Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot - By Jodi Compton Page 0,10

on Leo Carrillo Beach. I understood what they saw in him, but dammit, I’d seen it first. I hadn’t needed the big career or the eight-figure bank balance or the A-list friends to love Cletus Mooney. I just had, and now I was the only one who wasn’t allowed.

Serena’s voice floated out from the bedroom. “So I was thinking—Jesus, do you have to sit like that?” she said sharply, looking up at the no-hands way I was sitting on the railing, leaning forward with my elbows resting on my thighs, like someone following a ball game on TV. “If you fall from up there, you’ll break your neck.”

“Why would I fall?” I said, not turning around. “If I was sitting on the kitchen counter like this, you wouldn’t say that.”

“If you fell off the counter, you’d get up again. Can you please come in, so I don’t have a heart attack?”

I shifted my weight and swung a leg over, then backed up until I could rest my spine against the concrete wall, sitting sideways. “Is this better? Because this is about all the concession to safety I’m willing to make.”

She leaned against the slider’s framework. “Sometimes I really wish I knew how it felt to be you.”

“Blond?”

“Fearless.”

“I didn’t say I’m never afraid,” I told her. “I’m just … blunted. Haven’t you ever been drunk and you did something you’d never do sober? Your feeling was just, ‘What the hell, I’ll do it’?”

“That’s not the same thing,” she said.

“Isn’t it? Why do you think they call alcohol ‘liquid courage’?” I said. “It’s an extreme example, but think of people on PCP. They’ll do anything. Nothing scares them.”

“That’s different,” Serena said. “Those people are out of their minds. Nobody jumps off a roof just because it’s not scary to them.”

“Exactly,” I said. “I wouldn’t, either. I’m rational. But when things happen where I should feel afraid, there’s just an absence.”

“So it’s better,” she said. “Because you’re not uncoordinated, like a drunk person would be, or half asleep, like someone in a hospital on downers would be. That’s all it is, like a drug with no side effects?”

Other than eventual death from brain cancer?

“I guess,” I said. “There aren’t that many things you can compare to my situation. There are kids that seem to be born with a really high fear threshold, maybe from brain damage sustained during difficult births. They do a lot of heart-stopping things on their bicycles or jump off rooftops. Afterward they don’t understand why people are yelling at them. When people say, ‘You could have broken your neck,’ they say, ‘But I didn’t. What’s the big deal?’ ”

“And you feel the same way,” Serena said.

“Not exactly,” I said. “I haven’t had this problem all my life. I remember what used to frighten me, and I know what scares other people. That guides me.”

“Hmm,” she said, inspecting one of her thumbnails. “I guess it’s good you say that.”

“Why?”

“There’s something we gotta talk about. It’s Trippy.” Her face was serious in the ambient city light.

“She hates us, yeah. This is not news.”

“She hates you,” Serena corrected quietly. “I hear things, Insula. She’s been telling anyone who’ll listen that she’s going to kill you. She’s saying this is still her neighborhood and she’s not afraid to come onto my territory to put a bullet in you.”

“Let her try,” I said, shrugging. “She loves to wave a gun around, but she’s a lousy shot.”

“You’re so full of shit,” Serena said. “You just said that what scares other people guides you, but I’m telling you this is something to be scared of, and you’re, what, blowing me off?”

“I’m not blowing you off. It’s just, I’ve had more dangerous enemies than Trippy Ramos, and I’m still standing. Grudges like Trippy’s, it’s kid shit. She’s just blowing off steam.”

“Whatever. I had something to say to you—now I’ve said it. I’m going to bed.” She turned and left.

The truth was, she probably had a point about Trippy. Grudges could be deadly in the ghetto and the barrio. This wasn’t “kid shit” to Luisa Ramos. I’d taken her place and dealt a terrible blow to her ego. In antiquity, in the present, in organized crime, in corporate boardrooms, these kinds of clashes played out everywhere. Loss of position, loss of face: one of humanity’s most primal wounds. Why was I still here, making myself a party to it? Because of Serena. My loaded gun.

I looked inside to see her standing in front of the dresser where she’d