by A. J. Lape
Red sort of laughed, sort of sighed. “Reese Sanders could have a meteor land on her botoxed face for all I care, but she’s not stupid. She must feel she has some credible intel or she wouldn’t be lifting a finger.”
Reese Sanders was the Mack County Prosecutor, servicing Valley and the surrounding townships in the county. If Ivy was my arch nemesis, Reese was Red’s. More for reasons along the personal than professional. Reese wanted Red’s ex-husband in the biblical way, if you know what I mean, and she didn’t care that anyone knew it. Least of all Red. But Red’s and my Uncle Rookie’s relationship was all shades of the rainbow. Somehow they’d managed to maintain a close and loving friendship after four divorces, and that always confused me. If you could still be close and loving, why didn’t you just stay married?
“If you were to guess, what would be some credible intel?”
Cue the crickets chirping. “And you’re curious why?”
First of all, because I was me, and second of all, because I had to figure out what kind of connection Oscar had to Juarez, not to mention the female in the garbage truck. “Can’t a girl be concerned about her friend?” I lied, feigning hurt feelings.
Red mumbled something to herself. “To answer your question, Reese must have what she feels is concrete proof Oscar was connected to both victims. There must be motive and when there’s motive, most usually there’s a relationship.”
I tried another lie on for size. “I heard from his brother they’ve connected Oscar to the female found in the garbage truck a few days ago.”
More crickets chirping. In fact, Red was so silent I was afraid she was going to clam up altogether. “Sounds like someone in Reese’s organization has a big mouth.”
“Did you hear that?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you know what the relationship was?” When Oscar phoned again, I could get specifics, but frankly that meant I’d have to tell him that someone he might have had a relationship with was dead. I didn’t want to be the bearer of that kind of news. Been there, done that. Didn’t want to do it again.
Red uncharacteristically let the cat out of the bag. “Her name was Annie Hughes. She was nineteen years old and lived in a trailer park off Tylersville. It’s sad, baby. She’d been gone for a few days, but when the report was filed, it was pieced together that Annie was the body parts in the garbage truck. Dear God,” she prayed, “I sometimes hate this job.”
I gulped. Could that have been the missing person’s report that caused the fight at Valley Police Department on Tuesday? The timing made sense, and if they found something on Annie’s body—er, what was left of it—that pointed to Oscar, no wonder the cops immediately took him into custody on Wednesday.
“Will they try Oscar as an adult?” Oscar was sixteen—not your standard eighteen-year-old adult—but considering the severity of the crime, sometimes the prosecutor could pull things like that off.
“I heard she wants to. You understand this stays between you and me, right?”
My aunt practically raised me the last few years, but our relationship was sometimes more like peers. What she told me would be a legal no-no if she were still a practicing attorney, but since she’d been doing the private detective thing, “details” sometimes slipped out in everyday conversations. If anything, I knew how to keep my lips sealed, and that was coming from a person that liked to talk.
“I’ve already forgotten what we were talking about,” I assured her.
“Good girl. I gotta go. Easter’s right around the corner, and I’m getting my hair dyed blonde before I go to work.” Ah, I knew that was coming. She changed her natural red hue after every divorce simply as an up-yours to her red-loving ex-husband. I didn’t want them divorced, I just didn’t.
It was Monday morning, and the last thing I expected was a wake-up call at 6AM from Oscar...but now I had direction. Spring Break officially started tomorrow, and if it were up to me, I was going to be busy from daylight ’til dark. You might ask, why does Spring Break start on Tuesday instead of your standard Monday? It’s because Old Man Winter made us the butt of a cruel joke. Back in December we missed nine days straight—best nine days of my life, or so I thought—but there was always a payday. Instead of going until mid-June, the Board of Education elected to shave one day off of Spring Break and get rid of some teacher work-days.
