What Jesus Did

By Mary Penelope Young

redemption is often elusive!
people wrestle their demons or accommodate them. under-cover agents, jesus lopez and mickey pachuco aka scar, battle drug trafficking and gangsters running amok during the 1980s and 1990s in florida and on the west coast. decades before, on a hellish evening in 1967, the two men's futures took shape in a small village in guatemala. Then in july 2001 lopez and scar at last meet mano-a-mano in hilo, hawaii, to confront that nightmare encounter.

"Who the @#@ are you, and what do you want from me? Didn’t you rob enough from a small boy and his family? Do you want to kill me like you did my father and my sister? ”

surviving a civil war, battling the urban jungle, and searching for peace and love thrust Jesus amidst an interplay of characters. he and his lover, araceli embark on a manhunt for assassins of guillermo guerrero and emma hazelton. bobby bellamy, a compton drug kingpin whose limousine jesus chauffeurs, depends on him for solace especially when rival gangsters gun down his girlfriend, nakisha. senora miriam perez battling cancer offers him pieces to a baffling puzzle. disasters - an earthquake, a riot and a train ride along the west coast – are occasions of revelation.

meanwhile scar, ever alert to the transportation of contraband in south florida, befriends chico, one-time killer and now gay supplier of drugs to the rich and famous. their world dazzles and debilitates both men.

in the final encounter, will jesus lopez and scar aka mickey pachuco reconcile...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mary Penelope Young
• Release date: Oct 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301874125

Mary Penelope Young

Mary Penelope Young grew up in Asia, studied in Europe and now lives in the United States. Life experiences, travel across five continents, religion and Jungian psychology have all fed her creativity. She is a writer and watercolorist, and actively promotes social justice and civil rights.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

JITTERY HYPER-ENERGY WAS SUBSIDING from the cocaine the two men had ingested before the murders. They had needed the high and it served them well. Now, sucking on a shared joint, they tried to relax. But the Valley’s midnight cool could assuage neither the wet buds of sweat on the foreheads nor the zigzags of moisture running down the hollowed cheeks of the assassins, as the persistent wailing of the ambulance and explosive honk-honk of fire trucks see-sawed in concert, an active scrub brush grating on their nerves. Buttocks squirmed and squeaked involuntarily on the slippery vinyl.

Juvenal Navarro and Edgar Nunez, respectively Nosey and Chico to their fellow homeboys, hunkered in the spot they had chosen two weeks before the killings. Both conspirators figured they would need to recover their cool after the deed was done. They had driven up from Pico Rivera three times to scout the layout of San Benitez and La Coloma.

The lot Nosey discovered was isolated with a building in the middle of four acres and a substantial parking lot. Guards and watch-dogs had long since crossed this property off the list, leaving No Trespassing signs to do their job. Once-bustling, the now-abandoned warehouse, a half mile from the burning house, slumbered pitch-dark wrapped in an overhang of trees, all motion detectors shattered many months ago. Still blackness could not shroud the fluorescent mural spray-painted on a concrete wall. Orange flames leapt out of a bleeding heart into their mesmerized glances, threatening to consume the two murderers like the devastating reality they had created forty-five minutes earlier.

Nosey stopped the pick-up where a clump of trees, a building corner and the parking lot converged. For five minutes the pair sat silently, listening as their wild eyes darted and their shoulders hunched ready to duck and avoid the swooping life-like graffiti. Chico spoke first, his voice crackling as if fumes choked his throat,

I thought we could get out before - oh my God, the house falling down, burning like hellfire. The man and that woman up against the wall, their blood pouring out of them with their eyes wide open, like they were watching me. Those wide-open eyes! Two pairs, staring, cold, dead leading me to Hell.

His voice became a sputtering squeak,

At least we didn’t smell the bodies burning!

