by Jodi Compton
Standing and flipping the hood of my jacket up over my hair, I started out at a quick pace, a walk that was nearly a jog, keeping my face and eyes downcast.
“Órale, where you going in this neighborhood?” a female voice purred. “You lost, turista girl? You need directions?”
I’d heard rhetorical questions like those before. The helpfulness was insincere. It was the prelude to a jacking.
I also recognized the voice as that of Trippy, Serena’s scorned lieutenant.
She stepped out from the shadows and under a streetlight, tall, slim, strong. Her hair was blonder than I remembered—she’d lightened it—and her eyes were gleaming in anticipation of easy prey. When she saw my face, her supercilious expression melted into disbelief. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
My hand went for the small of my back and skated over empty space where the gun had been until five minutes earlier, when I’d kicked it under the Dumpster. Trippy saw my action and smiled happily. Then she charged forward and knocked me off my feet. My back hit the asphalt, but not hard enough to knock the wind out of me. I tried to reach up and grab her throat, but she had the advantage in position, and she straddled me, pinning my arms with her legs. Whatever her character flaws, Trippy was the veteran of more than a few fights.
“Bitch,” she spit. She cocked her fist and punched me in the face, hard enough to cause my vision to spark. “I can’t believe you’re stupid enough to come here. You think you’re so tough, like there’s no place you can’t go.” She threw another bomb. “You’re in the wrong place, rubia. You been in the wrong place since you left your trailer park.”
Another punch. Blood began trickling from my nose.
She said, “When Warchild’s gone, I’m going to run the sucias. I’ll own all these streets. You’re not going to stop me.”
She reached into her shirt and pulled out something that glinted in the streetlight. A butterfly knife, just her style, and she flipped it expertly open.
Pulling the last of my strength together, I wrested my right arm free from under her leg and smashed the heel of my hand into her face. The knife, already coming down, went off course; I heard it scrape the pavement next to my face. She was unbalanced now, and I pulled my other arm free. Capitalizing while she was still surprised, I grabbed her head with both hands and pulled it down while I brought my forehead up, smashing the hardest, least vulnerable part of my skull into her nose. Trippy yelled and fell to the side, cradling her face in her hands. I scrambled to my feet, quickly looking around for police, or anyone else who might have been drawn to the spectacle of our fight.
Sharp pain bloomed in my right foot, and I yelped aloud, then looked down.
Oh, hell no.
In my one moment of distraction, despite her own injury, Trippy had planted the knife in my foot, through the top, as if trying to pin it to the ground.
She wrenched the knife out for a second strike, swaying to her knees, but I grabbed her hair and yanked her off balance. It was a clumsy move, because I was standing on one leg like a flamingo. But she fell back, the knife clattering to the pavement. I kicked it out of her range with my injured foot, then dropped down to straddle her the way she had me, tightening my hands around her throat.
Her face turned red, the part of it that wasn’t already masked with blood from her nose. Her golden brown eyes narrowed, even though I wasn’t choking her hard enough to really cut off her air supply, just enough to make her pay attention.
“Trippy,” I said. Then, “No, Luisa. Let’s get a couple of things on the record. One, I’ve never lived in a trailer park. Ever. Two, you’re never going to own this neighborhood. Warchild doesn’t own it, either. Banks and moneylenders do. Three, some people have real problems, and tonight I’m one of them. So if you come after me, when I let you go, I’m going to put your own knife in one of your kidneys. Got it?” I eased up on her throat a little.
“Bitch,” she said. “I’m going to kill you someday.”
“But not today,” I said as I drew back my fist and punched her. Not out of anger, just to stun her. I understood now that her hatred didn’t allow for reason, that if she were fully conscious, she would have to come after me, even unarmed.
I let go of her, and she fell back to the pavement, her eyes half closed.
I could feel my injured right foot throbbing in time with my heartbeat, and the sock was already damp with blood. But there was no time to check out the extent of the injury.