Since the temperature was supposed to reach 72 degrees, I pulled on my True Religion jeans I bought from Justice yesterday. I paired it with a black t-shirt that said “WHY ME?” then added blush, mascara, and some rose lipstick in the shade of Secrets Suck. Lastly, I stepped into some silver flip-flops and was reminded that I still had a wart on my foot. So, the wart-ceremony was a crock. Flipping my foot over, I saw that the wart was larger and crustier than before.
Popping a Hebrew National hotdog into the George Foreman Grill, I waited eight minutes for my breakfast to be just the way I liked it: slightly charred and oozing fat.
I loved hot dogs, and although my favorite cuisine was Mexican, the hot dog was hands down, my favorite meal ever. If I had to dissect my penchant for the processed, on some level it might be that they’re the underdog. Even the all-meat one I was eating was a mutt in the meat family.
Finding a bun, I dropped the dog inside, slathered it with mustard then drizzled it with some shredded cheese as I poured myself a cup of coffee in my favorite coffee cup. Well, actually it was more like a silver container that should’ve hit the recycling bin years ago. It was from my first cup ever. Grabbing my things, I walked outside to meet Jon Bradshaw. By the time his truck backfired twice, my breakfast was nothing but crumbs, and I’d reapplied my lipstick.
“How was your weekend?” he asked first thing, as we pulled out onto the road.
“Uneventful. I endured sixteen hours of slow, inactive torture at Belinski’s. Frankly, I would’ve invited physical torture since it would be something more than watching the paint peel.”
The boy actually smiled. His lips curved upwards and everything. “Sounds great.”
I lifted an inquisitive brow. “Why are you being so friendly?”
I swallowed down some coffee. Shoot, it was cold. That was pretty much close to syrup of ipecac. I’d place the cup in a cup holder, but Jon’s car was so old they weren’t invented when it came out of the factory.
His normal rolled-out-of-bed self, Jon reached over to lightly caress my hand. Bizarre behavior; so bizarre there had to be reason. “Taylor said I need to talk to you so you can get all the rebellion out of your system. He thinks if you talk about things, you won’t be so inclined to participate in them.”
“Idiot,” I laughed.
“My thoughts exactly.”
I could picture Dylan lounging back with his long legs propped on a table, hands behind his head—checking on his favorite pastime. I must’ve given him an ulcer’s worth of things to think about. You’d think he’d want the two-week reprieve, and here he was pawning me off on his cronies, then making them tattle.
After I showed Jon my new and improved mouth, I messed around with my hair, readjusting the black headband I was wearing, all of a sudden self-conscious. “What happened to your hair?” he laughed.
One of Murphy’s coworkers told him the key to cutting bangs around cowlicks was to snip, then texturize. At my prodding, Murphy gave my bangs another go, but that woman was either an idiot, or God enjoyed making fun of me. My bangs were now so thin they looked like I’d singed them in a light socket.
After Jon snorted in laughter, he took a deep breath, and you could tell he mentally slugged himself. “Dylan would say you’re still the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.”
“Dylan’s blind,” I mumbled, and let’s face it, he had better hair than me. His parameter of what constituted beauty was probably dumbed down in my case anyway.
Pulling a Crest white strip out of my purse, I held my coffee between my legs and glued it to my teeth. “Wha’ arth you gitting from thith lil’ arrang-ment, Grumpy?” I slurred.
Jon grinned, not saying another word.
I’d been sitting here for two hours, and no one had discovered I’d skipped US History and Anatomy. I could look at that one of two ways: I wasn’t memorable or both my teachers were morons. Oh well, rules schmules. What good was it to have them if you couldn’t break them sometimes?
I found a place upstairs in the Media Center, tucked away in a corner, sitting at one of those brown wooden desks that had walls partitioning it for privacy. I pulled out my iPad, the product of six months of hard labor at Belinski’s. Then I drew my feet up under my body in case Mrs. Lowe decided to take roll call.
The longer I sat there, the more agitated I became. What was going on with Oscar? And had I stumbled upon this information to make a difference or had I stumbled upon it because I was Darcy being Darcy? Whatever the truth, the walls were crashing in and it was hard to breathe. I was thisclose to quitting, but I didn’t want to fall before I got to the finish line.
