Ditch Rider
Page 16
“What makes you think it’s Serrano’s gun?” she asked.
“He had to get rid of it somewhere. It’s the right weapon in the right place.”
“I’m on my way over,” she said.
The Kid went back to work. I went back to the valve, sat down on the ditch bank and waited with Danny for Jessup to show up.
“Now do you think my sister will go free?” he asked me.
“We’ll see. It can be hard to get fingerprints from a gun.”
But this gun had been sheltered. Nolo Serrano’s prints were on file and they matched the only print the crime lab was able to get from the gun. With the bullet Cheyanne had turned in, the crime lab had no trouble ascertaining that Nolo Serrano had fired the gun that killed Juan Padilla.
******
The day Cheyanne was released from the D Home I waited outside for her with her family.
“Hey, bro,” she said, running her hand across Danny’s skullcap. “Cool do.”
Danny laughed and kicked up some dirt.
“I’m real glad you’re coming home,” Sonia said, hugging her daughter.
“Me, too,” Cheyanne replied.
Leo and Cheyanne gave each other a tenuous hug. At least they were trying. “I’m real proud of you guys, you know that?” Leo said. “You proved you can do it.”
“Do what?” asked Danny.
“Beat the gangs,” Leo said.
Cheyanne came over to me and we faced each other. What kind of a relationship would this be now anyway? I wondered. I wasn’t her mother. She wouldn’t be needing a lawyer anymore. I was too old to be her friend. I extended my hand and she took it, but I didn’t know if I’d be seeing her again.
******
A few weeks later the doorbell rang. I couldn’t see anyone through the chevron pattern, but I opened the door anyway and found a baby lying on the stoop. It was wrapped in a blanket and tucked inside one of those plastic baby carriers with a handle. I bent over for a closer look and the baby started to cry. I was considering picking it up when Cheyanne laughed, came around the corner of the courtyard, flipped the doll over and turned it off. She was wearing her extra-large Chicago Bulls t-shirt. Her fingernails were painted blue. Her blonde curls bobbed around her head, but they didn’t hide all the scars. There was a jagged red lightning mark on one side of her face. It didn’t destroy her looks, but it gave them another dimension. Tabatoe was with her, and the cat turned and raced down the driveway, heading for my catnip patch.
“How are you doing?” I asked Cheyanne.
“Pretty good.”
“You didn’t steal a doll from the school again, did you?”
“No. It was my turn to take it home. It goes back tomorrow. Would you mind if I, um…”
“Got on the computer?”
“Right.”
“Come on in.”
Cheyanne followed me across the courtyard and into the living room. She put the doll on the sofa and sat down at the computer. Before she began searching for fine guys on the Internet, I asked her about Patricia.
“She’s in the D Home until she gets sentenced. I talk to her a lot.”
“She’s going to end up in the Girls’ School, you know.”
“I know. It’ll be hard for her in there. Nolo’s homegirls are already hassling her. She doesn’t care what she looks like anymore. She orders pizza all the time and is getting fat.”
Weight gain was a place girls went to hide out from guys and life and death. “Is she talking to her parents?”
“Yeah, they talk, and her mother goes to see her. Patricia told me that when Nolo died she thought that meant he couldn’t do nothin’ to hurt us anymore. But now she feels she can’t get rid of him.”
“He’s hanging from her neck like a rotting animal.”
“How did you know? That’s the way I felt when I was in the D Home. I didn’t kill Juan Padilla, but I had to act like I did. I tried to pretend what that would be like and I felt I was responsible for him twenty-four-seven. I hated the way his women looked at me in the courtroom.”
“Did you tell Patricia that?”
“Yeah, but she didn’t listen. She wanted to make Nolo pay for what he did.”
Payback was one form of justice that had existed for a long, long time. “We all pay, don’t we?”
“I know that now.”
I hadn’t seen the gray cat for a while, and I asked Cheyanne if she knew what had become of it.
“Leo got tired of it hanging around, punking Tabatoe and stealing her food, and he trapped it.”
“Did he kill it?”
“No. He took it to the animal shelter.”
Maybe the time had come for it to be somebody else’s dark shadow. “How are you getting along with your mother and Leo?”
“Better.” Her fingers were itching for the keyboard. “Can I?”
“Sure.”
I’d been expecting her to get on the Internet and Teen Chat, but she opened Digital Schoolhouse instead and inserted a disc in the CD-ROM drive. A spiderweb appeared on the screen. In a tinny voice, “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” began to play and Cheyanne sang along. Her fingers left the keyboard and climbed the waterspout.
THE END
You can find more of Judith Van Gieson’s mysteries as ebooks:
North of the Border: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#1)
Raptor: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#2)
The Other Side of Death: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#3)
The Wolf Path: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#4)
The Lies That Bind: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#5)
Parrot Blues: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#6)
Hotshots: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#7)
Ditch Rider: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#8)
The Stolen Blue: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#1)
Vanishing Point: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#2)
Confidence Woman: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#3)
Land of Burning Heat: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#4)
The Shadow of Venus: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#5)