Suddenly cutting short his jabber, he grasped the door handle, stumbled out. His chest pounded. Weak knees failed to carry him very far. Three feet from the truck, Chico vomited. The splash sprayed liquid and globules onto the wall of the warehouse. Doubled over, staring at the mix of semi-digested barbecued chicken and colas on the tarmac at his feet, he wrung out the words,

O God how will I live with this? Then he heaved up some more until dribbles of bile dangling from his lips slobbered to the ground.

His companion slouched at the driver’s seat, not voicing his thoughts. Right index finger caressed the trigger of the .38 hanging in the gun belt over his left shoulder. Nosey was very proud of that holster, an illicit purchase from a fellow-homeboy who had killed a cop and needed the money since he was on the run and left the country fast. Mebbe I should shoot this coward, hijueputa chiflado, crazy son of a bitch, be done with it. The forty grand will be mine, all mine. Nah, better not.

His mom would pay some cholo gang member to send me to my grave. Burn me in my bed for a hundred dollars. Prob’ly that’s all I’m worth. Nothin’ like a madre whose son gets hurt.

Nosey smiled to himself. Look at this mess. Guerrero beats up Smiley until he’s about to croak, forces him to report me and Chico to the cops. So he tells the pigs how we, I shot that Israel kid dead. Then Smiley goes up for ten years because of drugs. His mother calls Scar. Guerrero’s got to die. She blames him for everything. That woman, quiet like a lamb, eyes lowered always, she’s become so crazy loca she wants him dead. And now here we are. Nosey shook the disturbing thoughts from his mind.

Well at least we’re richer.

Nah, I’ll let this cholo lowlife survive.

He called out softly to his friend with the weak stomach and the hunched shoulders,

Nah, Chico, stop thinking so much. Guillermo Guerrero and his lover Emma Hazelton are dead and their house burned down around their asses. That’s it. You’ll live to do a few more jobs, and be so strong dinner at a steak house will be your next stop after the kill!

Seeing Chico’s mouth open and ready to regurgitate once more, and hearing the gurgle, he quickly continued, Okay, okay. Calm down. Get back here, have another smoke. He shook his head, clearing his thoughts once more, Nah, nah, no more smoking. We gotta go.

His torso jerked from side to side. Now, below his belt he felt an urgent ache,

"But wait, I have to pee.

Hey Chico, you clean up and pee too. It’s a long ride to East LA. So we gotta split this death-trap now. Pronto! Better move fast. No stops. The cops’re prob’ly headed this way already.

His dope-befuddled brain wandered off at a pleasant tangent. His words slurred,

But the smell of that money is in my nose like my mamacita’s perfume. Can’t you smell it?

As swiftly as a bullet exits a pistol, his mind changed course,

We gotta hurry, hermano, we gotta hurry!"

Nosey walked over to Chico who stood up and squinted into his cholo buddy’s face. Chico’s watery eyes and throw-up stench staunched Nosey’s manic chatter. Grimacing, he grabbed Chico’s arm dragging him towards the trees so that they could relieve themselves. Swaying and in silence, the two fugitives sprayed a desiccated juniper bush whose greenery had once graced the property. Relieved, they zipped up their jeans as they directed their steps back to the truck.

Nosey shoved Chico, sniveling and gagging, through the passenger door; slammed it shut. He jumped into the driver’s seat.

Five minutes later the black pickup was on the freeway headed to a meeting with Scar in East Los Angeles. He had promised to have their tickets outbound to Miami.

**********

Smiley’s mother, Miriam Perez lamented the gruesome deaths of Mr. Guillermo Guerrero and his fiancée, Emma Hazelton on that Friday night before Labor Day. She wept copious tears at their funerals, sending huge bouquets of flowers to adorn their graves. Wiping away her tears and blowing her nose, she told her neighbors and Detective Yow such ugly violence was a terrible thing, killing so many and causing such grief. 1990 was a very sad year for the whole community.

Detective Yow, who worked the Valley Division and had been instrumental in Smiley’s incarceration, commiserated because he knew her plight. The wretched woman was the mother of two jailbirds, and one victim of a drive-by shooting. Only one son seemingly steady, studious, remained at home to comfort her.

