House of Smoke (4 page)

“In the cabinet above the sink,” Mrs. Losario told Ray, her hand fluttering a direction, her jaw moving in opposition to her lips while her eyes were focused pityingly on her daughter.

This could be my daughter, Kate flashed, sick at the thought of it. This could be my life.

“Get the one that has the golfer on it,” Losario said. “I got it down at Pebble Beach, the day I went down there to watch the golf tournament last February. You remember that?” he asked his wife. “It was crowded as hell. I saw Clint Eastwood and Bill Murray. That Murray was something, wasn’t he? That guy cracks me up.”

Ray doled out a healthy pour, put the glass down next to Losario’s plate. Kate tried to catch his eye not to, but he deliberately wasn’t looking at her.

“He was funny,” his wife agreed. She was in her own time zone. That’s how she’s learned to cope, Kate realized. “He pulled some old lady right out of the gallery. She was standing practically right next to me. It was almost me instead.”

“You would’ve been on TV,” her husband chimed in, taking a pull from the glass. “A goddamn TV star.” He scratched his forehead with the fingernails of one hand. The other hand held the gun. He was eating one-handed. “Well, you’re a TV star now. I hope you appreciate what I’m doing for you.” Another har-har-har. “You, too,” he commented to Loretta, who had picked herself up off the floor and was slumped in her seat.

She glared at him but kept her mouth shut.

Losario drained his glass of wine and held it up. “Once again, if you please,” he said to Ray.

“Please don’t,” Kate pleaded with him. “It’s too dangerous drinking with all this happening.”

“If you please, kind sir,” Losario sang out, smiling at her. Clumps of pepperoni and melted cheese were stuck in the cracks of his teeth.

Ray refilled the glass, avoiding the daggers Kate was staring at him.

Losario ate another slice, drank down half his second glass of wine. All the while making sure he kept eye contact with Kate, so she wouldn’t make a move on him. He’d figured out almost immediately that she was the dangerous one.

After the first surge of appetite, no one else was eating. The pizza sat coagulating on the plates.

“How come nobody’s eating? This is good.” He glanced over at his wife. “Eat it, you ordered it.”

“I can’t. My jaw hurts too much.”

“For pizza? You can gum
pizza
.” He turned to Loretta. “What’s your problem with your dinner?”

“Three guesses,” she shot back. “The first two don’t count.”

“You got a mouth on you, girl, you know that? Since when do you mouth off to me in my own house?”

“Since you went crazy, Daddy, that’s when!”

He threw the glass of wine against the wall. Everyone except him ducked from the shattering shards; luckily, no one took a hit from the splinters, because the glass had no liquid in it—he’d drained it. Two eight-ounce glasses of wine in fifteen minutes, Kate thought—.12 on the Breathalyzer, maybe higher. One more drink and she could possibly make a move on him; the flip side was that the drunker he got, the more dangerous he might become.

“You see what you made me do?” he yelled at his daughter. He had come to his feet and was weaving slightly, one hand resting on the table for balance. “You made me break my favorite glass!”

“I’ll get you another one,” Kate volunteered, a bit hastily.

He shook his head, his eyes narrowing as he looked her over.

“Two’s my limit. You wouldn’t want me to get drink, drunk, would you?”

He herded them back into the living room. The curtains on the front window were bathed in light.

“Lie down on the floor,” Losario commanded them. “Everybody, down. So I can see you easier.”

There was a wide shot of the house on the television. It looked eerie, bathed in spotlights.

“On your stomachs, arms spread out above your heads.”

Kate fell to her knees. Until that moment she hadn’t realized how exhausted she was.

The phone rang, so loud it sounded like a bomb exploding.

“Oh, shit,” she groaned.

“Godfuckingdamnit!” Losario cursed behind clenched teeth. “I told them not to call anymore!”

It kept ringing. The sound rang painfully in her ears, like a dentist drilling without Novocain.

“They won’t stop until I answer it,” Kate explained in a self-conscious whimper, as furious at the ringing as Losario was. Without waiting for his approval she crawled across the floor and picked it up. The others, Ray included, remained lying facedown on the floor.

“What?” she whispered hoarsely, wanting to scream, but afraid of freaking Losario out even more.

