Hailey's War

eleven

SEPTEMBER 3

The first thought that came to mind, when I woke some time later, was that I was in the barracks, that I had overslept and was going to be late for morning formation. When I opened my eyes and looked around, I realized that wasn’t it.

“How are you feeling?” an accented voice nearby asked.

The speaker was a tall, heavyset man with a broad, kind, copper-brown face and the sort of brushy, full mustache that only Hispanic men look good wearing. He was also wearing a white lab coat. He was a doctor. I was in a hospital. At my side, I saw an IV needle taped to my wrist.

“Are you having difficulty understanding me?” the doctor asked.

I cleared my throat to speak. “No, I understand you,” I said. “You’re speaking English.”

He smiled indulgently. “So I am.”

I realized that wasn’t what he’d meant.

He shone a small light in my eyes. I blinked, but tolerated it.

He pulled up a rolling stool. “Do you remember your name?”

“Hailey,” I said. “Hailey Cain.” My voice was thin and dry.

“Well,” he said, “it’s a pleasure to finally know your name. We didn’t know. I’ve been calling you Miss America.”

“That’s flattering.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Mexico,” I said.

I knew that automatically, but less clear was why. I hadn’t been on vacation. I hadn’t flown down; I had been driving. And something had gone wrong.

Suddenly I stiffened. “Was I shot?” An impossible idea, yet as soon as I said it, I knew it was true. “Doc?”

“Yes,” he said. “You were shot, twice. You also had some blunt-force trauma to your face.”

From when the Impala hit the tunnel wall. Now I remembered.

“Nidia,” I said. “Where is she? Is she all right?”

The doctor looked thoughtful. “You mentioned that name before,” he said.

“Before?”

“Do you remember being awake earlier?”

“Vaguely,” I said. “What do you mean, I mentioned her? Isn’t she here? Haven’t you guys treated her?”

He drew in a deep breath. “About most of this,” he said, “you’ll need to speak with the police. It’s out of my area of expertise.”

“How long was I asleep?”

“You weren’t asleep; you were in a coma. For eight weeks.”

Jesus. Then something occurred to me. “How did you know I was going to wake up when I did?” I asked. “You were right there.”

“I woke you up,” he said. “The coma you were in wasn’t natural.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It was medically induced,” he said. “You needed time to recuperate from internal damage from the gunshots and from loss of blood. The best thing for your body was a short-term coma.”

That was a hard thing to wrap the mind around. How screwed up did your body have to be for it to need a coma to get better?

“Plus,” the doctor added, “during the brief periods when you were awake, you were agitated. You were interfering with the tubes and your IV.”

He talked to me a little bit about my injuries, the two gunshot wounds to the chest and the damage they’d done. Then paused, frowning slightly. “Do you remember saying, ‘They were white’?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Do you know the significance of that?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You said it twice. It seemed to be very important to you.”

I shook my head again, and the doctor got up from his stool. “Try to rest.”

“Wait,” I said. “You already know something about Nidia, don’t you? Is she dead? You can tell me. I’m strong, I won’t go into shock.”

He said, “You were traveling alone, Miss Cain.”

The rest of it I learned from an officer of the state judicial police. His name was Juarez. He was taller and thinner than the doctor, though with that same mustache. He took down some basic introductory details first, my full name, where I lived.

Juarez went on to tell me that I was found just outside the tunnel, alone on the edge of the road, bleeding profusely, without ID, money, or a car. The farmworkers who found me had believed that I was in a bizarre hit-and-run in which I had been walking on a remote highway. No one had realized I’d been shot until I was examined at the hospital.

“I wasn’t traveling alone,” I told him. “I was traveling with a girl, Nidia Hernandez. Even if she wasn’t at the scene, her things were in the car.”

He said, “There was no car. No luggage, and no girl. Just you.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why don’t you tell me your story from the beginning.”

I did, leaving out only the fact that the friend who had gotten me involved in Nidia’s situation was a semi-notorious girl gangster in L.A. Serena became, loosely, “a friend of Nidia’s.” The rest was the unvarnished truth, from Oakland to the border to the tunnel.

“They were white,” I said, “and armed. These guys were pros. I don’t know why they wanted Nidia, but they did.”

When I was done, Juarez didn’t ask the questions I would have expected. He didn’t ask for details about the ambush, or for a more thorough description of Nidia, which would have helped the police find her. Instead, he asked about my life in America: in particular, what I did for work.

“A bike messenger,” he said, “that’s a young person’s job, I understand. Not very lucrative, no?”

“I don’t need much money.”

“Really,” he said. “I’ve heard that life in America is quite expensive, particularly California. People have high standards for what their lifestyle should be. Everyone reaching for the golden apple.”

I had a sinking feeling about what was motivating this line of questioning. I said, “Can I ask why you’re so interested in my lifestyle and income?”

He looked thoughtfully at nothing in particular. Then he turned his attention back to me.

“Miss Cain,” he said, “let me be blunt. When an American meets with violence in Mexico, far from tourist areas, and without frantic American family members demanding information-”

“I’m not a drug mule,” I said.

He looked out the window, hesitated, and began to speak more slowly and deliberately. “In my experience,” he said, “when women become involved in the drug trade, it is rarely because of their own vice. Usually they become involved at the insistence of corrupt men who hold too much influence in their lives and do not have their best interests at heart. The law is commonly gentle with such women.”

“That’s nice to know, but I’m not in the drug trade,” I said.

I’d wanted to say it since he was about five words in, but it had been obvious that nothing was going to proceed until he’d finished his little speech inviting me to fall into the sympathetic arms of the Mexican law.

I said, “You’re skeptical about my story, okay, I can understand that. But Nidia is out there somewhere and needs help. I don’t want your suspicions about me to keep people from looking for her.”

“To be honest,” he said, “it occurs to me that if you needed an explanation for why a group of armed men would ambush you on the road, and you couldn’t tell us they were in search of money or drugs, a young woman would make a sympathetic substitute.”

“You don’t even believe that Nidia exists?”

“We have only your word on that,” he said. “Look at this from my perspective: You’ve described your traveling companion as a Mexican-born teenager without money or connections. Why would she be of interest to men like that?”

“I don’t know what kind of men they were,” I said, “so it’s hard to speculate.”

“Speculate,” he repeated, leaning back a little. “You have a certain level of education.”

“I did nearly four years at West Point. I didn’t finish.”

“That’s the American military academy?”

“One of them,” I said.

“Why didn’t you finish there?”

“I was discharged. Not for using drugs, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I told him. “Listen, whatever you think of me, Nidia needs your help. She’s only nineteen. You owe it to her to have people looking for her.”

Juarez hesitated, then said, “I must admit, you are convincing in your zeal.” He raised pen to notepad. “Tell me as much as you can about her and I’ll get her description out.”

“To the U.S. authorities, too?” I said. “In case these men took her back over the border?”

He nodded.

When we were done, I had one last question for him. I said, “The doctor told me that no one here knew my name.”

Juarez waited for the rest.

“Didn’t you identify me from missing-persons reports?”

“I’m sorry, Miss Cain,” he said, “but no one matching your description was reported missing.”

twelve

Sometimes one offhand comment can bring a truth about your life home to you. Until Juarez’s statement, I hadn’t realized how isolated I’d let myself get from other people. CJ, Serena, my mother in Truckee-there was no one who wasn’t accustomed to not hearing from me for weeks on end. My disappearance had not registered with anyone in my life.

Except for this: I’d promised to see Serena on my way back north. I’d never shown up, yet she hadn’t reported me missing. Serena, who was the only person in my life who’d known where I was going. Wasn’t that an odd thing?

