by Jodi Compton
“It’s a sucker’s game, trying to keep a sideline like that unnoticed,” he said. “Either you have to stay so small it’s not worth the effort, or you come to someone’s attention and pay the penalty for not cutting the right people in.”
I didn’t like where this was going.
“On Tuesday night Warchild went to her garage unit and caught someone breaking in. Maybe she thought he was some random street thief. He wasn’t. He was a foot soldier for one of the sureño bosses around here, who sent him to impound everything she had. I guess between back payments and punitive damages, the bosses decided Warchild was in the hundred-percent tax bracket. They wanted everything.”
He left unsaid something I was sure he also understood: that Serena, in particular, had to be taught a lesson because she was female.
“What happened?” I said.
“She and this gunny shot at each other.”
“Was she hit?”
“No. He was. Warchild fled the scene, but we caught her a few miles away. She’s in custody.”
Good, I thought. Well, it wasn’t good, but at least I knew she was safe.
But then Ford said, “She’s facing a homicide charge. The guy she shot died in intensive care.”
God, Serena. Last year, when we were in the thick of our troubles with Skouras, I’d asked her if she’d ever killed anyone, back when she was running with the guys of Trece. She’d evaded the question in a teasing way, and I’d hoped she was being coy. Now I didn’t have to hope. Couldn’t hope. That line had been crossed.
“It’s good she’s in custody,” Ford said. “La Eme put out a fifty-thousand-dollar hit on her, in retaliation for the foot soldier’s life.”
“They can’t do that,” I objected. “She’s familia. She’s made her bones.”
“Of course they can. Who’s she going to appeal to, the sureño HR department?” He let that settle. Then he said, “This isn’t really about Serena Delgadillo, though. She’s not the person I have sitting in front of me. You are.”
Before I could adjust to the shift in focus, Ford got to his feet and walked to the interrogation-room mirror. He pressed his face against the glass to see through.
“Who’s in there?”
“No one. I didn’t think there was, but sometimes cops get bored, just hang out in there for no good reason, watch the show. I wanted to be sure.”
Interesting. Magnus Ford was about to say something that he didn’t want his colleagues to hear.
He turned away from the mirror and said, “I’m retiring soon.”
“Congratulations?” I offered blankly.
He came back to stand over the table, pulling his billfold out of his jacket. He opened it and laid a business card on the table between us. I picked it up and read it. THE FORD GROUP, it read, in a spare, clean font.
He said, “I’m going into a private line of work. Personal security, surveillance, property recovery, negotiation, ransoms. A kind of private police work that wouldn’t have to abide by jurisdictional lines.”
“Wow. That must be a generous pension you’re getting, to be able to do all that.”
There was an answering flash of wry humor in his eyes. “I have financial resources beyond this job. Which I’ll be using to hire and to adequately compensate the right people. People with special talents.”
He stopped there, went around to the other side of the table, and sat down again. “This is the deal, Hailey: You agree to come work for me and you’ll walk out of here. What I know about your crimes as ‘Insula,’ that retires with me. I won’t take it to a prosecutor, and you won’t get charged. In addition, I’ll make the homicide rap against Warchild go away.”
“You can do that?”
“I’m not your average patrolman. I’ve made some friends in my time in government work.”
Not police work, but government work. That was interesting. I filed it away for the future.
He went on, “In addition, I’ll get Delgadillo a plane ticket out of state. She won’t be safe here, even if she went up to Northern California. There are sureño guys who’d follow her there, for a fifty-thousand-dollar payday.”
That was true. I said, “I’m not necessarily saying yes, but why me? I don’t have any special talents.”
He merely tilted his head.
“Oh, God,” I said. “You know about the brain tumor. That’s not a talent. And it won’t stay asymptomatic forever. That makes me a relatively short-term investment. I don’t see how I could be all that valuable to you.”
