Ditch Rider (3 page)

“Juan Padilla's body was found at two
A
.
M
. yesterday morning,” I told the Kid. “A witness said it was gang-related and the shooter was a white teenager around six feet tall.”

“Gangs,” the Kid said. “The big girl was right about that.”

“Are there gangs in this neighborhood?” I asked him. I hadn't seen the telltale signs, like graffiti tags all over the walls, pants that went beyond baggy or the t-shirts with Old English letters and comedy and tragedy masks that gang members wear to mourn their dead.

“Sure. They have cars. They can go everywhere. They can go to any high school they want to—if they want to go to school. If they go to the D Home or prison they teach everybody else what they know. It's
La Vida Loca,
the crazy life. Sometimes I fix their cars for them.”

“What are they like?”

“Don't worry about them,
chiquita.
They go after each other, not us.”

I was interested in how gangs had co-opted the symbols of another time and place, the way Elizabethan England had resurfaced in twentieth-century Albuquerque. “Those masks they wear on their t-shirts are the faces of comedy and tragedy,” I said. “What does that mean to them?”

“Smile now, cry later,” he said.

3

O
N
M
ONDAY THE
police sketch appeared in the
Journal.
The suspect had a thin face with high cheekbones, a long, straight nose, narrow eyes. He had curly blonde hair and wore an earring in one ear. What distinguished him from your average white dude was an expression of total malice.

“I wouldn't want to run into him in a parking lot at night.” my secretary Anna said when I showed her the picture.

“Me neither.”

“How old, do they think?”

“Sixteen or seventeen.”

Anna studied the sketch. “He wouldn't be bad looking if he wasn't giving somebody the stinkeye.”

He did have the even features that pass for good looks in our society. “He was shooting a fifteen-year-old boy when the witness saw him. Maybe the sketch artist was trying to recapture the moment.”

“If he looked like that all the time he should have been locked up long ago,” Anna said.

It turned out that the suspect had been arrested several times, but he was Teflon-coated—none of the charges had stuck. On Tuesday, his name, Ron Cade, appeared in the paper. The police said he was a member of a Heights gang. By now they had a photo and the
Journal
ran it. The witness had given the police a near-perfect description of the perp. The photo was very close to the sketch, except that Ron Cade's lips had a ripple of a smile in the photo. As might be expected, he hadn't been seen since the shooting. Ron Cade might have run away to live out his life in Mexico or California, or he might already be dead and rotting somewhere on a mesa or in a ditch.

******

I got home around seven that evening. It had been a boring day, and I'd spent most of it in my office pushing paper. The ice-cream truck was parked on Mirador, and some bike riders were gathered around it eating Popsicles. I waved to them as I drove by. It was one of those summer evenings when even the leaves on the trees are still. A field full of alfalfa in the middle of the block had been cut and baled as tight as tombstones. The sun had reached the place where it lingers before beginning its final descent. It was beating into the west side of my house and turning it hotter than a car that's been parked at the mall all day. I figured the Kid wouldn't be home until dark. I could have called him, but it was cooler
outside
than it was in, so I decided to walk down the ditch and ask him what he wanted to do about dinner.

When I got to the shop he was working on a 1950s Chevy, one of those classic cars he calls Fast Fives. The owner was hanging around waiting for the Kid to finish up. The guy's head was clipped and narrow. He wore wide, knee-length pants with boxer shorts sticking out over the waistband, knee socks and sandals. The short full pants reminded me of the culottes women used to wear. We've come to a weird place, I thought, where guys act tough by dressing like 1950s women. The Kid finished up. The guy thanked him, paid him in cash and drove away.

“Gangbanger?” I asked.

“Yeah,” the Kid replied.

“Which one?”

“The Fourth Street Originals. That was Juan Padilla's gang. Everybody calls them the Four O's, but I call them the
feos
.” The uglies.

“He was pretty ugly.”

“Some gangs like drugs and violence. Some just like violence. The Four O's are violent. Some of them are
bajo cero…”

Below zero.

“…but some of them are not too bad.”

“Why do they always wear gray and black?” I asked.

“The Nortenos' colors are red, the Sudenos' are blue. If anybody else wears those colors they get in trouble, so these guys just wear gray and black.” The Kid shook his head. “They know all about guns, but they know nothing about cars. They can't fix anything.”

“I think their role is breaking, not fixing.”

“Verdad,”
said the Kid.

“What do you want for dinner?” I asked.

“Lota Burger?”

“Okay.”

“I'll get them when I finish here,” he said.

I lingered in the shop trying to teach Mimo another word. I was working on good-bye, but Mimo was a stubborn bird. I think it knew the words, it just didn't feel like saying them.

“Try
adios,
” said the Kid. That didn't work either. Finally I gave up, put the hood over its cage and put the parrot to bed.

******

When
I started back home the sun had taken a dive, leaving behind a green afterglow in the west and turning the jet trails above the Sandias into golden squiggles. The cicadas were screaming their late summer song. The water in the ditch had a smooth, dark shimmer. A train wailed from the tracks near Rosa. In the fading light it was hard to tell where the trees ended and the shadows began. I picked up my pace, listening to the water lapping gently at the ditch banks. There was a rustling in the field beside me that might have been a skunk or a dog, but I could see two of them and one of them wore a white shirt. Kids getting it on beside the ditch. I hesitated, but kept on walking. I wasn't a parent. I wasn't the police. I'd been a reckless teen once myself.

“Don't!” A girl's voice squealed like a small, frightened animal.

“What's happening?” I called. If they were getting it on, it was without the girl's consent. There wasn't a whole lot I could do about it without a weapon, but that didn't stop me from trying.

“Leave me alone!” the girl yelled.

