. Esquire. I thought of him sitting in the that booth, Jen looking down at her drink, smiling “The dress was Popeye’s fault” him in his polyester suit and Mr.T starter set, chuckling at the joke.
Just for kicks, I flipped through the subpoena’s pages back to the client info and found Donabedian’s mobile phone number. I was right in the middle of dialing his number when something from inside of me said ”stop”. I felt all the warmth drain right out of me. I knew where he was and I had a pretty good idea what was waiting for me in that shack.
All this took maybe a minute. I had driven by, then stopped in the middle of the street, looked at my paperwork and was now backing up into the camp and parking in front of the shack. Usually in a situation like this, I’d have honked my horn and waited for somebody to come out and reign in the dogs that were always around places like this. But that same little something said “No dogs. No need for loud noises just yet.” I double-checked the name on the subpoena. I shit you not, it was Jose Jimenez.
I left the subpoena in the car and tucked the .38 inside my folio as I walked and knocked on the door. The door opened and an olive skinned male in his thirties said “What do you want?”
“Jose Jimenez? I have some paperwork and a check here for you.”
“Please come in, Jose is in the other room”
I stepped into the house and the man motioned me to a dingy plastic covered couch against the wall and closed the door. I moved towards the couch to put some distance between us, but said “I’ll stand thanks, this won’t take long” as I opened my folio and gripped the gun.
“Sure no problem. He turned and yelled Ho-zay!”
I saw the fat black barrel of a silenced sub-machinegun peek around the corner first and let the folio drop free. I brought the revolver up “front sight – squeeze” and hit the man holding the gun in the right shoulder just as he fired. The impact spun him back and to his right as his bullets hit the wall and the couch just to my left. My next shot came a microsecond later and hit him square in the chest. I continued to swing to my right “slow is smooth – smooth is fast” and squeezed the trigger twice as the front sight passed across the man blocking the door. I put the front sight back on the man collapsed in the hall. He wasn’t moving I walked over and took the machinegun out of his lap and set it back on the couch anyway.
The man at the door was still breathing. I’d caught him reaching for a gun in the small of his back but all he got was two small black holes in his upper chest. He groaned as I rolled him onto his stomach and found a Glock pistol tucked into his waistband. I threw that over on the couch too. When I rolled him back over there was blood in his mouth. He was looking at me, wheezing “he told us there’s no guns…they don’t let you…have guns”.
“That’s right, they don’t.”
I thumbed the hammer back and aimed my gun at his face but he closed his eyes and then he quit breathing and was still.
My hands began to shake and my knees wobbled so bad that I had to sit down. I thought maybe I’d been shot, but I checked and found no blood on me. I tried to think rationally again. Varoosh Donabedian wanted me dead and was with my wife at that very moment. I knew that for an absolute fact. Did Jen want me dead? How deep was she into this ? Was she in danger too? It was beyond me right now. Either way, I didn’t want her anywhere near that guy. I was at least an hour and a half’s drive away. I needed some help.
My choice was an easy one. I really only have two close friends in this world. Stacy Watson was still down in San Diego but Dave Jensen lived in Fresno’s Tower District, only minutes from the Landmark. That’s not the only reason I was dialing his cell. You know that old song “Lawyers, Guns and Money?” Stacy is lawyers and money right down to the shirt off his back, but Dave is guns.
After four rings I could taste the panic in the back of my mouth, then.
“Luke buddy, talk to me”
“Dave where are you right now?”
“I’m in the garage, where are you sweetheart”
“Are you stoned? Listen I need some help here”
All business now “What’s going on?”
I tried to explain how I’d just walked into an ambush out around Cantua Creek, killed two men and why I needed him to make sure my wife made it home OK.
“You probably just stumbled into the wrong methlab, get the fuck out of there right now”
“Dave these guys are Armenians. One of them had an MP-5 with a silencer”
“No shit? Look I want that H&K . What’s this Donabedian guy look like?
“Just look for Jen, he’ll be close by. He’s a big flashy Armenian guy.”
“Don’t even worry about Jennifer I can be there in 10 minutes, just get going and toss that Smith in the canal on the way home, it’s evidence.”
Evidence…
“Luke! Get your ass in gear. Go home. Do not stop by The Landmark. Call me tomorrow morning…and don’t forget that H&K!”
He hung up. Now it was just me and the dead guys and the hissing of a Coleman lantern, the only light in the shack. I hadn’t planned on anything like this. I might have felt like dying a few minutes earlier but I damn sure didn’t want to end up in court or prison over all this. And I still had a big score to settle with Donobedian. Things weren’t near this complicated the last time…
…Laatst time I was in Southeast San Diego County back at work now sitting in a tiny air conditioned shed on the shoulder of Hwy 94. Things were slow and under control. I had agents Walters and Bernal over at the checkpoint, which was simply a portable awning in the median of the two lane highway. Agents Martinez and Sloan were in an observation vehicle, semi hidden up on a hill about a half mile to the south. I could afford to let my mind wander and wander it did.
I daydreamed about Claudia. Her dark brown hair, the smell of it back around the nape of her neck. Her pale, soft shoulders and back…I felt like I’d just returned from some kind of exotic vacation and I was having a hard time getting settled back into my reality. Eventually I heard Sloan’s voice over the radio. “We have a white van stopped about a mile out and…six wets are headed into the woods”… Van is moving again, headed your way.
“Copy that, maintain a visual on our hikers. We’ll take care of the driver.”
