“Marco Gonzalez ring a bell?” Jack told him.
Chui half smiled and looked at his holmes close by, all of them smiling and nodding.
“He that big fat piece of shit maricon that played center on the Golden Thunderbirds last year?” Chui said.
“Yeah, that’s him,” Jack fired, his lips curled. “You dragged him to death behind your car and dumped his body on a dirt road across the New Mexico line, by Anthony.”
“Never heard of him.” Chui shrugged, and the whole gang behind him nodded. A sadistic smirk then spread on Chui’s face as he looked cold in Jack’s eyes.
“You knew him!” Jack snarled. Anger deep in his bones took over, and his voice rose as a tear driven by hatred trickled from his eye. “You killed him because he came out gay. He never did anything against you or anyone. Marco never hurt a fly. He was a big, gentle, sweet soul. My best friend! You murdered him for the fun of it!”
Jack wiped his face with his hands and glared at Chui, and in a cold, slow voice said, “Now I’m going to make you pay.”
Chui laughed. He looked right and left at his minions, lined abreast behind him, ready to pile drive some seriously medieval hard shit on the four young fools.
“So, you and your three mariquita chums, here, just waltz in the belly of the beast to kill Chui? Come on then, asshole. Take your shot,” the hood said, smiling large, daring. Then he casually tucked his fingertips inside the waistband of his tailored brown-silk-and-wool-blend pleated-front trousers and smirked.
A fine gold chain with a tastefully small crucifix glittered against his hairless brown chest and perfect white wife-beater undershirt. A light brown long-sleeve silk shirt hung loose on his shoulders, opened down the front, the cuffs turned up one neat fold above his wrists. He had a teardrop tattooed under his left eye and an Aztec warrior’s head tattooed on his right forearm with the Roman numeral XXI beneath it. A tasteful gold-chain bracelet dangled on his right wrist and three gold rings with large diamonds sparkled on his well-manicured fingers, two on the right hand and one on the left. A diamond-trimmed gold Rolex President wrapped loosely around his left wrist.
Jack snatched a beer bottle from the counter, and Sonny Gomez grabbed his bat, but Chui frowned at him and shook his head no.
“I admire courage, ese. Even from a half-breed fool like you, Jack Valentine,” Chui said, and smiled wide, showing off his movie-star-white enamel-veneered teeth.
Wide-eyed, Jack suddenly felt panic clutch his insides.
“You’re surprised I know who you are, Jack?” Chui laughed. Then he got serious. “You came here looking for me three weeks ago, right? My boys gave you a good spanking, too, while Sonny called the cops. You don’t think I’m going to check out somebody that comes to my side of town, into my house, wanting to kick my ass? Oh, correct that. Kill me?”
Then Chui got right in Jack’s face, and roared, “You got off light, you sniveling little son of a puta!”
Chui took a cold beer from the bar that Sonny had set up for him and swallowed a long pull. Then he cocked his head at Jack. “Yeah, I know all about you, Jack Valentine. Where you live, your family, everything, holmes.
“Your mother worked on her back over in Boy’s Town, and your daddy, just another Fort Bliss dumb-ass doggie, fell in love with that Mexican whore. Now he fixes air conditioners and she cleans houses and irons clothes for the gringos.”
Hellfire rose in Jack’s eyes while his three large friends, two guards and a tackle from the Golden Thunderbirds’ offensive line, quivered in fear like fat girls on a high dive.
“I watched you dudes play football. Not bad. I won some pretty good bones betting on you,” Chui said, taking another drink of beer and eyeballing each of the linemen. Then he focused on Jack. “Number eighty-nine, right, Jack? You’re a hell of a wide receiver, or is it tight end? I bet you got a really tight end about now, dog, don’t you?”
All of the gangsters behind Chui laughed, their face tattoos and glittering gold grills making them look more like devils than humans.
One of the scared boys shuddering behind Jack let out a whimper. “Let’s go home, Jack. This was a bad idea. Dude, they know where you live and can hurt your family.”
The boy next to him said, “Yeah, Chui, we’re sorry. We made a mistake. Please let us leave.”
Chui shook his head no. “You gotta pay the toll, ese. Don’t you know? Come to my barrio with your cocks out, gonna fuck me and my carnales? No, bro, you gonna pay the toll.”
