Ditch Rider

by Judith Van GIeson

  “Jell-O head?” I asked my companion.

  “Yeah.”

  “What flavor?”

  “Raspberry,” she replied.

  I passed Diamond Shamrock and turned the corner onto Mirador. We saw Danny biking down the road with a pole in one hand.

  Cheyanne rolled down her window. “Hey, bro,” she yelled.

  I pulled over beside Danny and saw that his pole was dangling a large plastic worm. “Going fishing?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “You dork,” Cheyanne said. “There aren’t any fish in the ditch.”

  “You don’t know that,” said Danny.

  “Is your dad picking you up?” Cheyanne asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good,” she said. “Than I can stay home alone.”

  Which could mean going out alone. “No way,” I said. “You can stay at my house till your mother gets home from work.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Yes, you have to.”

  Danny waved and headed toward the ditch.

  “Can we go to the trailer first?” Cheyanne asked. “There’s something I want to show you.”

  “Okay.”

  Leo hadn’t arrived yet, and there were no vehicles parked in front of the double-wide. I told Cheyanne to leave a note for her mother telling her she’d be at my place. While Cheyanne went inside, I looked at the bare yard thinking that scraping could be easier than watering, weeding, spraying and cutting.

  Cheyanne came back trailing Tabatoe behind her and holding something in her hand. She sat down beside me, pulled the car door shut and handed over a plastic Ziploc bag containing a spent bullet. The bullet was about a half-inch long, flat and narrow at one end and mushroomed at the other. There was some debris on the wide end—blood, dirt or flesh.

  Cheyanne flipped her hair over her shoulder and looked me in the eye. “Do you believe me now?” she asked.

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “It hit the wall after it went through Juan and I picked it up off the ground. If you show that to the DA, will he believe me?”

  “He might.”

  “Good,” she said.

  ******

  I called the Kid when we got to my house and told him to bring home a few more tacos for dinner. Cheyanne wanted to get on Teen Chat and I said go ahead. It couldn’t be any worse than the things she’d already experienced. When I told her to turn the computer off and come to dinner she groaned, “Now?”

  “Now,” I said.

  Cheyanne complained that the tacos were too hot and drank a lot of water, but she ate every bite. Tabatoe’s face appeared at the glass door and Cheyanne asked me if she could come in, but I told her I ran a no-cat household. After dinner we watched TV. Cheyanne fell asleep on the sofa. I took that opportunity to show the Kid the bullet. “She says it’s the bullet that killed Juan Padilla.”

  “Do you believe her?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Talk to Sonia.”

  The Kid went to bed, but I sat up, watched TV and waited for Sonia. Around midnight the doorbell rang.

  “My daughter’s here?” Sonia asked.

  “Yeah.”

  We went into the kitchen and I turned on the light. “There’s something I need to show you,” I said, holding up the plastic bag with the spent bullet inside.

  “Where’d that come from?”

  “Your daughter.”

  Sonia pulled a cigarette out of her purse but stopped herself and put it back. “Can they prove it was the bullet that killed Juan Padilla if they don’t find the gun?”

  “With DNA testing they probably can.”

  “Son of a bitch,” she said. “Are you going to turn it over to that DA? What’s his name?”

  “Saia. What do you want me to do?”

  “What does Cheyanne want to do?”

  “Turn it over.”

  “Do it,” she said.

  ******

  Cheyanne was sleeping peacefully as a baby, but she swore and kicked when Sonia woke her up. As I walked them back through the living room I noticed that the computer was still on and the screen saver was flitting across the screen. After the Morans left I turned the computer off and walked around the house looking for a good place to stash the bullet. The safest place I could think of was the drawer in the nightstand, beside my thirty-eight, next to my pillow. I got into bed and curled up behind the Kid, who was already asleep. Around four the temperature dropped and I woke up and covered us with a sheet. I’d been dreaming that there was a boardwalk behind my house and an animal lived under it that was a combination rattlesnake and cat. I could see its eyes smiling up at me through the spaces between the boards. The animal had thick orange and white fur and its long tail had rattles at the tip. The fur was so silky I wanted to reach down and pet it, but then it snarled and rattled its tail.

  7

  WHEN I WOKE up again the Kid had left for work and the bullet and gun were still in the drawer. On my way downtown I drove past the D Home. A bunch of gangsters in baggy clothes were standing outside waiting for their probation officers. In order to get in and out of this place you had to run a gangbanger gauntlet. I called Saia as soon as I got to my office and made an appointment to see him that afternoon. I was holding up the plastic bag and looking at the bullet when Anna walked into my office.

  “Where’d that come from?” she asked.

  “Cheyanne. She says she picked it up off the ground after it went through Juan Padilla and ricocheted off a wall.”

  “You really think that little girl shot somebody?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a cold-blooded, calculated shooting, but frightened, in self-defense? Who wouldn’t be capable under those circumstances?”

  “If you have a gun in your hand.”

  “A lot of things are possible when you have a loaded gun in your hand.”

  “She seems so innocent.”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes she doesn’t seem innocent at all.”

  “Where’d she get the gun? Steal it from her mother?”

  That was one road I hadn’t traveled down yet. “Maybe.”