Firing up Safari, Apple’s browsing software, first thing I did was type AVO into Google. With a couple of clicks, I was looking at the history of AVO. AVO started in Central America when a group of children in war torn times were being hidden in a convent for safety. When the children grew restless, missing their parents, the priest would always say, “AMOR VINCIT OMNIA” or “Love Conquers All!” It instilled hope in the children they would see their loved ones again...at least for a while. When political rivals discovered the children, the priest and nuns were slaughtered in their presence to send a message. Somehow a few of them made it out alive and were smuggled to America by sympathizers. They stuck together in a portion of Texas, but when they ultimately were sent to an orphanage in Corpus Christi, it seems they lost their hope for happy endings. Their organization was formed and their battle cry became the same “AMOR VINCIT OMNIA” —or their future gang symbol of AVO.
To date, AVO’s considered the worst gang in world history. Its members are ruthless, develop specialties, and are known to have blind allegiance to whomever is “Padre” to their specific faction. Their known felonies are murder, rape, home invasion robberies, drug trafficking, and anything else they see a profit in. Once in AVO, you don’t get out. You only get out by death or turning evidence to federal officials. If it’s discovered you’re a “nark,” the AVO does its standard amputation of the tongue. In other words, someone holds you down while it’s cut out.
With a click on “Images,” I was looking at the tattoos on Alfonso Juarez’s back. Juarez had a demon that ran across his shoulder blades with the word “death” spelled in Spanish. According to a nearby blog, members usually tattooed their backs with their specialty. That demon, accompanied with the word “death,” meant you were a hitter. In the world of AVO, it meant you not only defended yourself, but those too weak to do so themselves. Also, in the world of AVO, you were the one tapped to punish those that began to look like weaklings. My word, it’s like they had their own Internal Affairs Division, and Alfonso was the head.
The Gothic symbols on his back supposedly meant, “Me, Us, and Them.” Some gang members tattooed their fingers with a MUT along with the standard AVO. The AVO was indeed on Juarez’s dismembered hand, and my guess is, that was the first clue law enforcement had that the gang was in suburban, let’s-play-soccer-and-sleep-with-our-windows-open Cincinnati.
Sitting back and rubbing my eyes, I recalled that Red said authorities believed a local gang assassinated Alfonso. I didn’t push Red for particulars, but the only gang big enough in town to even care or have nerve enough to take on AVO was the River City Smugglers. I knew from past experiences, and a brief secondary search, that River City Smugglers didn’t dismember, and their hits were mob-like or the double-tap—in the head, in the heart. Also, they would’ve spray-painted RCS all over the place because they liked to take credit. They would want you to know—or more aptly put, the people around you—that they were settling the score. Alfonso, in my opinion, looked like a sloppy job.
The day started subpar, but when I was just about to term it a red-letter day, someone whacked the side of my cubicle twice with a ruler. I jumped, squealed like a pig, then looked into the beady, little eyes of AP Unger.
Oh, jeez, talk about a buzzkill.
“And here she is,” he growled into his cell phone. “All studious and practically singing the school’s fight song.”
I chewed on my lip for a minute. “This isn’t appropriate, right?” When he rolled his eyes, I said, “Did you hear that?”
He gave me his what-are-you-talking-about face, appraising all four walls. “Hear what?” he snapped.
“It’s villain music playing in the background,” I explained laughing. I hummed out a few bars of "You're a Mean one, Mr. Grinch."
I swear, he looked at me like if there were a cliff around, he’d push me over. File that under Should’ve Known Better. AP Unger had somehow sniffed me out. At first I wasn’t afraid, I could talk my way out of it—I think—but by the snarky “gotcha” look on his face, I knew he’d come with backup. He placed his phone on speaker, shoving it right into my face, and before the person even identified himself, I knew who it was by the ticked-off grunt through the receiver.
“Darcy Walker,” the voice seethed. “We’re going to have a conversation as soon as your feet hit the threshold of my home. You’ll do as AP Unger says; you’ll scrub the stinkin’ floor, you’ll put your hand in the toilet and wipe it clean, you’ll do the hillbilly hoedown in the middle of the gosh-danged cafeteria if he sees fit. Do you hear me?”
