by Jodi Compton
They weren’t hostile to me. The name they called me, la rubia, meant only the blond girl. That wasn’t an epithet, yet I read a tinge of contempt in it: Blondie. And although Serena had told them I spoke Spanish, they never seemed to believe it: Whenever they spoke it in front of me, it was rapidly and with the clear implication that they were talking among themselves. She’d also told them I had been at West Point, but they seemed to have only a vague idea of what that signified. If Serena had said I’d gone to the South Hudson Institute of Technology, that would have gotten about the same response.
Tonight, though, I had a credential that even the most jaded gangbanger couldn’t brush aside. When Serena came in from an errand, she looked at me and said, “Show them your scars.”
“Why?” I said.
Trippy said to Serena, “What scars?”
“Hailey got shot,” Serena told them. “Twice.”
“For real?” Risky said with disbelief.
I stood from the couch, listing slightly before getting my balance. I lifted up my shirt, revealing the angry, corrugated reddish marks. There was an appreciative murmur as they drew near to get a closer look.
“Can we touch them?” Risky asked. “Will it hurt?”
I nodded-Go ahead-and felt their gentle fingers on my wounds. “That doesn’t hurt?” Heartbreaker said.
“I’d tell you,” I said.
Their fascination was gratifying, but I knew they weren’t impressed by me, personally. I was like the nerdy kid who’d brought an awesome toy to show-and-tell.
Trippy didn’t even direct her questions to me, looking instead at Serena: “Why would somebody shoot her? She doesn’t even claim.” She meant that I was unaffiliated with any gang.
Serena said, “Tell them, Hailey.”
“Why?” I said. “I’m pretty sure that whatever Nidia was running from, it’s not related to anything that happened around here.”
I just didn’t feel like giving a speech. For all that I’d slept, I was still tired, and vaguely dehydrated.
But Serena said, “You never know what people are talking about, what the girls might have overheard.”
So I sat down on the arm of the couch and told the story from the beginning, Serena listening as patiently as she had the first time. When I was done, Serena said, “I’ve got some bad news. I called Teaser’s sister Lara.”
For a moment the name was unfamiliar, then I remembered the cousin of Nidia’s who’d acted as a go-between, enlisting Serena’s help in getting Nidia down to Mexico.
“And?” I prompted.
“Her mother said that the two of them had this crazy screaming fight and Lara split. Her mother doesn’t know when she’s coming back.”
“Great,” I said.
Serena turned to her girls. “Keep your ears open about where Lara Cortez is, Teaser’s sister. Hailey’d like to talk to her. Which is the same as me saying I’d like to talk to her. Okay?”
I’d been rubbing my aching temple, but I stopped to look up at her. “‘Hailey’d like to talk to her’?” I echoed. “What am I going to talk to her about?”
Serena looked at me quizzically. “Where else would you start, to sort all this out?”
“You think I’m going to find out what happened to Nidia?”
“None of the rest of us would know how.”
“And I would?” I said. “I went to West Point, not Scotland Yard. Besides, you told me earlier today you don’t even think Nidia’s still aboveground. Your words were something to the effect of, ‘They might not have needed her alive for very long.’ So what’s the point?”
“Retaliation is the point,” Serena said. “That’s what la vida is about. If those guys killed Nidia, they got something coming.”
“I thought retaliation was by homegirls for homegirls. Nidia wasn’t even one of you. And neither am I.”
Serena said, “I thought-”
“You thought wrong,” I said, getting to my feet. “Thanks for the ghetto hospitality, but this is your problem now. Me vale madre.” Loosely translated, I don’t give a shit.
“Wait!” she said.
I didn’t. I got to her entryway before she caught up.
“Hailey, stop! You don’t have a car. It’s not safe for you to be walking out there at night.”
“Safe?” I repeated. “You mean, safe like I was down in Mexico? Serena, did you even listen to a word I told you this morning?”
