Detective Danny Archuleta was an LAPD Metro officer in Predator 2, played by Rubén Blades. Lieutenant Mike Harrigan called him Danny Boy, and the two had come up together on the streets of Los Angeles before fifteen years as partners. During the 1997 heat wave he held the Colombian barricade beside Leona Cantrell, worked the gang massacres that followed, and kept the squad steady while federal agents took over its cases. He went back alone to a sealed crime scene and became the first police officer killed by the City Hunter.
Biography
Growing Up With Harrigan
Danny Archuleta and Mike Harrigan went back further than the badge. They grew up on the same Los Angeles streets, came onto the force together, and spent fifteen years as partners in the worst districts the city had. Together they had survived shootouts, ambushes, Internal Affairs investigations, and pressure from City Hall and the press. Harrigan was the one who charged in, and Danny was the one who read the situation, gave him the facts in a few words, and covered the open ground while he moved. By 1997 the pairing was so settled that the rest of Metro treated them as a single unit.
Danny worked the Alvarado squad under Harrigan with Leona, and he was the first to brief his lieutenant on staff changes. He pointed out Jerry Lambert as the replacement for Ferris, the transfer known as the Lone Ranger of Rampart station, then watched with Harrigan as the kid tried his luck with Leona and paid for it. Danny wore a necklace with a charm around his throat, and he kept it on through every raid. Harrigan knew him well enough to read his moods, and Danny was one of the few people who knew the lieutenant was afraid of heights.
Holding The Colombian Barricade
The summer war broke open on a downtown street, with two motorcycle officers bleeding in a crossfire and Tony Pope calling the city a slaughterhouse on live television. Danny and Leona were crouched behind the barricade when Harrigan arrived and demanded to be kept out of suspense. Danny gave him the picture fast: two motor cops had pulled over a truck, stumbled into a narcotics stakeout, and run into ten Colombians of the Scorpio gang armed to the teeth. Special Weapons was still pinned down by Jamaicans in San Pedro, where a police helicopter had been shot down.
Harrigan decided the wounded officers could not wait for an assault vehicle and asked for cover on his signal. Danny and Leona opened fire across the hood of their car while Harrigan drove into the street and dragged Mills and Johnson clear. When the surviving gunmen fell back into their building, Danny brought the order from Deputy Chief Phil Heinemann to surround it and wait for a special federal unit. He called it a bullshit special team to Harrigan, who ignored the hold and went in, and Danny and Leona followed him through the door.
Clearing The Scorpio Building
Harrigan chased the last Scorpio gunman to the roof and shot him over the edge, then felt something unseen standing close behind him. Danny burst out of the stairwell with uniformed officers in body armor before that presence could act, and he fanned the men out to secure the roof. Heights never bothered him, so he glanced over the edge at the body below while his partner kept well back. When Harrigan asked to be taken off the damn roof, Danny ordered every floor searched and sealed, then led him back down to the gutted rooms below.
What they found inside made no sense for a gang hit. The Colombians had been cut to pieces without a single bullet wound, and one man hung from the ceiling some thirty-five or forty feet up with no rope or ladder to put him there. Danny looked over the slaughter and told Harrigan that this was not good at all. Heinemann then arrived to pull Harrigan out of the building in front of his own men, and Danny stayed on the floor with the uniforms to hold the floor until Forensic arrived.
Profiling The Killer
Back at the Alvarado precinct, Harrigan sat behind a broken fan and asked Danny what they had. Danny summed it up as five lowlife Scorpions making the building and, the next minute, all of them shish kebab with not one bullet wound. Nothing had been taken, though there were drugs and money for the taking. He argued that a professional would have run at the first shots, that a team would have been seen, and that whoever did it waited until the last moment, killed four armed men by hand, and slipped past the police.
Danny did not think the killer was finished. His dry answer was that they should give him a job and put him on the payroll, a joke that showed how little the squad still understood. Harrigan wanted a real name on the man, and Danny promised to dig one up. Within hours Captain Pilgrim announced a federal task force under Special Agent Peter Keyes, and Danny found himself working a case that the feds were already trying to take away from the people who had bled for it.
