Sacrifices

by Jamie Schultz

  “Wish Tommy was here,” Nail said, giving voice to a slightly different version of her own sentiment.

  “Me, too.”

  A little girl and her mom walked past the drawing and across the street. Anna took that to mean it was safe enough. She and Nail continued the rest of the way across the street. She snapped a picture of the drawing with her phone.

  They continued past the drawing without incident. A block down, they came across an abandoned car, a white Olds that had been riddled with bullet holes.

  “Shit,” Nail said. He turned his head left and right, scanning the area.

  “What?”

  “That car drove past us half an hour ago.”

  “Just keep moving.”

  “There’s blood,” he said.

  “Not our problem.” She sped up. The sooner they got away from this, the better.

  “Looks like somebody’s gun blew up.”

  Anna’s foot stopped on a cracked, upthrust chunk of sidewalk. “What do you mean?”

  “There,” he said, pointing. She followed his finger and saw the twisted, blackened chunk of metal, the droplets of blood that trailed away from the scene. “Let’s get outta here,” he said.

  “We got people to see.”

  “They ain’t gonna want to see us right now. We can come back later.”

  He was right. That would be smarter. But that urge to act had seized her, and with its sudden intensity she was again reminded of the clock that was quickly counting down. Days mattered, and would anything really be that much different if she put this off until tomorrow? Her stomach growled again, and she started walking.

  “I was thinking the other way,” Nail said, jogging to catch up.

  “They ain’t gonna be any less likely to shoot us tomorrow.”

  “I ain’t sure that’s true.”

  “You ain’t a cop or a Norteño. You’re fine.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. Gave up, she supposed. Good.

  The streets became familiar now in their specifics as well as the general feel. Twenty years later, and she still remembered the convenience store on the corner. It had been boarded up, not that long ago from the look of it, and the colorful sign had faded, but it still kicked loose a landslide of associations. The woman who worked the counter on Tuesdays used to give her candy when she stopped in—just a little piece, but at the time it had seemed like the nicest thing an adult could possibly do. In retrospect, given the struggle the place must have had staying open, the gesture seemed even more powerful.

  This place was getting sucked into the earth, Anna thought. No jobs to start with, and now even the little corner store had closed. The cops didn’t come here for gunshots. She guessed the same was true for ambulances. One day, it seemed the neighborhood would be empty, all its denizens dead or fled. She wondered how long it would take anyone to notice.

  Four teenagers were hanging out near the store. A couple of older ones, tough-looking kids maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, and a couple of younger. All four wore a white T-shirt or tank top and the khakis that would be their uniform until they got out of the gang or died. All four watched Nail and Anna approach with their heads cocked back and chins high, putting on their best “You wanna fuck with me?” faces.

  They were openly armed, Anna noticed, pistols jammed in their waistbands and visible from across the street. Another change, but one that she supposed she should have expected. If cops didn’t come down here to break up a firefight, or even clean up the aftermath, why wouldn’t these kids be armed? It was the only thing that made sense.

  “Hey!” she said, waving. She kept her hands in full view and walked slowly toward them, intensely aware that there might not be consequences for them if they shot her, right here, in the street. It was practically martial law here, and the soldiers and enforcers were teenage kids, all trying to make sure everybody knew how tough they were. Fucking nightmare.

  “We out,” one of the kids said as she approached. He had a shaved head, tattoos all down his arms, a smiling mask next to a crying one drawn just below his collarbone. Had he already done time? At that age?

  “We out,” he said again. “We got nothin’. So how ’bout you get right the fuck on outta here?”

  “I ain’t here to buy. I need to talk to Dice.”

  “Don’t know no Dice.”

  A terrible thought occurred to her: what if this was the wrong gang? Things changed, and it had been six or seven years since she even talked to anybody down here. She looked over the kid’s tattoos as surreptitiously as possible. He had a big number 7 on his right shoulder, which was in the right direction, but it wasn’t certain. A quick glance at the others, though, gave her what she was looking for: GANT STREET, in big gothic letters all down one of the kids’ arms.

  “You’re Locos, right?” she asked.

  “Damn right.”

  She pulled a wad of bills from her pocket, a fat roll with “100” clearly visible on the outside. “And you don’t know Dice?”

  The kid didn’t even look at the cash. “Told you, I don’t know no Dice.”

  She racked her brain. He might be dead, might have moved on. Dead was more likely, because the Dice she remembered had a passion for this shitty little eight-block section of Hell that was damn near insane.

  “He in jail?” she asked.

  The kid gave an exasperated sigh and shared a glance with one of the others.

  She tossed him the cash. “There’s more where this came from, if you hook me up. I ain’t a cop. Ain’t got a score to settle. I just need to talk to the man.”

  “I’m happy to take your money, lady, but I’m tellin’ you straight up, I don’t know him.”

  “Any of his people around?”

  “Don’t know him. Don’t know who the fuck his people are.”

  The man had a regular name—Dice was just his street name. Anna dredged through the scattered debris of a thousand old memories, trawling for— “Moreno!” she said. “Rogelio Moreno.”

  The kid let his hard gangster face lapse just long enough to show surprise. The others didn’t do half so well. One of them openly gaped.