Ford reached into his coat pocket and took out a Hershey bar, unwrapped it. “Sweet tooth,” he said, as if apologizing. “You want some?”
I shook my head.
He broke off a rectangle of chocolate and put it in his mouth, sucked gently for a moment, and swallowed. “In a way you make a good point,” he said. “Your lack of fear could be a liability as much as an asset, if it makes you behave in unnecessarily reckless ways. As for your other assets, you’re a good fighter and shooter, but a lot of people have military training. And then you’re trilingual, but one of those languages is useless to me. French or German would be far more useful than Latin.”
My high-school guidance counselor had argued much the same thing, pushing me to enroll in French courses rather than leave campus and sit in on Latin classes at the community college. If only she were here. Vindication at last.
“You have potential,” Ford continued, “but that potential remains raw, and it’ll take time and work to develop. You are, as you said, an investment.”
He’d been thinking about this.
“How long would I be in the service of the”—I glanced at the business card again—“the Ford Group?”
“Well,” he said, “given the generous offer I’m making you here, your freedom and Warchild’s, plus the resources I’m going to put into your training, to fill in the gaps left by West Point and the streets … I’d say it’s fair to call your term of service ‘indefinite.’ Put another way, as long as you can realistically commit.”
“Realistically commit?” I repeated. “You’re talking about the tumor again. Are you saying I’m coming to work with you for the rest of my life?”
“It was you who called yourself a short-term investment. That wasn’t me.”
“Can I just stop here and congratulate you on your tact? You’re really putting on a clinic in sensitivity.”
He sighed and lifted a shoulder. “Be that as it may, I’m going to need an answer from you. The prosecutor’s office closes in”—he checked the readout on his cell phone—“forty minutes.”
I said nothing.
He added, “I should also have mentioned, in addition to the legal considerations you’d get from me for joining up, of course you’d be paid. You might be pleasantly surprised.”
He really was offering a lot. But it couldn’t exactly be called a choice, and I was pretty tired of being manipulated and boxed into corners.
He was watching me, waiting for me to get uncomfortable and fill the silence. He was very, very still: I’d rarely met anyone who made so few little, incidental movements.
Finally I cleared my throat.
“If I come work for you,” I said, “there’s one other thing I need, as part of my recruitment package.”
His eyebrows rose again, skeptically. “The package I’ve already offered isn’t generous enough for you?”
“This is important. It’s something I can’t leave unfinished.”
“I’ll consider it, then. Tell me.”
“There’s a girl in Serena’s neighborhood named Luisa Ramos. She goes by Trippy, though she might have a new moniker now. She used to be a sucia, but now she runs with Tenth Street. She’s a figure who’s probably beneath your notice, at least for now.”
He nodded but said nothing.
“I need your guys in gang intelligence to focus their attention on her and get her off the streets. They won’t have to manufacture any charges. If they watch her, she’ll gi
ve them reason. I think she’s a blossoming psychopath.”
It wasn’t just her attack on me I was thinking of. When she’d had me pinned, Trippy had said, When Warchild’s gone, I’m going to run the sucias. Not someday if, but when. It sounded like she’d known that Serena was going away.
The missing detail in Ford’s story, about the gunfight at the storage unit, was this: There were many ways the sureño bosses could have found out about Serena’s oil-of-chronic trade, but how did the foot soldier know exactly which storage facility, and which unit, was hers? Serena was cagey, and the only person who knew the location of her biggest stash was her lieutenant. That was me, and I hadn’t told anyone.
But before me it was Trippy. I felt fairly certain she’d betrayed Serena to La Eme.
Ford tapped the ends of his fingertips together. “You’re leaving that world behind you, though. You’ll be safe from this girl. So getting her arrested and imprisoned, is that just retaliation for past wrongs?”
I shook my head. “There are other people she could still hurt.”
“I see,” he said. “And if I do that, you’ll come work for me?”
“Yes.” Such a small word.