It was she who had asked me to do this in the first place. She’d called me out of the blue, after we hadn’t spoken in nearly a year, wanting me to take a girl I’d never met to central Mexico. Conveniently, none of Nidia’s family, nor Serena nor her sucias, could do the job. Only a white stranger in the Bay Area seemed to be able to do it.

A stranger to Nidia, that was. I was no stranger to Serena; we were friends, and now I couldn’t help pulling at the threads of that friendship, wondering how much they’d weakened in the time we’d been apart. Enough to allow her to set me up to be killed?

Some time later, a nurse came in and gave me a pill. I didn’t ask what it was. Maybe it was a sleeper, because sleep came on fast.

The next day, Juarez returned. I couldn’t tell from his long, sober face what he’d concluded about my story, but he blandly told me that when I was well enough to leave the hospital, I would be taken to the U.S. Consulate and would become their problem.

thirteen

Seventy-two hours later, I was riding high in the cab of a Peterbilt truck, rolling across the dry, severe Arizona terrain, heading back toward California.

I was exceedingly grateful for my military service, because having my fingerprints in the system had streamlined the process of proving who I was-and therefore my citizenship-to consular authorities. Of course, they’d wanted to hear the whole story, and I’d told it to them. I stressed the part about Nidia’s disappearance as I had with Juarez, but it didn’t make much of an impression. Nidia was not an American citizen, therefore not their problem.

I, on the other hand, penniless and stranded, was their problem. They arranged for me to get on a bus to the U.S. border, where I’d stuck out my thumb and eventually found what I was looking for: a truck driver headed to Los Angeles. That was Ed. Ed had rusty, curly hair and seemed decent; he kept his hands to himself and, as evening fell, had given me his jacket. At the hospital, they’d found me some civilian clothes to replace the ones that had been ruined in the attack. They gave me jeans and running shoes, and a T-shirt with the word NAVY on it in block letters, which I’d taken with a small inward smile. A little joke on the part of the universe.

“You’re young to have been on your own in Mexico,” Ed said. “You’re what, nineteen, I’d guess?”

People always lowballed my age, because of the open, guileless features I’d inherited from my father.

“Twenty-three,” I said. Then: “No, wait, twenty-four. I just had a birthday.”

July five, the day after I’d been shot. I’d turned twenty-four in my sleep.

“You got someone you can call when we get to L.A.?” Ed asked.

“Several people,” I told him. “There’s one friend in particular I’m dying to get caught up with.”

I was thinking, of course, of Serena. I still didn’t want to believe that my old friend had set me up, but it was the theory that best fit the facts.

Serena used to call me prima, meaning cousin. Yet I’d heard her call other girls hermana, or sister. I had never been sure if this was because they were sucias or because they were Mexican like her. It would have been uncool to ask. But the very fact that she made that distinction troubled me now. I was white, and since I’d moved north, I was no longer an everyday friend. Had those things made me expendable?

It was painful to consider that possibility. But if it was true, what had been her motivation for setting Nidia up? Money? Serena knew a lot of people, and she saw and heard a lot. Maybe she’d known that someone wanted Nidia, and had exacted a price for helping them to get her. Maybe that was why, when I’d called her from El Paso having second thoughts, she’d said, I don’t think you should interfere. Of course not, not if her big payday depended on me getting Nidia to the abduction point.

But if Serena’s incentive had been money, what was the motive of whoever had hired the seven men in the tunnel? Juarez’s skepticism on that point was entirely understandable. Seven armed men had braced us in a tunnel in a sophisticated maneuver, and shot me, and they had done all this, apparently, to abduct or kill a nineteen-year-old daughter of Mexican illegal immigrants. How to explain that? To have a plausible theory, didn’t you need to start with a plausible event?

I bit my thumbnail and shifted in my seat.

“You okay?” Ed asked.

“I’m cool,” I said.

It wasn’t necessary to think so far ahead. The theory I had now-that Serena set me up-was enough. It was credible and I could act on it.

That was why Los Angeles was my destination, instead of San Francisco. I was going to ambush Serena, and then she’d have to tell me what was going on.

Either that or I would screw up my ambush and she, being Warchild, would kill me.

fourteen

So, for the second time in my life, I washed up in Los Angeles, broke and without a plan. I’d had to ask Ed for ten dollars to buy a meal. This made him skeptical all over again that I really had friends in L.A. I could call. I assured him several times I’d be fine before he left me in the vast parking lot of a shopping center and drove away.

I wasn’t lying, strictly speaking, about having someone I could call. CJ could have provided most of what I needed: a safe place, a meal, a bed, and money. But I wasn’t going to call him, because I was into some heavy shit right now, worse than the Marsellus thing, and I was not going to get my cousin involved. This was my private, post-West Point honor code: You might have to lie, cheat, or steal, but you do not endanger Cletus Jeffrey Mooney.

Instead, I started walking.

If San Francisco was bigger than it looked for a person on foot, Los Angeles was huge. East L.A., where I was headed, wasn’t even in L.A. proper. I wasn’t sure how many miles lay ahead of me. I did know that in the oppressively bright, hot weather, I was going to have a wicked sunburn.

It’s just another road march, I told myself. At West Point we had done them all the time, with our rifles and heavy rucks on our backs.

A lot of what I’d learned at West Point was going to be useful here. The officers who’d taught us had foreseen the day when we might be dropped into a hostile landscape without resources and would need to survive by our wits. We’d learned to ignore hunger and other physical privations. We’d been taught to be resourceful, to find what we needed to survive in the territory around us.

You can do this, I told myself. You’re made outta this.

I had a basic plan. I was going to find a fast-food place where I could get a meal for less than ten dollars, and then I was going to keep walking until I saw my destination: the donation center for one of the nation’s largest charities.

Sometime before midnight, I was breaking into Serena’s car.

This hadn’t been Plan A, which had been to wait outside until she came home from some late-night mission or errand, and then brace her from out of the shadows. It had seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. It was rare for gangbangers to go places unaccompanied-they had an innate understanding of the fire-team concept-but Serena did it more than most, a combination of her bravado and her need for privacy. So I had a better-than-average chance of catching her alone.

Unfortunately, I’d arrived too late. She was inside the house, probably for the night. Staging a raid on the home base of the Trece Sucias was out of the question. Too many guns and trigger-happy girls inside.

So, Plan B: the car. I knew it didn’t have an alarm. In Serena’s neighborhood, the only kind of car you could park outside was an old and inexpensive one from which the sound system had already been stolen. That described Serena’s car, a pale blue Chevy Caprice with no radio.

Fortunately, I’d thought ahead and supplied myself for a break-in.

When I’d gotten to the donation center, I’d wandered casually to the back and slipped unseen into a supply closet. Then I’d made a small barricade of boxes in case someone opened the door and looked inside. I spent three hours sitting with my legs tucked up against me, behind those boxes, until I’d heard the volunteer workers close up and leave.

When I came out, I was alone in an acre-sized warehouse of used goods. One-stop shopping. By the time I left, I was wearing a heavy flannel shirt over my Navy T-shirt, and thicker socks under my work boots. I had a canvas backpack strapped to my back, into which I’d tucked a sharp boning knife from the housewares section, a long, tough screwdriver I’d found on a table laden with assorted tools, and a wire coat hanger. I was also pushing a ten-speed bicycle. That had carried me to Serena’s place.

Now I crouched against the passenger door of the Caprice, working quietly and feverishly. Unlike Serena and her girls, I had no experience breaking into cars. I’d only seen it done, under innocent circumstances-several times I’d seen my uncle Porter come to the aid of people who’d locked their keys inside their own cars. This was a very different situation, and not the brightest idea, not in a barrio neighborhood where anyone who saw me wasn’t going to call the cops. They’d grab a gun and TCB themselves.

But the door gave way to the force I applied with the long screwdriver, just enough that I could get the wire coat hanger in and trip the lock. I was in.