I picked up Trippy’s knife, staggered to my feet, and limped off into the shadows.
22
“I can’t believe this. I’ve never seen so many cops in this neighborhood, and that’s saying something.”
Diana was standing at her kitchen window. I was sitting in a chair I’d pulled away from the kitchen table, with my bloody foot poised over a stainless-steel mixing bowl half full of reddened water. Diana didn’t have a first-aid kit, so I was doing the best I could with soap, water, and clean towels.
I’d made it here by dodging from shadow to shadow, running in a kind of uneven lope because of my wounded right foot, changing course and hiding at the sight of police cars, and avoiding even the most harmless-looking civilians. By the time I was standing at the intercom box in the entry cavern of Diana’s building, my boot felt as soaked inside as if I’d walked through standing water.
I’d buzzed her apartment and said, “It’s Insula. I need to come up.”
When I’d reached her place and she let me in, I’d asked first, “Is Warchild here?”
“No.”
“Has she been here?”
“No.”
Damn. “Okay. I’m going to need a couple of things from you, starting with a first-aid kit.”
“I don’t think I have one,” she’d said. “I have Band-Aids.”
“We’re a little past that,” I’d said. “How about soap and water and clean towels?”
The injury was a puncture wound, potentially more serious than a surface cut that ran horizontally, but it had stopped bleeding, which told me that Trippy had missed the bigger blood vessels. If the knife blade had been clean, infection wasn’t a big threat. I dried the top of my foot with another towel, then elevated it onto the seat of the other kitchen chair. Its throbbing had finally abated. Rather, it had shifted to my head, which was starting to ache.
Diana turned from the window. She wore only a T-shirt and pajama bottoms; I’d clearly woken her. “Are all the cops for you?”
“Sure are.”
“Damn,” she said. Then, “Everyone’s been talking about you. They’re saying you’re making the cops look like pendejos because they haven’t caught you yet.”
Trust the people of Serena’s neighborhood to ignore the question of whether I’d killed an old lady and instead focus on the high-stakes hide-and-seek game I was playing with the police.
“Well, they almost did tonight,” I said. “If you’ll fix me something to eat, I’ll tell you about it.”
She went to the cupboard and looked over the contents. “What kind of food do you want?”
“Any kind, but a lot of it. I haven’t eaten in a while.”
While Diana worked, I told her about San Francisco and how I’d ridden down here in the trunk of Quentin Corelli’s car—“For real?” she said, amazed—and then how I’d gotten here, including my brush with the cops and the fight with Trippy.
“So what’re you going to do?” she said, setting a plate in front of me, laden with warmed tortillas, scrambled eggs, and refried beans. “You can’t go back out there, with all those cops looking for you.” She reached up into the cupboard again and brought down a tall drinking glass.
“I have to,” I said.
“Because of that girl, the one who was pretending to be you?”
“Yeah.”
I took a bite of eggs, and suddenly the emptiness in my stomach sharpened to a pitch that was almost painful. The truth was, I’d been hungry for a long time, but the pangs were first s
uppressed by several shots of raw adrenaline and later overridden by the pain in my injured foot.
Diana opened the refrigerator and reached for a pitcher filled with brightly colored fruit punch. I swallowed quickly in order to say, “No, milk instead.”
She glanced at me, eyebrows raised in surprise. Serena’s girls lived on sugary drinks, and they largely considered milk undrinkable by itself. The quart in Diana’s refrigerator was probably just for Serena’s coffee. But I needed protein, ballast for the long day that was coming. I didn’t know when I was going to be able to eat again.
She brought the glass to the table. Up close, I could see that her fingernails were painted magenta with a diagonal slash of gold on each, an elaborate treatment that didn’t go with her simple T-shirt and pajama bottoms.
Between me and my injured foot, both her kitchen chairs were occupied, and I was too distracted by competing needs—hunger, tiredness, the pain in my foot—to be polite and surrender one. Diana lifted herself up to sit on the kitchen counter, and from there she watched in silence as I ate.