  “Gangs use semiautomatics, don’t they?”

  “Usually.” One advantage to semiautomatics is that you can get so many rounds off so fast that accuracy hardly matters. You can spray your opponent into oblivion. The disadvantage is that semiautomatics can leave an all-too-easy-to-trace casing on the ground. But when it comes to shootings, gang members don’t often worry about evidence and what comes after. Their motto seems to be shoot now, think later.

  “What are you going to do?” Anna asked.

  “Turn it over to Anthony Saia,” I said.

  ******

  When I got to Saia’s office that afternoon every hair was slicked in place. His eyes were bright with a prosecutor’s zeal, but that was a fire I was about to put out. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I have the bullet that killed Juan Padilla.” I handed over the plastic bag.

  “How’d you get this?”

  “From my client, a thirteen-year-old girl named Cheyanne Moran.”

  “How’d she get it?”

  “She picked it up off the ground after it went through the victim.”

  “You’re going to tell me she was a witness, right?”

  “Wrong. I’m telling you she wants to plead guilty to manslaughter in the case of Juan Padilla.”

  That took the light from his eyes and the spray from his hair. His clothes already looked like they’d been through the wringer. “You’re giving me a thirteen-year-old shooter?”

  “I am.”

  “What the hell can I do to a thirteen-year-old girl?” It was a rhetorical question; he knew the answer better than I.

  “Put her in the Girls’ School for two years.”

  “She comes from a broken home? Right? Absent father? Mother works all the time or takes drugs? Fatherless, godless, jobless and
hopeless.”

  “Something like that.”

  “The Girls’ School will seem like summer camp.”

  “That’s a possibility.”

  “I could go for consecutive two-year terms and hold her over until she is twenty-one.”

  “You won’t get away with it.”

  “Let’s say she was an accessory. Cade’s her boyfriend and she’s covering for him. She’s crazy about the guy and she wants to save his neck. I can put him away for life, but she’ll only get two years. So she pleads guilty for him.”

  It was one scenario.

  “If she gives him up I’ll deal,” Saia said.

  “What are you offering? A trip to Europe? A new car? A father? A new life?”

  “I would if I could.”

  Avoiding the Girls’ School didn’t seem to be any bargaining chip with my client. “I’ll run it by her, Anthony, but I don’t think she’ll go for it. She says she acted alone.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “I find that hard to believe.”

  He wasn’t the only one.

  “Where’s the weapon?” he asked.

  “She says she threw it in the ditch.”

  “Can she show us where?”

  “I’ll ask her.”

  “Don’t ask her, tell her.”

  “When it comes to teenagers, nobody tells them nothing, don’t you know that yet?”

  “It won’t be like that when I have a family.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  “I’ll have the bullet analyzed to see if it was the one that killed Padilla.”

  “It’s in your hands,” I said.

  He flipped a pencil up on its tip and began poking the point into the pile of papers on his desk. “There is one more thing. Cade’s lawyer called and arranged to bring him in for questioning.” He laughed. “Maybe I’ll end up with two guilty pleas.”

  “Not likely,” I said.

  ******

  DNA analysis of the bullet would take time. Dredging the ditch could be done quickly, but more easily with Cheyanne’s cooperation. The APD could have searched the ditch without her. They could have followed the Chapuzar Lateral from the crime scene to Mirador Road, but they wanted Cheyanne to go to the scene with them to show them how and where she had shot Juan Padilla and to pinpoint the spot where she’d dumped the gun.

  I stopped by the trailer the following morning and found Cheyanne, Sonia and Leo sitting around the table having a cup of coffee before they went to bed or to work or stayed home all day and watched the tube. Tabatoe was curled up in Cheyanne’s lap. On the wall an orange tiger paced across a black velvet background. I looked out through the kitchen window and saw pigeons lined up like targets on the telephone line. I told Cheyanne that I’d given the bullet to Saia.

  “Will he believe me now?” she asked. Her eyes were wide.

  I glanced at Leo. I wasn’t sure this case should be discussed in front of anyone but Sonia and Cheyanne. “It’s all right,” Sonia said. “Leo’s in on what’s happening.”

  “Is it all right with you?” I asked Cheyanne.

  She studied her chipped fingernails. “I guess.”

  “Is that a yes or a no?”

  “It’s an all right,” she said.

  I took that as a sign to continue. “If you were with Ron Cade and he shot Padilla, you could be charged with being an accessory. Saia will cut a deal if you tell him Ron Cade was the shooter.”

  Leo put his elbows on the table. He was wearing an undershirt and I could see the black curly hair on his chest, the chain on his right forearm and the Virgin of Guadalupe tattooed on his left bicep. “What kind of deal are they willing to cut?” he asked.

  “Very little or no time at all in the Girls’ School, I’d say. Saia has a vendetta against Cade, plus Cade is too old to be treated as a juvenile. Saia would prefer to prosecute him.”

  Cheyanne stared at the crumbs on the Formica table and said nothing.

  “Listen up,” Leo ordered.

  She raised her head and flipped her hair over her shoulder. Tabatoe leapt off her lap. “Ron Cade didn’t do it, I did. Got it?”

