All Involved (24 page)

“There's a time to talk,” he says, “and a time to act.”

He sounds tough, but you can just tell he don't even want to do this, but he's doing cuz he knows I'll take his head off his shoulders from a foot away if he don't. That's the beauty of getting one of the shotties all to myself. I could've taken him out earlier but it's way more fun this way, making him march.

I tell both drivers to stay at the cars and keep them warm cuz we're coming out hot and right when we're all ready to roll up, I make Momo go first, right in front of me. A shield if I need it, you know? The six of us and Momo roll up army style, pure stealth passing through that Boardwalk where the only sounds are our footsteps and leaves and branches getting pushed back. I smile knowing they won't even see us coming. We're Viet-Conging this shit. For Ramiro, for Fox, for Lil Blanco that got it by the fence, and all them others at the party that got caught up.

We go through an alley with garages on either side and then back into the Boardwalk and out onto Pope in one long fast line like ants, looking both ways but nobody's there either, and then we go through one more alley to Duncan Avenue. Momo's first out and I'm second. Right away I spot the house Fate and that
manflora
Payasa and them been living in and jog my ass up the block.

Turns out Momo was good for something after all, with the way he came up with that info on where they stay. I asked him how he knows for sure, and he says his hypes say all kinds of shit when they're high, and when this motherfucker Lil Creeper gets high he talks and talks and so Momo would ask him questions sometimes about Fate's click so he could keep track of what was up, you know? When he said that, I just kinda nodded, cuz that was smart but it was still some viper shit.

Right now the house's set up behind a chain-link fence hip-high that leads my eye to three mailboxes out front of a shared driveway that goes way back. To the right of that concrete strip is the house. It's a boxy, sand-colored piece of stucco shit, one with a roof that slopes toward the street, like a baseball hat down low, and it's held up by six spaced posts. It's got a front door between the middle two and windows
on either side that look out on the saddest lawn you ever seen.

The shades are drawn up tight, but there's a cut of light in the left one showing from the inside, a lamp or something. There's a TV throwing out colors too.
Good
.

I put my hand up right then and I go up the driveway first, around the boxes and onto the lawn, coming straight at the door. No hesitation. For Ramiro. For our Yesenia. When I'm in a good spot, I set my feet and we all do. When I open up, we all open up. We go Al Capone right then, just a line of gangsters unloading.

The window bars don't stop us, but they must be doing something cuz I keep hearing
ping, ping, ping,
and I think that's weird but don't think much of it cuz we blast that glass all the way out. It goes everywhere, scattering over the walkway, the lawn.

I laugh when I blast the security door, like
boo-yaa,
cuz I feel invincible, and you know it ain't iron the way it bends and curls after I put the shotgun on it, and reload, and go again, and when it's kinda hanging there, I'm right up on top of it cuz I rushed up and I'm kicking it off its hinges and ripping at the doorknob and the handle's all dented with buckshot and it comes off in my hand, and I'm like, “Hell, yeah!”

I lean back as far as I can and kick the door, putting all my weight into it, and that shit is wood with no knob or deadbolt so it should just bust under my boot.

It don't. I fucking bounce off!

And my heel
hurts
. My knee too.

So I kick it again. But it's the same thing. Nothing moves.

Behind me, somebody's like, “What the fuck?”

And real quick I scope the hole where the knob used to be, but there's not really a hole there. I mean, it's a hole, but there's something behind it. Iron.

I shove into it with the lip of my gun but it don't go nowhere. Must be thick as manhole covers. It's got dents in it from buckshot and I run my fingers over it and it's still so hot it burns my fingers and as I rip them away, I'm like,
What the fuck?

That's when it hits me like a rush of hot water down my back. That's when my whole body gets hot again. And I'm embarrassed and I'm sad and I'm mad all at once. No. No, no.

This shit is a
setup
. The most fucked-up setup there ever was. No.

I walked us right into this shit. Me.
Fuck!

My mouth's dry when I'm about to yell out for homies to save themselves but then lights come on. No, no . . .

Blinding yellow-white lights behind me and from the side, making me blink as I turn, making me close my eyes and raise my shotgun up to my eyebrows to block the light and duck down and that's when I hear the first shot from far away and hear fools scramble.

And I'm thinking
What?
as I scrunch down low as I can and get my back to the house and slide across the stucco and it digs into my back, cutting me as I move fast sideways, toward the corner of the house so I can break out behind.

I scream when I say, “Get the fuck out!” But it comes out strangled.