Murphy...my worst nightmare. I clicked off my iPad shoving it in its case, half afraid AP Unger would apprehend it and never give it back. “Maybe if you knew what I was doing you would agree with me, Murphy,” I tried to explain. “You wouldn’t be so quick—”
“To judge?” he interrupted, laughing sarcastically. “You just judged yourself, kid. I don’t want to hypothesize about why you say or do the things you do. That’s going to give me a headache, freakin’-every, freakin’-single, freakin’-time. You better get your wallet open, too. You owe the Stupid Jar some money.” Where some had a swear jar, Murphy had a glass Mason jar on the countertop that Marjorie and I would drop fifty cents in every time we did something stupid. When it was filled to the top, we’d unload the booty to a charity of our choice.
Almost made me hate charity.
“How much?” I gulped.
“That’s undetermined at the moment, and because you didn’t learn your lesson the first time you skipped class, we’re going to do some payments retroactively. And by the way, I don’t appreciate the way you’re exploiting the relationship between Vance and me. That’s low, kid, really low.”
I knew what was going to come next...Murphy was going to issue his standard parental disclaimer. “AP Unger, this message is to you. The Walkers do not endorse nor are they associated with her behavior. Any circumstances real or fictitious are totally coincidental, and do not represent the opinions residing within my four walls. Thank, you, Jesus, and God Bless America.”
“Ah, a parental disclaimer,” AP Unger tried not to laugh. I swear, he looked at the BlackBerry in his hand, and for a moment, I think he might’ve been struck with the revelation as to where my brains and creativity I possessed came from.
Murphy grunted, and I heard something break in his presence. “I prefer a public service announcement. It’s my gift to society to steer clear.”
Slam. Disconnect. Go smoke a cigar in the parking garage.
I’d been taught to dot every “i” and cross every “t,” but that seemed a little too predictable. And predictability was one short step away from boring. I opened my mouth, but Murphy somehow closed it even from miles away.
The silence was deafening, but a sudden minute screech was louder than the current lack of words. Right then a tiny, gray furry creature scampered across my flip-flop and idled at AP Unger’s feet. If that wasn’t enough, two tiny babies toddled behind it. If a man could scream like a girl, I thin
k I just witnessed the spectacle. I burst out laughing as he all but put on a bra and took up the war for equal rights and estrogen. He danced around as the mouse squeaked some more then scampered off toward the baseboards.
“I hope you have Saxon Brothers’ Exterminators on speed dial,” I giggled.
He rolled his eyes and left me sitting.
13 CARPE DIEM
CARPE DIEM IS the Latin term for “Seize the Day.” It’s your call to live in the moment and not put all your energies into tomorrow. So, I was kicked out of the Media Center...so what. Where that might deter someone with a lesser fortitude, it wasn’t going to deter me. I was Darcy Walker, by God, and when I wanted something, I wanted something.
Third period, Spanish 3, was one of those classes that made people sweat. My one advanced class, it most often was taken by upperclassman. Growing up with Claudia, I’d become somewhat of a pro, and although her native tongue was a tad different, I could speak the language fluently and read and translate. Mr. Rafferty was the teacher—a fossil was more like it—and near retirement. The thing with teachers near retirement, they’re like trying to teach old dogs new tricks. Mr. Rafferty had his ways of doing things and wasn’t going to change no matter what.
Typical example? In all his years of teaching, he never took the time to learn students’ names. He called you by your seat number, so all year long I was—you guessed it—number thirteen or número trece.
Life really despised me.
As I slid into my seat and opened my book, I could see him stalking me like a lion did its prey. His bald head was dipped low, his glasses falling off the bridge of his crooked nose, his hairy hands clenching the piece of chalk he probably wanted to stab me with. While I wished I could’ve dissolved away into the ether, he jarred the windows bellowing, “Número trece, llegas tarde.”