Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot - By Jodi Compton Page 0,11

stashed her money. Now she pulled from the top drawer a bottle of pills, not one of the little orange ones that patients get but a larger wholesale one that she’d kept after a pharmacy heist. I didn’t have to watch her spill the little white oval pill into her palm to know what it would be: Ambien.

She washed it down with Corona and, still standing in front of the open drawer, crossed her arms and pulled her T-shirt over her head. The dog tags she wore as a necklace caught briefly in the collar, then fell back to bounce against her hard breastbone. Usually the tags were out of sight under her clothes, but Serena never took them off, in honor of the past life she believed she’d lost in Vietnam. I’d once encouraged her to travel over there, to see the country that occupied her dreams, but it didn’t seem that she ever would.

In the dim electric light of the bedroom, she was thin enough to count ribs. Weight loss, stomach pains, Ambien sleep—the glamorous gangster life.

The bottle of Corona I held was still half full, but I didn’t want any more. Briefly I considered letting it drop from my hand, three stories down to the sidewalk, just for the nihilistic pleasure of seeing shards of glass and white foam explode against the pavement. No. Reckless was one thing, but pointlessly antisocial was another.

I got off the railing and went inside. Stripped down to her panties, Serena had climbed onto the bed, wrapping the spread, but not the sheets underneath, around her; it’d been ninety-nine degrees at midday and would likely stay warm all night.

“You want me to look for a movie or something?” I asked, but then saw that Serena’s eyes were already closed. Ambien is quick.

I began getting undressed as well.

Home, right now, was an apartment in the Crenshaw district. Like Serena, I understood the virtues of being NKA; the apartment was my compromise. My name wasn’t on the rental contract nor any of the utilities. Instead I paid cash to a young woman as white as me, who was a schoolteacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District. She was gaming a federal program that gave teachers in “underserved communities” a sizable tax break to live where they worked. So she’d taken the modest second-story apartment, then immediately rented it off the books to me and moved to Hollywood.

It took me a little while to get used to living in the land of ay yo instead of órale, but I was accustomed to outsider-hood. And Crenshaw was the last place that Serena’s enemies—by extension my enemies, the ones who spray-painted SUCIA KILLER on walls—would look for me.

It wasn’t home, but I hadn’t had a real home for some time now.

4

The next day dawned bright, promising to be as hot as yesterday, and I was out of the apartment at ten, before Serena or Diana had risen. I was thinking of two things: one, that maybe the Blind Guy was at his bench in the park, and two, how good a chocolate-filled roll from a favorite panadería would taste.

I’d first seen the Blind Guy several weeks ago and still thought of him that way, even after learning his name, Joe Keller. He’d drawn my attention the first day I’d seen him, for two reasons. First, he’d looked enough like CJ—young and tall and loose-limbed, with curling red hair—that my heart had briefly skipped, until I’d realized it was highly unlikely that CJ would be sitting around an East L.A. park by himself. Second, I’d seen the white cane that immediately marked him as blind.

The cane was the reason I went over to talk to him that first afternoon.

“Hi,” I’d said. “My name’s Hailey.”

“Joe,” he’d said.

“Look, I could lead up to this by making small talk first, but I won’t. The thing is, this neighborhood is one where maybe you want to bring a friend if you’re going to hang out. I know it probably seems like a lot of nice people, kids and mamis with strollers, but there’s a lot of gang activity here, too. In fact, the bench you’re sitting on is pretty marked up with gang graffiti.”

I’d gone on, “And while I’d like to say that gangbangers have scruples about jacking the elderly or the disabled, mostly they don’t. They see someone like that, by themselves, and it’s like the rest of us feel when seeing something we need in a store marked half