Jack In The Green (6 page)

"I know. It's just…"

She doesn't want to lose him. She doesn't want him to be another casualty in the cartels' savage drug wars. That's what she wants to tell him. But she doesn't know how to say it without sounding clingy.  She and Jack have only just met. They've only ever kissed so far.

The Glimmer Twins drift into the study while they're talking. One of them sprays "Liberated by Los Murrietas—all the sheriff's drug $$" on the wall beside the safe. The fresh paint looks like blood glistening on the white adobe surface. The other twin takes a picture of it with his phone. The flash is a momentary flare of light in the darkness.

Jack puts his finger under Maria's chin and looks into her eyes.

"Just what?" he asks, his voice soft.

Before she can answer he stiffens, head cocked as he listens for something Maria can't hear. But then she hears it, too. Tires on the pavement. On the street outside. Turning into the driveway.

"Everybody out,
now
," Jack says.

Maria is so scared she can barely join the scramble to get to the back door, but Jack keeps a steadying hand on her upper arm as he steers her toward the back patio.

"Stay together or split up?" Will asks as they run to the gate in the back fence.

"Together," Jack says.

He hands Maria off to Ti Jean and stops at the sheriff's koi pond. It's surrounded by a band of smooth loose pebbles the diameter of silver dollars. He grabs two handfuls and dumps them in his pockets, then hurries to catch up with the others.

"Don't worry," he tells Maria. "We'll be gone before the first cop car arrives at the front gates."

One of the Glimmer Twins is thumbing his phone as they make their way through the next yard.

"Posting your pictures?" Jack asks.

The twin nods and grins.

They keep going through the next yard, slipping from one into the next, darting across silent streets until they reach the outer wall of the community. Their rope is still hanging where they left it. One by one they shimmy up and over the wall. Maria listens for sirens, but the night is still quiet. She grabs the rope, but she's trembling so hard that she can't hold on to it.

Jack gives her a quick hug. "Trust me," he says before he climbs the rope to the top of the wall.

Ti Jean offers his hands to Maria as a stirrup, like he did with the Glimmer Twin on the way in. She steps into his laced fingers and up she goes like she's popping out of a jack-in-the-box. Jack catches her and swings her easily onto the ledge.

Ti Jean joins them, then quickly goes down the other side of the wall.

"Hang on until I let you go," Jack tells Maria as he takes hold of her wrists and eases her into a kneeling position, facing the community. Using the rampart to brace himself, he lowers her down the other side of wall, holding on until Ti Jean's strong hands on her hips lower her the rest of the way.

"I feel like such a wuss," she says as Jack makes his own nimble way down the rope.

"Don't," he tells her. "It's your first time. We've been doing this for ages."

She hugs herself. "I still can't figure out why there aren't any sirens."

"Maybe he didn't call his own officers," Will says. "Maybe he called his drug-running buddies instead."

Maria shivers. and Jack puts his arm around her shoulders.

"Let's get out of here," he says.

Once they get well away from El Rio Valley and there still aren't any sirens, Maria begins to relax.

Will takes out a list of people who need help that Luz made before she was arrested. The gang splits up, each taking some of the money, and although it's not even daybreak, they spend the next couple of hours delivering bundles of the stolen cash to those in need.

Maria is with Jack on the delivery run. Her spirits rise as they visit several homes on Calle Adelanto. At one house, they leave money to cover the expense of a child's asthma medicine. At another, the cash will keep a man from losing his burrito cart. At the third house, the old woman who answers the door ushers them inside with a smile that falters when she is offered money to pay her electricity bill.

She looks from Jack to Maria.

"Where did you get this money?" she asks. "Is it stolen?"

Maria knows many old women like this. The neighbourhood is full of them. Their brown skin is wrinkled, they move slowly and their once glossy dark hair is grey. They balance on the sharp edge of the poverty line, but they have their pride and are honest to a fault.

"We took it from a bad man,
señora
," Jack says. "You deserve it more than he does."

