A few months later, in February, as Marcelo walked back to his house with his friend Javier, they noticed a black Jeep motoring down the street; a young man in the passenger seat rolled down his tinted window and, like the assailant outside the barbershop, contorted his fingers into an upside-down crown. He wore a ski mask to conceal his identity. Marcelo and Javier, both of whom showed great loyalty to the Kings, each picked up a brick and hurled it at the car. Marcelo’s brick smashed into one of the car doors. Javier’s cracked the windshield. The passenger in the ski mask pointed a semiautomatic weapon at the two boys and began shooting. They ran. Marcelo, as he’d learned from the older boys, ran in a zigzag fashion, trying to dodge the bullets. He felt lightheaded, and then sharp pain in both legs. He collapsed by a parked car and tried to crawl toward the sidewalk to find some protection. He looked up, and the shooter stood above him, taking aim. Marcelo knew this was it. He knows it sounds clichéd, but it was as if he were watching a movie trailer about his life. First communion. Graduation from eighth grade. Omar, his younger brother, playing video games. God, please take care of my mother, he thought to himself. I’m sorry for all that I did. Out of the corner of his eye, Marcelo caught Javier hiding behind a nearby car, his eyes wide and pleading. The gun jammed. Marcelo heard police sirens in the distance. The shooter ran back to the Jeep, and it took off. Javier rushed to Marcelo, cupped his head in his hands, and implored him, Don’t pass. Don’t close your eyes. Get up. Get up. Come on. Get up. Marcelo, when he recounts this moment, allows that he was crying, afraid that this was it. He had been shot in both legs, a bullet entering and exiting his left thigh, another bullet lodging in his left calf. Blood from the thigh wound gushed onto the sidewalk until a squad car pulled up; a woman police officer took Marcelo’s sweater and tied it around his left leg to stanch the bleeding.
* * *
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In a good year in Chicago, roughly 2,000 people get wounded by gunfire, or five people a day, give or take. Some years the number has risen to over 4,000, or roughly one person every two hours. These are the survivors, the ones still standing, more or less. Every victim has their own reckoning. For some, getting shot is an affront to their manhood. To their vigor. To their pride. And so that wound festers; the desire for vengeance and payback burns until it eventually erupts. I’ve met some who have held on to that fury for years. On the first day of spring in 2006, Jimmy Allen, who was then thirty-seven, spent the morning enjoying the sun in Veterans Memorial Park on the city’s far South Side. He was there with his mom and friends, many of whom were drinking even at this early hour. Nearby, a gaggle of men shot dice. Allen had $900 in his pocket, wrapped in a rubber band, money he had made selling marijuana. Allen saw three young men enter the park and saunter up to the dice game. Each pulled out a gun, and one yelled, Man, stick up. Another ordered, Lower it like you owe it. They seemed impatient, and Allen pulled the bundle of cash out of his pocket and held it aloft. An offering. But one of his friends who’d had too much to drink defiantly declared, Get the fuck out of here. We ain’t giving y’all shit. The three men started shooting. Allen got hit just above the heart, in the collarbone. “It felt like someone hit me with a bat,” he told me. With blood squirting from his chest, he took off running, and as he tried to hoist himself over a fence, he got shot twice more, both times in the buttocks. He flipped over the fence and fell to the other side. A friend rushed him to the hospital, where the staff stopped the bleeding before transferring him to a trauma unit so they could perform surgery. Four other people were shot along with him, including his mother, who was shot in the lower back. Everyone survived.
Allen became fixated on getting revenge. In the following weeks, he drove around the neighborhood for hours, looking for