Thirteen Hollywood Apes by Gil Reavill (Chapter One Excerpt)

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THIRTEENHOLLYWOOD

APESA Layla Remington Mystery

Gil Reavill

New York

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Thirteen Hollywood Apes is a work of fiction. Names, places, and

incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are

used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or

persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

An Alibi eBook Original

Copyright 2014by Gil Reavill

Excerpt from Thirteen Stolen Girlsby Gil Reavill copyright

2014byGil Reavill

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States of America by Alibi, an imprint of

Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin

Random House Company, New York.

ALIBI is a registered trademark and the ALIBI colophon is a

trademark of Random House LLC.

This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Thirteen

Stolen Girls by Gil Reavill. This excerpt has been set for this

edition only and may not reflect the final content of the

forthcoming edition.

eBook ISBN 978-0-553-39505-1

Cover design:

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Cover illustration:

www.readalibi.com

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Chimpanzee, n. [from Bantu kampensi, fake man or

mockman]: A great ape of the genus Pan, native to Africa,

believed by evolutionary biologists to be the closest existing

relative to human beings.

Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions . . . The Devil

under form of Baboon is our grandfather.

Charles

Darwin

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The family startled instantly awake, and the yard echoed

with screeches, barks, and howls. As the others scattered, Booth

remained inert and motionless at the foot of the tree.The night air filled with sharp, echoing reports, one after

another, spaced among the screams. Moment by moment, the

members of the family fell. The big chain-link fence cut off all

retreat. There was nowhere to run. The killing took but six

minutes.

Finally only a single lost soul survived, an eight-year-old

male, running along the ditch on the grassy western side of the

compound, frantic after the death ruckus of the others. He sped not

away but toward the shooter. Confused, or angry, bent on revenge.

The ruby laser dot searched, discovered, settled. Five grams

of copper-clad lead caught the last survivor with a glancing blow

on his right shoulder, spun him around, and pushed him into the

concrete ditch.

Then, silence. A few night birds called, poorwills and

mourning doves. Above, through the leaves, the far-off, uncaring

stars. Somewhere to the east a two-stroke engine sputtered,

sounding barely there.

Later that night, the dry October winds pushed the flames

down out of the hills into the parched grasses and brittle, needle-

heavy trees of the compound. But the wildfire found nothing left to

kill and, in its impotent rage, could do nothing more than cook the

dead.

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2

Why a deputy detective investigator with the Los Angeles County

district attorneys office might be carrying a potato on the night of

the Lost Hills wildfire was a fact that did not readily admit to

explanation.

The sheriffs department posted Layla Remington at a

junction along Las Virgenes Road, in the canyons above Malibu.

The sky a mile to the north of her was a wall of smoke, lit orange

and red from the inside, coin-size floaters of ash in the air, with a

background noise like the distant rumbling of a freight train. To the

east, homes, ranches, and camp buildings nestled in the dry

landscape went up like so many birthday candles. The fire teams

found themselves helpless to stop the destruction.

When she was off duty at the D.A.s office, and in

recognition of the fact that she had no real life, Detective

Investigator Remington volunteered for fire duty. She did backup

traffic control for the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department,

wearing an orange reflective smock that made her look like a

traffic cone. The big Lost Hills blaze, out to flatten a vast slice of

the county, represented an all-hands-on-deck situation.

From her post at the intersection, Remington could hear the

propane-gas pigs on the barbecue grills outside the burning homes

explode one after another. The fire crowned in dense stands of

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sycamore, fir, and gray pine. Mingled with the wood smoke was

the smell of burning meat from all the steak-filled chest freezers in

houses that were getting roasted in the flames.The beef smell made her think of the potato.

Denny Hamilton, long-dirty-blond-haired, scruffy-bearded

captain of a fire team from the Sierra Nevada that called

themselves the Wooly Mammoth Hot Shots, told Layla Remington

about the potato thing. An old guy with the Mammoth Lake Fire

Department said they used to do it all the time back during the

war.

That would be the Civil War, right?

Denny thought Layla might be serious, not quite getting her

yet. No, no, I guess he meant, you know, World War Two, or

maybeJesus, youre right, maybe it was Vietnam.

The potato thing, Denny, Layla prompted him.

Hamilton was waiting around at her intersection after a

resupply, looking for a lift back to the front lines. Layla didnt

mind him hanging out. The guy looked half-charred, his eyebrows

singed off, the scruff on the right side of his face curled by wildfire

heat. He was dirty and ashy and in his rootless early twenties, like

hotshot team members everywhere. But the whole package added

up to hero-handsome.

Okay, so you find a century plant, like an agave, you

know? The spiky ones? And you impale your tuber onto the top

spike. Hamilton mimed the move, impaling one of the several

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comes out tasting like butterscotch.