“Done,” he said, then he stood up and unlocked me from the D-ring.
I stood up, too, stretching my limbs after such a long time of sitting. “What happens now?”
Ford reached into his coat again and set a pager on the table. “That’s yours, as my employee. Don’t give the number to anyone else. It’s just for me to contact you. It won’t be this week, or next week, but when I’m ready, I’ll page you.” He put his handcuff key back in his pocket. “I’m putting a lot of trust in you, here, that you won’t be on the first Greyhound out of town once the charges against Warchild are dropped. So I’d like you to stay in Los Angeles. I’m not saying that I’ll be checking up on you, but you might find it wise to remember that I know where you live. In fact, I thought I might give you a ride home, unless there’s someone else you’d like to call.”
“No,” I said. “There isn’t.”
“All right,” he said. “If you’re ready, I’ll take you to say good-bye to your friend.”
EPILOGUE
1
Once I was proved innocent, I became the subject of a small media-feeding frenzy. My other life as “Insula” never came out, since only Ford and Joel Kelleher knew that particular detail, and neither of them spoke to the media. Given that, there was nothing to take the luster off my story, which became uncomplicatedly heroic. The Dateline and 20/20 types acted accordingly, immediately revising their take on me to stress my West Point accomplishments (whereas before they stressed my stigmatizing failure to graduate). They drew attention to the “mystery” of my “lost” years, the way I “dropped off the grid” after leaving West Point, then “came virtually out of nowhere” to “run Brittany Mercier literally to the ground on national television.” And then, they said dramatically, I walked out of a sheriff’s substation a free woman “and, once again, simply disappeared.”
Not true, of course. I hadn’t gone very far at all, just back to Crenshaw. I cleaned my apartment in anticipation of leaving it for good, scrubbing the corners of the kitchen linoleum, chasing dust kitties from under the couch. I ran for miles to stay in shape and did push-ups and sit-ups in my living room, but I stayed away from the Slaughterhouse.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t fight at all.
It was an unusually warm evening in Los Angeles, almost humid. The sun had set, but the streetlights weren’t yet on as I guided the Aprilia through waning traffic. Ford didn’t want me to leave the city, but he hadn’t said anything about staying out of Trece territory.
I parked my bike and dismounted in front of a stuccoed-over, one-story Craftsman house with bars on the windows. I didn’t bother with the front door, because there was noise from the backyard, a surf of female voices in mixed Spanish and English. The sucias were gathered.
I reached over the top of the gate, felt for the gravity latch, and pulled it up. The yard was a scene that looked like casual weeknight partying: some beers and cigarettes going, easy chatter. The sharp tang of lighter fluid rode on the breeze, and I saw a gunmetal-colored kettle grill, not yet lit. A picnic-style table with attached benches was pushed to the edge of the yard, and it was there that I saw Diana, not drinking, not smoking, wearing long, baggy shorts and a tight black tank shirt and hard work boots.
“Hey,” I said. Conversation stilled as everyone looked at me.
Diana stood up, and we inventoried each other. It was the first time I’d seen her wear any makeup: black eyeliner that made her gaze hard.
“I’m ready,” she said.
“Come on, then,” I said.
Her booted foot flashed out. I dodged it. Oh, faster than that, I thought.
She planted the foot that had missed and readied to come at me again, but behind her raised hands her eyes were a little less hard and sure than they’d been a second before. I raised my hands, too, and twitched my left as though about to jab but struck with my leg instead, launching my shin into the side of her knee at a forty-five-degree angle. She wasn’t ready—I hadn’t even glanced downward toward her legs—and her knee gave way, and she fell.
For just a second, she looked up at me from the ground as if to say, Why are you doing this to me?
You know why, I thought. She scrambled to her feet.
And we fought.