She backed up a step, startled.
“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry I screwed up the mission I didn’t even fucking know was a mission! But you put me in an impossible position, Warchild! You know what happened on Wilshire Boulevard, what I did, and you put me in a situation where I had to run down two guys or get killed myself! Do you have any idea how that feels?”
“Hailey-”
Maybe I raised my hand to her. I must have done something that looked threatening, because suddenly I felt an impact. My back hit the wall, and there was an arm pressed hard against my throat. Also, a cold ring against the underside of my jaw that I recognized as the muzzle of a gun.
It wasn’t Serena. It was Trippy. On the periphery of my vision I could see the other sucias, riveted.
“Thank you, Luisita,” Serena said calmly. “Hailey will settle down in a moment. She’s just not herself right now.” To me: “Right?”
“Serena,” I said stiffly, trying not to cough against the pressure Trippy was putting on my larynx, “you need to get her off me before she gets hurt.”
“Like you could, bitch,” Trippy said.
Serena, though, was watching my eyes. “If I do call her off, are we all going to make nice?” she asked me.
“Yeah. Sure. Whatever.”
Serena said, “Trippy, it’s okay. Take the gun off her.”
“Are you kidding? She just went fucking crazy.”
Serena said mildly, “No, Hailey’s been a little crazy for a while now.” Then, more authoritatively: “Really. Let her go.”
Trippy gave her a hard sideways glance, then, angrily, she stepped back. “This is bullshit,” she said, the all-purpose face-saving line. She walked away, not back to the living room, but out the front door. It banged shut hard behind her.
Serena watched her go, then looked at me with concern. “Feeling okay?”
“A little light-headed,” I said. It was coming on fast, along with a weakness in my limbs.
Serena’s face was worried. “You haven’t been out of the hospital for very long, right?” Her voice was kind. “Come on, lie down again.”
eighteen
I spent the next few days mostly sleeping, whether from a fever or just sun and dehydration and overexertion, I don’t know. Serena tended me. She’d clearly looked after sick people before, probably gangbangers too broke or too hot to go to the ER. She made me drink water and more water, fed me chicken broth and applesauce, and yelled at her homegirls to keep the music and the television turned down. I had a dreamlike memory of waking in the small hours of the night to see her dressed in dark clothing, with the cool smell of night air still rising faintly from her clothes and hair, counting money on the bedroom floor. She’d moved the lamp down from the night table and was counting cash by its small ring of yellowy light. Then she took down her framed print of Vietnam’s Halong Bay, unclipped the cardboard backing, laid a single layer of bills between the poster and the cardboard, and then replaced the whole thing on the wall.
Seeing me watching, she said, “Go back to sleep,” like a mother who’d come into a child’s bedroom to put away folded laundry.
After two days and three nights of rest, I woke up at half past five in the morning, feeling better, alert and clearheaded. I kicked the covers aside and stood.
I did some stretches, then got down to the floor and tried some military-style push-ups, hands close enough together to make a diamond of my thumbs and forefingers. It wasn’t as hard as I’d expected. I’d lost muscle in my chest and shoulders from lack of use, but at the same ti
me, I’d lost weight, so it evened out. I did ten push-ups and then sat on my heels, feeling my heart subside into normal rhythm.
When I was fully dressed, I quietly opened the door and came out. Serena’s living room, always messy, was bathed in the cool gray light of morning. On the couch, Serena slept in a pile of blankets.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever understand her. Three days ago she’d told me that if she’d felt it necessary, she could have shot me to death in her driveway and not felt guilty afterward. Yet here she was, sleeping on her couch so I could have her room.
I was quiet going into the kitchen, but when I pulled my head back out of the refrigerator after surveying the contents, Serena was at the terminator of the hallway carpet and the kitchen linoleum, hair disheveled, eyes violet-shadowed underneath from inadequate sleep.
