Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot - By Jodi Compton Page 0,7
had been to take a group beating, just like a guy. But lately, since I’d come back to L.A., there was a second option: a three-minute, one-on-one fight with Warchild’s lieutenant, Insula.
The only two girls Serena had initiated lately had chosen the group beating. Certainly that wasn’t less painful, but it was impersonal at least. A one-on-one fight was different: It was the gladiator thing, everyone watching to see if you proved yourself. It was intimidating in ways that went beyond I might get hurt.
“You sound pleased,” I said.
“Yeah, I’ve got hopes for this girl,” Serena said. “She’s got a lot of corazón.”
She sat on her heels and snapped open the latch to a fire-safe cash box, looked inside, and took out a sheaf of bills. She rolled them into a cylinder and wrapped a rubber band around them. I knew what she was doing: taking away some of her savings for storage elsewhere, at one of her sleeping places. Serena split up her money like a tourist separates traveler’s checks in case of a purse snatching. This was despite the fact that almost no one—including none of the guys in Trece—knew about her storage unit.
This was why Magnus Ford, the LAPD’s “Shadow Man,” was right to be interested in Warchild Delgadillo. She was a planner.
Serena stood up. “Okay,” she said, moving to the door. “Why don’t you come over to Diana’s place for a while?” she suggested. “I’d like you to meet her.”
“Sure,” I said. I was already giving her a ride to wherever she was spending the night, since we’d ditched the SUV and were down to only my bike as transportation.
Serena closed the door behind us and pushed the shackle into the body of the padlock.
Her directions took us to a four-story building in her neighborhood, a blocky gray building with a secure entry and bars on the first-floor windows. Serena had a key to the outer door, and I followed her into the entry landing. The heavy door clanged shut behind us, locking out the perils of the outside world. Serena called an upstairs apartment on the intercom.
“Bueno,” a girl’s voice said.
“It’s me,” Serena said. “Insula’s with me.”
A loud buzzing filled the entryway, and Serena pulled open the inner door, revealing a stairwell that smelled strongly of old cigarettes.
Upstairs, she knocked on the apartment door: three raps, pause, a fourth. To an outsider it would have seemed silly; the secret girls’-club knock. Or at least paranoid, since she’d called up seconds earlier, identifying herself to the girl within. But such caution was the key to Serena’s survival to age twenty-five, ripe middle age in gang years.
The door opened, and a tall girl stood in the breach. She didn’t resemble the sucias I knew. Where they invariably had long hair, Diana’s cocoa-brown hair was cut short in defiance of girl-gangbanger fashion dictates, and her eyes, almond-shaped like Serena’s, were free of harsh eyeliner and shadow.
She nodded to Serena first, but immediately after, her eyes flicked to me, with the undercurrent of curiosity I was used to by now. In her case I imagined it was also a sizing up: I was her opponent-to-be, soon.
We exchanged what’s ups and Serena and I came in. The place wasn’t very big. The kitchen grew into a living room, the division marked by the end of the kitchen’s tired linoleum. A door set into the far living-room wall indicated a bedroom. It was all dim, only the lamp on the living-room floor lighted, and the hood light over the stove. The windows were closed, and I knew why: Even on the third floor, Diana didn’t want the unmistakable scent of marijuana to get out. It was rising as steam from the big, ten-quart pot on the stove. Diana was making oil of chronic.
The first time Serena and I had done it, it had been just for fun: simmering marijuana and cooking oil together in a big pot of water to infuse, then freezing the water in a bowl so that the green sludge congealed on the surface, all the easier to scrape off and melt back into marijuana-infused oil, or “oil of chronic” as Serena named it, that could be mixed into foods or swallowed like a spoonful of medicine. With hip-hop music playing on the radio in the sunny kitchen at old Casa Serena, it had seemed little different from homegirl cooking, making pan dulce on a Saturday.
I don’t know when Serena got the idea to turn oil of chronic