  “Don’t get smart with me,” Leo snapped.

  “You’re not my father.”

  Sonia’s cigarette was burning in the ashtray and the smoke was rising like a warning signal from a fire. “Knock it off, you two,” she said.

  Leo shut his mouth, but he tightened his grip on his coffee mug until the virgin on his muscle shivered. Had he gotten those muscles from lifting the ladder? I wondered. From emptying the water out of evaporative coolers? Or was it from pumping iron?

  “Do either of you own a thirty-eight?” I asked Sonia and Leo.

  “I didn’t get it from them,” Cheyanne said.

  “Who did you get it from?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “I don’t keep guns anymore,” said Leo.

  “I never kept guns,” said Sonia. “Coffee?” she asked me.

  “No thanks. Saia is threatening to ask for consecutive two-year terms and to hold you over until you are twenty-one, Cheyanne. It will go better for you if you cooperate.”

  “I already said I did it. What else do they want?”

  “Saia wants you to show the APD where you threw the weapon.”

  “In the ditch, I said.”

  “They want to know where in the ditch.”

  “Do I have to?” She wrapped a curl around her finger and tugged at her hair.

  “DNA testing may prove that bullet killed Juan. It won’t prove that you’re the one who fired it. The gun could help if your prints are on it.”

  “But if we go to the ditch everybody will see me,” she moaned.

  “Do it,” barked Leo.

  “All right, all right.”

  8

  WHEN THE TIME came to search the ditch the police swarmed all over the Chapuzar Lateral and the neighboring fields like mosquitoes after a hard rain. They’d searched the area before, but their search hadn’t been nearly as thorough or precise. A ditch rider made the job easier by stopping the flow further north and letting the relevant part of the ditch network drain out. Instead of brown muddy water in the Chapuzar Lateral there was thick, brown mud. It resembled the ruts that pass for rivers in this part of the country.

  Cheyanne prepared for the search by pumping up the volume of her hair and putting on her largest t-shirt. Sonia took the afternoon off from work. The Morans, the investigating officers and I began at the strip mall. There were two officers: a tall, rangy guy with intense blue eyes named Jim Donaldson and Sandra Jessup, a plump woman with fine brown hair. She had blue eyes, too, but hers had a twinkle in them. His had long distance.

  Cheyanne pointed out where Juan had fallen, approximately where she had stood when she shot him, and the place where she had found the bullet. She insisted that the gun had gone off accidentally but wouldn’t say where she got it or who else was there. She said she’d been talking to Juan before the shooting happened, but she wouldn’t say what they’d been talking about.

  After we’d examined the crime scene we walked down Ladera toward the ditch, turning onto the access road at the corner where people dump their mattress springs and worn-out refrigerators. Donaldson and Jessup walked with Cheyanne, Sonia and me. A third officer named Tony Mares followed inside the ditch, which had to be like walking through a bled dry vein. The ground was wet, and it was slow going for him as the mud sucked at his boots. Rotting apples clustered at the first culvert we came to. They were covered with buzzing flies that were turning iridescent in the sun. I smelled the apples long before I saw them. It was the smell of a changing season. The air was already showing some of the coolness of fall, when the sun no longer pounds you into the pavement.

  Cheyanne was way nervous. Her eyes darted from the ditch to the fields to the houses and back again. Her hands tugged at the hem of her t-shirt. She walked quickly. The detectives let her go at her own pace. Maybe they thought she knew where she was headed,
but I wasn’t so sure. Sonia followed behind us puffing on a cigarette. After we passed the culvert and crossed the first street, Detective Donaldson gave Detective Jessup a sideways glance. I knew what they were thinking. Wouldn’t Cheyanne have tossed the gun as soon as she got to the ditch? Why wait?

  Detective Mares wrestled with the mud and fell behind. The drained ditch resembled an archaeological dig loaded with the relics of late-twentieth-century Rio Grande valley civilization—beer cans, the tiny liquor bottles known as miniatures, running shoes, sandals, a cowboy boot, the pale white skeleton of a long-dead bird, a sprinkling of condoms, a doll, a rifle, a rusty semiautomatic pistol. Every time Mares came across something of interest he stopped and examined it. He lifted the semiautomatic carefully and dropped it in an evidence bag.

  We passed behind the Kid’s shop with the flying red horse sign, the Renewal Spa and Beauty Salon, the Armijo wood yard, La Cienega gated community and the Texas Trailer Ranch and came to a place where the weeds on the bank were taller than Cheyanne. Beside us was an empty field. It was the same place I’d found her struggling with Ron Cade. What had been dark and shadowy at night was dry and empty during the day.

  Cheyanne stopped here and stared at the fields trembling like a flower in the wind.

  “Is this the place?” Detective Jessup asked.

  Cheyanne shook her head and kept on walking. We went on like this until we were only one block away from Mirador. By now school had let out. The police kept everybody away from the ditch, but from this location we could see the kids walking home from school. A couple of guys stopped, looked at us, then shuffled on down the road. They wore long black t’s and wide pants, the shape that said gang. Danny rode by on his bike. Patricia leaned against a tree and watched us until a cop made her move on.