“Hey,” I said. “Why don’t you go get in your bed, get some more sleep? I’m up.”
She shook her head. “I’m all right,” she said. “A lot of nights I don’t get eight hours.” She moved into the kitchen, stood behind me at the refrigerator. “You hungry?”
“Let me fix something,” I said. “You’ve cooked for me enough.”
Not long after, we were at her table, having Diet Coke and omelets.
“I was thinking,” Serena said, slicing into the center of her omelet, releasing steam, “that I was wrong the other night, to push you about finding out what happened to Nidia. It’s not your problem.”
“I know it’s not,” I said, “but I’m going to try, anyway.” I paused. “Because the thing is, what if she’s still alive somewhere?”
“You think she is?”
I hesitated. “If I had to guess, I’d say no. It’s probably been too long. If they took her alive intending to let her go later, she’d probably have turned up somewhere by now.”
“Unless they’re still holding her.”
“Unlikely,” I said. “Back east, we learned a little about terrorism and overseas kidnappings and hostage situations. As a rule of thumb, shorter is always better for kidnappers. The longer you have people, the greater the chance of an escape, or a rescue, or a hostage finding a way to stick something sharp in you, or to despair and commit suicide. And then there’s the logistics of feeding and guarding a hostage. It’s a labor- and planning-intensive mission.”
Serena considered this. “But maybe they’re capable of it. You said these guys acted like pros.”
“They did,” I admitted. “They were following us for a while. Babyface, the lead guy, he walked right up to me in El Paso and exchanged pleasantries. The scary thing is, he didn’t ask me any questions about where I was headed; he wasn’t fishing for information. He didn’t have to. He already knew.”
Serena looked curious. “So what was he doing?”
I shrugged. “Nothing,” I said. “As far as I know, he was amusing himself at my expense. These guys are beyond my league.”
“Yet you want to take them on.”
“Well, if I get killed,” I told her, “at least you won’t have wasted money on that tattoo on your leg.”
“There is that,” she agreed.
nineteen
Several days later, I got off a Greyhound bus in San Francisco. Compared to the way I’d arrived back in L.A., I was generously outfitted for my expedition: a pay-as-you-go cell phone with two hundred minutes on it, a pint of Finlandia, a SIG Sauer P228, and two thousand dollars from Serena. Most of that was my per diem for taking Nidia to Mexico. I hadn’t gotten the job done, but no one could say I hadn’t earned the pay. Serena had thrown in a little extra for my expenses going forward, a gesture that said this wasn’t just a private vendetta of mine, but that I had la veterana Warchild at my back.
The SIG was also a loan from Serena. It was chambered for fifteen rounds and was heavier than the Airweight, about two pounds, which was entirely worth it. Since the tunnel, I’d lost interest in guns with five-shot capacities.
I’d already programmed Serena’s number into my cell phone and made sure that she had my new number. Maybe I needed to feel like I had a home base. Like if I disappeared this time, someone would report me missing.
I got off the city bus in Japantown and walked to Aries’s offices. When I got there, Shay was sitting behind his desk, and when he looked up from the phone conversation he was having, his brows rose toward his hairline, like my old guidance counselor. When he hung up, he said, “Where the hell have you been?”
“I was in an accident.”
Serena and her girls could take the news of a shooting in stride; for them, it was just a bad day at work. But when I was dealing with other people, accident was going to be my euphemism for the ambush.
Shay said, “An accident? I thought you were going out of town on personal business.”
“It started out that way,” I said. “The accident was accidental. Hence the name.”
A new girl, olive-complected with springy black hair and a nose ring, was watching us now, alert to the prospect of drama.
“Why didn’t you call in and let me know what was going on?”
My tone sharpened. “I couldn’t, Shay. I nearly died; I was in the hospital a long time.”
“Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Listen,” I said, quickly moving on, “I lost all my personal stuff, too. I’m going to need a new key to the room.”
“The room?”