Just as Chui spoke, Jack spit in the gang lord’s face, and took his best swing, grazing Chui’s cheek as the gangster deftly dodged the blow.
Two Aztecas stepped up, guns drawn, hammers cocked, pressing their muzzles against both the angry boy’s cheeks. Jack stopped cold.
Chui eased back, took a blue-silk handkerchief from his pants pocket, and wiped the spittle off his face.
“¡Puta madre! Fucking disgusting! You know that, Jack?” Chui said as he moved out of the way.
Then Chui’s nine Barrio-Azteca hood soljas, hands loaded with lead-filled leather slaps, brass knuckles, batons, and beer bottles, went to work on the four boys.
Sonny Gomez waited until Chui and his crew had cleared out before he called the cops to clean up the bloody but still-breathing mess they left scattered on the sidewalk outside his nightclub’s front door. After a trip to Providence Memorial Hospital emergency room, the three sixteen-year-olds, just under the Texas adult-age wire, went to juvenile detention and waited for their moms and dads to pick them up. At seventeen, Jack went to the big-boy slam.
—
“Oh, you again,” El Paso District Judge Darius Archer grumbled. He spoke with a coarse voice accented by a heavy west-Texas drawl as he looked over the tops of his silver-wire-framed half-lens reading glasses at the shaggy-haired delinquent in bloody, torn, blue-check college-boy sport shirt and bloodstained Wrangler jeans. Split lips and eyebrows, red and purple knots elsewhere on his face, the look told of a battle gone way wrong.
Jack Valentine peered back through bare slits between black-and-blue swollen eyelids. “Sorry, Judge Archer.”
“I’ll bet you are.” The judge groaned and looked to the back of his courtroom, where young Valentine’s father stood, visibly nervous, twisting a Dallas Cowboys ball cap in his shaking hands.
Before the judge could ask the man to come stand alongside his son, the double doors behind Jack’s dad eased open, and a brawny man with a silver-and-black crew cut and a dark blue pin-striped suit stepped through.
“Can I help you, Counselor?” Judge Archer said to the sharp-dressed man who had entered his courtroom.
“I’d like to help the young man standing before your bench, Your Honor,” the lawyer said. “Pro bono.” Then he put out his hand to Harry Valentine and introduced himself. “Paul Cruz, Mr. Valentine. Do you mind if I represent your son? It would be a big favor to me and my daughter, and won’t cost you a dime.”
Jack’s dad smiled, and his face washed with relief.
“Why, yes!” Harry said, and shook Paul Cruz’s hand hard. “I mean, no! I, uh. We won’t mind at all! Please help us! He’s not a bad boy!”
Harry Valentine looked at the judge, then at his son. “Jackie, you don’t mind, do you?”
Jack Valentine looked with blurred vision at the man who had the build of a retired NFL linebacker and nodded his approval.
Judge Archer motioned both Harry Valentine and Paul Cruz to come forward and join their young thug at the bench, and gave El Paso Police Sergeant Freddy Montoya a look. Montoya nodded approval. Then the judge locked eyes with Alice Montoya, the police sergeant’s cousin, who had joined the El Paso County District Attorney’s Office six months ago, after graduating University of Texas at El Paso Law School and passing the Texas Bar.
Alice blinked at the judge, her face flushed red, at a complete loss of what to do.
<
br /> “Tell you what, Alice,” Judge Archer said, bearing a small hint of a smile at the fledgling lawyer. “Just don’t say anything, and let me talk to these gentlemen.”
The judge leaned back in his chair and eyed the men and boy standing in front of him.
“What’s going on, Paul?” the judge asked. “Pro bono? I’m impressed. Defense business must pay well these days.”
“Did you watch this boy play football?” Cruz asked.
“My grandson, Ken Archer, plays quarterback for the Golden Thunderbirds, but you know that, Paul,” the judge said. “I’ve watched him connect many a pass to this young man. Jack Valentine is very likely the best tight end to ever play the game at Coronado High School. He’s a big reason we won the bi district championship. That’s why I’m out of sorts that he stands before me today. Second time in about a month!”
Paul Cruz nodded. He’d often seen the judge sitting under a blanket, first row of bleachers behind the barrier at the home benches, on the fifty-yard line.
