Thieves get rich, saints get shot : a novel.

by Jodi Compton.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

Fans of musical theater will recognize the t.i.tle of this book as adapted from a lyric in Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along. So will viewers of the short-lived Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which was where I heard it quoted and loved it.

Hailey's Latin and Spanish are taken from my own studies of those languages. Thanks, though, to copy editor Maureen Sugden for catching an error in my Latin late in the editing process.

PROLOGUE.

"It's me. Hailey."

"I know."

"I thought maybe something was wrong with your voice mail. I left you a message, and you never called back.... Well, listen, I'm coming home to L.A."

"Is that right."

"I ... CJ, what's wrong? Are you p.i.s.sed because I left town without saying good-bye? I wanted to, it's just-"

"Why would that p.i.s.s me off, Hailey? Feel free to come and go as you please. Go down to Mexico and nearly get yourself killed, then come back and tell me nothing."

"Where did you hear about that?"

"You showed your mother the scars from where you got shot. She told my mother about it, who told me. It's great hearing this stuff thirdhand, by the way. It's not like you and me mean anything to each other."

"You mean everything to me, dammit. It's just that ... it's complicated."

"Your life is complicated because you make it complicated. If it ever gets simple, you'll go out and recomplicate it by any means necessary."

"That's not fair. You don't know what happened."

"Whose fault is that?"

"I kept you out of it because I was trying to protect you."

"Yeah? Let me make that easy on you, then. I don't want to see you when you get back into town. Don't call me, don't come around my place. Understand?"

"CJ ..."

"Do you understand?"

I've been slow to realize it, but a lot of what's happened in the past four months has to do with my cousin CJ and the conversation I had with him on New Year's Eve, just days after losing one of my fingers-and nearly my life-to a mobster's hired thugs. Since then my behavior has not been unimpeachable. Impeachable would be a very fair word to describe my actions. Or maybe acting out, as the psychologists say.

But the Good Friday killings, as the media is calling them, I had nothing to do with those. Because at the time I was over four hundred miles away, committing an entirely different crime.

a day in the life.

1.

good friday/early april.

You never realize how few stars pierce through the light-leached night sky over Los Angeles until you get out of the city. Way out. That's where I was tonight, at a little past eleven, in the desert on the edge of a lonely secondary highway near a railroad crossing, straddling my motorcycle and looking up at the sky. About the only thing I recognized in the dazzling treasure chest above me was the arched three-star handle of the partially visible Big Dipper.

Experts say that my generation can recognize, on average, two to three constellations and six to seven species of trees but over a thousand corporate logos. Supposedly a lot of us also can't find America on a world map, either.

I say, does it really matter whether Americans can find America on a map? What are we afraid of, that people will go to Canada and not be able to find their way back?

In my prior life as a sincere person, I would have gotten really bent out of shape about young Americans' geographic illiteracy. Not anymore. A lot of those teenagers who can't find the USA on a map can tell you, block by block, which gangs control which territory in their part of town, where it's safe to walk and where it's not. That's what keeps them from getting killed. n.o.body they know has ever been shot for not finding the United States on a map. People know what they need to know.

I know, for example, that there isn't much out here in the desert except, about four miles east, the laboratories of a major pharmaceutical company. And I know that the company's delivery drivers are instructed to stop, like school buses do, at the railroad crossing. My reconnaissance on a previous night suggests that nearly all of them do. By the time they cross the point where I am now, they're lumbering back up to twenty or twenty-five miles per hour, a manageable speed at which to have a blowout. And one of them is definitely going to have one.

That was why I'd come out here: to hijack a truck with my old friend Serena "Warchild" Delgadillo. I had a mask and a baseball cap in my backpack and a Browning Hi-Power in a holster concealed at the small of my back, and coiled at my feet was a homemade spike strip, like the kind that police toss across the road to end long-distance pursuits.