I hear more blams, faster this time, closer. Like,
blam-blam-blam
. . .

No
.

Bullets whiz and one hits the house over me and stucco explodes above my head with a
crack-thump,
chucking dust and pebbles down into my face, and then it's the worst noise I ever heard, a
brrrat, brrrat
. . .

And that right there's the fat lady singing cuz that's what sound an AK makes when it spits. I don't know how far away it is or where it's aiming, but I feel that noise in my chest, moving my heart around, and I know we're getting done, right here, right now. No, no.

I hear screams everywhere, all around me. My heart's beating hard and fast in my ears, making my head hot and hurting.

No. Everything's too loud now. Too fast.

“No,” I say, and that's all I can think to say.

This shit is my fault. But this's no time to mess with guilt. We gotta do the only thing we can and shoot our way out.

I got almost a roll call of all the homies I let down running in my
head. Best I can do for Ramiro right now, and our Yesenia, and Lil Blanco, and, and . . .

For Fox, and Looney, and . . .

“Shoot them lights out,” I yell, and I pump my shot and raise up blasting at black outlines moving in front of the brightness.

I pump and blast and kill one of the lights with sparks and a
ksssssss,
so I pump and blast again, and that's when I'm out and I know I'm out, but I pump and hit the trigger anyway. But nothing happens.

Is what it is.

I say, “Motherfuckers, you better fucking kill me! You better—”

Whatever else I'm gonna say, the words don't come. I'm flat on my side and I don't even remember falling down.

My ears ring like I got sirens in them. And I'm coughing. That's when I hear four quick pops, like
pop-pop-pop-pop
.

And then somebody falls on me, right on my shoulder too. Hard.

And I wanna see what's going on but I can't really keep my eyes open right then, they're just so heavy.

MAY 2, 1992

12:58
A.M
.

With the way we shot up Joker and them, we knew their homies were coming, we just didn't know when, so Fate had us do everything we could to bunker up. Lu wasn't happy about the plan at first, because it was her house that had to be the decoy, but she came around to it. She liked living better than she liked the other option.

So two nights ago we went door-to-door to clear the block three houses in every direction. It was me, Fate, and Apache mostly, unless homies lived there, and if they did, they talked to their own families. We explained to people that it'd be really a good time to see relatives or friends. We even helped a few load up their cars to get ready. Apache even carried someone's
abuelo
to the car because he couldn't walk himself. Everybody might not have liked it at first, but they did what we asked and left, which was good because Fate didn't want it on his conscience if bullets started flying like he thought they would.

Lu didn't go with us. She'd had a fight with her girl, Lorraine, right as we were gearing up to go. It started in her room first and got louder and louder till the door flew open and they ended up in the living room. There was some screaming and crying from Lorraine and through the doorway, I saw Lu packing a bag with all her girl's clothes and everything in it, and Lu told her not to be such a dumb, dramatic bitch. Right after that, Lorraine threw a bottle of nail polish
at her, hard too. It caught Lu in the left eye as she flinched away, and it gave her a shiner almost instantly. I was surprised Lorraine didn't get her ass beat after that, but Lu held off, and that's when I knew Lu was doing right by her, getting her out, because it just wasn't safe to be here. Her pushing her away meant she cared, but some people you never can explain that to, and Lorraine didn't get it. She drove off crying.

In a way, it worked out for Lu, though, because Elena Sanchez came by to say thanks for killing Joker not too long after that, and they went into Lu's room and shut the door. At first I thought it was just to hear how it went down, even though I know Lu wasn't one for talking about that kind of thing. I didn't know if Lu was trying to flip her to the other team, but I wouldn't be shocked. She's a player. If she could, she would. I guess it depends on if Elena was up for that, but I can't speak to whether or not that went down for sure. They were in there awhile though.

I left before Elena did because Fate needed me across the street. A couple of O.G.'s caught the score of a lifetime by stealing an official city truck that first night of the riots, the tall white kind with a city seal on the doors and a big, tall bed almost four feet high in the back. Ever since they took it they've been able to go wherever they want, wearing the orange vests, and cops and National Guard just wave them through, wherever they want to go, so they've just been driving around looting, hitting construction sites mostly. They got a bunch of tools and materials that got abandoned when everything popped off. They sold them to people in the neighborhood.

Also, they picked up a grip of steel plates, just recruited a small crew of guys to pull them up off the streets and load them in the back. It was the kind the city uses as a base for asphalt or to cover potholes they weren't ready to fix yet, or might never. That steel was half an inch thick and some of the slabs can weigh over three hundred pounds depending on dimensions. We took that right off their hands and used it to secure the house.