I lay in the backseat for an hour, staying alert until I was pretty sure that Serena wasn’t coming out on some late-night whim, like a trip to the 7-Eleven. Then, finally, I curled up and closed my eyes and gave in to my exhaustion.

fifteen

Everyone gets sloppy. Even someone like Serena. If she walked out of her house every day scoping for assassins, she’d have cracked up long ago. She didn’t look through the windows at the interior of her car before getting in. She just unlocked the door and slid behind the wheel.

I rose up from my crouched position, grabbed her hair from behind the headrest, and laid the boning knife to her throat. She jumped, startled, but she also grabbed my wrist, ready to fight faster than most people would have been.

“Don’t,” I said. “Stay still.”

“Hailey?” she said, incredulous, her eyes going to mine in the rearview mirror.

“Don’t touch the wheel,” I said. “If you lay on the horn and get your sucias out here, they’ll shoot me, but not in time to save you.”

“Where the hell did you come from?” she asked.

I ignored that. “Put your hands on the wheel.”

“You said not to-”

“I am not in a joking mood, Warchild. Put your goddamn hands in the eleven-and-one position on the steering wheel and don’t take them off.”

She did it.

“Are you strapped?” I asked her.

“Of course.”

“Where?”

“Right side pocket.”

She was wearing loose olive-green cargo pants, the kind with generous pockets for carrying a weapon. I couldn’t take my right hand off her throat, nor could I reach her right leg with my left hand. Stalemate. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll let that be for a minute. You know better than to reach for it.”

“What are we doing, Hailey?” she said.

“A little Q and A. Did you set me up, down in Mexico?”

“What?”

“I said, did you set up that little girl, Nidia, and me to get jacked?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. She’d recovered from her initial shock and didn’t sound all that scared. I’d known she wouldn’t be.

I said, “We got ambushed. I nearly died, and she’s missing. You were the one who set the whole thing up. And you knew I was down there and when I was supposed to be back, but you didn’t report me missing. That looks pretty bad, Warchild.”

She said, “When you didn’t come back from Mexico, I assumed you were dead.”

“Maybe you didn’t assume. Maybe you knew how and why.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head very gently, in order not to increase the pressure of the knife on her throat. “I called Teaser’s sister, Lara. She said that no one knew where Nidia was, either. I knew something went wrong. I can prove it.”

“But why didn’t you report it?” I pressed her.

“Hailecita, use your head! Have you ever known me to call the fucking cops about anything? We all know the fucking jura doesn’t care about illegal Mexicans! What were they going to do?”

I said, grudgingly, “What did you mean when you said you could prove it?”

“I added you to my roll call,” she said. Her tattoos on her calf, she meant. She added, “Can I show you?”

It meant reaching down and pulling up the hem of her pants. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I said. “You think I’ve never heard of an ankle holster before?”

She drew in a steadying breath. “Okay, listen. I’m going to, real slow, pull my leg up where you can reach. You can get the nine I’m carrying in my pocket, okay? And then you can hold that while you reach over and look for yourself. Okay? Will that work?”

“Keep your hands on the wheel,” I warned.

Carefully, I let go of the hair I’d been gripping in my left hand, leaned back just a little, and slid my left arm diagonally past the headrest, crossing over my right arm, which was still holding the knife. Then I couldn’t get my arm down to her leg, because my elbow was locked in the wrong direction. I lifted my weight up slightly from the backseat, putting myself in position to turn my arm downward.

Serena flinched. “Hey!”

The shift in my weight had caused me to increase the pressure of the knife on her throat. “Sorry,” I said, glancing at her neck in the mirror. The knife hadn’t broken the skin.

I said, “I can’t reach. Lift up your leg a little farther.”

She did. I felt her body shake a little; she was laughing nervously. “This is some crazy shit, prima,” she said.

I angled my arm down toward her thigh and managed to slide my hand into her pocket, feeling the cool metal of her nine-millimeter. Gently, I extricated it, drew back my arm, and set it down on the seat next to me.

“Feel better?” she said.

“Yeah, but I still don’t want you going for your ankle. Pull your leg up where I can reach.”

Serena was five-nine, and it wasn’t an easy task for her to keep her hands on the wheel and slowly draw up her right leg, ease it past the automatic gearshift, and prop it on the dashboard. When she did, her knee was almost to her shoulder. I leaned forward and slid my arm along her leg, toward her ankle.

“Ghetto yoga,” Serena said, a shimmer of near-laughter in her voice.

“Shut up and let me do this,” I said, and with effort, I reached the cuff of her pant leg and slid it up, revealing the tattoo I remembered.

Two names had been added since I’d last seen it. The third from the bottom read, Teaser. And just below that, I saw the newest and freshest name, Hailey. It was like looking at my own obituary.

“Jesus, Serena.”

“I told you,” she said. “You went down to Mexico and didn’t come back. I figured you were dead, prima.”

It wasn’t logic that they’d understand in the suburbs. But gangbangers lost people all the time. In Serena’s world, it made sense.

I eased the knife away from her throat. “You really just assumed I was dead, with no body, no news report, nothing? Next time, try to be a little more aspirational, will you?”

“You been expanding your word power, eh?” she said, amused.

“Yeah,” I said, starting to laugh. “I did a sleep-learning program while I was in my coma.”

Her laughter dried up. “You were in a fucking coma?”

“For two months,” I said, unable to stop laughing, like it was the funniest thing I’d ever told anyone. “I fucked up, Serena. That little girl, I let them get her. I didn’t know how serious it was. If someone had told me, maybe I could’ve protected her. God, I fucked everything up.”

I was crying now, my arms crossed on the back of the driver’s seat, my face tipped down, forehead touching my wrists. The knife was still in my hand. Serena got out of the car, opened the back door, and gently took the knife away from me.

“Come in the house,” she said.

“Not like this. I don’t want your girls to see me like this.”

She nodded like she understood, although it didn’t make much sense; I’d never had any standing with the sucias to lose. Serena walked away, plucked an orange from her tree, and peeled it, standing in the late-morning sunshine in her driveway.

I pulled myself together, got out of the car, and walked over to the spigot at the side of her house. I turned on the water and splashed my face clean.

“Weren’t you on your way somewhere?” I asked, straightening up.

“It can wait,” Serena said. “Believe me, prima, you’ve rearranged my day.”

Her house was like I remembered. Same homeboy memorials on the refrigerator, same subtle pulse of music from the sound system. One of her girls, heavyset with brown-red hair crinkly with a perm and then mousse, looked up from the television as we entered.

Serena was rummaging through her kitchen shelves. “What would you like?” she asked. “Chorizo and eggs?”

“Not right now.”

“Coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“A beer?”

I shook my head.

“Mmm. Some Vicodin?”

“Oh God yes.”

sixteen

A half hour later I was in Serena’s bathtub, floating in a cloud of strawberry-scented bubbles and Vicodin peace. I was listening to my own voice telling Serena, who was sitting cross-legged on the closed toilet seat, about Mexico, about the tunnel rats, as I’d started to think of the seven armed men, and their leader, whom I thought of as Babyface for his soft features.

“You’re sure it was about her?” Serena said. “They wanted her?”

“That’s what the guy said.”

“So none of this was about a sick abuelita up in the mountains.”

I shook my head. “Nidia made that up.”

“She lied? I thought she was really religious,” Serena said.

“I think she was. Is, I mean,” I said. “But scared. When push comes to shove, people lie.” I paused. “She was so quiet on the drive up, and I thought it was just that the two of us didn’t have anything in common. But now I wonder if she wasn’t feeling guilty. She knew there was heavier shit going on that she wasn’t telling me about.”