Reading The Vega Massacre
The next massacre came at the penthouse of Ramon Vega, the crack king of East LA, after Jamaican gunmen executed him in front of his own people. Metro ignored a radio order to stay out and went in behind Harrigan. Danny identified the dead men as Jamaicans, the boys of King Willie, while Leona read the missing heart as a voodoo ritual meant to terrify rivals. Then Danny found the one woman left alive on the floor, whispering in Spanish that the devil had come for them. The squad agreed that a new player had come to town.
Before they could work the room, Keyes arrived with his task force and declared the penthouse restricted. He threatened Harrigan, took the survivor away in a helicopter, and had his men drag Pope out by his camera. On the way out the squad noticed a small metal object lodged high in a ceiling beam that looked like a spear tip. Neither Danny nor Harrigan believed the federal team was really the DEA, and both wanted another look at that room once Keyes had gone.
Staying Behind At The Penthouse
Harrigan sent Lambert after the helicopter and gave Danny the quieter job. He was to stay out of sight, watch what Keyes's people did, and meet Harrigan at one o'clock for a proper look at the room. The parting words became the line Harrigan could never forget: no hero stuff, and watch your ass, Danny Boy. Danny waited until the federal team left with its cases of equipment, then rode the elevator up alone to a door sealed with federal evidence tape.
He went through the seal anyway and followed the blood on the floor to the beam where the metal point still glittered. Climbing up under a headlamp, he pried it loose and found it almost weightless and sharp enough to cut on contact. Crossing back, his necklace slipped loose and caught out of reach, and he stretched along the wood to save his charm rather than leave it. That small choice kept him in the rafters a few seconds longer than he should have been.
Dying In The Rafters
The City Hunter was already in the roof space under its cloak. It mimicked Harrigan's voice and called him Danny Boy, and Danny answered with Mike's name before he saw what was really waiting in the dark. His last words were a cry to the Mother of God, followed by gunshots and screams. The hunter killed him with a blade that nearly cleaved his heart in two, hung his body above the penthouse floor, and took his skull and spine as a trophy. Harrigan later pried the spear tip from Danny's hand.
The next morning Heinemann threatened to charge Harrigan with Detective Archuleta's death and ordered him off the case. The medical examiner, Irene Edwards, told Harrigan that death had been instantaneous and that his partner had been boned like a fish. Her tests found that the spear tip matched nothing on the periodic table, and a splinter from the beam carried cattle blood and steroids that pointed to the slaughterhouse district. Danny's last find gave the squad the trail that led Harrigan to the hunter.
In the novel version, Simon Hawke's Predator 2 novelization, Danny dies without the necklace or the voice trick. He slips on splintered wood, touches invisible scaled flesh, and is caught by the ankle in a three-fingered claw while his pistol drops to the floor. The hunter decloaks, copies his Mother of God back at him, and pulls him into the dark. Afterward it carries his skull up a clock tower and draws lightning to its spear, a scene the Dark Horse comic also gives to Danny.
Burying Danny
Metro buried Danny in the heat with Harrigan, Leona, and Lambert at the grave. Harrigan had tried to keep the mutilation from Danny's family, but news reports had already spread it across the city, and Pope was telling viewers that a psycho-vigilante had become a cop killer. Harrigan told Pilgrim that he and Danny had come up together and spent fifteen years on the street, and that whoever killed him was going to pay. Leona answered that this was not his personal war and that she had loved Danny too.
When the others had gone, Harrigan came back to the grave alone. Something glittered in a tree behind him, and he found Danny's necklace hanging from a branch. The hunter had stalked him to the cemetery and left the trophy as a message that it could find him anywhere. Harrigan carried the necklace into the rest of the hunt, through the subway massacre and the slaughterhouse trap, and told his squad that the man who killed Danny was going to fall.
