Sammy Keyes and the Search for Snake Eyes (9 page)

“Oh, please,” she says, then nods down the street. “There's the only drive-by you've got to worry about.”

It's a police car. And as it gets closer, the passenger window powers down and the Borschman calls, “Couldn't resist a tour of Tigertown, huh?” across the front seat.

“Tigertown?” I ask him.

“Uh-huh. Our little urban jungle.” He parks along the curb and gets out. “And why is it,” he says as he's hiking up his gun belt, “that when I say left, you go right?”

“Officer Borsch, really! We were just taking a shortcut to the high school to check out the fields. I didn't know where we were until I saw
that
.”

He nods across at the graffiti and says, “Last night's roll call. A unit's supposed to be by to paint it over, but —”

“Roll call? Like that's a list of everybody in the gang?”

He chuckles. “Not exactly. See the
Viva la Buena
?”

We both nod.

“What you see there is the roll call of the Buena Park set of the South West gang.”

Marissa says, “The Buena Park
set
?”

“Clique. Group. Faction. Specifically, the Buena Park neighborhood in the South West territory. They claim Buena Park, so we police it a lot. Try to keep the activity
low. Especially after school, when trouble tends to start brewing.”

Marissa's eyes have been getting wider and wider, and I can tell, softball is finally
not
the only thing on her mind. “So this is really the middle of gang territory?”

“That's right.”

“Are you
serious
?”

“As a heart attack.”

“What's the thirteen all about?” I ask him, because I'm starting to make out more on the wall. Some places it's a spiky 13, some places it's a Roman numeral XIII, and in one place it's a combination—X3. “Does it mean bad luck?”

He laughs. “No. It stands for the thirteenth letter of the alphabet.”

“M?” Marissa asks.

“Which stands for … ?” He looks from Marissa to me and back again, waiting for us to fill in the blank. Finally, we both shrug, so he says, “Mexican. South West is a Mexican gang.” He points at a different spot on the wall. “R means rules. So X3R means Mexicans rule.”

“Wow. How'd you know that?”

He shrugs. “You learn to read the walls.” He points to another one—13 P/V. “Can you figure that one out?”

I study it a minute, then shake my head.

“Know any Spanish?”

I shrug. “Not much.”

“Por vida?”

“For life?”

“That's right.”

“So that means Mexican for life?”

He nods. “How about
vato loco
?”

“Crazy dude?”

He smiles. “Right. So that one right there,” he says, pointing to a fancy B.B.V.L., “was probably put up by someone with the moniker B.B. who's trying to get a rep as being gutsy.” He points to a spiky, overlapping CZR sprayed on a diagonal with RIFA written under it. “That's some homie saying he rules.
Rifa
—or usually just R—means rules.”

“Wow.” I said. “It's always looked like hieroglyphics—or just a mess—to me before.”

“What about H?” Marissa asks. “What's that stand for?”

Officer Borsch frowns. “Heroin. So don't get too fascinated. There's a lot here about drugs and threats that you don't want to be able to read.”

Marissa looks around over both shoulders. “But …I mean … we're not like, in any
danger
here, are we? They don't have, you know, drive-bys and knifings and …and stuff like that … do they? It's more like they just hang out and, you know,
van
dalize, right?”

He makes a little sucking sound. Like he's vacuuming pastrami from between his teeth or something. “I take it you don't read the
Santa Martina Times
? Or watch the news? It doesn't reach up to your oasis on East Jasmine, but wake up, kid. It's a growing problem—one you and your, uh, sister want to stay away from.”

Now, a) I didn't like the “uh” in Officer Borsch's
sentence
again
, and b) he's starting to act pretty hostile toward Marissa, so I just want to cut it short and get a move on. And this whole conversation
is
making Marissa do a bit of the McKenze dance, squirming from side to side, biting a nail, but does she say, Yes, sir, and now I'm getting
out
of here? No. She says, “You mean, people have actually gotten
killed
around here?”

“More than once,” he says, then adds, “South West has no beef with you per se, but it still would be wise to avoid this area. They might flash a sign that you don't get, might mistake something you do or say as a challenge, might even think you're from North West.”

“What would we be doing
here
if we were from North West?” I ask him.

He shrugs. “Casing. Carrying. Serving as decoy…” Marissa squints at him.
“Us?”
“You.” “But —” “I can't frisk you, now can I? And no, you're not too young. We've got all sorts of kids in juvee that are younger than you.”

“But —”

“Look, just be smart and stay out of this area. Good chance nothing'll happen, but why risk it?” He sucks at his tooth some more, then says, “This is not make-believe, girls, or me trying to scare you. It's reality, so deal with it accordingly.” He looks at me, saying, “By the way, I visited Ray Ramirez's mother out on Las Flores. She claims her son's being a perfect angel, and Ray himself says he doesn't know anything about anything.
Doesn't know
who
I'm talking about. Was just cruising the mall yesterday for fun.”

“But … you don't believe him, do you?”

“I don't believe anyone with eyes like that.”

“See?”

“Oh yeah.” He heads back toward the car, saying, “No one's come to claim Pepe yet, but I've put out an APB for his mother based on your description. The scar should help.”

He zooms off, and we head out of there as fast as we can, cutting through the park and across Morrison to the high school. And while we're running, I'm filling Marissa in on all the stuff I hadn't told her about before Officer Borsch had shown up. And when I've finally gotten it all out, she pants, “Wow,” and then, “Do you think she could be … dead?”