“You said she ‘was’ religious, then you changed it to ‘is,’” Serena said. “You think she’s still alive?”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly, “but it seems like if they wanted to kill her, they would have done it and dumped her right next to me. They took her with them, which means they wanted her alive.”

“Just because they needed her alive for the moment doesn’t mean they needed her alive for very long,” Serena pointed out.

I must have looked disturbed, because Serena said, “We’ve got to be realistic about this.”

I didn’t answer, tipping my head back and letting the warm water crawl through my scalp.

Serena said, “Come on, get out before you fall asleep in there.”

When I stepped out of the tub, before I could get the towel around me, I felt her eyes on my body, the healed wounds that couldn’t yet be called simply scars.

“They don’t hurt anymore,” I said, “if that’s what you’re thinking.”

A few minutes later I was wearing one of Serena’s T-shirts and a pair of boxers, pulling back the covers of her bed. She was still standing in the doorway.

“Thanks for letting me crash here,” I said.

“That’s what Casa Serena’s always been about, prima, a place where my homegirls can go to ground. You’re not the first.”

“But how many of the girls you’ve taken in were holding a knife on you just minutes earlier?”

Serena shrugged. “Around here, shit like that happens.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “Out there, if I’d said, ‘Yeah, bitch, I set you up,’ would you have cut my throat?”

Her words gave me a chill, even through the Vicodin calm. I said, “I don’t know. You had a gun. That would have made it very dangerous for me to back down.” But then I shook my head. “I don’t think it would have mattered. I couldn’t have cut you.”

“That would’ve got you killed, then.”

“You mean, if you’d admitted to setting me up, and I let you go, you’d have shot me, anyway?”

“Of course.”

I couldn’t pretend her answer didn’t hurt. She saw it in my face. “Come on, Hailey. If you had a legitimate grudge, what else could I do? That’s the number-one thing that gets people killed in la vida. It’s always retaliation. If you had a grudge against me, if I’d done something to make you my enemiga, and I let you walk away, that’s like”-she searched for a comparison-“like leaving rat poison around in the kitchen. It’s something you just don’t do. It doesn’t matter that I started it.” She saw my disapproval. “It’s the same reason I don’t hold it against you that you braced me with the knife. You had a legit reason. I respect that.”

I shook my head. “Thanks, I guess.”

“De nada.”

“One other thing? That tattoo, my name on your roll call?” I gestured to her leg. “Can you do something about that? It’s going to give me the creeps, seeing it all the time.”

She winked and said coolly, “Might as well keep it. You know?”

I said, “That’s cold, Warchild.”

She turned sober: “Sorry.”

seventeen

The Trece Sucias, who were almost exclusively Mexican-American, would have surprised an outsider with the diversity of their features and coloring. At first glance, they all conformed to gang style, with cheap tattoos and hard masks of eyeliner and dark lipstick, long nails painted fuchsia or black. Some sharpened those nails to points for an unexpected weapon in a fight.

Up close, though, you saw the differences. Their hair was reddish, golden, black, or brown; skin creamy pale or tawny gold. In Juicy Couture and Skechers, for example, Heartbreaker would have blended in with the UCLA girls on Melrose Avenue. She was five-ten, with a lean, flat volleyball player’s stomach, golden-brown hair, and wide-set greenish eyes. Her cousin and closest friend, Risky, was a small, fine-boned girl who could have been taken for Italian, with straight brown hair, brown eyes, and pale skin. Trippy, Serena’s lieutenant since Teaser died, was tall and strong, with chestnut hair in sharp bangs across her forehead and long down her back. Teardrop had classic Hispanic looks, straight black hair and rich brown skin.

The four of them, who made up less than half the sucias’ number, were in Serena’s living room when I came out a little after ten. I’d slept all day, and I still didn’t feel too hot. The girls were playing with Teardrop’s baby daughter and talking in Spanglish. I fixed myself a bowl of cereal and sat at the table to eat. They ignored me, except when Teardrop said in Spanish, Look, she’s all red, meaning badly sunburned, and the rest giggled. I told myself it wasn’t a slur I needed to answer and pretended I didn’t hear.

I’d told myself more than once that it was stupid to seek validation from a tribunal of gang girls. Underneath the hard shell of gang identity, they were just teenagers, emotional and naive, sentimental about babies and their abuelitas, desperate for the slightest affection from a homeboy. Most of them knew little of the world outside East Los Angeles. I, on the other hand, had jumped out of planes in Airborne School and boxed on my company’s team back east, sparring with guys my height and weight in the ring. But none of that mattered to the sucias. To them I was less than, just because I was white and unaffiliated.

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 time, 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.

Except I kept thinking about one thing: I sincerely hoped that all the shit that was gonna go down in the Lopezes’ neighborhood had gone down already, because if any of the guys from the tunnel came around doing cleanup work, and they talked to the neighbor lady, I’d laid it right out there: Hailey Cain, looking for Nidia Hernandez. Without that, the would-be assassins would have no reason to think I was still alive.

Sometimes I didn’t really think things through.

At home, I took the Finlandia out of my little refrigerator, cracked the seal, and drank. Then I called Serena and told her what I’d learned.

“I’m pretty sure Mrs. Lopez is dead,” I said. I was standing near the window, looking down at the street. “If she realized she was in danger and left town, she wouldn’t have left her kids in danger. I think the guys from the tunnel picked her up, found out what she knew, and killed her so she couldn’t warn anyone.”

“God,” Serena said. “This is getting serious, Hailey.” Like me nearly dying in Mexico and then later jumping her with a boning knife was all light sparring.

“What do you think she knew?”

“Well, where Nidia and I were going, for one thing,” I said. “I’d wondered how, if they were just tailing Nidia and me, they knew to get ahead of us and set up that trap in the tunnel. This answers that. Herlinda Lopez knew about the village.” I played with the drawstring of the blinds. “If Nidia told her something else, like what all of this is about, I still don’t know what that was. That’s the same guessing game we’ve been playing for days.”

I tipped my head back and drank again, the vodka cool and antiseptic on my tongue.

“You still there?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I was just thinking, this doesn’t make me feel good about cousin Lara being unaccounted for. Maybe she really did fight with her mother, but she knows the stuff Mrs. Lopez knew, maybe more, and recent events are proving that’s not a safe position to be in.”

Serena said, “Be careful, okay?”

“I don’t know how to do that and still find anything out,” I told her. “Being careful would be forgetting all about this. Either I’m going to do this or I’m not. In fact…”

“In fact, what?”

I drank again, then leaned on the window frame and looked down at the street. Cars shuttled back and forth, red brake lights flaring and fading. I said, “Maybe it’s best they know I’m out there looking for her.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“I have no idea who these guys are,” I said. “I could look for them the rest of my life and not find them, but if they come looking for me, that’ll streamline things, if nothing else.”

“Don’t streamline yourself into an unmarked grave, prima.”

twenty-one

What little there was to know about Herlinda Lopez’s disappearance, I learned from the San Francisco Chronicle.

She was apparently taken from her own garage, in her own car. The garage had a back door that opened directly onto the Lopezes’ small yard, and then another into the house. The investigating officers found that the door leading into the yard had been pried open, its cheap lock broken. A short time after that, Herlinda’s old crimson Toyota was found in a parking lot in a quiet, light-industrial area. The implication was that whoever had taken her had broken into the garage in the small hours of the morning via the yard door and simply waited for her to come through the house door to her car, which she’d done at five that morning, on her way to her bakery job. She had raised no cry when confronted, probably intimidated by a gun and aware that her children were still sleeping in the house. She apparently let her attackers drive her away in her car, then they transferred her to a second car in the parking lot, where the trail stopped.