  “You know him?” the kid asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “He gonna know you?”

  “Yeah.” I think so.

  “A’ight,” he said. Then, in a falsely deep tone of authority: “Assume the position.”

  Anna put her hands against the wall, relieved to see that Nail was following her lead. The kids patted them down. They found her pocketknife and let her keep it. Same with Nail’s multitool. When they didn’t find anything else, the leader pointed down the street. “That way,” he said. “Freak, you go on ahead. Let ’em know we’re coming.”

  The youngest one—no. Not the youngest one, Anna now saw. The smallest one was a girl, but with her shaved head, spare frame, and the standard cholo uniform, Anna hadn’t really noticed. She might have been the same age as the others. She ran ahead. On the back of her head, tattooed in letters three inches high, was the word LOCOS.

  Anna and Nail moved in the direction she’d gone. Two of the others followed a few steps behind. The leader stayed at the corner.

  The one they called Freak was out of sight before long, but the others gave them directions. Keep walking. Turn here.

  They stopped at a little house on Gant Street. The porch sagged in the middle, and the white clapboard siding was stained brown from dust, but other than that the place seemed in decent repair. A couple of guys sat on lawn chairs, watching as Anna and Nail’s escorts opened the short chain-link gate and ushered them into the yard.

  Freak came out of the house. “It’s gonna be a few minutes.”

  They waited, standing in the sun with the eyes of half a dozen gang members watching them. Anna sifted through what she knew of Dice—Moreno now, she remin
ded herself—and the Gant Street Locos in general. Not a hell of a lot. It had been too long. The Locos were a small gang as far as these things went, with a fairly tiny territory. She didn’t know how they’d stayed in existence, other than through Moreno’s determination and sheer force of personality. Anna couldn’t quite figure out what was going on with him now. She had expected him to be here, if he was still alive, but that he’d dropped his gang name was odd—singular, even, for somebody still tied in so closely—and she wondered what it signified. This whole thing was weird.

  The door opened, and everyone turned in that direction.

  Moreno came out, squinting, into the light. God, the years had been hard on him. He had to be—what, forty? Forty-five? He’d been old by gangbanger standards back when she was a kid, which meant he was a fossil now. He walked with a stoop, and his movements were slow and weary. From a distance, he might have been mistaken for sixty-five rather than forty-five. He wore a checked flannel shirt, which wasn’t uncommon, but it was buttoned all the way to the neck, which seemed insane in this heat.

  “Anna,” he said. “It’s been a while.” His voice hadn’t aged any. He spoke in a warm, lightly accented baritone, the kind you could imagine telling you bedtime stories before you drifted off at night. Calming. It was frankly amazing he remembered her, but she guessed that was his thing. Had he forgotten anybody from the neighborhood ever?

  “Yeah, you know how it is. Been, uh, kinda busy.”

  “Busy not getting shot at, you mean?” It could have been caustic, but he softened the words with a smile.

  “I wish. Just found myself in a different kind of shit, you know?”

  “No matter where you go, you take a piece of home with you.”

  Was that what she’d done? She didn’t think so, yet hadn’t she just been worried about repeating all the mistakes of her mother, about running her life in self-destructive circles? “I don’t know about that.” She looked at the gangsters around them. Kids, as always. When she’d lived here, they seemed impossibly old and streetwise, but they really were just kids. The oldest was ten years younger than she was now, at most. “Hey, can we go inside or something?”

  “We can talk out here. Why don’t you and your friend have a seat? Want a glass of water? A beer?”

  Anna moved into the shade of the porch and sat in a frayed green-and-white lawn chair. Nail came over at a measured pace, stood for a moment behind another empty chair, and then sat, visibly uncomfortable at the arrangement.

  “Water,” Anna said. “Thanks.”

  One of the kids went inside the house. Moreno sat opposite Anna, hands hanging loosely off the arms of the chair. The years had been rough on him, but the sparkle in his eye hadn’t gone out, and when he smiled, even now, Anna wanted to smile with him. “Thought you’d got out of here for good, kid,” he said. “Did my heart some good.”

  She was at a loss. She hadn’t been sure he’d remember her at all, let alone fondly. She pulled her gaze from his and looked over the kids in the yard. The ones who weren’t watching her suspiciously had their eyes on Moreno, and she recognized the look on their face. It was probably the same look she’d had on her own, twenty years before, when Moreno and a couple of his tough guys used to walk her and a group of other kids to school. The look said this guy, right here—he’s the one adult I can trust. The one adult I know is looking out for me, not to make sure I don’t break something or shoplift or raise hell, but just because he wants me to be safe. It wasn’t far from unconditional love, the kind usually reserved exclusively for parents.

  These kids would die for him, she thought, and, turning back to Moreno, she knew the reverse was true as well. Why the hell else would he still be here?

  “I, uh, don’t plan on moving back in,” she said.

  “Your friend here used to be a hell of a scrapper,” Moreno told Nail. “I had to protect the local boys from her, or she’d beat ’em up.”

  Nail chuckled. “She still does.”

  “Asshole,” Anna said, but she couldn’t keep herself from smiling. “Place is . . . different,” she said to Moreno.