The spike strip had been the most time-consuming part of our prep work. Neither Serena nor I was particularly good with tools, and we'd spent hours in the chop shop of a vato affiliated with El Trece, Serena's gang, trial-and-erroring our way to a workable spike strip. Then we'd painted it a non-reflective black so it wouldn't glint in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.

My cell phone, set to its two-way-radio function, crackled to life. "orale, check it out." Serena was on the opposite side of the road, in an SUV with a V6 engine and its backseats removed for greater cargo capacity.

I saw now what Serena had seen, a pair of headlights shimmering silver-white in the distance. "Is that it?" she asked. "Is it showtime?"

"Give me a minute," I said, still looking into the distance.

Waiting, I ran a hand under the hair on my neck, lifting it up and letting it back down. I could feel sweat on the nape of my neck. Most of California had been in the grip of an early-spring heat wave. It would have been more comfortable to pull my hair back, but my motorcycle helmet wouldn't fit over a ponytail. Neither would the ski mask.

The truck drew closer, and I was sure of the shape of the headlights and the size and ma.s.s of the vehicle. I raised the phone again. "Yeah," I said, "that's our guy."

I swung my leg off the bike, scooped up the chain, ran to the edge of the road, and threw it across, watching it skitter and land mostly straight.

The drug-company truck slowed at the tracks, then accelerated again. But only for a moment. There was no dramatic sound, no pop or hiss of air as the tires were punctured, but I saw the brake lights and the truck slow, and then it lumbered to a stop at the edge of the road.

I pulled in the spike strip so we wouldn't accidentally trap an unwanted second vehicle, then pulled on my mask. I was wearing gloves already, not because I expected to leave prints anywhere but because I'd stuffed the smallest finger of the left glove with newspaper so the driver wouldn't be able to tell police that one of the robbers was missing a finger on that hand.

The driver's door of the delivery truck opened, and a man climbed out from behind the wheel. He wanted to know what had gone wrong. It's a little early to be using the past tense, "gone wrong," buddy. Things are about to go wronger.

Serena, masked like me, walked out of the shadows behind the man and clicked off the safety on her Glock.

"Put your hands up and keep them up where I can see 'em," she said.

He stiffened, his gaze going from her masked face to the gun and back to her face.

"Don't be afraid," Serena said. "It's just a little robbery. Happens several thousand times a day in America. Take a walk over to my a.s.sociate"-she raised her chin at me, standing across the highway-"and please note that she, like me, is armed, so don't make any sudden moves, like you're reaching for something."

When he got to my side of the road and I'd gotten behind him with the gun, he said, "I have kids."

"Then be smart," I told him. "You're just going to lie down in a ditch for few minutes, that's all."

"That's okay, I guess," he said, his voice stiff and uncertain.

I walked him about thirty yards off, to the dry bed of a drainage ditch. "Go on," I said. "Lie down on your stomach and lace your hands on the back of your neck."

He navigated the downslope carefully, like a guy unused to being outdoors, then got to his hands and knees, then lowered himself to his belly. He placed his hands on his neck, like I'd said.

I raised the cell with my free hand and radioed Serena. "Paratus," I said. Ready.

"Venio," she said.

Serena's first comment on the Latin language, when she'd seen me reviewing flashcards in study hall when we were both fourteen years old, had been, Weird. Now she was studying it herself. It was baffling to both the English and Spanish speakers who surrounded us. More than that, it was highly economical, ideal for text messaging. You could say in three words of Latin things that would take six or seven in English.

Once Latin had been the language of my early-adolescent ambitions, of a cleaner, purer self. Now it had become a code between outlaws.

I heard the engine of an SUV start up, and Serena backed down the shoulder of the road to the truck, her headlights off, only the reverse lights visible. Normally Serena drove a Chevy Caprice, but the SUV was borrowed for tonight's mission. Well, it was borrowed in that Serena had gotten it from one of the vatos in Trece, but I had no illusions that he hadn't stolen it. We'd ditch it somewhere right after unloading our cargo.