**********

For three weeks after the arson-double homicide the Los Angeles Police Department, including reinforcements from the downtown office, conducted a manhunt and intensive search for clues and evidence. The radius of the operation stretched across the San Fernando Valley and into East Los Angeles. Searchers collected clues meticulously from obvious and obscure places within the area of investigation.

Two days after the slayings and conflagration, at a vacant industrial lot, an officer gathered samples. Years ago, trucks had rolled in daily with loads of lumber, plastics, steel and hardware for the construction of aircraft parts. Now the storage house waited forlornly for demolition or rehabilitation. Abuse by vagrants, lovers, gangs and teenagers had left scars, derelicts’ debris. Used condoms, flesh-gashing beer bottle shards, crushed plastic, flip-flopping fast food wrappers littered its grounds. The slash of wrathful graffiti writhed on its walls.

Walking slowly, eyes on the ground through the detritus, Officer Jesus Lopez also discovered fresher-looking vomit and the strong odor of urine. Well, at least forty-eight hours fresher and wetter, and smellier than the rest of the garbage! He placed scrapings and damp earth in two neat baggies to be analyzed in the Forensics lab at the Central Office.

Two sets of tennis-shoe prints were too windblown and mangled in the dirt to be discernibly distinct. The urine sample revealed sugar levels of a diabetic. Lab tests and data base displayed no matches for suspects. The police department's report concluded more than one perpetrator was involved in the arson-murder case.

CHAPTER 1

JESUS LOPEZ ONCE LIVED AMONG THE COSONUSCO FOOTHILLS in Southern Mexico where the coffee fields of Chiapas flourished. This was his home from his fifth through his seventeenth years. Long hours of daily labor and harvesting the beans in their new country enabled Jesus and his brothers to glue back together the shattered pieces of their past life.

Their parents worked and raised a family in the small town outside Ciudad Tecun Uman in Guatemala before the troubles began. Paulina Xertal married his father when she was sixteen years old. Her oldest son, Ernesto was born eleven months after the wedding. Another son arrived, Manuel, and then a daughter, Carmelita. There was a gap of six years between his older siblings and Jesus. Jesus and the brothers surmised there were other babies, but he never asked. Better that he did not know how, when or why, his other brothers or sisters, if any, had died. Maybe that was why his name was Jesus, in thanksgiving for an offspring that survived.

Mother, you have told me this history a hundred times, Jesus protested when Paulina recollected the horrors of their flight from Guatemala in 1967. Usually she told it after the last meal of the day, as the darkness fell upon the tiny dining area and she lit the kerosene lamp. This evening, Jesus had hoped to pick up the novel he was reading and finish it. He held the open book in his two hands with his eyes on the page, even as she began her story,

But I want you to promise me you will not forget your past as you soar into the future and a whole new life.

Her voice brought him from his book back to the kitchen. Paulina spoke, slowly, her voice broken by memories. Her dark eyes were wide as she looked at him. Now, as Jesus gazed into them, he saw once again as he had seen a thousand times before, where his mother hid the suffering of the years gone by.

Jesus lowered his lids to hide from her pain, reached up and massaged the throbbing spot between his brows. He gave up thoughts of reading, and focused on listening like a dutiful son. Since his mother sat silent, he looked up into his mother’s eyes again. They gleamed. The tears flowed from them and dried on her cheeks many years ago. The light was coming from fervor deep in her, a mixture of love and hatred. He nodded his vow to do her will. Then he opened his mouth,

We’ve spoken often and long about our history, mama, and I cannot forget. Especially the loss of our papa and our sister, Carmelita. Her face is still too often in my nightmares and dreams. She wakes me up with her screams and her bloody face and toothless mouth. Remember how you woke me up and had to calm me down?

His mama shook her head. Sometimes the shaking was sad. At other times, like the present, she spoke with a frown,

What a way to remember your sister. Ugliness stayed far away from her until devils forced it upon her.