There had been an unfortunately long lead time on the case, because her coworkers at the bakery had been patient with her failure to show up, assuming that responsible Herlinda must have had a good reason to be tardy. They didn’t call her home until ten, long after her kids had left for school through the house’s front door, never going into the garage or seeing the broken door there. No one knew she was missing until her daughter played the answering machine message at four that afternoon.

The accounts of Herlinda’s disappearance shed new light on the men who’d taken Nidia. My theory had been that they had waited to take Nidia in Mexico because it was too risky to try to kidnap someone from a dense urban area with lots of potential witnesses. That was true enough; the neighbor lady who caught me looking through the garage windows was proof of that. But with Herlinda, these guys had proven themselves capable of an urban kidnapping. That suggested that they hadn’t known where Nidia was until just before I came to get her. If they’d had time, they would have done the same job on Nidia that they’d done later on Herlinda.

So they’d tracked Nidia down, but before they could move, I’d come and gotten her. That had forced their hand. Almost on the fly, they’d put together their plan to kidnap Herlinda and find out where Nidia and I were going.

That worried me more than anything else. These guys could think on their feet. The way they’d extracted Herlinda from her house had been almost surgical, and that had been their Night at the Improv.

This was where I should have been saying, Imagine what they could do with a little lead time, but I didn’t have to imagine. I’d seen it, in the tunnel.

I didn’t learn anything else useful that day.

Serena called me and told me that no one had a line on Nidia’s cousin Lara Cortez, and that Nidia’s family was somewhere in California’s vast agricultural-worker community. That could have meant picking strawberries near Santa Maria or garlic in Gilroy. Though I would have liked to talk to them, when I thought about what had happened to Herlinda Lopez, I was glad Nidia’s family weren’t anywhere they could easily be found.

twenty-two

West Point prides itself on being a four-year university with a broad, well-rounded curriculum. But it’s also very much an Army post, and from your first day there, you’re a soldier.

That was why, when I surfaced from BART and walked up onto the campus of UC Berkeley the next day, I stopped for a moment to look around at the student body all around me. I’d gone to college in a sea of cadet gray, and after all this time, the sight of a civilian student body gave me culture shock. Some wore jeans and Cal-logo T-shirts or caps, like the model students in a course catalog, but many more wore clothing as diverse as costumes: motorcycle boots, skater motley, Buddy Holly glasses, Afros, Birkenstocks, minidresses. Some wore tank tops and cutoffs that showed amazing amounts of skin; others were swathed almost head to foot in flowing ethnic prints. They drank lattes on the steps of Dwinelle Hall and Web-surfed on their phones. I’d nearly forgotten that students lived this way.

I wondered what they would do if they knew the student with the blond ponytail and the birthmark on her face had a loaded SIG Sauer in her backpack.

I was here to look for an obituary, that of the mathematician whom Nidia had cared for until his death. I didn’t have a name, except Adriano, which Nidia might have Spanicized from Adrian. That would have made searching the Chronicle’s obits difficult. And if this guy hadn’t done anything of real note, his death might not have made the Chronicle at all. I was fairly certain, though, that the university paper would have covered it.

So that was how I ended up outside the offices of the mathematics department, looking at a glass case on the wall where news and events were posted. There it was, an obituary for Adrian Skouras. Both the Daily Californian and the Chronicle story were posted. When I saw the accompanying photo, I had a dawning sense of understanding.

All along, I’d made a sloppy assumption: that a professor dying of cancer would have been a white-haired old man. But cancer is indiscriminate. Adrian Skouras had died at thirty-three. The photo both papers used had probably been taken years before that. The young man the camera had captured had almost sensual features-he was obviously olive-complected, though the photo was black-and-white, and he had dark curly hair and deep-set eyes. The effect, though, was offset by the thin sharpness of his face and his wire-rim eyeglasses, and like many people unused to attention, his smile for the camera was almost a wince.

I read both obituaries. They didn’t disagree on any points. Adrian Skouras had been born and raised in San Francisco and had been fascinated with math and science at a young age. He’d graduated high school at fifteen and gone back east to study at Princeton. In his second year, he’d become a star in the world of mathematics by discovering a rare subspecies of prime number, now called a “Skouras prime,” the definition of which went over my head. After that, he’d gone overseas to Oxford for graduate work, then come home to settle at Berkeley, working among some of the leading lights in the field.

He had never married and left no children behind. Associates said that Skouras had been “married to his work, in the best possible way,” in the words of one. “When he was working on something that fascinated him, which was almost all the time, he’d forget to eat, much less to get out and have a social life. But if you knew him, you wouldn’t have any doubt that he was completely fulfilled.”

The best work of his career was undoubtedly ahead of him, they said, if only cancer had not stolen a fine mind from the world.

His father, Anton Skouras, was a San Francisco businessman and philanthropist; one brother, Milos, had preceded Adrian in death five years earlier. In lieu of flowers, donations could be made to the American Cancer Society.

I looked at his photo again. Adrian Skouras appeared shy, gentle, unsettled by the photographer’s attention, and impatient to step back into academic anonymity. This was no cliché-the graybeard professor. This was a real person. Looking at him, I thought I knew what happened between this man and Nidia Hernandez.

According to his colleagues, Adrian had been totally satisfied as a bachelor, living his life on the higher plane of numbers and ideas. Of course, that was what anyone would want to think about a newly dead colleague. Between the lines, Adrian had likely been one of those geniuses who would have been able to converse easily with Newton and Sagan-and hard-pressed to make small talk with real people at a cocktail party or a university mixer. Adrian had probably spent his weekend nights in the company of ideas, not women. Maybe, as his colleagues wanted to think, he had been satisfied with that. And then he got cancer, and his whole life became about the survival rate.

But Adrian had had just a little time, time he’d spent with a very lovely nineteen-year-old living in his house, a girl who had the same otherworldliness about her. He’d denied himself simple human warmth and pleasure for too long; she was recovering from a terrible loss. Put two people like that in close proximity alone for too long, and anyone could tell you the result.

What if that little potbelly she’d had, the one I’d assumed was puppy fat, wasn’t? What if it had been a baby, and Nidia had been going to Mexico to have her child away from the eyes of anyone who knew her?

It was a theory that made sense until the entrance of the seven armed men. That changed things. It said that Nidia hadn’t run to Mexico to escape gossip and character assassination. She’d foreseen the approach of the men in the tunnel, whoever they were. And she’d warned her family, who’d effectively disappeared into the migrant worker community, for once using poverty and anonymity to their benefit. Nidia could have gone with them, except that if these guys were determined to find her, that wouldn’t have been enough. A beautiful green-eyed redhead, and, if my theory was correct, increasingly pregnant? Anywhere she went, people would have remembered her.

So Nidia had 911’d cousin Lara, and Lara had called Serena, playing the card of loyal dead soldier Teaser. And Serena had called me, and that was how the only person without a stake in the matter nearly bled out in the mountains of Mexico.

I walked out into the midday sunlight. It wasn’t going to help me to talk to people who’d known Adrian in the math department. Whatever there had been in Adrian’s life that had involved him with men like the guys in the tunnel, his colleagues weren’t going to know about it. I needed the story behind the obituary, the whispers that had never made it to print.

I sat down on the steps like a student, minus the latte. I dug my cell from my backpack and made a phone call.

“AP, Foreman.”

“Jack? It’s Hailey.”

“Hailey?” he said, mildly surprised. “I thought I’d said something to piss you off. I called you and you never returned my message.”

“My phone was stolen,” I said.

“Really? That’s too bad.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Listen, I need a favor and I don’t have a lot to exchange for it. Maybe I could buy you a lunch or something.”

“Depends what the favor is,” he said.

“For you, it shouldn’t be a problem,” I said. “I need some background information, the kind of things reporters talk about but can’t or don’t print.”

“About what?”