I could easily have ridden with Serena in it, but my motorcycle was part of our escape plan. If things went wrong, she could jump on the back of my bike and we'd be gone. The SUV wasn't much of a getaway car, V6 or not, but my bike was a different story. It was an Aprilia, built for speed. There wasn't much on the road that could outrun it, including the average police-issue Crown Vic.

Once Serena and I had made the spike strip and I'd done reconnaissance on the truck routes and found a safe place to do this, the plan had fallen together with wonderful simplicity. Done right, it would take about five minutes. Serena would know exactly what she needed from the truck, what was resellable and what wasn't. She had been robbing pharmacies back when I was still ... well, back when I was still sincere.

After we'd pulled back the spike strip, it didn't matter if a car came along before Serena was finished unloading. The delivery truck was safely off the road and the SUV parked well to the side of that, lights off, in the shadows. People drive past stalled vehicles all the time. Samaritans are rare.

The driver, lying in the ditch with his head turned to the side, said, "My older daughter's in an Easter pageant on Sunday."

"Be quiet," I said.

What I wanted to say was, For G.o.d's sake, I'm not a serial killer. You don't have to flood me with biographical information so I'll see you as a person. But I didn't, because that was a little too lighthearted and rea.s.suring. When vics get rea.s.sured, they get overconfident, and then they do stupid things. I didn't want this guy fantasizing about getting some kind of special commendation from the company after thwarting a robbery, up in front of a whole auditorium full of applauding executives. That would be bad, because if this guy acted up, I knew I couldn't shoot a union-card-carrying hourly employee whose daughter was going to be in an Easter pageant. But Serena, across the road, might.

Then my cell phone crackled again. "Ecce," Serena's voice said. Loosely translated, Heads up.

There was a second pair of headlights coming down the road. The same size, the same shape.

I'd done some scouting on this location, but my observations hadn't indicated that the trucks ran on any sort of schedule. The plan tonight had been to simply wait until one came. I certainly hadn't been expecting a second truck so soon.

I raised the radio: "Voles?" I asked Serena. You want to?

"Faciamus," she said. Let's do it.

I couldn't leave the first driver unwatched to go get the second from Serena, so I added, switching to Spanish, "Cuando traigas el conductor aqui, seas tierna." When you bring the driver over here, be gentle. I'd switched to Spanish because Serena's Latin wasn't very advanced yet, and I didn't want there to be any confusion, not when people could get hurt.

"Claro," she said, and her dark silhouette moved quickly and lightly across the highway to get the spike strip. She bent and sent it skating across the asphalt, and we were ready for the second truck's approach.

Ten minutes later I heard Serena slam the cargo door of the SUV, finished with the loading. I waited for her to pull onto the highway before I spoke to the two drivers lying on the ground. "Count to a thousand before you get up," I said. Serena had taken their keys. They'd be out here awhile. "I don't want to see either of your heads prairie-d.o.g.g.i.ng up into my line of sight before I'm out of here, okay?"

As I turned to go, the second driver, a woman, spoke. "I don't know how you live with yourself."

"Deb, shhh," the man said.

I stopped and looked back. "The company you work for has made record profits off its erectile-dysfunction drug, which was only a minor variation on impotence drugs already on the market," I said. "How much of that money did they put into research on malaria or the rarer cancers? They did find money in the budget, though, for research on a new weight-loss drug."

The woman said, "That's not a justification."

"I'm not in the justification business," I said.

I scrambled up the steep side of the ditch, then turned back, adding something I knew they wouldn't understand. "That duty-and-honor thing? I'm over it."

2.

I've never had strong feelings about the G.o.d-versus-Darwin debate, but if I ever doubt that humans evolve, I have only to look back at my life. I'm only twenty-four, and already I've left a series of selves behind me: Army brat, West Point cadet, aimless L.A. twenty-something, San Francis...o...b..ke messenger, and now, second-in-command to a rising Latina gangster.

I know where you probably got hung up: Go back to the part about West Point-what was that? Yeah, it's true. I don't recommend it, but here's how, in five easy steps, you get from being in the top fifteenth percentile of your cla.s.s at the United States Military Academy to jacking trucks in the desert.

