Jodi Compton - Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot

Fans of musical theater will recognize the title of this book as adapted from a lyric in Stephen Sondheims Merrily We Roll Along. So will viewers of the short-lived Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which was where I heard it quoted and loved it.

Haileys Latin and Spanish are taken from my own studies of those languages. Thanks, though, to copy editor Maureen Sugden for catching an error in my Latin late in the editing process.

I ts me. Hailey.

I know.

I thought maybe something was wrong with your voice mail. I left you a message, and you never called back. Well, listen, Im coming home to L.A.

Is that right.

I CJ, whats wrong? Are you pissed because I left town without saying good-bye? I wanted to, its just

Why would that piss me off, Hailey? Feel free to come and go as you please. Go down to Mexico andnearly get yourself killed, then come back and tell me nothing.

Where did you hear about that?

You showed your mother the scars from where you got shot. She told my mother about it, who told me. Its great hearing this stuff thirdhand, by the way. Its not like you and me mean anything to each other.

You mean everything to me, dammit. Its just that its complicated.

Your life is complicated because you make it complicated. If it ever gets simple, youll go out and recomplicate it by any means necessary.

Thats not fair. You dont know what happened.

Whose fault is that?

I kept you out of it because I was trying to protect you.

Yeah? Let me make that easy on you, then. I dont want to see you when you get back into town. Dont call me, dont come around my place. Understand?

CJ

Do you understand?

Ive been slow to realize it, but a lot of whats happened in the past four months has to do with my cousin CJ and the conversation I had with him on New Years Eve, just days after losing one of my fingersand nearly my lifeto a mobsters hired thugs. Since then my behavior has not been unimpeachable. Impeachable would be a very fair word to describe my actions. Or maybe acting out, as the psychologists say.

But the Good Friday killings, as the media is calling them, I had nothing to do with those. Because at the time I was over four hundred miles away, committing an entirely different crime.

a day in the life

Y ou never realize how few stars pierce through the light-leached night sky over Los Angeles until you get out of the city. Way out. Thats where I was tonight, at a little past eleven, in the desert on the edge of a lonely secondary highway near a railroad crossing, straddling my motorcycle and looking up at the sky. About the only thing I recognized in the dazzling treasure chest above me was the arched three-star handle of the partially visible Big Dipper.

Experts say that my generation can recognize, on average, two to three constellations and six to seven species of trees but over a thousand corporate logos. Supposedly a lot of us also cant find America on a world map, either.

I say, does it really matter whether Americans can find America on a map? What are we afraid of, that people will go to Canada and not be able to find their way back?

In my prior life as a sincere person, I would have gotten really bent out of shape about young Americans geographic illiteracy. Not anymore. A lot of those teenagers who cant find the USA on a map can tell you, block by block, which gangs control which territory in their part of town, where its safe to walk and where its not. Thats what keeps them from getting killed. Nobody they know has ever been shot for not finding the United States on a map. People know what they need to know.

I know, for example, that there isnt much out here in the desert except, about four miles east, the laboratories of a major pharmaceutical company. And I know that the companys delivery drivers are instructed to stop, like school buses do, at the railroad crossing. My reconnaissance on a previous night suggests that nearly all of them do. By the time they cross the point where I am now, theyre lumbering back up to twenty or twenty-five miles per hour, a manageable speed at which to have a blowout. And one of them is definitely going to have one.

That was why Id come 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 wed spent hours in the chop shop of a vato affiliated with El Trece, Serenas gang, trial-and-erroring our way to a workable spike strip. Then wed painted it a non-reflective black so it wouldnt glint in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.

My cell phone, set to its two-way-radio function, crackled to life. rale, 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 wouldnt fit over a ponytail. Neither would the ski mask.