“A man named Adrian Skouras. He was a mathematician at UC Berkeley and died of cancer three months ago. His obit was glowing, but I need to know if there were things about him that were, I don’t know, unsavory.”

“Mmmm,” Jack said thoughtfully. “Right off, can I ask you if this guy grew up locally?”

“Yeah, he did.”

“Do you remember if he’s related to a guy named Anton Skouras?”

“That was his father. You’ve heard of him?”

“Sure, he’s probably the biggest unindicted racketeer in San Francisco.”

“He is?”

“Unofficially, yeah. Officially, he’s a ‘prominent businessman.’ I haven’t had the opportunity to write about him that often. Someone who writes for the business pages over at the Chron would know his story better than me, printable news and unprintable rumors both.”

“Could you ask someone over there?”

“It depends: Where are we going to lunch?”

“Anywhere,” I said, guessing that his innate decency wouldn’t let him hold me up for anyplace expensive.

“You know where Lefty O’Doul’s is?” he said.

“I know it,” I told him. Dim and comfortable, with old-style cafeteria-line food.

Before we hung up, Jack said, “Why are you interested in Skouras, anyway?”

I said, “I think he stole my cell phone.”

twenty-three

When I saw Jack Foreman waiting on the sidewalk outside Lefty’s, he was smoking, of course. I noticed that he’d let his hair grow since I’d seen him last. He’d probably just been too busy to bother getting it cut. He wasn’t the type to change styles out of vanity, or to care that the new length made his gray more noticeable.

When he saw me, he tossed the cigarette down on the sidewalk and stepped on it, looking at me appraisingly. “You’ve lost weight,” he said. “Come inside, we need to get some calories into you.”

We went in and moved through the cafeteria line, then settled in at a booth. Lefty’s was never empty, but it wasn’t packed, either, and quiet enough for us to talk. We sat under the photographs of Tinker and Evers and Chance, and I looked at Jack and said, “So tell me about this Skouras guy.”

“Well,” Jack began, “he came from a big family in Greece. Before World War Two, they had money and landholdings, all that. But then came the German occupation, then the civil war, and it all went away. Tony Skouras talks about this in interviews, how he came here as a teenager with nothing, determined to rebuild. It’s his bootstraps story.

“What he doesn’t talk about,” Jack said, “is that his first business venture in his twenties was to buy a pair of X-rated movie houses. He built those into a chain, and added a line of adult DVD-rental stores. They were so profitable that he was able to sell by the age of thirty and buy a shipping line, which was, on the surface, a more respectable trade.”

“Why ‘on the surface’? That sounds a lot more respectable than pornography.”

“Well, he’s using the shipping line and his import business to bring stolen art and antiquities into the country,” Jack said, “but that’s not the big deal. The bigger problem is he’s bringing in illegal immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. He’s got contacts in the Balkan states, where a lot of people’s lives have been ripped up by the civil wars there, and they’ll do anything to get out. If it were just undocumented young men looking for work that Skouras was bringing in, that’d be one thing, but a big part of the trade is young women. Skouras supplies prostitution rings. Essentially, the guy’s a human trafficker, and he’s said to dip into the rings he supplies quite a bit, like a private dating pool.”

I nodded.

“None of that’s been proven. The feds have sniffed around him; the SEC has subpoenaed papers, but he’s got good accounting and good lawyering and nothing’s stuck. In the past few years he’s branched out further into legitimate enterprises. He owns a minority stake in a film studio in L.A., and he opened a seafood restaurant on the Embarcadero, Rosemary’s, named for his wife. As far as I’ve heard, there’s nothing dirty about those operations.”

I nodded.

“But then there’s this. About ten years ago, Skouras got interested in horse racing. He went in big, bought a costly colt from Dubai and had it brought here and stabled at Golden Gate Fields. Then it didn’t live up to its potential. After it finished out of the money in several races, its heart just exploded during a routine exercise gallop.”

“Drugged?”

“That was never proven,” Jack said. “Which probably wasn’t much of a consolation to the exercise groom who suffered a compound pelvic fracture in the fall.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah. Let’s see, what other Skouras rumors can I dazzle you with? Oh yes,” he said. “There’s a very faintly whispered story that Tony had a daughter on the other side of the sheets, but that’s never been confirmed.”

I said, “A lot of the shit that sticks to him seems to be sexual-the X-rated theaters and the prostitution and an affair, and yet he was a family man. He had this genius kid.”

“He had two sons,” Jack reminded me. “Milos was a chip off the block. Followed his father into the family businesses, until the day he died of ‘food poisoning.’” He put finger quotes around the words.

“You think he was murdered?”

“Seems likely,” Jack said. “The kid was a piece of work. I guess Adrian was different. If you read his obituary, you’d know more about him than I do. Adrian never comes up much in conversations about his father. He certainly didn’t go into the family business. I think they were estranged.”

Nidia had said as much in our one conversation about him.

“Is his wife still alive? No, she’s not,” I said, remembering Adrian’s obit. “Not a very long-lived family, are they?”

Jack shook his head. “The funny thing is, though, Tony Skouras was never a good bet to outlive his wife, much less both sons. He had heart trouble and had undergone major bypass surgery four years ago. It wasn’t supposed to be a real long-term fix,” he said. “People keep expecting this guy to drop in his tracks, but it never happens. He’s a survivor. He just goes on and on.”

I couldn’t think of anything else I needed to ask. So I said, “You want some coffee?”

We went back to the cafeteria line and bought some, Jack stirring his a little too much, with the random gestures of a smoker who’d rather be outside having a cigarette. Then he asked the question I’d been expecting: “So, what’s your interest in Tony Skouras?”

“Sorry,” I said, “I can’t talk about it.”

“Yeah, I knew you were going to say that,” Jack said.

I’d expected him to dig, and said as much. “That’s it? You’re satisfied with that?”

“I don’t think it’s going to help me any to be dissatisfied.”

“I thought all reporters refused to take no for an answer.”

“Are you kidding? We hear no all the time,” Jack said. “And you’re thinking of the Hollywood version of journalism, where a reporter hears a hot tip one day and two days later there’s a big story splashed across A1. Real investigative journalism takes time. It takes slow circling around your subject, Freedom of Information Act requests, compiling and synthesizing of information. It doesn’t happen overnight.”

I wasn’t sure what he was telling me. “You’re saying that after today you’re going to look a bit harder at Skouras?”

“People are always looking at Skouras,” he said. “But since you’re feeling guilty, throw me a bone. Answer just one question, totally unrelated to the rest of this.”

“No, you had your chance,” I said. “You already traded your information for a free lunch. Too late to change the deal now.”

“You sure that’s all the information you’re going to need? You don’t have to stay in my good graces in case of follow-ups?” He cocked an eyebrow.

“Fine,” I said, making my voice sound more impatient than I really felt. “One question.”

“The school you went to back east, the one that didn’t work out, was that Annapolis or West Point?”

“I… yes. How the hell did you know that?”

He’d turned serious. “I observe people, Hailey. I always knew you were something more than you let on. So it made sense that the school wasn’t any State U. But at the same time, I didn’t get Ivy League vibes. That left one of the military academies.”

I nodded. “It was West Point.”

“Why didn’t you finish?”

“I almost did.”

“Maybe you’ll tell me about that someday.”

“No. Sorry,” I said. “I just don’t talk about that. Don’t take it personally.”

That afternoon, I called Serena to tell her what I’d learned. When I was done, she said, “You’re thinking that the guys in the tunnel were gangsters.”

“It makes sense,” I said. “They were obviously well-funded and disciplined.”

“So it sounds like you shoulda searched Nidia’s suitcase,” said Serena. “She took something from that rich guy.”

