Chapter 5 Once more into the breach

Contents Back to Chapter 4    On to Chapter 6 (someday)

"

        "Full repulsors!"   I yelled, but Sterling's Seal reflexes had served us well and we were already rocketing skyward when the grenade's blast harmlessly buffeted the armored undercarriage of the limo.   The distinctive ping of anti-personnel shrapnel rattled harmlessly as Sterling calmly banked away from the overpass and toward the cluster of police command vehicles 500 yards back down I-5.  "Circle back!" I demanded.  "We've got to take that maniac out!"
        Wordlessly he tapped a small CRT on the dash.   I leaned forward to see, and found myself looking down from the vantage point of a camera mounted somewhere in the car's undercarriage.  Below us at the end of 40 feet of nearly invisible monofilament dangled the rent-a-cop, enmeshed in a sticky web of anti-personnel line.  I smiled.  Sterling had obviously fired the anti-riot detention net at the same time the possessed flatfoot had fired his grenade launcher in our direction, pulling him from his perch atop the overpass and dangling him like fishbait over the sea of twisted steel and mangled bodies he had created from the fast-moving nighttime freeway.  He twisted slowly under the helicopter and several shrapnel wounds from his own explosives sprinkled dark blood as we flew.
        Blue uniforms scattered as Sterling plopped the struggling rent-a-cop into their midst, though several pointed weapons at the car as we settled to the pavement at the side of the prone, web-wrapped form.  He no longer struggled, and his eyes rolled back in his head as I reached him, foam flecking his slack mouth.  "Don't touch him!" I snapped at the approaching police and paramedics.  Frantically I searched him head to foot as Sterling cut away the detention net.
        I leaped to my feet.   "Amal!  The emerald!  He doesn't have it!"
        "I know," he muttered.  He stood staring back toward the overpass in the distance.  "He dropped it.   Somewhere out there."  As we watched, hundreds of people emerged slowly from the twisted, smoking wreckage, and police and paramedics converged on the wounded, the dead, and the dying.  And adding to the chaos, down through holes in the tall freeway fence that lined the freeway, the denizens of the surrounding barrio -- some Samaritans, some predators and scavengers -- descended into the carnage.

        His Abuela would like this pretty thing, reasoned little Javier Jesus Villalobos Garcia.  Absently he ran the fine gold chain through his hands and fingered the massive cool green stone.  He had seen such things before, of course, draped around the necks of the beautiful Santos his grandmother enshrined on the shelves and walls of the tiny trailer that was their home.  He would place this pretty thing around the neck of Our Lady of Guadalupe with his own hands -- Abuelita would be so proud! 
        He had even seen such beautiful jewelry around the neck of his mama the last time she had come to visit -- two years before, when he had been only four years old.  She was beautiful, his mama, with her long black lashes surrounded by blue, and her bright red lips with the thin outline of black.  She had nice things -- a very tight red dress that for some reason had made Abuelita's lips go very thin, the way they did when Javier displeased her.  And money!  So much money that when Abuela had slapped away the proffered handful with a muttered, "Putana!" his mama had pretended not to care and had turned on her heel and left the tiny trailer without a backward glance. 
        She would come again soon, he knew, and take him to live with her and he would have more than just this one pair of threadbare shorts and the scanty  tanktop teeshirts that Abuela made from the scraps of cloth she found in the dumpster outside the sewing factory.  The Patron said her arthritis-twisted hands now made her too old and sick to work there any more.  So many years she had toiled over a rattling sewing machine, she sometimes muttered, and now on days when her hands did not shoot fire up into her wrists they became so numb that she couldn't raise a spoon to her own mouth and Javie had to do it for her.  And because she could no longer work they could no longer afford to live in the studio apartment that had always been Javie's home and had moved to the little trailer in the far reaches of the abandoned lemon grove where so many others, some even worse off than Javie and his Abulita, made their homes.  There was no more tv, of course, no more cartoons or baseball games, not just because the tv had gone to the pawn shop, but because there was no electricity in the lemon grove. 
        He lowered his chin to his knees, picked at a leaf of the ivy in which he sat, and calmly regarded the pandemonium on the freeway below.   He knew that when the excitement had died down a little the police wouldn't be nearly so vigilant and he would be able to see what could be found among the tangled wrecks.   When he had seen Javie darting among the wrecked cars a few minutes before, one stern-eyed Highway Patrolman had shouted and waved him away, telling him to get back up the hill, away from the freeway, and go home.
        But he couldn't just leave -- every time he had seen a wreck on the freeway there had been coins on the pavement, just lying there for the taking -- bright pennies, clunking nickels, jingling dimes, and the occasional quarter, just lying there amid the the glinting shards of auto glass and the bloody glow of pieces of tail light lens.  The first time he had seen this he had darted out into the whizzing traffic time and again, long after the ambulances and the fire trucks and the police cars and wreckers had gone, snatching up the precious coins.  How could these rich Anglos just leave this treasure there on the pavement under the overturned cars?  He didn't know.   But he knew that with the coins he had gathered that first night he had enough money to buy a half kilo of tortillas and enough frijole negro that Abuela had taken strength enough to sit up for the first time in days.
        And now here was an accident far greater than the usual two or three-car pile-ups that yielded the earlier bounty.  No, he had to stay and see what he could find -- perhaps there would even be other small items lying around that he could sell to buy food.
        He watched with interest as the helicopter flew low overhead, surprised that a policeman seemed to be dangling below it -- no, not a policeman, he could see, but a security guard, a goon like the goons who the landowner would occasionally send to chase the squatters out of the lemon grove, the goons who would leave you alone if you had a few dollars you could give them, but who would break your head and scatter your things if you didn't.  Javie hated these men, but he carefully saved every cent he could so that the next time they came they would leave his Abuelita in peace.
        The helicopter landed and a beautiful lady leaped out and ran to the security guard and bent over him.  Even from where Javie sat a hundred yards away he could tell that the beautiful lady was very angry.  And so was the tall dark man who stood at her side staring out at the wreckage on the freeway.  The tall man's eyes swept back and forth and Javie thought he could almost feel their piercing heat, sweeping back and forth across him like a nearby searchlight.  Suddenly the man stopped moving and pointed straight at him, and Javie felt a prickle of fear go up the fine hairs of his back.  The tall man and the beautiful lady shouted something to the men climbing down from the helicopter and ran toward him.   Javie jumped up and raced up the embankment to the hole in the fence where he had come through.