Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot Part 19

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 gra.s.s, 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."

"Bulls.h.i.t."

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, b.l.o.o.d.y hug, whispering. "Thank you," she said. "Thank you, Hailey."

I patted her shoulder and then pulled back to speak to the a.s.sembled 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 s.h.i.t 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-jalapeno 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 f.u.c.king 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."

"Yeah, a murder rap. That was your doing, right? What'd you give the Shadow Man in trade?"

"Nothing I can't afford. I'll be fine."

I'd known that Serena had served time, but I'd never seen her that way before, in loose county blues, makeup-less, eyes shadowed from lack of sleep. She'd laughed and slipped back into the speech patterns of the adolescent chola she'd once been, something she did when she was nervous or upset.

I understood why. The most frightening thing ahead of her wasn't the cold weather of Chicago, or loneliness, or going legit. It was the memory of the man she'd shot and killed. No matter how bad a guy he'd been, he'd been a person, and she'd pointed her gun at him and pulled the trigger and taken away his everything. He was going to visit her in her dreams. Trey Ma.r.s.ellus still sometimes visited me, and his death had been solely accidental.

I wanted to ask her if he'd drawn on her first and if the shooting had at least been self-defense. But either it had been or it hadn't, and Serena already knew. It wouldn't change anything for me to have that information.

Then I'd asked if there were messages she wanted me to carry back to the people she knew, and she nodded and beckoned me closer to the bars, telling me her succession plan for the sucias, and I'd promised her that I'd fight Diana and make sure the other girls knew that it was Serena's will that she be the new leader. Then we'd said our good-byes, as Magnus Ford waited, out of earshot, by the gate at the end of the cell block.

2.

Back at my apartment building, after Diana's initiation, I was slowing the Aprilia to park when I saw him across the street: a tall, lanky young man with curling reddish blond hair, leaning against a late-model Porsche, his eyes hidden behind aviator shades despite the fading light. My heart skipped a beat with antic.i.p.ation.

But as I was pulling off my helmet, I realized that something was off. CJ seemed out of proportion to his car. It was as if he were too short.

Then he took off his sungla.s.ses, and I understood.

"Virgil?" I said.

It was really the midnight blue Porsche that had thrown me off. It was nothing that Virgil Mooney should have been able to afford. Beyond that, CJ and Virgil had always looked very much alike, and if Virgil's West L.A. style was very like his older brother's ... well, it wasn't like a lot of the guys under thirty in Southern California weren't wearing the same thing.

But Virgil, at five-eleven, was well shy of CJ's height, and beyond that, there was a kind of spark that was missing in him. I'd always felt that the G.o.ds had touched CJ in a way they hadn't his older and younger brothers. But Virgil had a sunny simplicity that made him straightforwardly easy to love, compared to his sometimes maddening older brother.

I loped across the street to him. "Virgil?" I said, as if still not sure of his ident.i.ty. I hadn't seen him in years.

"Hi, Cousin Hailey," he said.

"Hi," I said. "How did you find me?"

"You mailed your address to CJ," he said. "I have his house key, so I can check in once in a while, and I saw the postcard."

He smiled at me, but I didn't miss the serious cast of his eyes.

"Is everything okay?" I said, meaning, Is CJ okay?

"It's Dad," he said, and brushed a stray hank of hair away from his face. "He had a little heart attack, then a bigger one in the hospital, and then they think he's got blood clots in his carotid. It's a lot at once. He's going to have surgery, early tomorrow. They said they could put it off a little while, for his kids to get into town." He swallowed. "You know what that means."

I did know. Porter's doctors wanted him to have a chance to say his good-byes. Just in case.

Virgil went on, "He asked to see you. He considers you one of his kids, he and Mom both."

How long had it been since I'd spoken to either of them, Porter or Angeline? Virgil was absolutely right: They'd treated me as one of their own children, given me the kind of nonjudgmental guidance and approval my mother had been by nature incapable of and my father had not lived to provide.

"I should've kept in touch with them better," I told Virgil.

And though I would have a hard time explaining it to Virgil, there was going to be a problem in rectifying that now, if it meant going to Nevada, across state lines. Ford had been very clear on that point. He didn't even want me to leave Los Angeles. He'd also been clear on having powerful friends, from his time in "government work." I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that my name was on some kind of list: if not the actual Homeland Security no-fly list, then something that would a.s.sure that Ford would be contacted as soon as my name turned up on a pa.s.senger manifest.

I sighed. "This is hard to explain, but I don't think I can fly."