“Not exactly,” I said. “Think about it: If they just wanted an object, they’d have taken it from the car, shot her, and left her where they left me.” I smiled, though she couldn’t see my face. “She had something, though.”

“Stop giving me an IQ test over the phone and tell me what it was.”

“Something that belonged to her and Adrian both,” I added.

There was a brief silence on the line. Then Serena said, “No way, prima. She was still getting over her boyfriend dying.”

“Grief in itself can make people do funny things,” I said. “I’m not saying she fell in love with Adrian, but there was something between them. She got a little weepy talking about his death. I thought it was because it reminded her of her fiancé. And she was thin except for her belly, and she was nursing ginger ale a lot in the car, to settle her stomach. Pregnancy makes women more prone to nausea. Not just in the morning, but anytime. None of this registered with me then, because I was used to thinking of her in a certain light, as a virgin-slash-war-widow, since the first time I heard her name.”

“Say you’re right,” Serena said. “How would the grandfather find out, if he and his son didn’t talk?”

“Fathers and sons tend to talk over deathbeds,” I said. “Probably Adrian asked his father to take care of Nidia and the baby financially. A guy like Tony Skouras would probably react in one of two ways to that kind of news. Either he’d be appalled at the thought of having a half-Mexican grandchild and refuse to acknowledge Nidia’s baby at all, or he’d embrace the fact that this is the only grandchild he’d ever have, and want full control of its upbringing. He doesn’t strike me as the type to write support checks and let his grandchild be raised Mexican in working-class Mexican neighborhoods.”

“Damn,” Serena said. “All that for a kid? Most of the guys I know run away from their responsibility to a baby.”

“This is a lot different,” I said. “Skouras isn’t just trying to build a fortune, he’s been trying to build up his family again, after the troubles in his homeland. Everything that Skouras has amassed, the money and influence-what’s the point if it all just disperses into the hands of strangers?” I paused. “That explains why he took the full-control route. He must have told Nidia he wanted his grandkid, and she freaked and ran away. We know the rest. In a way, this is good news. Because if Skouras wants the kid, then Nidia is still alive. She’s only about six months’ pregnant by now.”

“Oh, God, she’s living like… he’s got her…”

“Don’t trip,” I said. “It’s in his best interest to take care of her not just medically but psychologically. Trauma is very bad for pregnant women. He’d know that.”

“Until she gives birth,” Serena said. “Then what happens to her?”

“Well, he might feel that he’s too powerful and she’s too insignificant for her ever to get the American law to listen to her,” I said. “Maybe he’ll let her go.”

Serena was doubtful. “Wouldn’t it be safer for him just to kill her?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It would.”

twenty-four

Was there anything in my West Point training that could help me with the problem at hand? A criminal like Skouras wouldn’t operate like a conventional military enemy. He’d be more like a terrorist. But the times being what they were, we’d studied a bit about counterterrorism in school.

Terrorists lived among the general population. They didn’t wear uniforms. Sometimes you knew who they were but couldn’t prove it. You could watch them, but their actions looked innocent on the surface, and their communications were carefully coded. You couldn’t be sure who around them was a disciple and who was an innocent acquaintance. They attacked in small-scale but sometimes very deadly operations. They always needed money, and if you could disrupt their flow of funds badly enough, you could cripple their operation.

I knew how the Army would deal with a high-level terrorist: It would watch his home and track the movements of his vehicles with spy satellites capable of reading numbers off license plates. That didn’t help me. That was the difference between being the United States Army and a twenty-four-year-old with one gun. If anyone was going to be crippled by dwindling funds, it was me.

I could try to watch Skouras, but I doubted that would lead me to Nidia. Surely she wasn’t in his own home. It seemed unwise, in the first-place-anyone-would-look sense. And I just didn’t think he’d want her around, no matter how many rooms his place had. Home was where a guy like Skouras went to ground. It was where he locked out his complicated world and poured himself a Macallan. He wasn’t going to want a frightened teenage hostage in the next room.

Start over. You’re going at this wrong. Imagine you’re them, kidnapping Nidia. Start from the tunnel and go from there.

They shoot me, I lose consciousness and probably crash the Impala at a slow speed into the tunnel wall. They drag me out of the car, strip me of my ID, and take me outside the tunnel and shoot me, far enough off the road that no one is supposed to find me. That had been the important part of the story to me, but in terms of the kidnapping, it wasn’t relevant. I hadn’t been their objective. Nidia had been.

She might have been injured in the crash, though not badly. I hadn’t had enough time to work up any speed. So assume she was basically all right, maybe dazed. Either she got out and tried to run, or they reached in and got her. They put her in one of the cars and drove away. They also drove the Impala away and disposed of it, probably in a river or a lake. Again, not important to the story. Where was Nidia at that point?

Getting a Mexican without papers across the border would have been difficult. Illegal Mexicans crossed the border all the time, of course. They simply walked across at unguarded, unobserved areas or were smuggled across in trucks allegedly carrying consumer goods. But Nidia wouldn’t have been cooperative, and handling her roughly or drugging her would have been too risky; she was pregnant, and a healthy Skouras grandchild had been the point of the whole operation.

But Skouras had something better than a truck: He owned a shipping line. What if the tunnel rats had taken Nidia to a port and onto one of the Skouras cargo ships? They could have sailed her right to San Francisco. That made a lot of sense.

Whatever the logistics of getting Nidia where she was going, Skouras would then have to have someplace fairly private to keep her. That was most likely a second home or a vacation home, which could be almost anywhere. Once they had her safely there, the rest would be easy. It wouldn’t take more than one guard to keep her in line, maybe a second to relieve the first one from time to time, and to keep him company. Other than that, Nidia would require only healthy food, some fresh air, maybe some prenatal vitamins, and-

I sat up. I’d been thinking, an occasional checkup from a doctor, but how were they going to work that? They couldn’t just take a kidnap victim into town to sit around in a doctor’s waiting room. I drummed my fingers against my thigh, thinking.

Like everyone else, I’d heard casual references in movies to “Mob doctors,” but those films were never quite clear on where those guys came from. They were just there, available at any hour of the night, corrupt and unconcerned about whom they worked for. Or they couldn’t have a conventional practice, because they’d never finished med school or been barred from practicing.

I thought about that a moment longer. Maybe I’d just found a way in.

twenty-five

An hour later, I was waiting at a bus shelter for a MUNI bus over to UCSF medical school. It was a little before six in the evening, the going-home hour, and several other people waited with me. Others moved around us in a thin but steady stream.

I wasn’t sure whether the medical library would be open to the general population, or exactly what data base or archives I needed to ask for, but if somehow I could find a listing of doctors who’d been barred from practicing medicine in San Francisco in the past several years, I might find doctors who would be open to an overture from Skouras.

My theory was that Skouras would feel most comfortable reaching out to a man. No matter how ruthless he was, I didn’t believe he’d ask a woman to help him use a powerless teenager as an incubator. So if I was right about that, it would narrow the field of candidates some. There weren’t as many men practicing obstetrics as there used to be; it was an area increasingly dominated by women. A male ob/gyn who’d been suspended or expelled from the profession: That just might be a narrow enough bottleneck that I could catch the right suspect there.

In addition, a doctor with a prescription-drug problem, once separated from his supply, might quickly need money. That’d be an extra incentive to get in bed with someone like Skouras.

I was theorizing wildly and I knew it. This kind of work was uncharted territory for me. Not to mention the fact that all of this depended on my initial premise being correct: that Nidia was pregnant with a Skouras baby. This bordered on pointless.

The bus was approaching, but now I was undecided. As the people around me began to move into boarding position, I stayed back and glanced away, then stepped directly into the path of a well-built, nicely dressed man, who happened to be the lead gunman from the tunnel, the one I’d called Babyface.