Paulina's expression changed. She smiled slightly as she continued, reaching back into the past to happier times,

"She was so lovely, like a fragile butterfly. My little Carmelita, when she was four or five, would flit around the garden and the small field where we raised the vegetables and the coffee plants. It was so small, she could dance through the bushes, like trees to her, I am sure. She would laugh, a child’s giggle when she thought we could not find her. We would play her game, her brothers and I. Then she would leap out from behind a bush and run into my arms. ‘Mammy, mammy,’ she would squeal, hugging me with arms that encircled my waist. Her dimples were the deepest in the village, and she never knew a stranger. Oh God, God why did He have to end her life that way.

She did nobody harm. No insect, or puppy or kitten or flower suffered at her touch. Carmelita was a gentle angel.

Once she started, she could not halt her memories.

"That day was market day. That day devils rose from Hell. They grabbed her.

"She was older then, eleven. Carmelita begged her father to take her along instead of me because her friends, Genesis and Serenia would be there with their papas. How could we refuse? It was a beautiful day!

I remember so well what your father had carried to the plaza. Beans, chiles, squash, some melons, just a few because they were not yet all ripe. Black beans, bananas avocados, coffee beans. I helped him load the wagon.

"Your tio, Uncle Horatio told me about what happened when he ran back frantic that afternoon.

"He said children were there in the park, running, skipping and screaming as little ones do. Carmelita along with a dozen other young girls chatted with each other and with the customers they served.

"Horatio told me, with tears running down his cheeks, at noon soldiers gathered around the square, without warning. They conceived this plan in the bottomless pit where they were born.

"Those men rounded up the young women, senoritas, Carmelita, Genesis, and Serenia, Luisa and Guadalupe, all of them. Herded them like sheep. The girls shrieked, lambs about to die. When parents rushed to protect them, some of the abductors shooed them away with gunshots aimed over the heads. They laughed, jeered and sneered, asked why everyone was worried. They were taking the senoritas to lunch, they lied, then they would bring them back to their homes.

"Your father was there, he witnessed all this. In agony observed everything that happened. He yelled amid the confusion to his brother to go home.

"Horatio did that. He slipped from the marketplace, ran and ran, a terrified deer back to our place with the news.

"Later, at twilight when your papa returned, we became crazy with worry. Worse with every passing minute. Carmelita had not appeared. Twice, three times your father ran back down the empty road to watch for her. Nobody.

"Your papa became a madman. I think the sight of his daughter’s capture drove him insane in the first seconds of witnessing it. She was a young woman, a virgin, his oldest daughter.

"After he walked back the second time from looking, he shouted at us, pushed us around the small house, stumbling over the furniture.

"He made us grab money and gold chains and rings from the box under the bed, and told us to leave, quickly, quickly. No clothes, no food. Only what we wore and the sandals on our feet.

"We fled out to the fields.

"Your brothers wanted to stand by his side and face the soldiers and demand the release of Carmelita. She had done nothing. We had done nothing except try to live a quiet life.

"What did we grow? Beans, tomatoes, eggplant, chiles, bananas, cherimoyas for the weekly market, and, on the plantation, coffee for men who would come twice a year for the harvest. What was the value anyway of half an acre of plants that we shared ownership with our neighbors.

"But Matias, mi probrecito, mi amor said, ‘No, no, you two must take care of your mother and your little brother and sister, Veronica. I will defend Carmelita’s honor. Go at once.’

When your father had that look in his eyes, we obeyed. We moved, dumb, terrified. You clung to my skirt and you tried to run fast but then you stumbled and we all had to stop because a stone in the soil had cut a deep gouge in your left knee. You still have that scar so you can never forget.

Jesus rubbed the spot on his knee absent-mindedly as he listened. His mother continued,

"Pobrecito. You were so brave after you screamed, just once. Then you let the tears run down your cheeks, but no sound from your lips.

"Because we stopped to care for you, we saw it all, heard it all. Those other shrieks. When those devils pushed your father into the new seedling patch and forced him to watch them rape your sister, we huddled among that cluster of trees. Helpless. Powerless. Numb. I almost choked you to death with my hand over your mouth. We could do nothing.

