House of Smoke (2 page)

“Sit your ass down, lady cop,” Mr. Losario commanded her, indicating the chair she’d been in.

She sat. The gun lay heavy on the floor, drawing her attention. Five seconds of distraction, that’s all she needed. Take this fucker down and walk away to tell the tale.

Don’t be a hero. One of the first things they teach you. The cemetery’s full of heroes.

Losario glanced over at the TV set, which had been on to
Ricki Lake
when she and Ray had arrived. At first, when the TV crews had shown up and the live feed had started, Losario had been transfixed. He was on television. A nobody all his life, now suddenly a celebrity. He had started flipping channels with the remote, finding himself on several of them.

“We’re making history!” he had crowed to his wife and daughter.

“You’re sick,” his daughter, Loretta, had spat back at him. She was the type of kid who didn’t take squat from her father, Kate knew that ten seconds after she and Ray had walked into this inferno. An admirable quality and one of the main reasons they were in this shit barrel.

Losario had smacked Loretta good for that remark, a heavy closed-fist blow across the cheekbone that had sent her reeling. Kate had winced at the sound—she knew the feeling, all too well.

That had been three hours ago. The cheek was turning blue/yellow now, the left eye closing to a slit like a boxer’s. Losario wouldn’t let Loretta put ice on it, he wouldn’t let anyone out of the living room where he could keep his two eyes on them. He paid particular attention to his wife, “the ungrateful cunt” (which seemed to be his normal way of describing her).

“We’re in here because of this ungrateful cunt,” he’d told Kate and Ray shortly after the mess started seriously unraveling. “I hope you appreciate what you’ve caused,” he’d railed at his wife, who sat cowering on the couch, her hands covering her smashed-in face with a dishtowel.

“It’s not her fault,” Loretta had come back at him. “It’s you, it’s always you, Daddy!”

“I didn’t ask you, miss!” he’d screamed at her.

Shortly after this had come the exchange that had led to his daughter’s getting hit upside her head.

This was not the first time, not by a long shot. Kate knew that; now. Unfortunately, the information had come too late. She wished she’d known the history before she’d walked into the middle of this. She would’ve done things much differently. Her own personal experience with this kind of dehumanizing behavior would have guided her, changed her approach.

Too late now. She was going to have to play the hand she’d been dealt.

She’d been suckered into it by the circumstances, the normalcy on the surface. She should have known better, because they weren’t very different from her own. The banality of evil. Where had she read that? She didn’t remember, but it was true.

It was a normal house in a normal lower-middle-class neighborhood. Small yards, most of them fenced, the lawns mowed, everything neat and clean and orderly. Nothing to indicate the danger within. She and Burgess had parked half a block away, walked up to the front door, and knocked. Hardly anyone had been on the street. It was a neighborhood where wives held jobs as well as husbands. A few kids passing by on their way home from school checked the cops out. In some neighborhoods the police are part of the scenery. This wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. This was a nice, middle-class, law-abiding neighborhood.

“Who is it?” A girl’s voice from the other side of the door. It sounded guarded, but that hadn’t registered.

“Police,” Kate had answered. “We got a call there was a disturbance at this residence.”

Silence after that. She heard some low voices talking, nothing distinguishable.

“You’ve got the wrong house,” the girl’s voice finally answered.

“We have to check it out,” Kate said to the door. “Would you open the door for a moment so we can see that everything’s all right? It’ll just take a moment. We don’t want to disturb you, but we have to respond whenever we get a call.”

“Nobody here called you,” came the reply. “It’s a mistake.”

“Fine. Just open the door then, we’ll take a quick peek in, and we’ll be on our way.”

Another silence. Kate glanced at Ray. He was wetting his lips, reaching for his holster. She put up a calming hand to restrain him. You don’t pull your weapon in the street unless the situation calls for it. This didn’t. So far all they had was a scared kid behind a door.

“Are you alone in there?” Kate asked. “Is that why you’re afraid to open the door?”