When he saw me, surprise rippled clearly across his face and his steps faltered. Then a mask of normalcy fell over his face. He was very good. All this took maybe two seconds.

The bus opened its doors with a pneumatic hiss, and a section of the Chronicle skated around my feet. As if nothing had happened, I turned my attention away from him and stepped up, onto the bus. I’d been distracted enough that I didn’t have the fare ready, and it took me a moment of rummaging in my messenger bag to find the coins inside.

I paid and moved down the aisle. Behind me, I heard someone else dropping coins into the fare box. I didn’t look back but kept going until I found a seat close to the back of the bus.

When I was seated and looked up, Babyface was standing over me.

“Hailey?” he said. “That’s your name, right? We met in Texas, remember?” He was looking at me with that same half-benign curiosity in his heavy-lidded eyes that he’d shown in the tunnel.

“Yeah,” I said. “Hailey Cain.”

I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know. Clearly, he and his guys had looked through the personal items they’d taken off me down in the tunnel.

“You mind if I sit down?” Without waiting for an answer, he slid down into the seat, forcing me to move over.

He was wearing a leather bomber jacket over a cream-colored shirt, dark trousers, good shoes, but no tie, no briefcase or PDA. It would have been hard to say what his line of work was or where he was coming from.

He said, “I wasn’t expecting to run into you here. I thought you lived, what, in Los Angeles?”

I understood where he’d gotten that idea: The driver’s license he and his guys took off me in Mexico had my old L.A. address on it. But we both knew the truth: Babyface hadn’t been expecting to run into me anywhere aboveground.

“I do,” I said. “I’m just up here for a few days.”

We were playing a game. I wasn’t sure what it was. But he hadn’t been shadowing me. I’d seen surprise clearly on his face, however briefly, when he first caught sight of me. Had he been shadowing me, intending to kill or even seriously question me, he would have waited to get me someplace private. I didn’t think Babyface had any idea of what I was doing in San Francisco. He’d seen me on the street, his curiosity was provoked, he’d followed me to satisfy it. This was plain-view reconnaissance, the kind you did with an enemy so inferior that you had no fear of it. That was how he saw me, as no threat.

That was how I wanted to keep it, then. Sometimes you have to swallow your pride and get away clean.

I spoke softly. “I don’t know what happened to Nidia, and I don’t care.” I hunched my shoulders slightly, trying to project fear. “All I want is to forget about it. Every night I feel guilty, wondering why I came home alive and she didn’t.”

“You don’t need to feel guilty about that,” he said. “You’re just a kid who got mixed up in something a lot bigger than you realized.”

I nodded and stared straight ahead, at the grab bar on the seat in front of me.

Babyface’s voice was almost kind as he said, “If you forget all about this, you’re going to live a long and happy life, Hailey.” He took my hand, squeezing it as if to comfort me.

I nodded again.

“Well, this is my stop.”

It wasn’t his stop. But now his curiosity was satisfied.

Babyface said, “One thing, though. One of my guys couldn’t get out of the way of your car in time.”

In my mind’s eye I saw the Mexican tunnel, how two men had been almost directly in my path as I floored the Impala’s gas pedal.

Babyface took my little finger between two of his and said, “He’s never going to walk right again.”

Then he did something quick and efficient with his hand, and I both heard and felt bone crack as he broke my little finger.

twenty-six

“I need to get out of the city,” I told Serena. “It’s gotten too hot up here.”

It was around ten in the evening. I was sitting on the bed, holding the cell phone in my uninjured hand. My broken finger was splinted to its neighbor, the left ring finger.

The splint wasn’t a doctor’s handiwork; I hadn’t gone to the ER. After Babyface had gotten up and walked to the exit door, I’d stayed where I was sitting, bent over with pain, feeling the aftershock ringing up the bones of my hand and past my wrist. If anyone around me understood what had just happened-and believe me, I’d made noise when the bone snapped, a sound between a yelp and a short scream-they were determinedly refusing to show it. Rule number one of city life: Don’t Get Involved.

Then, as if nothing had happened, I spent an hour and a half fruitlessly looking through Medical Board of California newsletters for the thumbnail reports on disciplinary actions against doctors. Finally the pain got distracting enough that I went home, found Aries’s first-aid kit, and splinted my finger the best I could. I would have liked something stronger than Advil for the pain but didn’t have access to it.

Serena said, “You’re coming back to L.A.?”

“I ran into one of Skouras’s guys today,” I said. “The head gunny. Now he knows I’m alive and in San Francisco.”

“He recognized you?”

“More than. He broke my finger.”

“Jesus, Hailey,” Serena said.

Had Babyface guessed that what I said about being “up for a few days” was bullshit? Did he truly believe I was as frightened and harmless as I’d acted? If he didn’t, I had a problem. San Francisco wasn’t a big city. Forty-nine square miles wasn’t a lot when you had to share it with someone who’d already tried to kill you once.

Serena said, “I thought you didn’t like being in L.A. Because of you-know-who.”

“I don’t,” I said, “but it’s been a year, and besides, where you live is pretty far from Marsellus’s L.A.”

Even so, I thought grimly that, having exiled myself from L.A. a year ago, now I was making deadly enemies in the north, too. Not wise. There was always Oregon and Washington, but they weren’t for girls like me. I could never learn to walk in Birkenstocks.

“Well, you know my place. There’s always room for one more girl on the run,” Serena said. “But what’re you going to do once you get down here?”

“Research,” I said. “I think that trying to find Nidia through Skouras’s real-estate holdings is the best prospect. He’s got to be hiding her somewhere.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Serena said. “I don’t know how you learned to do this shit, prima. I can’t think of anyone else I know who could have done what you’ve done.”

“The thing is…”

“What?”

“I can’t do this alone,” I said. “If I find Nidia, there’s going to have to be a rescue mission. I can’t go in single-handedly.” I paused. “Skouras’s men are like soldiers. Criminals, but soldiers. I need the same kind of guys on my side, guys who don’t scare easy and can shoot.”

“You want El Trece,” Serena said.

“Nothing against your sucias, but this is out of their league,” I said. “Yeah, I need your homeboys. I hate to ask, Serena. This will be dangerous.”

“I know.”

“And they won’t do it for me, a white stranger. I need you to ask on my behalf.”

She was silent so long that I thought she was going to say no. Then she said, “It is a big thing, and I’ll ask it for you, but there’s something I want from you in return.”

“Anything I can do, I will.”

“Take your beating. Get jumped in.”

This was her old tease, about me becoming one of her sucias. Except this time her tone left no doubt that she was serious.

“Serena,” I said. “We’ve had this conversation before. There’s too many white people out there already trying to be something they’re not. I won’t join them.”

“That’s not what this is,” she said. “It’s symbolic. You want me to go to the guys and ask them to ride on a mission with you, first you gotta be blood.”

“That’s my point. I’ll never really be one of you.”

“You’ll always be different,” she said. “But I’m different, too. How many girls shave their heads, put in work like a guy? What made me different let me become a leader.”

“But-”

“But nothing. You’re always saying you’ll never really be one of us, but you know how often white people tell people like me to act white, to assimilate? They know we’ll never really be one of them, but if we want the good job, the big house, we’re always getting asked to make the effort. Why is it different when I ask you to make the effort?”

I stretched out on the bed and didn’t say anything.

“I won’t ask that much of you, either, afterward,” she said. “I know you’re never gonna steal cars for me and then kick it in my living room with my girls. But you want my help, that’s my price.”

There was an interesting correlation in Latin. The noun for close relative or good friend was necessarius. The same word, as an adjective, meant unavoidable. Family and obligation had been inseparable in the Roman mind. That’s what this was about: Serena was my necessaria.

In other words, home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to beat you up.

“All right,” I said. “Yeah, okay. I will.”