We had homies haul it in through the front door and line it up all
along the front wall. Each plate took six of our biggest homies too. The metal was so heavy the drywall groaned when it had to take the weight to the left and right of the front window. We blocked that off to protect the inside of the house, so that if somebody wanted to shoot in, they'd have to aim for the top two inches to get anything through. At first, it was plated up completely, but I took a look and knew it wouldn't work, so I had them moved till a sliver of light could show through and then I set the curtain so you couldn't see the iron from the outside. To me, that was the key to the whole setup. It wouldn't work unless they thought people were inside, so I turned the TV on too and made sure it could be seen from the lawn and from the street.

“If you don't put a flame up,” I said when Apache asked me why I did that, “you can't draw any moths.”

We've been taking shifts across the street since we finished, waiting up in the house of our
compadre
Wizard. It's a little casino house he runs, but he's not here. He's back with his wife in an apartment they kept from when they lived in Lil TJ over on Louise, because he's kind of
paisa,
but the good kind, reliable, even if he's a bit country.

This whole place is empty now, except for us. It doesn't have much of a living room, not one with couches and chairs arranged around a TV or anything. Instead, it's got gambling machines along every wall and little brown chairs in front of them, like the cheap kind you'd find in a bar, the ones where if they break, it's not a big deal.

Gambling is a nice side. You'd be surprised how much money we make on it in a month. The whole block can't get enough of it. People even come from other neighborhoods to check it out because they hear about it. There's twelve machines in here altogether. Ten are slots and two are card games. We call it Mini Vegas. There's a moneychanger machine in the back corner, right next to an iron and an ironing board with a box of wax paper on it because the change
machine is picky. Sometimes, people need to iron bills out flat by sandwiching them between two sheets of wax paper. That was Lu's idea, and it works. After the cash is crisp enough, you put them in and it spits out quarters so you can play Gold Rush with its little miners on it holding up full pans, or Star-Spangled Winner, or any of the other ones.

Nobody's playing the bandits because we cleared the place over a day ago, but still the machines sit there and flash. We're all just sitting in this room, me, Lu, Fate, Apache, Oso, and a couple soldiers here and there. Everybody's strapped up good. Sherms aren't allowed tonight because Fate said so. He wants us sharp, so no drugs. A Cypress Hill tape is playing so low in the background that I only hear guitar squeal samples or snares coming from the boom box.

So this is how we wait, how we've been waiting. Lu's quiet, staring out the window, a little sawed-off across her lap. She's got a good purple shiner on her eye now. On the other end of the room Fate's reading a book called
The Concrete River
by Luis J. Rodriguez, only really stopping to turn the page or take a swig from a beer he sets down between his chair and an AK-47 he's got propped against the wall. Oso's pacing back and forth, but he's careful to avoid Apache, who's flat on his back in the middle of the room, catching some zees. That's how calm he is. The other two are just posted up on chairs, looking at their guns. We've all got sunglasses hanging off the front of our collars, even sleeping Apache, because they'll be important later.

Normally we're not this quiet, but there's a lot weighing on this room. Not only are we wondering when Trouble is going to get it into his head to do something stupid, but by now we're all pretty sure Lil Mosco is never coming back, and that's not something that will ever get talked about. The aftermath of a disappearance like that is always quiet. It's not like you have a heart-to-heart and find out exactly what went down, before the right party apologizes and everybody cries and understands like on TV. Around here, sometimes things have to go unsaid if you want to stay alive.

Nobody's asking me, but I'm okay with Lil Mosco going. I'm not saying I'm good with it, but I'm okay. He was too out of control, to the point where you couldn't always count on him, but even though that's true, I know the only reason it would ever happen was if it was an us-or-him-type situation, a trade, almost, like in baseball. You send one guy and get another in return. Fate gives the big homies Lil Mosco, and we get to keep Fate, or the other scenario is we trade Lil Mosco and the whole click gets to stay alive. I'm fairly certain it's one of those two options, so I convince myself that's how it went down, because right now, there's bigger stuff to deal with.

“Trouble ain't coming,” Oso says. “They didn't come last night neither and that's cuz nobody's that stupid to come in here and try to shoot us up. I mean—”

He shuts up quick when Fate looks at him and gestures toward Apache, in a reminder to Oso to be a little more considerate. It's too late though, Apache's blinking awake. He's yawning.

