Hailey's War

by Jodi Compton

  “So what’s your idea?” Serena said. “Gonna go to Bank of America? That’s a loan program we could use around here. ‘Whether you’re starting a small business or starting a gang war, BofA is here to help.’”

  I rolled over again, looking up speculatively at the ceiling. “That’s not exactly what I have in mind.”

  thirty

  LAX has a great energy: the constant flow of people whose lives are in motion, and, of course, the diversity. It’s hard to think of anywhere else you see such a racial and economic mix of people. It’s like a gigantic jury pool.

  It was also a useful place for me to meet someone: accessible by public transportation and crowded enough for me to blend in. You’d think I’d chosen it as a place of meeting. I hadn’t. Nonetheless, around four in the afternoon, I was sitting in a bar off a main concourse, people-watching, with an ice-choked Pepsi in front of me. I’d been there about fifteen minutes when I saw him: CJ, half a head taller than the people around him, wearing tight, wash-faded cords and a T-shirt with the classic picture of Che Guevara over the legend I Have No Idea Who This Is. He was carrying no bag, just his Dobro guitar in its case, and a small box wrapped in paper from the Sunday comics and a red self-adhesive bow, the artless way men wrap a birthday present. It had been CJ who chose our meeting place. His flight to New York left in fifty-five minutes.

  “I like your shirt,” I said, by way of greeting.

  CJ said, “Funny, I was just about to say I liked yours. I think it’s a healthy step in you moving on from your relationship with the Army.”

  Serena had loaned me a few things, but I was getting fond of the Navy T-shirt, which was why I was wearing it.

  He set down his guitar. “I don’t feel really great about you being in L.A. like this,” he said, sliding onto the opposite stool.

  “This isn’t even L.A.,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure someone like Marsellus travels by private plane.”

  “People think someone like me travels by private plane,” CJ said, “yet here I am.”

  I said, “I doubt you’re even going first class, dressed like that.”

  “First class is a waste of money,” he said dismissively. “I just want to get there; I don’t need my ass kissed.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “though I’d expect you could use the extra legroom. Speaking of, isn’t your guitar too long for a carry-on?”

  “I always clear it with the airline in advance,” he said. “If they lose my bag, that’s no big deal. I wear the same thing two days running-people just assume I went home with a girl and never got back to my room to change. But I lose this”-he nodded at the guitar case-“then we have a problem. I promised some people I’d play for them.”

  At that moment, the cocktail waitress approached. “What can I get you to drink today?” she asked him.

  CJ shook his head. “Nothing, thanks. I’m not staying.”

  She said, “Are you sure? It’d take me no time to bring out a Rolling Rock, or mix up something.”

  Women loved to get things for CJ. And because I didn’t want to see him leave quickly, either, I said, “How did you know? He loves Rolling Rock.”

  She smiled at me as though we were co-conspirators and went back to the bar.

  CJ said, “You want me to miss my flight?”

  “I didn’t notice you telling her that if you wanted your ass kissed, you’d go first class.”

  He gave me a look and said, “Someday I’ll understand why asking favors and having them granted actually makes you meaner instead of nicer,” putting the newspaper-wrapped, ribboned box on the table between us.

  I glanced down, gently shamed by the sight of it. “CJ, I-”

  Then the waitress, true to her word, came back with the Rolling Rock. She noticed the box. “Somebody got a present.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Lucky you,” she said, and walked away, CJ watching the swing of her hips as she went.

  I tried again: “Listen, I don’t know how to thank you for this. I’ll probably be years repaying you.” If I’m alive to do it. “You don’t even want to know what it’s for?”

  “That isn’t a lot of money for me,” he said. “And I know things have been tough for you.”

  It was best to let him think I’d let debts pile up, so I didn’t say anything to that.

  He drank a little Rolling Rock and then said, “I’m sorry I haven’t been up to see you.”

  I shrugged. “It’s okay.”

  I saw It in his pale eyes, that he was weighing his next words. Then he said, “You should know… Marsellus’s wife left him.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Or he asked her to move out, I don’t know,” CJ went on. “I just thought you’d want to know. I’m not saying it’s anything to do with Trey. Marriages fail for a lot of reasons.”

  “I know,” I said.

  But my voice must have sounded leaden, because I saw the sympathy in his gaze as he spoke again. “Hailey, we’ve talked about this,” he said. “That boy’s death-”

  “Is something I’m supposed to feel bad about, fault or no fault,” I interrupted. “That’s not being morbid, CJ. It’s being human.”

  “You’re right,” he said after a moment. “I get it. I do.” Then: “I just wish things were like they used to be.”

  I nodded.

  “Hailey,” he said, “the other thing is, it’s not like I want you even farther away, but there are cities a good deal farther away from Marsellus. Places where you could live more out in the open.”

  “Like where? Wichita?”

  “Well, probably not New York or Miami, those are places that Marsellus and his associates travel to. But I always figured someone like you would do great in Alaska. Or down on the Gulf Coast.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I’d loan you a little money if you wanted to start a bar. Someplace on the water. You’d never have to pay me back, as long as I could drink there for free, and you learn to cook something Cajun for me when I come down.”