She had heart, and clearly some experience, but not technique, and, worse, she telegraphed everything by looking first where she intended to strike. I blocked everything she threw at me and bloodied her nose though I didn’t mean to do it. Her eyes were narrowed with determination, but she was breathing hard, and in another minute she’d tire, and her hands would begin to drop, and her blows wouldn’t be convincingly strong to those watching.
Now. I let my left hand waver downward, like I might in a moment of carelessness, and she saw it and capitalized.
I’d been hit harder, but even so, one of those bright neurological camera flashes went off in the periphery of my vision. Good girl.
I came back with a hard flurry, as if angered. Actually, I was backing her up to a slender strip of grass, off the concrete. When I had her there, I closed in, swept her right leg with my foot, grabbed her shoulders and wrenched them to the right. Then her center of gravity was over the place where her leg should have been but wasn’t, and she fell.
When she was pinned, her face turned to the side against the turf, I put my elbow against her jaw and said, loud enough for those watching to hear, “Give it up. Tap out.”
“No,” she said.
I leaned forward to get a little more weight on her. “Give it up.”
“Bullshit.”
I lowered my face and whispered. “Do you think you could really be Warchild’s equal?”
Her eyes were squeezed closed in discomfort. “Not hers, maybe. But yours.”
It was a sign of the defiance she was supposed to demonstrate and, more than that, of family pride. I took my weight off her, got to my feet, and extended a hand. She looked up at it with uncertainty. “It’s okay. You did good,” I said, and she let me pull her up. She fell against me in a rough, bloody hug, whispering. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Hailey.”
I patted her shoulder and then pulled back to speak to the assembled girls. “I’m not going to be around from now on. Neither is Warchild.” I put my hand on Diana’s shoulder. “This is Gladia. She’s in charge. Anyone has a problem with that, say something now. To me. Don’t sneak around talking shit later.”
I let my gaze roam over them, looking for resistance. There were sucias here who were older than Diana, and nearly all had put in more work than she had. But no one said anything.
“Okay, then,” I said.
“Serena wanted this,” I said, into Diana’s ear. “She told me so.”
It was also for Diana’s sake that I’d asked Ford to take Trippy out of commission. With a power
vacuum in the sucias—and however strong and smart Diana was, Trippy would consider her leadership a vacuum—she’d come back to take by force what she considered her rightful place, and Diana—who I’d known even before speaking to Serena was the best choice to fill the leadership role—would be directly in her crosshairs.
“She also chose your new name,” I told her. “It’s from the Latin gladius. You should look it up.”
More beers were brought out from an ice chest, and a cold, wet can was thrust into my hands. Diana pressed hers against the back of her neck, a home remedy to stop the last seepage of blood from her injured nose.
Someone lit the charcoal grill, and when the flames died down, one of the other girls laid a slab of ribs marinated in honey-jalapeño barbecue sauce on the grate. It was tradition to party after a jumping-in, even in hard times.
No one asked me why I was leaving. I was nearly twenty-five, an eternity in gang years, an age where those who had escaped a violent death or imprisonment counted their blessings and stopped banging, even if they were, technically, down for life. And I was white. I’d always been an anomaly, someone who shouldn’t have been in their world in the first place.
What the girls of Trece did ask me was what I knew about Serena. I told them as much as I could: that she’d gotten into an unfortunate clash with a guy who was breaking into her storage unit, that she’d shot him and had faced a murder rap, but that it had been dismissed, and now she’d left town. When they asked me where she’d gone, I lied and said I didn’t know.
“You caught that girl. I knew you would, prima.”
“Yeah, I did. How are you, Serena?”
“What’s to say? I finally found out what the limit of my fate is. Chicago. That’s where the Shadow Man is sending me. Can you believe it? Me in Illinois, in the fucking snow? You know what they call the two big gang nations out there? The People and the Folks. The first time somebody told me that, I was like, are you playing with me?”
“I don’t think the Folks Nation is going to have much room for a homegirl from East L.A. Maybe it’s time to go legit. You dodged a real bullet today.”