This didn’t happen very often out here but we had our procedure down. I left the shed and filled in Walters and Bernal. We’d stop the van at the checkpoint, detain and secure the driver and then they would head out to help Sloan and Martinez round up the illegal entrants. I’d stay to watch the driver, monitor the communications and call the Calvary if needed.
The van rolled on up and Bernal approached the drivers side. There was a driver and a passenger, Calif. plates. Walters went around back and checked the rear of the van. He was coming up on the passenger side as Bernal took a step back and put his right hand on the grip of his Beretta and told the men to get out of the vehicle.
I saw the passenger door burst open and a Hispanic male run across the westbound lane with Walters right behind until he slipped in the loose dirt and gravel. The guy turned and headed right for me. When he saw me run out of the shed, he tried to run up and around me on an embankment but I had a good line on him and caught him around the waist and tackled him to the ground. He fought free of my grasp but we had fallen close by the shed and he had no room to run. I had just gotten up on my feet when he wheeled around and stabbed me.
I focused on the knife in his right hand, but all I could do was get a hand out in front of me. The blade passed right through my fingers and entered my stomach. I still had hold of his hand as I drew my pistol and fired into his torso. He let go of the knife and fell back a step. I put the front sight over his face and blew a .40 caliber hole in it.
I looked back toward the van. Eddie Bernal had the driver cuffed and face down in the median. Walters was next to me then saying “c’mon boss lets go sit you down” as he helped me sit down against the wall of the shed. l was still holding the knife in my stomach but it wasn’t in very deep so I pulled it out and set it on the ground beside me. “Shit boss he stabbed you pretty good” My shirt and pants we’re soaked with blood and there was blood running down into my lap. Walters put his hands over my hand and pressed down.
“Bernal! Get MEDEVAC here now!”
I hate waiting more than anything else in the world. I sat there against that shed trying to figure out how long it would take to get a helicopter out to us. A bunch of people saved my life that day. Gregg Walters squatting there beside me, keeping pressure on my wound, kept me from bleeding out there on the side of the road. The MEDEVAC crew that flew me over to UC San Diego’s trauma center and the people there who stitched up my lacerated liver. All of them good, competent, professional people.
When I came out of the anesthesia, Jen was there. She smiled “Hey look who’s here!”
After a minute or so of looking around…
“Am I OK now?”
“Doctor Chopra says you’ll be fine”
“What happened…what was bleeding so bad?”
“Luke you were stabbed in the liver but they stitched it all up and you’ll be fine. Dr. Chopra says the cut wasn’t that bad and your liver will repair itself good as new. Your left index finger was cut down to the bone. They’ve sewn it up but you will need some reconstructive surgery in a couple weeks.”
I raised my hand and saw the bandaged finger swollen and pointing straight out. I tried to move it but it just stayed pointing straight. ”I feel sick.”
“It’s just the anesthesia. They gave me this little bowl, you just go ahead and puke right here if you need to.”
So I did.
I was kind of a celebrity there for a few days. The guy I’d shot turned out to be a U.S. citizen that was wanted on a murder warrant up in Stockton. I was in the hospital four days and during that time, I was personally visited by my sector chief and my U.S. Congressman, Duncan Hunter. I was shaping up to be the poster boy for the new fences that they’d started putting up. “A tough man doing a tough job.” A guy from internal affairs also came by to get my statement on the shooting. He smiled and shook my hand and wished me a quick recovery.
Then the toxicology results came through. I knew something was up when the internal affairs investigator showed up at the hospital again. I was on administrative as well as medical leave pending the shooting investigation. He was ”just wrapping things up.”
“So you are absolutely sure you had never seen either Mr. Ramos (the driver) or Mr. Villareal (the dead guy) until the actual time of the shooting.
“Sure to the best of my recollection”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, maybe there’s a slim chance I saw one of them in the checkout line at Home Depot a year ago, or anywhere else. But if I did, I don’t remember.”
“Maybe you remember smoking marijuana with one of them?”
“What?”
“How about cocaine? Did you ever purchase cocaine from either John Ramos or Richard Villareal?”
“Hell no!”
“Well where do you get your drugs Agent Winslow?”
“I need to talk to my Union Rep., get the fuck out of here.”
“So…you are choosing not to cooperate in this investigation?”
“No. I am respectfully asking you to please get the fuck out of here.”
And it all went to shit from there. Claudia came by later that afternoon. When she walked in, I forgot all about my lacerated liver, the investigation and Richard Villareal’s brains all over the side of the road.
“I came by last night but your wife and daughter were here…They’re both so beautiful.”
“Yeah I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”
A little pissed, “Yes you are.”
After a nervous pause…”You knew I was married right?”
“Of course. Do you remember handing me that book of matches with your pager number? Your wedding ring was right there in plain view.”
“I never thought to take it off.”
“I know, You didn’t even try to be sneaky or smooth. That’s what I liked so much about you.”
“You know what I liked about you?”
“Yes I do.” Smiling now.
“Then kiss me one last time before you break an old man’s heart.”
Then things got kind of sappy and awkward and after I assured her I was OK, she finally left. I’ll always remember that kiss. I’ll always remember everything about Claudia. Some days I hope I never see or hear from her ever again. Other days when the phone rings, I secretly hope to hear her voice on the other line. Shortly after Claudia left, my wife showed up. She’d heard everything.
“One last kiss? Before you break an old man’s heart???!!!
I felt like I was being stabbed all over again.