“Chill, bitch,” a guy said. He stood up and stared at me long enough to tell that he was tall, blonde, thin, wearing a white t-shirt and wide pants. He walked across the field and disappeared into the shadows.

The girl who climbed up onto the ditch bank was Cheyanne. “Are you all right?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” she said, but she shivered while I walked her back to my house.

I led her into the courtyard and locked the door behind us. Under the sensor light that comes on at dusk, I could see that she was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, that her clothes were dirty and mussed but not bloody or torn, that her hair had come loose and was falling down around her face.

“Was that guy trying to rape you?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“What did he want?”

“I don't know.”

“Cheyanne, a guy's beating you up beside the ditch and you don't know what he wants?” If she'd been carrying anything he could have stolen, it was long gone.

“It was nothing,” she said, her face turning sullen.

“Was it Ron Cade?”

“I don't know who it was. Just some guy.”

“Do you want me to walk you home? Do you want me to call your mother?”

“No. Could I wash my face before I go home?”

“Okay,” I said.

We went into the house, and while the water was running in the bathroom I went into the kitchen and called the Kid. He was somewhere between Lota Burger and home, and he didn't carry a cell phone
in
his pocket or truck. When Cheyanne came out of the bathroom, her hair was slicked back and her face was clean. She walked down the hallway and caught up with me in the kitchen. There was a basket of fruit on the counter and her hand latched onto a mango.

“What's this?” she asked me.

“A mango.”

“Can I have it?”

“Sure.”

She took the mango and said she had to go. She insisted on walking home alone, but she couldn't stop me from standing outside my doorway and watching her do it. When we went outside we could see that the moon had risen and clouds were settling into a saddle of the Sandias as if they were filling an empty cup.

“The sky is falling,” Cheyanne said.

I watched her walk down the street and waited until she'd entered the trailer and shut the door behind her.

A few minutes later the Kid showed up. When I told him what had happened he drove around the hood in his truck, but he didn't see signs of Ron Cade or of anyone else who looked like trouble.

4

A
FEW DAYS
later when the doorbell rang at eight in the morning, I was in the kitchen drinking coffee and the Kid had left for work. It was too early to have my guard up, so I lifted the latch without bothering to ask who'd come calling. A small, tense woman stood before me. Her hair was thin and brassy from too much bleach. Her skin was weathered from too much sun. Her eyes were a pale, weary brown. She wore silver filigree earrings, a miniskirt, high heels and a green t-shirt with a Sandia Indian Bingo logo. She was smoking a cigarette that even at eight in the morning I coveted.

She coughed and cleared her throat. “Are you the lawyer?” she asked in a smoker's raspy voice. Smokers are often drinkers, and I wondered what this woman's drink might be. Not beer. She didn't have the subcutaneous layer of flab.

“My name is Neil Hamel,” I said.
And this is my home, not my office,
I thought.

“I'm Sonia. Sonia Moran.” She took another drag on her cigarette, blowing some smoke in my direction. “I live down the street in the trailer. Cheyanne's my daughter. Can I come in?”

“Okay.”

She followed me across the courtyard, and when she got to the front door she stopped and stared at her half-burned butt. “You want me to throw this away? I know some people don't like it when you smoke in their houses.”

I wouldn't want to be known as a person who ran a no-smoking household. It hadn't been that long ago that I'd smoked in this house myself. “Actually, your cigarette looks pretty good and I am trying to quit.”

“I can understand that,” she said. “I've quit many times myself.” She took a deep drag, dropped the cigarette on the brick floor and ground it out. We went into the living room and sat down on the sofa.

“Would you like some coffee?” I asked.

“No thanks. I'm getting ready to go to bed. I worked late—I'm a blackjack dealer at Sandia—and then I was up all night waiting for my goddamned daughter to come home.”

“Cheyanne didn't come home last night?”

“Not till five in the morning she didn't.”

I wondered if I ought to tell Sonia about finding her daughter beside the ditch, but I decided to see what Sonia had to say first. There's a law that says doctors can't tell a mother when a daughter is pregnant. Maybe there was another law that says a lawyer ought to keep a daughter's secrets.

“
Fucking police,” Sonia said. “There's supposed to be a curfew in this town. Why the hell are they letting teenagers stay out all night anyway?”

Which could be exactly what the police were saying about the parents. “There are more teenagers than there are police, and at five in the morning the teenagers have more energy,” I said. “What is it you wanted to talk to me about?” I did have an office to get to.

“You know Juan Padilla? The boy that got shot?”

“Yeah.”

“When Cheyanne finally got home this morning she told me she was the one that shot him.”

That was the kind of news that could shatter your life.

“She says she pulled the trigger.”

“Do you believe her?”

“That's what she says.”

“Where's the weapon? Does she have it?”

“She told me she threw it in the ditch.”

“Did she tell you what kind of gun it was?”

“A thirty-eight, she says.”

“A thirty-eight?” Tech Nines were the guns of choice in gang slayings. Even a thirteen-year-old was likely to know that.

“Yeah.”

“How did the shooting happen?”

“She says she was with some guys and there was an argument. She was holding the gun for one of them. She says she didn't mean to kill Juan, but the gun went off.”

“What guys?”

“She's too scared to tell.”

That made sense in New Mexico. “We have a law in this state that makes an accessory as guilty as the shooter.”

“Yeah? I didn't know that,” Sonia said. She was rubbing her fingers together—the telltale gesture of a worrier in need of a bead or a smoker in need of a butt.

I wondered how much Cheyanne knew about the accessory law and, if so, who had told her. Gangs, I figured, would have their own accessory laws.

Sonia fixed her tired eyes on me. “Could you help us?” she pleaded. “Cheyanne thinks a lot of you. I know you could represent her better than anybody, but I can't afford to pay you much.”

“Don't worry about it,” I said. “If I take the case, we'll work something out.”