A pause. “Yes,” came the reply then. “My mom doesn’t want me opening the door to strangers when she and my dad aren’t here.”

“Okay. I can understand that. I wouldn’t want my kids opening the door to strangers, either. Tell you what
—
you’ve got a peephole in your door there, I can see it. You look through that peephole so you can see I’m what I say I am, me and my partner. We’re police officers. We’re here to help you. But we have to check inside. So go on, look at us through that peephole. I’ll hold my badge up so you can see it.”

She motioned to Ray to stand next to her in front of the door, so the girl could see both of them. She waited. Longer than necessary.

“Okay,” she spoke, after giving the girl the benefit of the doubt and then some. “Now you’re going to have to open up, miss, or we’re going to have to radio for some other policemen to help us out, and what do you want that for? All we want is to make sure you’re okay, okay?”

Slowly, the door swung open. The girl stepped back enough to allow them to see into the empty living room past her.

“Can we come in just for a second?” Kate asked, “to make sure you’re all right?”

Without waiting for a reply, she pushed by the girl. Ray followed. SOP, by the book.

The girl stood in the center of the room, looking sideways at them. About fifteen, sullen, dark-eyed pretty, dressed in the white-blouse-blue-skirt uniform of a parochial high school. A large silver cross hung around her neck.

She had two daughters of her own. The older one was almost exactly the same age as this girl, she realized. Given her own family dynamic, how suspicious of authority would either of her daughters be in this kind of situation?

The room they were standing in was neat, clean. The furniture was a cut above Sears. Matched couch and chairs in pastels, dark-stained oak end and coffee tables. A new 32˝ Sony television set tuned to
The Ricki Lake Show
stood prominent in the corner, and there was a bowl of fresh fruit on the dining-room table. A large wooden crucifix was prominently featured on one wall.

A nice house in a decent neighborhood, nothing about it to remark on.

“What’s your name?” Kate asked the girl.

“Loretta. Loretta Losario.”

“I’m Officer Blanchard, and this is Officer Burgess. We’re with the Oakland PD,” she offered, stating the obvious.

The girl didn’t say anything. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She was wearing Doc Martens over her bobby sox.

“Where’s your boyfriend?” Kate asked.

“I don’t have one,” Loretta answered. A little too fast, to Kate’s ear.

“You were talking to somebody. I heard a man’s voice.”

“No, I wasn’t. It must’ve been the TV.” She pointed to the corner, to the show in progress. “You must’ve heard the television.”

“You’d better let us take a quick look around,” Kate had said to the girl.

“Do you have to?” A whiny teenager’s voice, but with too much fear, way beyond the normal fear kids have of cops.

They found Mrs. Losario in the bedroom lying on top of the quilted bedspread, her back to the door, all curled up in a ball. Shaking uncontrollably.

“Oh, shit!” She heard her own voice—the woman part of her, not the part that was an officer.

“Mrs. … Losario? Did you call us?” She crossed to the other side of the bed, so she could see the woman’s face.

It was bad. Some teeth knocked out, the nose broken and flattened against both cheeks. Heavy bruises on the jaw and temple. A terrible battering, done by somebody who knew how.

Kate knelt by the bed next to the woman. “Who did this to you?” she asked, trying to keep the quiver from her voice. “Is he still here?” The shock
o
f recognition, of empathy on a gut level, immediately turned her stomach into a clutched fist.

The woman didn’t answer. Her mouth was swollen, most likely her tongue, also.

Kate turned to Ray. “Call an ambulance. And backup.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

She looked up, surprised, although why she should have been surprised was a mystery to her. This was a domestic quarrel, a husband beating up on a wife. Why hadn’t she assumed he was still here, and taken precautions?

Because one event had led to another, and there had been no warning until it was too late.

When she and Ray hadn’t called back in after the appropriate amount of time, a second car was dispatched to the scene. That’s when they found out they had a madman on their hands, an armed and dangerous wife-beater who was holding his wife, daughter, and two police officers hostage. Three hours ago, already an eternity.