The woman shakes her head. "The devil has sent you. Do not tempt me."

Maria takes out the silver cross she wears on a chain under her dress.

"My friend is a good man," she says. She lifts the cross to her lips and kisses the silver. "I swear by Our Lady and
los santos
."

"Please,
señora
," Jack says. "Let us help you. We know you are alone in the world. Let us do what your children would if they were still here to look after you."

"My children…it was joining the gangs that killed them both."

"We have nothing to do with the bandas," Jack says. "We—"

His cell phone rings.

"
Pardon
," he says as he pulls it out of a pocket.

His eyes go dark as he listens to the voice on the other end.

"I'll be right there," he says before he cuts the connection.

"What is it?" Maria asks.

He shrugs. "Nothing, really. Just a little trouble—coincidentally, with the 66 Bandas. Will you wait for me here while I straighten it out?"

"But—"

"This is not the same as what we did earlier in the evening," he tells her. "That was like a game. In this, your inexperience will get you hurt."

"I'm not afraid."

"I know," he says. "But I'm afraid for you and I need all my wits about me. Don't worry. I won't be long."

He kisses her on the cheek, nods to the old woman, then slips out the door.

"I
knew
this had to do with gangs," the old woman says. "Everything bad in the barrio comes from their drugs and killing."

"We aren't with the gangs," Maria says. "We stand against them."

She can hardly believe the words coming out of her mouth. Before tonight, she would have been no different from the old woman standing in front of her. She would have believed that it was always better that the gangs didn't even know you existed.

But now she understands that ordinary people have to take matters into their own hands to help themselves. The police are corrupt and the government does nothing. The church can't keep up. And all the while, the rich hide behind the walls of their gated communities.

"Then you are doomed," the woman says. She makes the sign of the cross. "And you have brought them and their dirty money to my house."

"For that I apologize," Maria says.

Before the old woman can say any more, Maria opens the door and steps outside. She's surprised by the change in the light. The sun is rising above the Hierro Maderas. It's much brighter now than it was fifteen minutes earlier.

She remembers what Jack said about staying out of his way and slips through the old woman's dusty yard to the corner of the next house. Peering around its adobe wall she sees Jack and Ti Jean in the middle of the street. Jack's swinging something in one hand—she can't quite see what it is. A necklace perhaps. It's a blur, swinging too fast for her to see. Ti Jean is holding a length of saguaro rib as tall as he is.

Facing them are a four men wearing the colours of the 66 Bandas. Coming down the street behind the bandas she sees Will approaching at a run. She can't spot either of the Glimmer Twins.

This is bad. Two of the bandas are carrying guns. The others have a machete and a tire iron. So far as she knows, her friends have no weapons—unless you could call Ti Jean's staff a weapon. But a saguaro rib is nothing against a gun or a machete, or even a tire iron.

Maria wants to hide her eyes, but she can't look away.

She looks around for something to use as a weapon. If the boys are going to fight, she will too.

But then she sees them. Three more bandas sneaking up through an alley behind Jack and Ti Jean. The buildings hide them from everyone except for her.

She cries out a warning to Jack.

In the alley, one of the bandas raises his gun. Maria feels the bullets punch into her chest before the sound of the gunshots register. They lift her up onto her toes and then she falls backwards, arms outspread. She hits the ground hard. She tries to suck in air but her lungs fill with blood.

She doesn't hear Jack's inarticulate cry. She doesn't see him spring into action.

The bottle tree man knew as soon as he saw Jack that the boy in the green hoodie was a marksman with any weapon—even it was only a stone in a sling. He would not be surprised by what happens next.

Jack had planned to only scare off the bandas. Break an arm, a leg. Incapacitate them.

Now, he shoots to kill.

He moves with supernatural speed, turns, looses a stone from his sling. Another. The bandas who shot Maria and the man beside him are dead before they even realize Jack has a weapon. Ti Jean charges the other four. Will comes at them from behind. The Glimmer Twins appear from a side yard and run to help.

