A Cold and Broken Hallelujah (15 page)

They were in David’s living room in Rose Park. It was less than a mile from the small back house that Jesús shared with his family, but it felt like a whole other city. Trees all up and down the street, the houses all fixed up and painted with lawns. And no apartment buildings. It was a nice place. David’s father didn’t live with him either, but at least David got to see him most weekends and he helped out with child support for David and his little brother. And David’s mom had a good job, too.

“You just got his voice mail?” David asked.

“Yeah. Maybe he’ll call back.”

“You know what he does for a job now?”

“No,” Jesús said. “It’s been like six years and all he ever did was send a birthday card like twice.”

Jesús had been right. Of course David was cool with him staying. And his mom wouldn’t be back until like seven in the morning, so she’d probably never even know he’d stayed all night. He used to think sometimes how much he liked it there. He’d spent the night many times when they were younger, and often Jesús would feel envious of his friend. And not just because he got all the new Xbox games and they had a big-screen TV with all the cable channels. It was nice there. David’s mom was kind to him, and he never had to be the one to clean up everybody else’s mess.

“You think I should call the cop?” Jesús asked David.

“I don’t know. If Omar’s gang is the one that shot up the front house, they must think you’re already talking to the police, right?”

“I guess they must. Why else would they do that?”

“You want to try your dad again?” It was almost five.

Jesús did. He heard the same message as before: “This is Roberto. Leave a message and I’ll call you back.” It felt weird to hear his father’s voice. It seemed familiar to him in a way that didn’t make him feel good. Like when you go to the dentist and hear the drill in another room and wonder how you could have possibly forgotten that sound, how it wasn’t the only thing you remembered at all.

“Just the message again. Can I use your charger?”

“Sure.” David looked like he didn’t know what to say. “You want to have something for dinner?”

They microwaved Stouffer’s lasagna while Jesús’s phone charged.

Jesús tried to pretend everything was normal, and a few times, for a few minutes, he succeeded. They watched TV and played
Black Ops II
for a while. He tried to read while David worked on a paper that was due the next day. Jesús thought he should have been working on it too since they were in the same English class, but he hadn’t been to school all week and really couldn’t imagine when he’d be able to go back. David didn’t get very far, though—because, he said, “I can’t just leave you sitting there worrying.”

The night was almost as hard as the day had been, but Jesús felt better not to be alone. He actually felt less alone than he had all week. But there was another worry tugging at the corners of his awareness. It took hours for him to realize it, but once he thought of it, he couldn’t rid himself of the notion that he was somehow putting David at risk, too. That was why he ran when he heard the shots—he thought he’d put Maria and his mom in danger if he stayed. And now he was thinking the same about David. But it was different, wasn’t it? They knew where he lived. There’d be no way they could find him here, though. He kept telling himself that.

Then he wondered who might guess where he was. His mom, maybe. Pedro for sure. But his brother wouldn’t say anything. Could he even tell anyone anything while he was in jail? He asked himself if there was anyone else. He didn’t think so. But the worry wouldn’t go away.

Even after they went to bed, with Jesús on the floor of David’s room on top of an unrolled sleeping bag, he listened to his friend’s soft snoring and thought about them pulling up outside this house and unloading just as they had at his home that morning.

Jesús’s breathing accelerated, and he felt a kind of pressure on his chest. It seemed like there wasn’t enough air in the room, and he imagined himself inside the sleeping bag and feeling it constrict around him, tighter and tighter, until he could barely breathe at all.

He closed his eyes and tried to force himself to slow down his inhalations, but he couldn’t. It kept getting worse and worse, and he became certain that he was dying.

The next thing he knew, David was holding him by the shoulders and telling him to be quiet, that it was okay, everything was all right.

Slowly, he began to calm down. His breathing returned to a more normal rhythm, and he started to cry.

“It’s okay,” David said again. How many times had he said it? Ten? Twenty?

Jesús was embarrassed because of the tears and wiped his face on his hand and then found himself not knowing what to do with his fistful of snot. David went into the bathroom and brought back a box of Kleenex.

“You okay?”

Jesús nodded.

“I think maybe I should call my mom.”

“No, don’t. I’ll just go, okay? You’ll get in trouble.”

“I won’t. She’ll be cool, I swear.”