Judge Archer scowled at Jack. “Master Valentine. You promised me! I threw out the last case of you brawling, and got the arrest record tossed, your seventeenth birthday and all. You promised me you’d walk the straight and narrow. Yet here you stand. Why, son?”
Jack Valentine looked at the scuffed toes on his cowboy boots, and tears ran out of his swollen-shut eyes.
“What in hell’s going on, Jack?” the judge blew up. “That Gomez lounge is a bloody bucket rod-and-gun club for every cholo outlaw on this side and the other side of the border. You just hate living? Is that it?”
“Your Honor,” the lawyer interrupted, his hand raised. “How much do you know about why Jack was in that bar?”
“Not one bloody word of it,” the judge fumed. “Sergeant Montoya pleaded to me to let young Valentine go last time because he and Harry here are old friends, the lad just turned seventeen the day of the fight, and he had no prior trouble. Freddy vouched for the boy. Now look.”
“May we go off the record for ten minutes?” Paul Cruz asked. “Talk as friends and concerned fathers.”
“Why not. Consider this a recess,” Archer told the clerk and stenographer. “Doris, you and Cynthia take a coffee break. Check back in twenty minutes.”
“My daughter, Alicia, and young Mr. Valentine have a relationship,” Cruz began.
“I thought that pretty little girl named Liberty something or other, the cheerleader, was your girlfriend, Jack?” Harry Valentine blurted at his son.
“That’s her nickname, Pop,” Jack mumbled. “Her Christian name is Melita Alicia Cruz, but everybody calls her Liberty.”
Paul Cruz smiled. “When Alicia was a little girl, every Halloween, instead of goblins or ghouls, she wanted to dress up as the Statue of Liberty. Little Miss Liberty, her mom and I called her. Then it became Liberty and stuck.”
“Well, that’s a nice daughter you have there, Mr. Cruz,” Harry Valentine offered.
“Call me Paul, Harry, please.” Cruz smiled.
“I know Liberty,” Judge Archer said. “She applied to work here this summer as a student clerk. Headstrong girl, that one. Smart, too. Up to a point,” and the judge glared at Jack Valentine when he said it.
“Do you recall the grisly story last year, about the boy from Coronado High School getting dragged to death behind a car for miles down a country road, and his body dumped just across the border, out by Anthony, New Mexico?” Paul Cruz said.
“Who can forget it?” Judge Archer sighed. “Gang thing, wasn’t it? The kid was supposedly gay and had just started telling people?”
“Barrio-Azteca gang we think did it, but nothing solid on any of them to make an arrest,” Freddy Montoya offered. “New Mexico police have jurisdiction since the body wound up across the state line, and apparently the murder occurred over there. Abduction here, murder there, FBI supposedly looking into it. Hate crime and all.”
“Case has gone nowhere, Judge,” Cruz interjected. “Poor kid from El Paso. Just another dead Mexican. Who cares? Right? Plus, he had come out gay right after he graduated from high school, and nobody wants anything to do with that can of worms. Why stir up trouble? Kick it under the rug with all the other poor dead Mexicans.”
The lawyer paused, letting the sense of injustice set in, then asked Judge Archer, “Do you recall the boy who snapped center for the Golden Thunderbirds last year?”
“Sure. A big boy, as I recall. Stood about six-four and weighed in at two-thirty or so,” the judge answered. “Gonzalez, I think?”
“Marco Gonzalez,” Cruz said, head nodding.
“Don’t tell me that’s the same boy dragged to death?” The judge sighed.
“One and the same.” Cruz kept nodding. “Not a big star. El Paso Times story focused on gang violence and the gruesome nature of the murder and barely mentioned Marco had played football or even graduated from Coronado High School.”
“Judge,” Harry Valentine interrupted, “Marco’s dad, Herman, works in my heating and air-conditioning business. Been with me from the start. That boy and Jack grew up together, hanging out in my shop, learning to bend sheet metal, machine, and fabricate. He was Jack’s best friend.”
“So after a year of the police doing nothing about the murder, you went hunting the killers?” the judge asked Jack.
The boy nodded yes. “I loved Marco like a brother.” Tears flooded Jack’s eyes, and he wept. “He was my brother, Judge. Same as, anyway. Besides, Marco never hurt anybody, not ever. He was shy all the time, embarrassed real easy. Soft-hearted, gentle.”
