out here: to hijack a truck with my old friend Serena “Warchild” Delgadillo. I had a mask and a baseball cap in my backpack and a Browning Hi-Power in a holster concealed at the small of my back, and coiled at my feet was a homemade spike strip, like the kind that police toss across the road to end long-distance pursuits.
The spike strip had been the most time-consuming part of our prep work. Neither Serena nor I was particularly good with tools, and we’d spent hours in the chop shop of a vato affiliated with El Trece, Serena’s gang, trial-and-erroring our way to a workable spike strip. Then we’d painted it a non-reflective black so it wouldn’t glint in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.
My cell phone, set to its two-way-radio function, crackled to life. “Órale, check it out.” Serena was on the opposite side of the road, in an SUV with a V6 engine and its backseats removed for greater cargo capacity.
I saw now what Serena had seen, a pair of headlights shimmering silver-white in the distance. “Is that it?” she asked. “Is it showtime?”
“Give me a minute,” I said, still looking into the distance.
Waiting, I ran a hand under the hair on my neck, lifting it up and letting it back down. I could feel sweat on the nape of my neck. Most of California had been in the grip of an early-spring heat wave. It would have been more comfortable to pull my hair back, but my motorcycle helmet wouldn’t fit over a ponytail. Neither would the ski mask.
The truck drew closer, and I was sure of the shape of the headlights and the size and mass of the vehicle. I raised the phone again. “Yeah,” I said, “that’s our guy.”
I swung my leg off the bike, scooped up the chain, ran to the edge of the road, and threw it across, watching it skitter and land mostly straight.
The drug-company truck slowed at the tracks, then accelerated again. But only for a moment. There was no dramatic sound, no pop or hiss of air as the tires were punctured, but I saw the brake lights and the truck slow, and then it lumbered to a stop at the edge of the road.
I pulled in the spike strip so we wouldn’t accidentally trap an unwanted second vehicle, then pulled on my mask. I was wearing gloves already, not because I expected to leave prints anywhere but because I’d stuffed the smallest finger of the left glove with newspaper so the driver wouldn’t be able to tell police that one of the robbers was missing a finger on that hand.
The driver’s door of the delivery truck opened, and a man climbed out from behind the wheel. He wanted to know what had gone wrong. It’s a little early to be using the past tense, “gone wrong,” buddy. Things are about to go wronger.
Serena, masked like me, walked out of the shadows behind the man and clicked off the safety on her Glock.
“Put your hands up and keep them up where I can see ’em,” she said.
He stiffened, his gaze going from her masked face to the gun and back to her face.
“Don’t be afraid,” Serena said. “It’s just a little robbery. Happens several thousand times a day in America. Take a walk over to my associate”—she raised her chin at me, standing across the highway—“and please note that she, like me, is armed, so don’t make any sudden moves, like you’re reaching for something.”
When he got to my side of the road and I’d gotten behind him with the gun, he said, “I have kids.”
“Then be smart,” I told him. “You’re just going to lie down in a ditch for few minutes, that’s all.”
“That’s okay, I guess,” he said, his voice stiff and uncertain.
I walked him about thirty yards off, to the dry bed of a drainage ditch. “Go on,” I said. “Lie down on your stomach and lace your hands on the back of your neck.”
He navigated the downslope carefully, like a guy unused to being outdoors, then got to his hands and knees, then lowered himself to his belly. He placed his hands on his neck, like I’d said.
I raised the cell with my free hand and radioed Serena. “Paratus,” I said. Ready.
“Venio,” she said.
Serena’s first comment on the Latin language, when she’d seen me reviewing flashcards in study hall when we were both fourteen years old, had been, Weird. Now she was studying it herself. It