Jesús didn’t say anything, and David took that as acceptance.

When she got there, less than an hour later, she held Jesús in her arms and let him cry and cry.

He couldn’t remember ever feeling that safe before.

14

D
UCT TAPE
, 3M
BRAND
,
ONE ROLL
:
PARTIALLY USED
,
APPROX
. 1/3
REMAINING
.

Jesús told Jen and me the story in the car on the way to the station.

“You hungry?” I asked him. He and I were both in the backseat of Jen’s RAV4.

“No,” he said. “David’s mom made bacon and pancakes.”

“She seemed really nice.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Have you talked to my mom?”

“No, not yet. We’ve been trying to get her on her cell phone, but she hasn’t returned any of my calls.”

He looked out the window without answering.

“Do you know where she is?” I asked.

“No.”

“She disappeared with your sister after the shooting.”

“You didn’t keep track of her or something?” he said. “Aren’t you guys supposed to do that?”

I could see the smile in Jen’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Yeah, we are. That was somebody else’s case, though. We didn’t know it might be connected to the thing with Pedro until last night.”

“What if they shot them too?” He pulled the seat-belt strap across his chest away from his body and twisted it in his hands.

“They didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“We’re homicide cops. We know about everybody who gets shot in Long Beach.”

“Is there a lot of people who do?”

“Yeah. But we know about all of them.”

That seemed to relax him. I hadn’t been dishonest with him, but I still felt my conscience nagging at me.
We do know about all of them
, I thought,
eventually
.

“When we get to the police station, there are going to be other people who need to talk to you, but we’ll be there, too, okay?”

He looked at me as if he wanted to say something, but he pinched his mouth into a slit and just nodded.

“What’s on your mind, Jesús?” I said.

“I’m scared.”

“It’s going to be okay.”

Jen’s eyes caught mine again and I knew she was thinking the same thing that I was. We were both hoping I hadn’t lied to a frightened teenage boy whose father’s murderer was, in all likelihood, at that very moment hoping to kill him too.

Patrick met us in the squad room. He had a trace of a limp that I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been looking for it, but his left arm was still in the sling he’d left the hospital with the night before.

Jen gave him a sympathetic wince when she saw it. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault. We’re two fully grown detectives. We can handle things.” It was clear from the tone in his voice that he didn’t find any more veracity in that statement than she did.

Ruiz was in his office with a social worker from Child Protective Services who was there to help break the news to Jesús about his father and to evaluate any other needs he might have.

The lieutenant came out and I introduced him to Jesús.

“How are you, son?” He still had faint traces of the Rio Grande in his voice from his days as a Texas Ranger. Otherwise he never would have been able to get away with that “son” appellation in his greeting.

“Okay,” Jesús said.

Ruiz spoke with a warmth in his voice that I’d only heard him use on rare occasions when talking to a victim’s next of kin. “I need you to come into my office for a minute, okay?”

Jesús hesitated.

“You want me to come with you?” I asked.

He looked at Ruiz, then at me. He shook his head, and Ruiz led him across the room and into the office, gently closing the door behind them.

With all the activity, it didn’t seem much like a Saturday after all.

When they came out of the office, Jesús didn’t seem too shaken with the news of his father. “You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah.” He lifted his shoulders slightly in half a shrug. “I barely remember him. He hasn’t talked to us in years.”

“But you tried to call him yesterday.”

“I didn’t know what else to do.”

“I’m sorry,” I said to him.

“Thanks. Now what do we do?”

Jesús, Jen, Patrick, and I set things up in the same conference room where we’d talked to Henry Nichols. We wanted to make the boy as comfortable as possible.

“What happened to your arm?” Jesús asked Patrick.

“I got in a fight,” Patrick said.

“Did you win?”

“Not this time, but there’s going to be a rematch.”

We spent a long time talking. Jesús took us back several months to his initial meeting with Omar and Francisco.

“I thought they were bad news the first time I saw them. They think they’re all big time with their sleeves and everything. But I knew they were going to get Pedro in trouble. Guess I was right.”

He wanted to talk. It had been building up in him since before Bishop’s murder. He had watched his brother going off the rails and felt powerless to help him and afraid to reach out to anyone else. Now that he knew he’d been correct in his predictions, his inaction was troubling him.

Jen said, “There is no way this is your fault. No way at all.”