When the worst of the hunger pangs were satisfied, I made myself lean back and slow down. I took the bottle of pills out of my jacket and popped the lid off with my thumbnail, then shook out a pair of Advil and washed them down with milk. My headache hadn’t gotten any worse, but it wasn’t going anywhere, either. Neither was the ache in my foot.
“So what happens next?” Diana said. “I mean, what do you need from me?”
“Do you know how to ride a motorcycle?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. I need you to go get my Aprilia from Chato’s shop.”
“Aprilia,” she repeated. “That’s a kind of bike?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s French?”
“Italian.” I tore a long strip off one of the tortillas and began rolling it up. “Do I need to call Chato and tell him you’re coming and that he should give the bike to you?”
“No, he’ll do it. He knows that anything coming from me is like it’s coming from Warchild.”
I stopped with the tortilla just short of my mouth. “Really?” I said. “Why is that?” Diana hadn’t been around that long and hadn’t even been made a sucia yet. Why should she have status in Trece?
There was a moment’s pause, and then she said, “Warchild’s my tía.”
“Your aunt?” For a moment the chronology didn’t seem to work out, but then, Serena’s brothers were all older than her. I tried to remember the name of the oldest and could only come up with his moniker. “Droopy’s your father?”
She nodded.
“Serena didn’t tell me any of this,” I said, perplexed. I remembered clearly Serena’s words: my new girl … a lot of potential. Nothing about the family tie.
“She doesn’t want you to think less of her,” Diana said.
“For having family?”
“For making me a sucia,” she explained. “I want it. I brought it up first. But she feels like you wouldn’t approve.”
I remembered Serena’s irritation when I’d suggested that she steer Diana onto a better path than gang life. “Maybe,” I said slowly, “but it’s not like her to hide things or act guilty. She’s Warchild. There’s nobody above her in the sucias. Hell, right now there’s no one above her in Trece.”
“But this is you,” Diana said. “She wants you to think well of her. Hardly anyone’s opinion matters to her, but yours does. And maybe she thought that if you knew I was her niece, you wouldn’t fight me for my initiation.” She looked concerned. “You will, won’t you?”
I sighed. “Let’s worry about that when the time comes. I’ve got a lot on my hands right now other than sucia business.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice full of respectful contrition.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You’re helping me a lot here. I’ll remember it.”
Outside the window we again heard the rise-and-fall wail of sirens.
I finished my meal, and Diana got up and went into the bedroom to change her clothes. When she returned, she was wearing boot-cut jeans and an Army jacket over a T-shirt, and she was holding a bandanna handkerchief. “Here,” she said. “I don’t have any gauze, but you can wrap this around your foot. It’s clean.”
“Thanks.” I took it. “I’m not sure it’ll fit under my boot, but I can wear it here, while I’m sleeping.”
“Sleep?” she said. “Somebody just tried to kill you and the cops are all over looking for you, and you can sleep?”
“Watch me.” My stomach felt pleasantly heavy from a full meal, and both my headache and the pain in my foot were rolling out like a tide under the onslaught of ibuprofen. I had no doubt I’d be able to sleep. What I worried about was waking up again. The readout on the microwave oven said it was three minutes to two in the morning. I didn’t have long to rest, not if I was to be back up in Woodland Hills around dawn to start a stakeout of the house.
“Don’t let me sleep any later than four-thirty, though, okay?” I said. “Don’t forget.”
I finished tying the handkerchief around my foot and gingerly stood up, anticipating feeling a throb of renewed pain as blood flowed back to the area. I did.
Just before Diana left, I added one last thing. “Listen, I probably don’t need to tell you this, but obey all the traffic laws. Don’t speed. You’re my only ally. I can’t afford for you to get arrested.”
“I know.”
“Plus, I don’t want you to get arrested because … you know, I don’t want you to get arrested.” I lifted my shoulders in a self-deprecating shrug. “I know I’m asking a lot of you, but I won’t forget all the help you’re giving me.”