Danny In Predator 2 Comic
Franz Henkel scripted the two-issue Predator 2 comic adaptation for Dark Horse Comics in 1991, and Danny's whole story played out in the first issue, penciled by Dan Barry. The comic kept him at Harrigan's side through the Colombian standoff, where he briefed the lieutenant on the narcotics stakeout and gave cover for the run to the wounded officer. He followed Harrigan and Leona into the gang building, asked his shaken partner on the roof whether he was okay, and later suggested a martial arts fanatic or a hitman with exotic weapons as the killer.
After the Vega massacre, Danny reported that Keyes had set up in an off-limits tactical wing and confiscated the gang bodies. He then went back to the penthouse alone, crawled through the ceiling, and found a glowing spearhead wedged in a vent rather than a beam. The hunter uncloaked above him, and Barry drew a clawed hand closing over his upside-down face as he gasped Mother of God, then his body hanging above his gun and hat in a pool of blood. A full-page splash followed, with the hunter holding up Danny's skull and spine in a lightning storm.
Personality And Traits
Danny Archuleta was the steady half of the partnership. Where Harrigan charged, Danny gave the clear situation report, laid down cover, and handled the uniforms while his lieutenant took the risks. He was dry rather than loud, the detective who suggested putting the mystery killer on the payroll and who enjoyed watching the new kid strike out with Leona. He knew his partner's weaknesses, including the fear of heights, and never used them against him. He was also a careful reader of crime scenes, the first to name the Jamaicans at Vega's penthouse and the one who found the survivor.
His curiosity was his strength and his undoing. He could not leave a puzzle alone, which was exactly why Harrigan trusted him with the penthouse, and he was willing to break a federal seal to get the truth. Loyalty ran through everything he did, to Harrigan, to the squad, and to the streets they had grown up on. His death turned the war for Harrigan from a drug case into a personal hunt, and the grief belonged to the whole Alvarado squad.
Behind The Scenes
Rubén Blades played Danny for director Stephen Hopkins in the 20th Century Fox release of 1990, from a screenplay by Jim Thomas and John Thomas. The Panamanian singer and actor gave Danny a cap, glasses, and the necklace that became the most important prop of his story. Unit publicity paired him with Danny Glover, María Conchita Alonso, and Bill Paxton as the Metro squad. His death in the penthouse rafters is the hinge of the film, the point where the City Hunter stops culling gangsters and begins hunting the police who follow it.
The novelization makes Harrigan and Danny childhood friends, gives Danny a gold medallion he fingers when under stress, and adds a funeral with an honor guard, Pilgrim knocking Pope down, and an academy photograph left on the grave. Years later, in the short story Drug War from Predator: If It Bleeds, Harrigan's flashback lists Danny, misspelled as Archuletta, beside Jerry and Leona. It recalls that he and Lambert had been killed by a hunter in Los Angeles years before.
Famous Quotes
- "Two motors pulled over a truck, stumbled right in the middle of a narc stakeout."
- "This is not good, Mike. Not good at all."
- "Five lowlife Scorpions make it into the building. The next minute... they're all shish kebab. Not one bullet wound."
- "Jamaicans. King Willie's boys."
- "Hey, we got a survivor!"
- "Oh, Mother of God!"
Conclusion
Danny Archuleta was Harrigan's oldest friend and partner, the Metro detective who held the Colombian barricade, profiled a killer nobody could see, and read the Vega massacre before the federal team shut it down. He went back alone, pried the spear tip from the beam, and died in the rafters while reaching for his necklace. His skull became a trophy and his necklace a taunt in a cemetery tree. His death made the war personal for Harrigan, and every step that followed was taken for Danny.
Appearances
- Predator 2 (1990)
- Predator 2 novelization (Simon Hawke, 1990)
- Predator 2 comic (Dark Horse, 1991)
- Predator: If It Bleeds, Drug War (2017), mentioned
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore | Predator 2 Lore