That seemed to comfort him for a little while, so we tried to nudge him in the direction of talking more about the buildup to the murder.

“I didn’t really know what was going on, right up to the day it was supposed to happen. Pedro told me the other guys wanted me to hang out with them and help them with something, but he didn’t say what they wanted me to do. I didn’t want to do it, but Pedro kept saying that it would be really good for us—the family, he meant. I was worried about how things were going with Maria and my mom, but Pedro kept saying that this would set us up.”

“What did you think they were going to do?”

“I don’t know. I knew it would be bad. Maybe breaking in someplace or something.”

“When did you get out?”

“Not until it was almost time to go. We were at Omar’s house. They have a fancy place, kind of by the beach? Pedro said they wanted me to film something on this cool new Galaxy he got. I like to make videos sometimes. My phone won’t do them, but last year Pedro got a pretty good Android that had video. Sometimes he’d let me use it.”

“And that’s what he wanted you to do on Tuesday?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know what they wanted me to shoot.”

“How did you find out?”

“I was in the bathroom. I was in there for a while, and when I came back, I heard them talking about how were they going to carry the gas. So I knew they were going to burn something.”

“But you didn’t know what?”

Jesús shook his head.

“What happened then?”

“I asked what they needed gas for. ‘You’ll see,’ Omar said. That scared me even more.”

Omar told him they’d planned on taking two cars to wherever they were going. Omar was going to take Francisco in his Mustang, and Pedro was going to drive Francisco’s Scion with Jesús. Why this was all so complicated, Jesús could only guess.

They were already on the way when Jesús asked Pedro what was really going on.

“This is a really big deal,” Pedro said. “Don’t screw this up. It’s gonna be really good for us.”

“What are we going to do?” Jesús was almost crying, and he knew Pedro could hear it in his voice.

“We’re gonna do a favor for somebody Omar knows. It’s a really big favor.”

“It’s bad, isn’t it?”

“Somebody saw something they shouldn’t have. We’re gonna fix it.”

“What are you going to do, Pedro?”

“We’re gonna fix it.”

“With gas?”

Pedro stared through the windshield at the taillights of the BMW in front of them.

“I don’t want to do this.”

“Don’t be a pussy.”

“You shouldn’t do it either.”

“We don’t got no other choice.”

“Mom’s going to get a new job.”

Pedro looked at him with the saddest expression he’d ever seen on his big brother’s face.

“Please, Pedro, let’s just go home, okay?”

“Too late for that.”

Jesús asked again. But Pedro did that thing he always did when he was done talking. His face became a stone-like mask, unmoving and emotionless.

Jesús knew his brother had said all he would, and if he kept trying, Pedro would just get pissed off. And that would make things even worse.

They were getting close to downtown. Jesús knew what he had to do. When Pedro slowed down at the red light at Ocean and Alamitos, Jesús put one hand on his seat-belt buckle and one on the passenger’s side door handle. As soon as they rolled to a stop, he released the seat belt and flung open the door. Before Pedro could do anything, Jesús was already running past the gas pumps at the 7-Eleven on the corner.

He kept going until he couldn’t run any longer. Around the corner and halfway up the block on First, he stopped and leaned over with his hands on his knees to catch his breath. He looked behind him to see if Pedro was following. It didn’t look like it. Just in case, though, he cut back to Ocean at the corner, figuring that if Pedro went looking for him, he’d guess that Jesús would head straight for home. He wouldn’t go back to Ocean. Pedro wasn’t smart enough for that.

“What did you do then?” I asked.

“I walked up Ocean, then cut over on Junipero and walked home.”

We pressed him for more details. But he wasn’t able to add much to what he’d already given us. We now had confirmation that Bishop’s murder was more than just three kids with sociopathic tendencies. We knew that Omar, Francisco, and Pedro were out to make their bones killing a man who’d witnessed something he shouldn’t have. Another answer that led us to another question. That’s the nature of police work. You keep answering the questions until there aren’t any more to ask. Then your case is either closed or it’s cold. We had Bishop’s killers. We could close the case with what we already had on our plates. People would start pressing us to do that before too long. But that wasn’t enough. Those three teenage wannabes didn’t kill Bishop. They were just the weapon. I wouldn’t be able to rest until I knew who aimed them at him and pulled the trigger.