would give pride of place to an Anglo girl. Serena had met the criticism coolly, saying, “Insula was my homegirl before all these other homegirls, back in the 805, when teachers thought she was gonna be a soldier girl and I was gonna go to secretarial school someday.”
In time it became part of the Warchild mystique that she had a white, blond, ex-military chick as her second. It was as if Serena had an exotic weapon; I was her ivory-handled switchblade. And Serena knew that having me around made her safer. I had training that her other girls didn’t. I was a good fighter and shooter. When Serena and I were out on the street, I always had my Browning at my side and, often, a baby Glock on my ankle. But the other part of that was this: I wouldn’t shoot unnecessarily. I respected guns and what they could do, and I was careful in a way Serena knew her girls wouldn’t be.
Funny to look back on it now, but I hadn’t wanted to become a sucia. It was a commitment she’d extracted from me last year, when I’d asked her for Trece’s backup in taking on Tony Skouras. When I took my beating and joined, Serena had given me the street name “Insula,” Latin for island. She’d meant it as “someone alone or separate,” and that had reflected the understanding that we’d both had, that I was joining her clique mostly in name. Neither of us had foreseen that after the Skouras business was over, I’d become her lieutenant. I hadn’t foreseen coming home to L.A. so restless and angry.
Some of that anger was because of the brain tumor, which had stolen away my Army career and much of my future. I had been in my third year at West Point when things went wrong, except it didn’t feel wrong. I was simply never afraid. That wasn’t normal for someone at a military academy. The curriculum was designed to push you out of your comfort zone. Jump out of this airplane. Walk into this room and get gassed without a mask so you’ll always remember what it feels like. Compete at the levels we’ve set for you or you’ll go home in civilian clothes and everything you’ve done here will be for nothing. It was supposed to be frightening. Except then it wasn’t. In my third and fourth years, “What the hell” had practically been my mantra: What the hell, I’ll go first. What the hell, I’ll try it. I don’t care. I’ll do it. I’m not scared.
Then my tumor, so small and unknown, outed itself. My fearlessness brought me too close to the edge of a high bluff in a training exercise, and I fell. A precautionary MRI showed the tiny white glowing spot in my amygdala. Inoperable, the doctor said, and no matter that it was slow-growing and I was in perfect health otherwise, the “emotional anomalies” the tumor was causing made me unfit to serve as an officer in the United States Army. And it wouldn’t stay asymptomatic. I would not celebrate my thirtieth birthday.
But the truth was, I’d been dealing with the collapse of my life’s plan for a long time before I became Serena’s lieutenant. The simmering resentment that I felt when I came back from San Francisco couldn’t fairly be blamed on that. Nor was it even how badly Skouras’s men had punked me up north, their mutilation of my left hand. No, to be honest, a lot of my anger was about CJ.
So my career as Insula, Warchild’s second-in-command, began in earnest. I needed to be needed, and I found that in the sucia life. It was me who had seen that if the pharmacy robberies Serena pulled two or three times a year were profitable, truck hijackings would give us a bigger haul at a fraction of the risk. And on the streets I was Serena’s protection. In private I was the confidante she needed more and more.
Serena was under an appalling amount of pressure. I think I was the only one who saw what her new status cost her. Because in the gang life, even when things are good, they’re never really good. Gangbangers call it la vida loca, but privately I thought of it as cura nigra, or “black care,” the Roman phrase for trouble and worry. I’d seen the graffiti at the edges of her neighborhood, left by rivals, that said SUCIA KILLER and WARCHILD 187. The