Layla laughed and shook her head. The guy was so damned

irresistible.No, really, Denny insisted. What you do is you go up to

a ponderosa pine that has direct sunlight shining on it, give it a

hug. Im telling you, put your face right into the barkit smells

exactly like butterscotch. Like, I mean, exactly.

Youre a tree-hugger now, Denny?

Did you know the first tree-huggers were a band of Hindu

women in the foothills of the Himalayas who were trying to save a

grove of sacred trees from loggers?

Later that night Denny Hamilton went up-canyon to face

off with Lost Hills. Layla wound up holding one of his big oblong

Idaho baking potatoes. She stuffed it into the pocket of her orange

reflective smock. She thought she might try out the tuber or not

tuber pun that her dad had taught her on some poor victim, but in

the flurry of activity around the wildfire she actually forgot about

the thing.

Until the nimrod in the Mercedes morgue wagon showed

up.

He came on a little after 1 A.M. The blocky, outlandish

vehicle he drove pretended to be a sport-utility crossover of some

sort, the German answer to the Hummer. For all its upscale design,

a Mercedes G55 AMG wound up looking like a childs idea of a

hearse. The black truck gave a throaty growl as it pulled up at the

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Las Virgenes Road intersection.

The driver didnt even bother to roll down his window, just

pointed past the roadblock up toward the fire. Deputy John Velske,one of several Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department personnel

assembled at the intersection, approached the vehicle. He made a

circling motion with his finger, indicating that the driver should

open his window, the gesture held over from when people still

cranked windows down manually.

Sir, this road is closed. Velske stated it as a fact but kept

his tone polite.

Gotta get up there, the driver barked. He was smooth and

well tanned, as if he had been cast in an ad for the car he was

driving.

We have emergency protocols in place, sir, Velske said.

Deputy, is it? Deputy, Ive got a five-million-dollar

residence up in Coral Canyon and I am within my rights to secure

said residence.

Great, weve got ourselves a lawyer. Remington could

almost read Velskes thoughts.

I could try to contact the fire teams in the vicinity and

have them radio down a report, the deputy offered.

I dont want a goddamn report, Deputy. I want to retrieve

the three gold records that are up on the wall in my office, the

platinum record in the entry hall, the contents of my safe.

Velske turned to Remington and mouthed the word

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douche.

What did you just say to her? Like the guy could read

lips. He wore his hair wicked up and, even though it was pastmidnight, had a pair of five-hundred-dollar sunglasses propped on

the back of his head, probably slept with them on.

He said, Okay, Im heading up right now, and if you try to

restrain me the sheriffs department is going to find itself in a

world of trouble.

The Mercedes G55 lurched forward an inch as the driver

slammed it into gear. Remington marveled. She had seen men face

off like this all her professional life, and even before, in the school

yard. Velske and the morgue-wagon driver were like a couple of

silverback gorillas in the rain forest. What was the guy going to do

now, plow his rig over a sheriffs deputy?

What he did instead was maneuver his ultra-expensive

sport utility into the ditch for a little improvised off-roading.

None of the law-enforcement personnel stationed at the

intersection could believe it. The nimrod had a death wish. Coral

Canyon was right in the path of the Lost Hills fire.

Sir? Sir? Deputy Velske yelled, but the guy just kept

going.

As the glossy Mercedes bumped slowly past her,

Remington extracted the potato that Denny Hamilton had given her

from the pocket of her smock. She reached down and crammed the

tuber into the vehicles exhaust pipe, where it vented immediately

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in front of the rear wheel.

Velske saw her make the move. He grinned and nodded.

The two of them watched the driver pull down into the ditch,around the roadblock, and back up onto the pebbled asphalt of Las

Virgenes.

Ill give him fifty yards, Velske said, staring after the

vehicle.

Twenty, Remington guessed.

The Mercedes compromised and died about thirty yards up

the road, the exhaust fumes backed up in the manifold to choke off

the engine.

You know, the Germans just dont make cars like they

used to, Velske said.

The platinum-record-in-the-entry-hall guy stormed out of

the G55 and stood there staring at his $115,000 vehicle, disabled

by a potato.

The shoulder-mounted two-way that Remington wore

crackled with incoming comms from Denny Hamiltons team

working in the hills.

Wooly Mammoths Hot . . . Were at . . . 34.115642 north,

118.679937 west . . . We got . . . Trappe Ranch . . . wildlife

sanctuary. Blasts of static kept interrupting the message.

Remington fumbled with her speaker-mic. Mammoths,

this is the sheriffs post at Las Virgenes Road. Repeat.

. . . Thirteen dead monkeys . . .

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Mammoths, this is Las Virgenes roadblock. Please repeat.

Mammoths?

The connection went cold.

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