"They slapped her and punched her in the stomach. They flung her on the ground. And one by one, five of the demons violated her. She screamed and screamed, ‘Mammy, Mammy, Papi, Papi.’ Like an animal howling; then moaning in agony. Then she was silent. I hope she was dead by then.

"And one of them held Matias to make him see them tear her body apart, sticking their filthy rods into hers and beating her at the same time. They laughed and laughed and jeered, calling them desechables, easily disposed of because they were worthless and existed only for the pleasure of men. Cheap flesh to use and throw away.

"They shot her in the head and stabbed your father many times. And then the howling hyenas staggered off, pulling up their pants and buttoning their shirts. That image of hell is burned in my brain.

"My mariposa, my little butterfly, lay there, her wings tattered, her body carrion for the beasts. And your father lay beside her, his face in the ground he loved to nourish and watch as it produced fruit. It was the last we all saw of them.

"The whole world burst in flames as the village exploded, one thunder clap after another. It would not stop. I prayed the fires that were blazing all around burned their corpses to ashes so they both returned to the earth.

"Your father would have wanted that. He was a man of the soil.

But Carmelita was an angel who came down to visit us and bless us; and we could not cherish her as we should have. Perhaps her ashes would fly up to the heavens, back to paradise.

She paused in her recollections to pray,

"Oh God, oh God, Dios mio after all these years I pray to you that you will avenge their deaths. But even so, you can never wash away the horror and the pain."

Paulina paused, gulping in deep breaths of air. The memories were choking her, draining her of life. This happened every time she remembered. Yet she persisted to keep the memories alive for her sons.

Jesus stood up, walked over to his mother and knelt by her side. He wrapped his sorrowing mother in his arms and held her tightly. They remained in the embrace for long minutes. Then with a shudder, wiping her runny nose with the back of her hand, Paulina pulled back. Jesus sat on his chair. His mother continued,

"We got away. Somehow we crept along, or stumbled or ran all that night. Ernesto carried you, then Manuel took his turn. They had to carry you and Veronica so we could get far, far away from the monstrosities.

Behind us we heard shouts and the rumbling of vehicles. The sounds came closer. We had to hide, shadows behind the thick tree trunks. The voices faded. We crept out. The forest saved us. Branches hung low. Huge leaves draped around us, enveloped our bodies keeping us hidden and safe. We crept along in the woods even though the narrow paths made it difficult to walk.

Paulina slumped in her chair as though she was weary,

"After awhile we were too tired to care. Muy, muy cansado. We stumbled, we fell. We lay wallowing in mud when the rain fell on and on. You tried to walk, but your screams would have raised the devils from hell again. Sometimes we dragged you along in the soft slush. Our rags were too torn and wet to matter. It made you laugh and took our minds off the danger and hunger we felt. Other times we lifted you up between us and hobbled. The wild pigs in the bushes probably sensed we were too skinny and filthy to kill and eat! We smelled bad!

"How many days this continued, I don’t know. Nobody was counting. Day is night, night is day when you are fleeing the hunters.

"At last we heard the river splashing. Ernesto and Manuel, they rolled down the slope to the bank, with me shouting at them not to drown. Cuidado, Cuidado! You, Jesus, sat on the dead leaves and bounced down to the water. You were slow, with one leg and your skinny ass doing all the moving. Each of us in our own way stumbled down that bank. We made it to the Rio Usamacinta."

Jesus interjected,

I can’t remember a single moment of this time! Completely blocked it out of my mind.

"I’m happy for that, mi hijo. The experience was so painful."

His mother’s mind returned to that long-ago scene.

"Hundreds of other people were camped on the rocks, under the trees, in the bushes. Terrified. They were running away from the war like us.

"Children played, laughing, jumping, some of them orphans, their parents slaughtered. How could they know they were alone now? Friends carried them to safety.

"Your cousins Pedro