“My stuff’s still up there, isn’t it?”
My Wheelock’s, my birth certificate, the picture of my father, my class ring, and cadet sword. Irreplaceable things. I didn’t have any rental contract with Shay. If he’d assumed I wasn’t coming back, and had pitched my things into the trash, I probably didn’t have any legal recourse.
Shay let me wonder a long moment. Then he said, “Yeah, it is. I didn’t think you were coming back, and I kept meaning to look into the law about how long I had to keep your stuff, but I never got around to it, and it seemed easier to store it up there than anywhere else.”
“Thanks.”
He said, “What about the rent, by the way?” He kicked his legs up on his desk. He was wearing shorts with sandals, revealing the impressive undiminished muscles of his legs. “I’m full up on riders, so I can’t let you pay it off that way,” he said.
“No problem,” I said. I pulled out the two thousand dollars I had from Serena, kept in a rubber-banded roll. “I’m two months behind, right?” I began counting it out, enjoying the slight ripple of disbelief on Shay’s face. For all he knew, I’d been laid up and not working for two months. He hadn’t expected me to be flush; in fact, he’d probably wanted me to grovel for the chance to work.
When he brought the spare key, he said, “Look, if you’re around a lot, maybe there’ll be some work I can throw your way. You know how it is.”
I understood why he was hedging. Shay always had new people walking in the door wanting to ride, but often they lost interest when they learned what demanding work messengering really was. Shay always needed riders he knew were reliable.
The truth was, I didn’t know how much time the search for Nidia would leave me. And after two months of immobility, I wasn’t sure I was in any shape for the street. But there was no point in antagonizing Shay. The most likely scenario in my search for Nidia was that I’d never find out who shot me or why, the money would run out, and then I’d be nothing but an unemployed bike messenger.
“Sure,” I said, and took the key.
twenty
Herlinda Lopez’s house in Oakland was already dark at half past eight at night, which was when I got there on foot, walking from the nearest BART station. At first glance, I thought maybe she and her kids had gone to bed quite early. Then I noticed that the geranium on the front step had turned brown, and the little strip of lawn was like straw.
The garage door had a row of narrow windows in it, just at sight level for an average man. I walked up the driveway, trying to amble casually as if I belonged there, then I stood on tiptoe to look in.
> There was no car inside.
Maybe they were out. Maybe they’d never owned a car. It wasn’t as if I’d looked in the garage when-
“Can I help you with something?”
I turned. The woman watching me at the end of the Lopez driveway was short and dark-skinned, but not Hispanic. Her accent was East Indian, or something close to it.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m looking for the Lopezes.”
“You’re looking for them in their garage?” she said skeptically.
“Uh, not really,” I said, walking back down the driveway. “I’m not so much looking for them as for a friend of mine, Nidia Hernandez. Did you meet her while she was staying here?”
The neighbor shook her head.
“I thought the Lopezes might know where she’s living now,” I said.
“They don’t live here anymore. You’re not from this neighborhood, are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Mrs. Lopez went missing,” she said.
“Missing? When?”
“About two months ago.”
Two months.
She continued: “The kids went to live with someone else. The house has been empty awhile.”
I said, “Has anyone but me been around here, asking for Nidia?”
She said, “I didn’t even know there was somebody by that name living here. Even the police didn’t mention her.” Her lips thinned slightly in suspicion. “Who did you say you were?”
“Just a friend of Nidia’s. My name is Hailey Cain.”
“I have to go in now,” she said, nodding toward the house next door. “Be careful out here. It’s late to be walking.”
MacArthur Station was probably my favorite place in the Bay Area. It was BART’s main transfer station, a raised platform right in the middle of a tangle of freeways. From the platform, you could see the campanile of UC Berkeley, the Oakland hills, the towers that surrounded Jack London Square. You could do a lot worse with your evening than to spend a little of it at MacArthur Station, taking a breath and letting the world roll off your back.