Virgil didn't do the obvious, which would have been to ask why not. Instead he smiled slyly and held up his car keys. "Oh, we can fly," he said.

The car, it turned out, was a repair job Virgil was doing. "I called the owner and said there was an emergency in the family and I'd be delayed in getting it back to him," Virgil told me. "I didn't promise that the car was going to be locked in my garage that whole time."

"Is this thing going to break down somewhere in the desert?"

Virgil shook his head. "It's minor stuff. The heater/AC fan is broken, and the pa.s.senger-door gasket is warped so that it leaks in the rain. Nothing that'll keep us from getting up to Nevada in time."

So I'd napped in the pa.s.senger seat while Virgil, as he'd promised, flew us across black and empty highway, unpatrolled secondary roads where he could drive as fast as he liked, under a blanket of night sky broken by icy stars.

Porter was at the main hospital in Reno, and it was there that I greeted my family, each in turn. Angeline wore her hair shorter now than she had most of her life, but still long enough to wrap in a short knot on her neck, and her face was only gently lined-laugh lines around the eyes and such. Then Moira, with whom I had briefly shared a room during my first days in California. By an accident of genetics, she looked more like my mother than I did, with Julianne McNair's dark hair and good bones. She was quieter than her brothers, but underneath it kind and nonjudgmental like her parents, and I leaned in for a feminine wishbone hug, shoulders and chest touching but hips separate.

Constantine was nearly as tall as CJ but kept his red-gold hair short, and his nails were clipped but still stained faintly with grease from his mechanic's job; he thumped me on the back like he might have a guy.

"Is CJ on his way?" I asked when the greetings were finished.

Moira said, "We've left him two messages, but we're not sure exactly where he is right now," and Angeline added, "I never knew his job required him to travel so much. It didn't used to. Seemed like he was always in L.A. when his daddy or I needed to talk to him."

I didn't see a need to add anything to that, though I could have enlightened them on CJ's desire not to be in Los Angeles.

Angeline said, "Why don't you go on in and see your uncle? We've all already been, and he was asking specifically if you were coming."

Porter looked frail and wan, but who didn't, in pajamas and a hospital bed? His eyes were bright and sharp, though, as I came in. "There's my youngest daughter," he said, and a smile creased his work-worn face.

"Hi, Uncle Porter." I kissed his forehead. "How are you feeling? Didn't you tell them you're a Mooney, that there's never anything wrong with you a Goody's Headache Powder won't fix?"

He lifted a hand from the bedsheet and waved it. "I used to think that. It's all vanity, like the man says. Sit down, kid."

I did as he said.

"I'd ask if you were keeping out of trouble, like I used to, but ... well, I've seen the news."

"Yeah," I said. "Things got a little crazy for a while."

"But now they know"-he gestured at the TV, indicating the ma.s.s media and the police beyond-"that you didn't hurt anybody."

"Yes," I rea.s.sured him. "They do."

"That's good," he said. "We need you, you know."

"Me?" I gave him a "that's crazy" look. "You guys don't need me."

"I do," he said. "Listen, this is a good hospital, and I'm getting good care, but ... Hailey, promise me you'll watch out for your cousin." He didn't have to specify which one.

"CJ doesn't need looking after," I said. "Are you worried that he'll get addicted to something?"

It was the only thing I could imagine Porter or Angeline lying awake at night about; they'd known about his marijuana use in high school, and they were smart enough to know that anything else he wanted was readily available to him now, in the circles he moved in.

I said, "Trust me, I've never seen any sign that he's using anything to excess. He doesn't even drink very much."

"I know," Porter said. "That's not what I'm worried about."

"Then what? CJ's smart, you know that, and he's got more money than most of us will earn in five lifetimes. He's handling success fine."

"He is right now," Porter said. "You make sure it stays that way. Don't let him find a guru and move to an ashram."

I laughed in spite of myself.

Porter didn't. "You may not think so, Hailey, but of all my kids, Cletus has the hardest row to hoe as he gets older, and I think you're the only one tough enough to put a boot up his a.s.s if the day comes that he really needs it. If I'm not around then, you tell him I told you to do it."

"Yes, sir," I said, and was surprised to find my vision blurring with tears.

"Don't do that, kid," he said gently.

"He's on his way here," I said, knowing it'd be true soon enough; CJ never neglected his voice mail very long. "I'll do what you're asking, but when he gets here, give him the guru-and-ashram speech yourself. It'll have more weight coming from you."