The first time the phone had rung, Losario had answered it. He had listened for a moment, then had hurried to the window and looked out, making sure he kept one eye on Kate and Ray. He had drawn the curtains and slammed the phone down, hard. When it rang again he let it ring: ten, twenty, thirty times, until even he couldn’t stand it and picked it up.

“What the fuck do you want now?”

He listened, his eyes darting around the room, keeping everyone in sight.

“No.”

He listened some more.

“Why should I?”

His brow was wrinkled in concentration he was listening so hard.

“Okay, I will,” he said finally into the phone, “but no funny stuff. Any funny stuff and she’ll be the first to go.” He stared at Kate. “They want to talk to you.” He put the receiver on the table, backed off so she couldn’t get close to him. “No funny stuff,” he warned her. “I’ll blow your pussy brains out you try something cute.”

It was Captain Albright. That’s when Kate learned that Losario had been doing this to his wife for years. He had been arrested on assault charges before but never formally charged—Mrs. Losario had always backed off at the moment of truth: the typical, tragic syndrome. If Losario had been charged, the record would have been on the computer and Kate would have been forewarned for the time he’d flip out and cross the line. The time he took prisoners. This time. It was another crack in the system, which she and Ray had had the misfortune to fall into.

Albright had told Kate about Losario: a solid citizen, by all accounts. He was the assistant service manager of a Mercedes/Porsche dealership in Walnut Creek (those vehicles were out of his league; his personal car was a frugal Honda Accord), member of the Rotary and Elks clubs, a steady churchgoer. He and his wife had been married twenty-two years.

That was the bitch of it. She remembered what one of the good judges in superior court had told her once, during a trial when a kid was accused of murdering his mother and father for no discernible reason:
No one can know what goes on behind closed doors.

“Thank you, sir,” she had said into the receiver, her heart plunging to her knees. “That’s good to know. I had kind of figured as much.” But wished against.

“Be careful,” Albright had cautioned her. “Don’t take chances. Time is on our side.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.” She had hung up.

How much time is enough? she thought.

On the television set an off-camera female reporter was interviewing Captain Albright.

“Is that the guy you’ve been talking to?” Losario asked her, turning for a moment to the screen.

“Yes.”

“… and that’s all we’re going to do,” Albright was saying in response to an off-camera question. “We have no plans other than to wait this thing out and hope that the gentleman inside comes to his senses.”

“I have my senses, you asshole!” Losario yelled at the box, spinning back away from it to point his gun at Kate.

Almost, she thought. You almost let me. Keep talking, Captain.

“… We are not going to go in after him. Let me repeat that,” Albright said, turning and looking right into the lens. “If you are watching this, Mr. Losario, let me assure you that we are not going to come in after you. We are going to wait until you calm down and come out of your own volition.”

“And a bear doesn’t shit in the woods. You’re going to wait until hell freezes over!” Losario screamed to the television set.

Five seconds, Kate thought, watching him closely. That’s all I need. Keep talking, Captain, don’t stop. Piss him off royally, until he’s so wound up with you he forgets about me.

The camera cut away to the broadcaster, one of the anchorwomen from Channel 8 across the Bay, who started in on how long Kate and the others had been held hostage, how many police there were outside the house—over a hundred—stupid shit like that.

They could hear a helicopter overhead. Loud, like it was hovering right over the roof.

“Mr. Losario,” Kate began. She had to talk to him, engage him. She had to talk him down off this ledge he’d constructed.

“What?”

“I have to go to the bathroom.” She hadn’t meant to say that, the words had blurted out; she couldn’t hold on any longer, she’d had two cups of coffee at lunch and iced tea later that afternoon, her molars were floating.

“So go.”

She started to get up to go to the bathroom. Was it going to be this simple? She should have thought of this hours ago.

“No,” he said, pointing the gun at her. “Here, you can go here.”

“Are you serious?” You humiliating bastard, if—no,
when
I get out of this—I’m going to fuck you up so bad you’ll wish you’d never been born.

“I have to go, too, Daddy.”

He herded them all into the bathroom, even Ray.