I didn't want to think that way. I mean, what if it was true? What if I'd doomed Pepe to a life without a mother because I hadn't gone straight to the police? What if I'd ruined his life? I could just see his epitaph:

Marissa was saying, “All that stuff Officer Borsch was talking about—it doesn't even feel real. It's like we've walked into the middle of some movie.”

“Yeah. Only there's no theater to walk out of.”

“Well, at least we're out of
there
,” she said, nodding back across the park. “Ready to check out the fields?”

Marissa McKenze is one of the few people on the planet who can find beauty in mowed weeds and gravelly dirt. I swear she even thinks chain-link is beautiful. Well, as long as it's in the form of a backstop. Ask her to climb it when it's in fence form and she'll cower like it's a big clanky monster out to rip the clothes right off her bottom.

Anyway, there were practices going on at the top two diamonds, so we watched for a few minutes, then went down to check out the lower field. Marissa got on the mound and tossed a few pitches, and you could tell—in her mind she was already under the lights, pitching a no-hitter.

I let her throw about a dozen pitches before calling, “Have you seen enough? I've got a lot of homework to catch up on!”

“I could stay out here all night, but yeah, we should go.”

So we headed up past the other fields and hung a right on Morrison. And as we're hiking along toward Broadway, Marissa's jabbering away about how having at least one practice on the high school field before the tournament might really give us an edge. And I'm listening, but I'm also noticing these three girls walking toward us on the sidewalk.

Marissa sees them coming, too, because she steers her bike onto the high school lawn and moves out of the way,
but she's still jabbering away about softball like they're not even there.

And I know
they
know
we're
there because they sort of shift to the side to pass us by, but they're not seeing us, if you know what I mean. They're more looking through us.

They're not saying anything to each other, either. They're just shuffling along, kind of stony-faced. Two of them are wearing baggy jeans and strappy tops, and the other one's got on camouflage pants with pockets every-where and a tight white T-shirt that doesn't even come close to covering her stomach.

Then as they pass us, I notice their shoes.

Their shoe
laces
.

They're blue. And black. Doubled up; laced together.

And all of a sudden it hits me —these girls are gangsters.

Gangsters from South West.

And before I can stop myself, I've turned around to talk to them.

I didn't know what I was going to say. And even though one side of my brain was screaming, Let it go, Sammy! Let it go! the other side was saying, It's okay…. What are they going to do?
Shoot
you? So before you know it, there I am, walking alongside three South West gangsters, saying, “Hi.”

They look at me like, Who let you out of your cradle? then look at each other and bust up.

Now, to me this no big deal. This is the way most kids in high school treat kids in junior high. And even though I can hear Marissa running up behind me saying, “What are you
doing
?” between her teeth, I just smile at them and say, “You guys from South West?”

All of a sudden everyone stops walking. The Gangster Girls line up to face me; then one by one they hold both hands up in front of them, near their waists. The pinky, ring, and middle fingers of their left hands are spread out, facing up, with the first finger and thumb pinched together, while the fingers of their right hands are curved around like they've suddenly developed some sort of painful cramp.

And they just stand there, caught in a giant finger spasm, giving me really hard looks.

“I … I'm not trying to fight or anything, I'm just looking for someone.”

They keep right on glaring.

“I've … well, I've got something of hers. Or I
did
anyway. And actually, I'm pretty worried about her because she never came back to pick it up.”

One by one they drop their hands. Then the girl in the camouflage pants says, “What's her name?”

“Yeah,” says the girl to her right, who's wearing really white makeup and brown lipstick. “And what makes you think we know her?”

“I…I don't know her name. But she's about five six and, you know, normal weight, and she's got long kinda curly black hair and … and she's got a scar on her arm.” I tap the inside of my left forearm and say, “Right here.”

They just stare at me. Hard. And as I look from one to the other to the other, I realize that
they're
all about fivesix and, you know, normal weight, and they've all got long kinda curly black hair.

Then one at a time they turn their left arms outward, and I see that they've got something else in common, too.

SW scars.

I cringe and ask them, “Do you do that to your
selves
?” The one in camo pants sort of snorts and says, “You can't just walk in, y'know. You gotta prove you're down.”

“Yeah,” says the one with the brown lips. “Down for life.”

Now, Marissa's standing by, sort of doing the McKenze dance, whispering, “Sammy, come on. Sammy… ?” but I couldn't just leave. I had a million questions zooming through my head, most of them revolving around the word
why.
And since this connection was better than
no
connection to Pepe's mom, I tried to act as casual as I could when I asked, “Well, is anybody, you know,
missing
from your gang?”

The girl in camo pants says, “This ain't no
girls'
club, you hear what I'm saying?”

“I…I know, but, I mean … how many of you
are
there?”

She snickers and says,
“Somos pocos pero locos,”
then leans in and says, “Enough, okay? There's enough of us to bust on any and all of you.”

Now, she's getting pretty up close and personal. And I'm scrambling through my limited list of Spanish words to figure out what she said. I know
poco
is small, and
loco
is crazy, so I try, “Well, if there aren't many of you, then you
must
know who I'm talking about. I mean, she has to be older than you, but —”

The girl in camo pants steps forward and snaps one wrist like she's shaking off water. “This here's a cemetery for the ignorant, and you,
hina
, are ignorant. You get my meaning? You don't go quizzin' up gangstas, girl.” She flicks her wrist again and says, “Today I'm cuttin' you slack. Tomorrow I'm in your face, you hear me?”

Well, let me tell you, she was already in my face. I took a step back and tried not to let my voice shake as I said,
“Look, there was this guy named Raymond Ramirez after her.”

Their faces smooth back into blanks.