“The sucias are for the sucias,” she said. “We represent like the guys.” It was one of Serena’s old affirmations.
She went out, closing the door behind her. I limped into the bedroom, collapsed on the bed, pulled marijuana-scented covers over my head, and fell into sleep.
23
“Insula? Insula, wake up, it’s four-thirty.”
No fair. It’s only been a minute since I closed my eyes.
Reluctantly I rolled over toward the sound of Diana’s voice. She was standing at my bedside, still in jeans and her Army jacket. She looked alert. I felt like I’d been lying in a grave, like the grit in the corners of my eyes could be cemetery dirt.
“I made coffee,” she said. “Extra strong.”
“Thanks.” My voice was a raspy stranger’s.
“Do you want milk? I didn’t put anything in it.”
“No, just sugar. Two spoonfuls.”
She sat on the end of the bed while I drank it. She was right, she’d made it strong. Strong and sweet. I was awake enough now to realize that my head didn’t hurt any longer and the pain in my foot was a low-grade, tolerable ache.
“Did you have any trouble getting the bike back here?” I asked. “Did the cops bother you?”
“No, it was fine.”
I nodded.
Then she said, “I was listening to the news. They know about your new hair color. That and the bruise.”
“I figured as much. That cop in the alley made me so quickly.” Had Joel Kelleher reported that? Or was it Pratt, the officer who’d seen me point-blank in King City? “What else are they saying?”
“That you were spotted in this neighborhood, that you should be considered armed and dangerous.”
“Armed I’m not, except for Trippy’s knife.” I frowned. “Serena keeps a weapon here, doesn’t she?”
“A couple.” Diana pointed toward the tall dresser.
I set down my coffee and reached for my cell phone, flicking it back on. It came to life, but the message-waiting symbol didn’t appear on the readout.
“Did Warchild call you?” Diana asked.
“No.”
“Is she okay?”
“Warchild can take care of herself,” I said, “but this is a strange time for her to go incommunicado.”
I swung my legs over
the edge of the bed, then gingerly put my weight on my injured foot, checking to see if this would bring on a fresh wave of pain. It didn’t. Mostly the bandanna wrapped around it made walking feel awkward, so I bent down to take it off.
I went into the bathroom and surveyed my face in the mirror. Already the caffeine and sugar were beginning to filter into my bloodstream, and I was feeling better, but my face hadn’t caught up. The cosmetic bruise was faded and smeared. I set my coffee cup down at the edge of the white porcelain sink, turned on the cold water, and bent to splash my face. The bruise, of no use to me now, began running down my cheek in gray rivulets. I picked up the bar of soap from the soap dish, worked up a lather between my hands, and scrubbed my face until all that remained was a faint outline of thundercloud gray at the edges of my birthmark. The rest of my skin looked clean-scrubbed and fresh. Better, I thought.
Serena had two guns in the dresser: the old TEC-9 that she used to keep on the nightstand while she slept, and a Beretta 92F. I chose the latter, checking that it was loaded, and went out.
In the kitchen my motorcycle helmet and keys waited for me on the table, as well as a pair of energy bars—food to go.
Diana was at the stove, fixing herself a cup of instant hot chocolate.
“You don’t drink coffee?” I asked.
“Sometimes, if it has a lot of milk.”
It was easy to forget that she was only fifteen. She was like her aunt, steady and serious.
She poured the cocoa into a mug, blew on it, and looked at me over the rim. “When you go back up there, to find the girl who was pretending to be you, are you going to kill her?”
“What? No.”
“She did kill two people, and she tried to set you up for it.”
“I know,” I said. “But I think Serena might have built up my reputation for bloodthirstiness to an exaggerated level. I could have killed Trippy last night, and I didn’t.” I paused, swirling my coffee to make the sugar mix through. “Also, if I kill her, that would make it kind of hard to prove it was her and not me who shot those two people. It’s not like she’s going to confess from a drawer in the morgue.”