“What’s the status?” Captain Albright asked flatly.

She could hear the impatience in his voice. The frustration.

Which was too fucking bad. He was going to have to contain it, he should know better. Lives were at stake; including hers.

“Unchanged. And what is wrong with you?” she railed at him, for a moment losing it. “Have you taken leave of your senses?”

“We can’t wait forever,” he informed her. “I’ve been given my bottom line. We’ve got to figure this out, come up with a plausible plan.”

“A plan to get us all killed? Now listen up good. No more calls,
comprende
? I will let you know when we’re ready to come out.”

There was silence from his end for a moment.

“I read you, Officer Blanchard,” he answered finally. He was giving ground; grudgingly, but for the moment at least he was acknowledging the situation, and not the outside pressures.

“I don’t have a chance otherwise.”

“You’re the one at ground zero. It’ll be your call from now on, that’s a promise.”

The line went dead. She guided the receiver back into its cradle; she hadn’t realized until that moment that her hand was visibly shaking.

Losario was staring at her.

“My boss,” she explained to this petty, angry man who had lost touch with basic reality, his shaking finger putting them all an accidental sneeze away from oblivion. “He’s just checking in. He wants this to come out okay; like we all do.”.

“I’m tired, Daddy.” Loretta had rolled over and was sitting up in the lotus position, staring at Losario.

“So go to sleep. What’s stopping you?”

“You are. With that gun.”

“This gun isn’t going to interfere with your sleep. Your precious beauty sleep,” he sneered. “Some sleeping beauty you are.”

The girl started crying again, from anger and exhaustion.

“What’s wrong with you, Dad? You’ve gone crazy.”

“No.” His face flushed. “I might be a lot of things, like angry or pissed off or angry or … a whole bunch of stuff,” his voice started rising as it grew louder, “but I am not crazy! Not!”

“Then prove it,” Kate said. She was on her feet, across the room from him. This shit had to stop: the time had come, because every minute that went by raised the unpredictability quotient beyond tolerance. If she didn’t take this gun out of his hand real soon he would be forced to use it, by the power of his own warped psychology.

“Put your gun down and we’ll all walk out of here.” Her voice was surprisingly steady; she’d been trained to do this, and to her surprise it was paying off. “Nothing has happened yet that can’t be fixed. You can walk away from this, Mr. Losario. But
you
have to do it. Now.”

She took a step towards him, her legs shaking in her regulation-issue trousers. She hated wearing these pants, they were the most unflattering pants she’d ever worn. She’d been wearing them for over ten years and she still hated putting them on in the morning.

“Don’t,” he said. “Not any closer.”

“You can put this all behind you.” One foot in front of the other, treading carefully on the balls of her oxfords, like walking a tightrope in a hurricane.

“That’s bullshit!” he exclaimed. “Kidnapping’s a capital offense. Even I know that.”

“Who have you kidnapped?” Another step, a small one. Her gun, lying on the floor, froze her mind. Five seconds of diversion and she’d have him, sewn in a shroud and hand-delivered:

“You,” he answered. “And him,” pointing to Ray, lying on the floor near his feet. “Two cops. You think they’re going to let me walk away from kidnapping two cops?”

“If I tell them to,” she said. “If I tell them we weren’t being held here against our will, but that we were trying to stop you from harming your wife and daughter. It happens all the time—you’d be surprised how often incidents exactly like this happen,” the syrup was coming back into her voice now, the ease, the control, this could actually work, she had a chance, “to all kinds of people, doctors and lawyers and businessmen. …”

“And stupid assholes like him!” Loretta screamed in his face, totally out of control. She had sprung to her feet and was right in his face, shrieking into his ears.

“Don’t, Loretta!” Kate cried, “for Godsakes, don’t!” Rushing at them, trying to pull her away, the girl was out her mind now, as crazy as her father.

“Who beat up their wife and daughter and play with themselves thinking about it!” The words were cascading out of Loretta’s mouth as she fought Kate off with surprising strength. “And those porno magazines, too, I’ve seen you, Daddy, sitting out there in the garage in your crappy car where you thought nobody could see, some of the times after you beat up Mommy, you look at that garbage and play with yourself, you pervert! You bastard!”

