Wild Instinct

20

At the wheel of her black Explorer, Daniela follows her son using the TeenShield app on her phone, which is propped up in a console cupholder beside a caffeine-and-sugar-loaded energy drink.

She has recently — and secretly — downloaded the TeenShield software onto Jesse’s smartphone, allowing her to see his emails coming and going, read his texts, watch his social media interactions, and locate him in real time through GPS. It even has a geo-fencing feature that notifies her when Jesse enters a “Forbidden Zone” — an area where Daniela doesn’t want him be.

She’s still getting used to the bizarre power of this kid-protection app, of which Jesse is of course oblivious. And she’s trying to get used to the idea that although she’s protecting him, she’s betraying him, too. She’s terrified that he’ll find out. If he did, it would drive him away, into the very things she’s trying to protect him from.

She’s four cars and a hundred yards behind him.

He’s supposed to be in class right now, thinks Daniela.

Instead, he’s in tart Lulu Vega’s cobalt blue Subaru, eastbound on First Street, headed toward Barrio Dogtown.

Just half an hour ago, Daniela was sitting with Gale in the Moulin Café, having concluded her interview with the annoyingly cool and not-very-credible Norris Kennedy. Talk about a tart, thinks Daniela. A Tarlow tart.

As a strict Catholic, Daniela has a strong dislike of morally loose, privileged women. And respect and affection for the young victims she encountered in Vice, many of them innocent girls.

Virgins once, as she was, and of course was the Holy Mother.

Norris Kennedy, she thinks, to whom Lew Gale showed curiosity and respect and checked out with unsubtle interest.

She looks at Lulu’s Subaru, remembering the look on Gale’s face as Norris Kennedy walked down Forest toward Coast Highway in Laguna. While, according to TeenShield, Jesse was in Enrique’s Liquor, the liquor store closest to her home, with a reputation for selling beer to minors with fake IDs. Definitely a Forbidden Zone.

Now Daniela follows the car south onto Edgar Place, then east on Colton, then right on Victor.

There’s four cars between them now and she can see from her elevated SUV view that Jesse’s driving.

The neighborhood is 1940s, stucco walls and wood-shake-roof one-stories. Twenty years newer than her bungalow a few miles west in Tustin. But the same leaf-strewn magnolias and avocado trees centered in sun-starved front lawns, same grape-stake fences surrounding backyards. Cars on the street and driveways and even lawns. A gleaming cherry red Chevelle lowrider under a blue tarp.

Graffiti on cinder-block walls and curbs, even on the metal phone-company switch boxes.

Varrio DT

Barrio Dogtown, alright.

Jesse pulls right into a driveway, and Daniela glides to a lucky spot three doors short.

She watches them park and get out, cuts her engine.

Jesse’s got his standard black skinny jeans and a black Death Games T-shirt on and his clunky black Doc Martens. A case of Modelo dangles from a skinny arm; from the other his camo gaming duffel, most likely containing his two-part keypad, VR headsets, and a dozen games, all first-person shooter/fighter featuring spectacularly gory gun deaths, sword decapitations, machete dismemberments, grenade mayhem, etc.

She wonders if it contains some of the condoms she left in his room after he told her about this girl in his class, Lulu Vega.

In the side-view profile she has of Jesse just now, his face looks like Tim Malone’s must have looked at eighteen.

Lulu is barrio chic in her sleeveless red plaid flannel blouse, a black miniskirt, and red ankle-high fashion boots. Her hair is up and her lollipop earrings sway in rhythm with her long-legged strides. She cuts an angle toward the front porch, leading Jesse under a sprawling magnolia whose big spent blossoms litter a threadbare lawn.

The door opens, and Daniela recognizes Flaco Benitez, the big guy from Bowl Me Over. Lulu walks into the house like she owns the place.

Jesse swings his beer through the open doorway, pulls the duffel in, and the door closes shut behind him.

Daniela Mendez leans her head back against the rest, feels the heavy thump of her heart.

Notion #1: Knock firmly on that front door, march in, and order him to come with her. Use her shield if she has to. Which of course could get her suspended. And worse, probably send Jesse packing.

Notion #2: Text him and tell him she’s watching him. When he comes out, flash her headlights just to make sure he knows she’s here.

Notion #3: Text him, say, Hi, I’m working, just seeing how your day is going. Be home regular time she hopes. Ask him casually about his day and see how he covers his visit to Barrio Dogtown.