In moments five bandas lie in the street, their lives bleeding out on the pavement. The survivor in the alley turns tail and runs.

But for Maria, it is too late.

The next morning the news is full of the gang war between the 66 Bandas and Los Murrietas, which left seven dead on the barrio streets. There's also speculation about Sheriff Crase's involvement, fueled by his sudden disappearance and the photo the Glimmer Twins uploaded of the sheriff's safe with their message spray-painted on the wall above it.

No one pays attention to the release of Lucia Chaidez from county. With all the heat spilling over from the sheriff's office, the D.A. doesn't want to risk being seen as holding an innocent girl behind bars.

Luz walks from the county jail to the camp the boys have outside of town. The camp's hidden under some cottonwoods where the San Juan River winds its dusty way along the back of a ranch on the east side of town. It's only during monsoons that water fills its banks.

Jack's not there.

"We haven't seen him since last night," Will says. "He walked out into the desert after we got back to camp and he hasn't come back."

Jack doesn't return until the funeral, three days later.

Santa Margarita Maria church in the barrio is filled to capacity. The whole neighbourhood has heard that the bandas killed the leader of Los Murrietas, and everyone has come to the funeral service to pay their respects. Burly barrio boys without gang affiliations keep watch by the doors of the church and stand on street corners nearby in case the 66 Bandas are brazen enough to show up.

Luz sits unnoticed in a pew at the back where she hopes Pablo and the rest of Maria's family won't notice her. Jack and the boys are scattered through the congregation. Luz pays no attention to the crowd. She doesn't hear the priest. Her attention is on the photo of Maria on an easel beside the coffin.

Oh Maria, she thinks.

And she remembers.

Once upon a time, they were best friends.

Earlier this year, when they are both nineteen, Luz comes back to Santo del Vado Viejo with Jack and the other boys. The first thing she plans to do is look up Maria.

"She's a good friend?" Will asks when she excitedly mentions this to the boys.

"She's my best friend."

"And here I thought I was your best friend," he says. He lays the back of his hand against his brow. "I'm so hurt."

She punches him in the shoulder and grins.

"Don't be silly," she tells him.

"Don't you be silly either," he says.

She's about to make another joke when she sees how serious he looks.

"What's up?" she says.

"What will you say when she asks what you're doing back in town? Will you invite her to join our little gang?"

"Of course not. I'm not going to tell her about any of that."

"But it will be hard keeping something so big from her."

She's about to say it's not even going to come up, but then she realizes how can it
not
? Maria will ask her lots of questions about her life. She'll ask if she found her magic. Luz will have to spin some story, but it won't do much good. Maria knows her too well. She'll see straight through any lie.

"It will be easier for both of you if you don't see her at all," Will says.

Ti Jean nods. "She doesn't sound like us. If she gets involved, she'll get hurt."

"If you love her," Jack says, "you'll let her go her own way."

The Glimmer Twins nod in agreement.

Though it upsets her, she knows they're right. She'll do what they say because the last thing she wants is for Maria to be hurt in any way.

"I really miss her. We were always best friends," she says.

"Then you have to decide," Jack says, "which is more important? The work, or her?"

She knows the answer to that, though she's not sure it's the right one because the decision is made by her head, not her heart.

But fate brings them together again anyway.

Maria is laid to rest in San Miguel Cemetery. Half the barrio comes out to the graveyard, but Lucia is no more aware of the crowd here than she was back in Santa Margarita Maria. She watches as the coffin is lowered into the ground. It feels like a piece of her is being buried with Maria in that grave.

She stays long after the crowd is gone and the grave has been filled in. She knows Jack and the boys are close by, but they give her some distance.

Finally she hears a soft step in the dirt. Jack sits on his haunches beside her.

"We were supposed to be together," Jack says. His tears make tiny dark circles in the dirt at his feet.

"I didn't know until I saw her," he continues. "But as soon I did, I knew. She's my other half. We've only barely met. How can it be that she's gone?"