  It sounded like paradise, except it was two thousand miles from L.A. and my God-given brother and sister. In that regard, it was purgatory, just like everywhere else. I said, “I can’t cook for shit.”

  “For crying out loud, you can learn. Hailey, you’re twenty-four, you have all the time in the world.”

  I didn’t mean to wince at that, but I guess I did, because he said, “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “That sounds nice. I’ll think about it.”

  He took a last sip of his beer and said, “I gotta run, sugar.” He got off his stool, picked up the guitar, and kissed me quickly on the lips.

  I stayed at the table and watched until he was out of sight. Then I left money for the drinks and joined the crowd headed for the exits, just an average-looking girl in a T-shirt and jeans, carrying ten thousand dollars in cash in a newspaper-wrapped box.

  thirty-one

  I was on the bus home when my cell rang. I checked the screen: Not surprisingly, it was Serena.

  “Prima,” she said, “you gotta come home right away. There’s someone here you need to talk to.”

  “Who?”

  “Wait and see.”

  “I’ve had enough surprises for a while, Warchild.”

  “Just come home.”

  Serena’s coyness irritated me, but after I hung up I thought about it, and by the time I was getting off the bus, I was pretty sure who was at the house.

  Cousin Lara Cortez didn’t look much like Nidia. She had pale olive skin and brown eyes but straight hair chemically lightened almost to blondness. She was in the living room when I got there, on the couch, with a schoolgirl’s bright yellow backpack sitting at her feet.

  “Risky and Heartbreaker ran into her at the Pollo Loco,” Serena told me when we briefly conferred in the kitchen. “No one’s asked her anything yet; we were waiting for you.”

  I went into the living room, Serena at my heels.

  “Are you Hailey?” L
ara said as I entered. “You’re the one who got shot.”

  “Yeah.”

  Her eyes were worried. “Did Nidia?”

  “Get shot? I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if she’s still alive. I’m just trying to piece together what happened.”

  Lara pulled out a pack of chewing gum and unwrapped a piece.

  “So,” I said, slowing my speech as I reached the critical point, “this is the big thing I need to know from you.” I moved to stand over her, close enough that I could smell her hairspray and the sugary watermelon scent of her gum. I said, “Was Nidia pregnant?”

  Lara looked down at her cheap plastic sandals, and then she nodded. She looked up again and shot a nervous glance at Serena, behind me. “Am I in trouble, for not telling about that?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Nidia was scared, she didn’t want to tell even me about the baby. She said she had to get to Mexico right away, because our grandmother was sick. But I knew that wasn’t true; my mother has a letter from Grandma every couple of weeks, so I knew she was fine. I said to Nidia, ‘What is it really?’ and she started crying and told me about the baby. She said its grandfather would steal it from her and she’d never get it back, that the old man was already looking for her and she had to get to someplace safe. She knew I knew Warchild a little through Teaser, and she thought that Warchild would know how to make it happen. I said I’d ask for help, but then she begged me not to say the real reason. She wanted me to tell the story about our grandma.”

  She turned still-worried eyes to Serena. “I didn’t want to lie, but she said it was too dangerous for people to know about this.”

  “More dangerous not to know,” Serena corrected. “Hailey drove into an ambush blind because none of us knew what was really up.”

  “I know,” Lara said, chewing her gum hard. “And I’m sorry. Really sorry.”

  “If you were one of my girls, you’d take a pretty good beatdown for lying to me, but lucky for you, you’re not,” Serena said.

  Lara shifted as if to get up from the couch right away, but I held up my hand.

  “One last thing, Lara,” I said. “Stay alert. If the old man knew about you, he’d probably have sent someone much earlier. But be careful. You see anything, you even feel anything’s not right, call Warchild.”

  She nodded.

  Then I said, “Other than that, try and forget about this stuff. You’re supposed to be on your way out of this story, not deeper in. Out is the smart direction here.”

  Lara nodded seriously and got up off the couch and left, as if she’d been dismissed from class by a teacher.

  Serena said, “Now what?” She and I were still headed deeper into this story, the wrong direction.

  “Call Payaso,” I said. “Have him bring over the guys he trusts. It’s time for a war council.”

  thirty-two

  Two hours later, I was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, notepad on my leg. Serena was nearby, on the couch.

  Lara had confirmed my theory, and yet I had mostly given up on the idea of finding Nidia by finding a doctor fallen from grace; even if I trolled extensively through Medical Board of California records, there was no effective way to follow up a hunch about which ones might have been receptive to a Skouras overture. My plans, for now, were fixed on finding out where Skouras held property, particularly individual properties in isolated areas.

  Serena got up to answer a knock at the door, and came back with Payaso and his 24-7’s, his most trusted homeboys, Deacon and Smiley and Iceman. A few minutes later, Trippy and Risky and Heartbreaker came in. Not that the girls were going to be in on this mission, but Serena said they could listen.

  “They might as well learn,” she’d said. “Even if they’ll never be able to use this shit. Think about it, Insula. This is the kind of thing people like us are part of maybe once in a lifetime. If that.”