Step One: Get diagnosed with a tiny but inoperable brain tumor that severely blunts your fear and compromises your judgment, thus disqualifying you from Army service and wiping out all your plans for the future. Step Two: While sober and obeying all traffic laws, accidentally hit and kill a child who darts from between parked cars on Wilshire Boulevard. Step Three: In an attempt to make symbolic amends for that death, get involved in protecting a pregnant runaway from a mobster. Nearly get killed, twice. Step Four: Survive that and come home only to get slapped down by the one person you've loved and counted on since childhood.

That was my cousin, known to the world as Cletus Mooney, the Grammy-winning music producer. To me he was simply CJ. We'd been born ten days and nearly a thousand miles apart, and met for the first time at the age of eleven, when my mother and I, shortly after my father's death, had moved in with his family in their farmhouse outside Lompoc, California. CJ and I had taught each other to kiss in the shade of the willow tree outside his parents' home. It wasn't right to say we were "inseparable," because I'd gone to West Point and he'd gone to L.A., to find a way into the music business without a single contact. But our emotional bond had been unbreakable. Until New Year's Eve and that disastrous phone call.

Here's the difference between rich people and the rest of us: When most of us have arguments with the people we love, we slam out of the house, let the screen door bang shut behind us, and walk around the block a couple of times until we cool off. But when you've got the kind of money CJ now had, you don't have to stop at a block or two. You can let the screen door bang shut behind you and be halfway across the world. Which is basically what he did. At first CJ had been back east, recording at a friend's studio in New York City, but now he was in Africa, traveling and looking for talent in the music clubs of Dakar, Nairobi, and Accra. No one knew when he planned to come back. G.o.d knew he hadn't left any contact information for me. I'd sent him a postcard with my new address on it but hadn't gotten any response.

Which brings me to Step Five: Go lick your wounds with an old friend, a career criminal whose antisocial ways increasingly make sense to you.

That was Serena. When it came to personal evolution, she made me look like a piker. If you knew me at twelve, you'd recognize me at twenty-four, and not just because I still have the same port-wine birthmark high on my right cheekbone. That couldn't be said of Serena.

When I'd first met her, back in the seventh grade near Lompoc, she resembled the telenovela character Betty La Fea, with harsh black bangs cut straight across her forehead and braces her immigrant family went into debt to afford. She'd also had an unbecoming layer of baby fat on her face, though she wasn't at all overweight; she'd been a speedy and accurate striker on the soccer team where I was a midfielder.

By ninth grade, in the halls of our high school, Serena appeared as a proto-g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ger, outlining her lips in pencil three shades darker than her lip gloss and shaving off her eyebrows to redraw them. Then, after moving to Los Angeles with her family, she'd reinvented herself as a virtual boy, with a shaved head, Pendletons, and khakis, and run with the Thirteenth Street clique, or Trece. After a stint in jail, she emerged visibly feminine again but no less committed to la vida, and she'd formed a clique of girls she called her sucias, supposedly a "girls' auxiliary" to Trece, but who banged just as hard. Serena had dreamed since childhood of a past life in Vietnam-choppers hovering over the jungle, chaos and fighting-and believed herself to have been an American GI who'd died over there. That was the source of her gang moniker, Warchild, and her conviction that life is war, this time around no less than the last.

The coach who knew the twelve-year-old soccer player, the teachers who shook their heads over the fourteen-year-old underachiever, the gang-suppression officers who ran down alleys after the sixteen-year-old gender-bending chola-none of them would recognize the woman she'd become now. And in fact, conventional wisdom said it was virtually impossible for Serena to be what she was at age twenty-five: the leader of El Trece.

The things we'd done last winter had only raised her profile in the neighborhood. There was more than one version of events in circulation, but basically it was said that Warchild had punked this Italian mobster up north, stolen his grandbaby (or baby, in some inaccurate accounts) right out from under his nose, and gotten away clean.