Troubled Sea by Jinx Schwartz Page A

raised in Los Angeles. It would never occur to Martine, who had lived all his seventeen years  in the bosom of a close-knit multigenerational household, that his cousin Hector was capable of using family to fulfill his greed. But neither did Martine understand that Hector’s erratic and sometimes violent behavior was due to his cocaine use. Drug addiction was still relatively rare in Martine’s part of the Baja. There was a growing problem around Tijuana, created by cartels paying their employees in dope instead of cash, but in central Baja the spread of drug addiction hadn't affected him or his family.
    Hector Lopez returned home to Baja three years before and was welcomed with open arms by his Mexican relatives. Oh, they had heard of Hector’s troubles with the authorities up in the States and were more than a little put off by the teardrop tattooed on the outside corner of his eye, but their prodigal cousin returned with money, and a good story.
    Hector had been, he explained, a victim of racial bias. The family accepted his story without a second thought. Everyone knew the North American police has it in for Mexicans. And Hector came with money in his pocket. A rarity in the family.
    What his relatives did not hear was Hector’s real story. Martine’s Aunt Alma, deserted by her husband, fled to California with baby Hector years before, and found work as a housekeeper at a Beverly Hills estate. She quickly advanced to cook’s position and was allowed to live in a small cottage on the grounds.
    Hector grew up in the wealthy neighborhood, attending good schools, and that justified Alma’s agonizing decision to leave her entire family in Mexico to live the lonely existence of an illegal alien.
    By the time Hector entered the sixth grade he was an honor student who carefully constructed an aura of mystery regarding his personal life. He and his best friend, the son of a Colombian “coffee” magnate, were both darkly handsome and irresistible to their yuppie puppy classmates. The tantalizing pair hobnobbed with the offspring of the film and Rodeo Drive crowd and were on everyone’s invitation lists.
    Alma and Hector were naturalized under an amnesty allowing working aliens and their offspring to become American citizens if they met certain criterion, then Alma benefited from a new law whereby the elite had to start paying Social Security Insurance Tax for their hired help. The future looked rosy.
    Hector was fourteen when Alma died suddenly from a stroke. In her will, she left the guardianship of her son to Isabel Camacho, a childless friend who worked at the estate next door.
    Isabel worked for the neighbors, but she lived in East L.A. In a well-meaning attempt to save Hector’s social security benefit money for his college fund instead of spending it on the high rental rates near the neighborhood where she worked, Isabel enrolled him in her school district, in the tough streets of the barrio.
    Hector, first devastated by his mother’s death, then torn from his home and friends in Beverly Hills, was ill-prepared for barrio life. Though intelligent, he had no street smarts. But he was a quick learner and soon found that making the dean’s list would not help him get home from school unharmed. Lonely and scared, he joined a gang and by the time he was sixteen, the once-promising student built a thriving business dealing drugs to his affluent school chums back in Beverly Hills. Since he could talk and dress “Caucasian”, he moved freely across the chasm separating his new neighborhood from his old.
    It was when he started using his own product when things began to unravel. As a guest of the Los Angeles county jail, and high on crack and machismo, he and a few other inmates tattooed blue tears near the corners of their eyes. The telltale jailhouse tattoo severely hampered his ability to walk freely around Beverly Hills when he was released;  the B.H.P.D. do not believe in any free trade agreements with East