“A darned good center on the football field, too, no matter what the newspapers didn’t say,” Harry Valentine added. “And a good boy. Darned good boy! Gay or not. Besides, I don’t think he ever messed around with other boys. He was too shy, right, Jack?”
Jack nodded yes at his father.
“Why didn’t you tell us this when we had you in here a few weeks ago?” Freddy Montoya snapped.
“I aim to kill the bastards that murdered Marco,” Jack shot back. “If I told you that, what would you do then?”
“I’d help you, damn it!” Sergeant Montoya blew.
Alice Montoya gave her cousin a hard elbow. “Even off the record, Freddy, you can’t say stuff like that. You’re a police sergeant.”
“According to the arrest report, it says that you and three sixteen-year-old boys were in the El Gomez Club drinking beer and got into a brawl with a group of men. I take it they were Barrio-Aztecas, given the location of that den of iniquity?” Judge Archer said, scanning the report.
“Your Honor, my daughter came to me this morning, after getting the news that Jack and three others from the football team were arrested, and asked me to help,” Paul Cruz said. “She told me the whole story. How Marco Gonzalez had gotten killed New Year’s Eve last year, and how Jack had become obsessed, hunting the killers. A couple of months ago, a mutual friend of Jack’s and Marco’s told Jack that he heard a guy they call ‘Chui’ had bragged about giving a maricon what he deserved. Jack put two and two together and went after him.”
“I know Chui, real name Rafael Baca,” the police sergeant spoke up. “He and his crew of Aztecas hang at the Gomez club. Bad hombres, all of them.” He looked at Jack. “Son, you’re no match for those dogs. Not even the whole T-Birds football team, with guns.”
Jack smiled at the cop.
“You know, for the last ten years, my wife, Patricia, has worked for the Drug Enforcement Agency at the El Paso Intelligence Center,” Paul Cruz said. “If it’s any consolation, Jack, DEA’s close to dropping a net on Chui Baca and his crew. It’s only a matter of time. Let the pros handle it.”
“Mr. Cruz,” Jack said, no longer caring. “That’s all fine, sir, but I want to be the one who turns out Chui’s lights.”
“That’s not happening, Jack!” Harry Valentine fired at his son. “Yo
u know how my heart breaks for Herman and Lola, losing their son. I loved Marco, too! But we can’t go killing people! Those gangsters are the animals, not us.”
“We’re gonna get Chui. I promise,” Freddy Montoya added, and put his arm around Jack. “Let the law kill him.”
Darius Archer looked over the tops of his glasses at Jack, studying his beat-up face. Contempt still raged inside the young man, and the judge knew it.
“El Paso, Texas, grows two kinds of people, Jack,” the judge said, pursing his lips between thoughts. “Those that live to serve greater humanity, like us here, your mom and dad, and like Herman Gonzalez and other hard workers just like him. Or those that die in gangs, living out their short, unhappy lives on the wrong side of the law, destroying everything good around them. Good and evil, son.
“Hunting a man to kill for revenge, unleashing your wrath, committing murder, corrupts your soul. It’ll take you to those dark places where the devil lives and turn you into a beast just like Chui Baca and those other monsters.
“You need to think about that, son, and make some serious choices. A day soon comes in all our lives when we reach that moment where we each have to choose which direction we take. Jack, today’s your day. You’re at the crossroads.”
Harry Valentine put his arm around his son, and tears ran from the strong man’s eyes. He looked at the judge and swallowed hard. Paul Cruz shouldered by him and put his arm over Harry’s shoulder.
“Son, since we’re still off the record, let me explain a few things. This session before my bench today is supposed to be simply an arraignment,” Judge Archer said to Jack, and gave a look at the prosecutor, then at Paul Cruz. “I can throw out any or all of the charges I deem have no merit, or I can bind you over for trial and charge you with this whole laundry list of mostly trumped-up nonsense that Sonny Gomez has put in this police complaint.”
The judge stopped and looked at Alice Montoya. “Counselor, did you or anyone else even investigate any part of this mess? Attempted armed robbery, assault, menacing, willful destruction of property? Seriously? What were you going to do, just throw this boy’s life away for a bunch of no-account hoodlums?”
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