Notion #4: Cool off, bitch. Have a calm mom talk with your son tonight. Keep your ugly little TeenShield secret but try to put some sense into him. Get your own pathetic, fear-driven butt to the three o’clock interview with Supervisor Kevin Elder. You’ve got a decent chance of being on time if you leave right now.

What it all boils down to is this, Daniela thinks. The harder I try to protect him, the harder I’ll push him away. I can stall and sneak and spy, but if he even suspects, he’ll run from me. I know him. He came from me, and that’s what I would do.

Staring at the front door of the house, Daniela remembers herself at eighteen. She had graduated high school early, was working full-time as a secretary at Azusa Catholic College, part of her sprawling, beloved Church of the Holy Martyr, while she took criminal justice night classes at Citrus College in Glendora. She had applied to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department because she thought being a deputy would be a good career. You could start at a fat sixty-five thousand dollars a year back then, plus overtime, drive a fast car, arrest bad guys, and help innocent people defend themselves against criminals. Her dad had a friend in the Sheriff’s Department, Albert Ybarra, who was a cool guy and said they were always hiring. He said the LASD got a bad name because of its racist gangs, but most of the deputies were good men and women. They backed each other up, both on the streets and off.

And Father Tim said she’d be a good policewoman because she genuinely cared about people, and wrote a letter of recommendation to the LASD Academy. It was the most positive endorsement of her “high character, spiritual strength, intelligence, and unlimited potential” that Daniela could have imagined. Coming from Tim Malone, it hit her like a judgment from the Lord himself.

She remembered crying when she read it, emailed by Father Timothy for her approval and any suggestions to make it better.

Now, using her binoculars to magnify a crack in a window curtain, Daniela sees darkness and the flicker of screen lights and a woman moving inside. As she considers the violent video games soon to be played inside the Barrio Dogtown house, Daniela thinks of her own attraction to guns when she was Jesse’s age. Even before holding or firing a gun, she liked that they could make her equal to other human beings. Instantly. Could protect her. Make her powerful. Years later, after Jesse was born, when she fired her first handgun in training for the Orange County Sheriff’s, she was surprised by its sudden explosive force and the recoil. What a machine, she remembers thinking. I’m a machine with this thing in my hands. I am power. But she never pictured the bloody results, was never enthralled by them like Jesse is at eighteen.

Her eighteenth birthday? A quiet dinner with Mom and Dad. Still the Virgin Dani. Still months away from storming Tim, and almost a year from giving birth to Jesse.

Looking out at the fallen blossoms of the magnolia tree, she remembers what it felt like when she first felt the living thing inside her. Thinking if he’s a boy she could name him Jesus, but decided that would be melodramatic. You think things like that, Daniela knows, when you’re eighteen and overwhelmed by a man you think is directly descended from God.

She wonders what Lulu thinks when she looks at her son. Is it possible that she sees — or thinks she sees — God in him?

Well, maybe.

But more likely she sees a handsome, shy young man who looks at her in a certain way. A young man who’s a fun hang because he’s smart. A really good smile. Still growing to full size, which, judging by his hands and feet, is going to be substantial.

And, as a bonus, she can easily boss him around. He has a desire to please. There’s something guilty in him, too, giving Lulu the same target Daniela sights in on when she’s trying to sway him.

Sometimes Daniela hates herself for exploiting that target. And right now, knowing that Jesse is inside a gangbanger’s roost with a hot woman stronger than he is, she hates Lulu Vega, too.

What does Jesse see in her, Daniela wonders.

Easy. She’s beautiful, confident, and proud. Actually gets good grades, according to Jesse’s Tustin High School counselor, with whom Daniela some weeks ago had a long phone call. Jesse likes smart. Wants to be smart. And if smart is pretty in her short skirt, sleeveless blouse, and hot red side-zip boots, well, thinks Daniela, he definitely sees that. Get a few beers in him and he’d probably crawl through cut glass to impress her. Or do something really stupid like ask Lulu’s older friends in Barrio Dogtown to jump him in.

With her eyes on the front door again, Daniela genuflects swiftly, asks God not to lead Jesse into temptation the way she led Timothy, careful not to suggest that God was in any way to blame for what she did.

Amen.

She starts the Explorer and tells her phone to take her to the Orange County Building in Santa Ana.