“Shut up, you liar, you whore!” he screamed, louder than any of them, he was going to wake the dead he was so loud.

“You’re going to die in hell,” his daughter came back at him in a banshee voice. “Die in hell and rot!”

“You’ll die before me,” he swore at her, “that’s a guarantee!”

And at that exact moment the high-pitched warning beeping of a truck backing up invaded their space like a rifle shot echoing in a canyon.

Losario jerked like he’d been burned, spinning at the sound and squeezing off a round, screaming “
Shut up!
,” the wild shot shattering the picture window.

That ripped it. Sirens started wailing, Albright’s voice was coming over a bullhorn, he was yelling they were coming in or something like that, Kate couldn’t hear it, the gun, she had to get to her gun and stop Losario, and Loretta screamed “you bastard!” again, right in his face, her spittle hitting him across the bridge of the nose, and the gun jerked in his hand and Loretta half-twisted-half-fell to the floor, the front of her blouse spreading with blood within one second, and Mrs. Losario screamed and he shot her too, twice, right in the face, and Kate was scrambling on the floor for her revolver, drawing on Losario, Ray had crawled behind the La-Z-Boy, he was useless, she raised her weapon to blow Losario away and he was jamming the barrel of his own gun into his mouth.

Kate screamed. To make him stop. So she could do it.

He ate the gun. All of the back and a big piece of the top of his head smashing into the wall, blood, bone, brains, hair, dripping down above the television set which was still broadcasting, live to the world beyond this quiet residential street, the incipient invasion that was about to commence and make everything safe.

Her gun was in her hand. She hadn’t fired a shot.

A
WOMAN IS STANDING
on a porch, looking out at the hills. She is singularly beautiful. She is fifty-one years old, and men openly gawk at her.

There is a cup of coffee in her hand which has gone cold. She doesn’t notice. She is going over in her mind all the things she has to do in the next few days. She has to be strong, stronger than she has ever been in her entire life.

It is early morning—precisely dawn. The sun, a rufous shimmering Jell-O, is starting to break through the early-morning fog, a pale nimbus spreading across the low horizon.

The porch wraps halfway around a small wooden ranch house in the Santa Ynez Valley in Santa Barbara County, California. This house is one hundred fifteen years old. A functional house, no frills. The family the woman married into, her husband’s family, owns all of the land she can see to the horizon, and beyond.

Their ranch is one of the largest in the county, over 20,000 acres. A working cattle ranch, the real thing, not for show. The people that do the actual work, the cowboys and their families, live in another area of the property, in houses the ranch provides for them, in close proximity to the barns, corrals, and feed pens where the livestock is kept and the tin-roof sheds where the heavy ranch machinery is stored.

Years ago the woman’s husband’s father had gotten it into his head that this ranch would be an ideal place to grow bananas. The location of this property situates it climatically similar to parts of South America, areas of Ecuador and Colombia; and after reading several books and pamphlets on the subject, sent to him courtesy of the Department of Agriculture, he was convinced of the viability of the idea. There are dozens of varieties of bananas grown in the world, and he was going to grow some of them in his very own backyard. They grow bananas down by the coast, in La Conchita, south of the Rincon, so why shouldn’t they grow here in the valley, a mere thirty miles away as the crow flies?

His neighbors, those that were venturing into agricultural pursuits other than cattle, the production of choice in these parts for two centuries, were planting vines for table wine or laying out strawberry fields.

He was going to grow bananas.

They didn’t grow. The topography was similar to that of other banana-growing regions around the world, but the climate wasn’t lush enough. After ten years of trying different strains and failing with every one, the property was let go back to range.

About the only thing that came out of that enterprise, besides the family taking a considerable financial hit, was an unofficial and definitely unauthorized name for the ranch. The holding is officially titled
Rancho San Miguel de Torres
: a centuries-old name, bestowed on the property by the king of Spain in Sevilla, with his own hand. After the fiasco with the bananas, however, it became known derisively throughout Santa Barbara County as
The Banana Republic
, and although the family has striven mightily over the years to get rid of that laughable appellation, it has stuck like gum on the bottom of a shoe.