“Sorry, Patch,” Oso says. The only person on earth who can get away with calling Apache that is Oso. That's family, I guess.

Apache shrugs. He doesn't take it personally. Oso, the big dumb bear, is his cousin and really only here to lift heavy stuff if this goes right. We all know he's jumpy. We all are in our own ways. He's never been through a stakeout like this before, and waiting to kill or die can wear you out. It's exhausting being eyes-up on the block for hours. Which reminds me, have you ever noticed how the loudest sounds seem to be when people are trying hard not to make noise? I think that's because you're tuned in. You're listening hard. You're aware. That's how it is in Mini Vegas right now. And I guess that's what's making Oso so nervous, because he starts talking just to talk, just to hear something other than silence.

“Hey, Patch,” Oso says, “tell us again how you scalped that fool.”

Apache shakes his head. No way is he telling that now. I don't blame him.

“Okay, so”—Oso keeps trying to avoid the quiet by running his
mouth—“you guys heard that one about the O.G. homie that cut his Pachuco cross straight out of his hand with a knife? Was just like”—Oso makes his right two fingers straight and digs at the thumb web in his left—“ahhhh.”

I swear, Oso likes stories too much. I look at Fate and he looks at me. We know this story has gone around forever. It follows me, and maybe it should, because it's about my dad. Nobody really knows that but Fate, though. Most just think it's about some faceless homie, but my mom told me when he left his click in East Los, and when he left us, he cut his cross out of his hand so no one would know he used to be in. He left his click on good terms because he'd put in work and kept his mouth shut. All that bullshit you hear about people having to die to get out is just that. Somehow, though, the way my dad cut his tattoo out grew into this story of a dude who wanted out of the gang so bad he cut it out in front of everybody at a party just to show he was serious. That didn't happen though. My mom says he did it in the garage with a kitchen knife he heated up on the stovetop first.

Fate knows all this. He also knows just by looking at me that I don't want to hear it all over again, the Oso version, so he says, “Hey, Oso, how about you tell us about that one time you shot up all them Crips by yourself when your car stalled?”

Oso smiles and starts telling about how this one time, he was out driving and how, at this red light on Imperial, a car came up beside him with five blacks in it and they looked at him and he looked at them and the big motherfucker driving starts licking his chops like a cartoon wolf and Oso tries to floor it, his car stalls, and right at this big point in his story, right when he's being all quiet for dramatic effect, I sniffle. Not on purpose. Because I can't help it. The smoke has really been bothering my sinuses lately.

Oso jumps on that. “Damn, you still sniffling? You better not get me sick.”

“He ain't sick and he won't get you sick,” Lu says, coming to my
defense without turning around in her chair. “He's got allergies and the smoke's been fucking his nose up ever since the city was on fire.”

“Oh” is all Oso says before he wraps his story with a sad little “so, you know, I just took care of business.”

Lu's already shaking her head at that. She never did like Oso.

“New booty motherfucker,” she says under her breath.

I've known the Veras, and Lu in particular, since before they were involved, which is almost twelve years now, ever since we were next-door neighbors on Louise Avenue, across from Lugo Park. Well, it will be twelve years in August, because my mom moved us from East L.A. in 1980. Out of everybody, Lu is the person who has known me longest in the world. We got along right away and stayed tight all these years. When I joined up, she did too.

I'm pretty sure I'm not like most people. When homies are gone, I don't miss them, even if we spent a lot of time together. For me, when they're not there, they're just not there. I don't even think about it. I don't know if that means there's something wrong with me, but probably there is. As it stands, I know Lu's going through something and I can't imagine it. Ernesto was like my older brother too, but he wasn't, not blood-wise. I've always been an only child, but she has gone from being the youngest to the only kid in the span of a couple days. That's got to be rough.

I've been thinking about it, and my conclusion is Lu knows Lil Mosco's gone for good. She knew on the street a few days ago when she shot up that car. She was sitting right next to me in the backseat and I was watching her as she was breathing in, holding it, and biting her lower lip. I've seen her make that face a few times before: when her dad passed, when Fate told her the house was too hot and she had to move her mom out, and after she got robbed walking home once on Wright Street. She only ever does that face if she's accepting something she doesn't like, something she can't change, and when she's holding in breath like that, biting her lip, and before she needs to breathe out, that's when the Lil Mosco thing must have clicked, because she said, “Shit.” She whispered
it, really, like she was finally accepting it. I don't think anyone else heard her say that.