  She’d sounded awestruck. I hoped she didn’t think this was going to be a harmless adventure, like the movies. She’d seen too much to be thinking that way.

  Maybe, though, she was being romantic precisely because what we were doing was so different from the usual banging. Saving Nidia and her child, it was honorable. So I didn’t say anything to bring her down.

  Serena, Payaso, and the crew settled down in positions around the living room. Heartbreaker was adding rum to a half-full two-liter bottle of Coke, and passing ice and glasses around.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’re not ready to plan the mission itself yet, because that can’t get done until we’ve learned where Nidia is and checked out the layout and all that.” I sipped a little of my rum and Coke and went on: “We need to figure out the smartest way to proceed. In other words, how to find out where Nidia is without drawing attention to ourselves in the process.”

  Payaso said, “What’re you thinking?”

  “There are two things I’m sure that Skouras needs right now: a corrupt doctor willing to take care of Nidia extralegally, and an out-of-the-way place to keep her. Getting a line on the doctor is going to be next to impossible, given that there’d be no paper trail. So right now I think we should concentrate on finding out where he owns property.”

  “And then we go get her,” Payaso said, “Trece style.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But after that, we can’t really stand down. When we have Nidia, we’re going to be in essentially the same situation that Skouras’s guys are in now. They’re going to be looking for her, so we’ve got to keep her under wraps, safe, and healthy. And she’ll need medical care during the last weeks of her term.”

  “And someone’s gotta birth the baby,” Payaso said.

  “Yes,” I said. “We have a couple of choices there, none of them ideal. The best choice is probably to take her to an ER. If we’ve lain low enough, and Skouras’s men don’t know where we are, he can’t have every maternity ward in the state being watched.”

  “What about computers?” Heartbreaker said. “Could he have people in his organization who could hack into, you know, hospital computers?”

  I hadn’t thought of that. “Beats me. But I don’t think it’s going to help us to start thinking of this guy as the master of the universe. We’ll get too paranoid to plan anything.”

  “But if we can’t go to the ER,” Payaso said, “maybe we could jack a doctor, get him to birth the baby. I heard about some vatos that did it for a gang member who got shot. They let the doc go afterward. They didn’t hurt him.”

  I’d heard those stories, too. “That’s one way,” I said slowly, “but I’m not wild about sticking a gun in the face of someone who’s spent his or her life trying to help sick people. It’s a cliché, but I don’t want to become like Skouras to defeat him.”

  I watched Payaso, to see how he took this rejection of not just his idea but his gangster ethics. He didn’t look mutinous.

  “Speaking of that, though, there’s a middle way,” Serena said. “You said there’s got to be a doctor who’s looking after Nidia. If he’s there when we come in and grab Nidia, we could take him, too, keep him until her due date.”

  “One-stop shopping,” I agreed. “Tempting, but the problem with that is controlling the doctor over a period of days or even weeks. I know some of you guys have jacked people before. What’s the key to controlling a vic in that situation?”

  “Fear,” several voices said.

  “Right. So the key to keeping the doctor in line would be keeping him-or her, I guess-pretty well psychologically traumatized, as well as never giving him any privacy in which to escape. You may think you’re ready for that, but there’s a difference between keeping a jacking victim under control for two minutes, and keeping someone intimidated for two weeks. You may not be as prepared as you think. You may not like who you have to become.”

  There was a moment of silence around the circle. Then Payaso said, “What about us delivering the baby? No doctor. Women have been having babies for centuries without help.”

  I exchanged glances with Serena. People
loved to say that about childbirth, and they never seemed to apply it to other medical situations. No one ever says that people have been having infections for centuries before we had antibiotics. I only said, “That’s something else to think about.”

  I didn’t want to oppose Payaso too much in one meeting. There’d be time later to argue against that idea.

  * * *

  Another conversation in Serena’s bed:

  “So, prima, you gonna tell me where you got that ten K?”

  “No.”

  “I thought we were familia now. No secrets between us.”

  “Everyone’s got secrets,” I said. “You have secrets from me, I’m sure.”

  “Like what? Ask me what you want to know.”

  I rolled onto one elbow. “When you were in high school, with your head shaved, dressed cholo, you did a lot to prove you were one of the guys. You told me that.”

  “Sure.”

  “When teenagers are banging hardest, that’s usually when they do their killings. They walk into parties or up to porches and blast away. Often they get away with it.”

  “That’s what you wanna know? If I did that?”

  “I’m just making a point,” I said. “That’s something I’ve never asked you. So we do have secrets between us.”

  “You’re assuming the answer is yes,” she pointed out. “If I didn’t, then I don’t have a secret, do I?”

  “That’s true,” I said, “but it’s not an answer.”

  “So if I tell you straight out,” she said, “are you gonna tell me where you got the money?”

  “No.”

  “Stalemate,” she said.

  thirty-three

  Right away, out of the money CJ gave me, I put another month’s rent in the mail to Shay, who undoubtedly was pissed at me all over again for disappearing without word. I was sure he’d never offer me work again. I could live with that; I just didn’t want him to pitch my things out in the street.