  “Yeah. Less jobs. More gangs, more guns.” The exhaustion on his face became a soul-deep weariness, suddenly banished with another smile. “But my boys—and my girls—they hold things together.”

  The young man who’d gone into the house came back with two plastic cups and handed one to Nail and the other to Anna. When Anna looked up to thank him, she saw the inked teardrop at the corner of his left eye. There were lots of those down here, she thought, and almost always they meant prison time. The kid couldn’t possibly be twenty yet.

  She took the water.

  Moreno crossed his legs. “So. I guess this ain’t a nostalgia thing. What’s up?”

  Anna looked over the kids, partly out of nerves at having this discussion, and partly to check tats. Just the one teardrop, as far as she could see. “Okay. I was hoping you could kind of help us check out the area.”

  He stiffened, almost imperceptibly. Either she wasn’t all that welcome here after so long, or he had something to hide. “The area’s fine. I don’t know that it needs anything in the way of checking out.”

  Being cagey about this wasn’t going to get her anywhere. “We’re looking for something. A relic of some kind.”

  “Relic?”

  “Like . . .” How to even explain this? “A, um, body part. From a saint, probably, I guess. I don’t really know.”

  “That ain’t all that helpful.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s all pretty vague right now. But if I don’t track it down, I’m gonna be in a world of hurt. I think the thing we’re looking for is down here, somewhere. Maybe near the church.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I got reasons, okay?” When he didn’t say anything, Anna continued. “Look, I heard some weird stories about what goes on there. If any of that is tied in with, like, occult stuff, it might be important.”

  “Can’t really help you. That ain’t the kind of thing we deal in around here,” he added, crossing himself.

  A straight-up lie, smoothly delivered, but apparent all the same. There was the diagram, for starters, but she also wondered about the buttoned-up shirt. Tommy had needed a lot of blood for his work, and Genevieve did, too. The sleeves might be covering up cuts on his arms. For that matter, there was the dead car and exploding gun. Not the sort of thing that just happened without a reason.

  “It’s worth fifty Gs to us to get our hands on this relic.”

  That got everybody’s attention. One kid’s mocking smile fell right off his face. Two others traded a shocked glance. Fifty grand in one go was a hell of a lot of money for anyone, but that went double down here.

  Anna weighed her chances. “Worth a few bills just for news, so if you got anything . . .”

  There it was—one of the kids, a tall, gangly boy with slicked-back hair, shot a nervous glance toward the kid with the teardrop tat. He didn’t say anything, and Anna didn’t think he wanted to rat the other kid out. He was just scared that somebody was looking for his friend.

  Moreno shook his head. “I’ll ask around, but I wouldn’t hold my breath, I was you.”

  “No, I guess not.” She took out her wallet and wrote her number on the back of a card for a sandwich shop—looked like she wouldn’t be getting the tenth one free, after all. “Call me if you hear anything. Or, you know, if there’s anything you need. I got more connections than I used to.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” He took the card, but his tone of voice had chilled by a few degrees. “Things are getting pretty fucked-up around here. You might wanna stay clear.”

  Hard to miss the hint there. “Yeah.”

  “Momo and Heavy will walk you out.”

  “Cool.”

  * * *

  True to their instructions, Momo and Heavy took them right to the
edge of Locos turf—right at the occult drawing they’d seen on the way in. Anna and Nail kept walking, and the two boys watched them go.

  Nail glanced back over his shoulder after they’d gone a block or so. “What is going on back there?”

  Anna frowned. “Not sure. Moreno’s right, though. It looks pretty fucked-up.” Anna was still replaying the whole experience in her mind. Damn weird, every bit of it, and given all the heat on this area of town, it was too much to chalk up to coincidence. She’d tried to draw Momo and Heavy out during the walk to the edge of Jacinta Street, but they’d refused to say a word.

  “They got an occult hookup, though. Somebody does.”

  “Probably Moreno.” Who else? “He didn’t used to, though. Not that I knew of. I mean, that’s the kind of thing you keep on the down-low, but still. I’d’ve heard something by now. I think.”

  “Hey!”

  Anna spun toward the shout, and from the corner of her eye, she saw Nail twitch, reaching for a phantom gun.

  In the alley to their left, pressed up against the white-painted brick of a destitute restaurant, stood the one the gangsters had called Freak. Must be serious, Anna thought. She was off Locos turf, and with that big tattoo across the back of her head, rival gangs wouldn’t have a hard time guessing she didn’t belong here.

  Anna approached the alley. “What’s up?”

  The girl swallowed. She moved constantly, her weight never staying on one foot for more than a second or so as she shifted and shuffled. Nervous energy. She was wound tight. “My old man. You knew him back in the day.”

  “Your . . . ?” There was only one possible answer. “Moreno?”

  “Yeah.”

  How old was this girl? Sixteen? Nineteen? “That was before you were born, kid.”

  “And what? You so fuckin’ old you don’t remember back then?”

  Anna looked back toward where they’d come from. No gangbangers in sight, but still. “You shouldn’t be here,” Anna said.

  Freak shrugged. “Ain’t your problem. How’d you know my dad?”