a day in the life
1
good friday/early april
You never realize how few stars pierce through the light-leached night sky over Los Angeles until you get out of the city. Way out. That’s 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 can’t 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 can’t find the USA on a map can tell you, block by block, which gangs control which territory in their part of town, where it’s safe to walk and where it’s not. That’s 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 isn’t much out here in the desert except, about four miles east, the laboratories of a major pharmaceutical company. And I know that the company’s 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, they’re 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 I’d 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 we’d spent hours in the chop shop of a vato affiliated with El Trece, Serena’s gang, trial-and-erroring our way to a workable spike strip. Then we’d painted it a non-reflective black so it wouldn’t glint in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.
My cell phone, set to its two-way-radio function, crackled to life. “Órale, 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 wouldn’t fit over a ponytail. Neither would the ski mask.
The truck drew closer, and I was sure of the shape of the headlights and the size and mass of the vehicle. I raised the phone again. “Yeah,” I said, “that’s our guy.”
I swung my leg off the bike, scooped up the chain, ran to the edge of the road, and threw it across, watching it skitter and land mostly straight.
The drug-company truck slowed at the tracks, then accelerated again. But only for a moment. There was no dramatic sound, no pop or hiss of air as the tires were punctured, but I saw the brake lights and the truck slow, and then it lumbered to a stop at the edge of the road.
I pulled in the spike strip so we wouldn’t accidentally trap an unwanted second vehicle, then pulled on my mask. I was wearing gloves already, not because I expected to leave prints anywhere but because I’d stuffed the smallest finger of the left glove with newspaper so the driver wouldn’t be able to tell police that one of the robbers was missing a finger on that hand.
The driver’s door of the delivery truck opened, and a man climbed out from behind the wheel. He wanted to know what had gone wrong. It’s a little early to be using the past tense, “gone wrong,” buddy. Things are about to go wronger.
Serena, masked like me, walked out of the shadows behind the man and clicked off the safety on her Glock.
“Put your hands up and keep them up where I can see ’em,” she said.
He stiffened, his gaze going from her masked face to the gun and back to her face.
“Don’t be afraid,” Serena said. “It’s just a little robbery. Happens several thousand times a day in America. Take a walk over to my associate”—she raised her chin at me, standing across the highway—“and please note that she, like me, is armed, so don’t make any sudden moves, like you’re reaching for something.”
When he got to my side of the road and I’d gotten behind him with the gun, he said, “I have kids.”
“Then be smart,” I told him. “You’re just going to lie down in a ditch for few minutes, that’s all.”
“That’s okay, I guess,” he said, his voice stiff and uncertain.
I walked him about thirty yards off, to the dry bed of a drainage ditch. “Go on,” I said. “Lie down on your stomach and lace your hands on the back of your neck.”
He navigated the downslope carefully, like a guy unused to being outdoors, then got to his hands and knees, then lowered himself to his belly. He placed his hands on his neck, like I’d said.
I raised the cell with my free hand and radioed Serena. “Paratus,” I said. Ready.
“Venio,” she said.
Serena’s first comment on the Latin language, when she’d seen me reviewing flashcards in study hall when we were both fourteen years old, had been, Weird. Now she was studying it herself. It was baffling to both the English and Spanish speakers who surrounded us. More than that, it was highly economical, ideal for text messaging. You could say in three words of Latin things that would take six or seven in English.
Once Latin had been the language of my early-adolescent ambitions, of a cleaner, purer self. Now it had become a code between outlaws.
I heard the engine of an SUV start up, and Serena backed down the shoulder of the road to the truck, her headlights off, only the reverse lights visible. Normally Serena drove a Chevy Caprice, but the SUV was borrowed for tonight’s mission. Well, it was borrowed in that Serena had gotten it from one of the vatos in Trece, but I had no illusions that he hadn’t stolen it. We’d ditch it somewhere right after unloading our cargo.
I could easily have ridden with Serena in it, but my motorcycle was part of our escape plan. If things went wrong, she could jump on the back of my bike and we’d be gone. The SUV wasn’t much of a getaway car, V6 or not, but my bike was a different story. It was an Aprilia, built for speed. There wasn’t much on the road that could outrun it, including the average police-issue Crown Vic.
Once Serena and I had made the spike strip and I’d done reconnaissance on the truck routes and found a safe place to do this, the plan had fallen together with wonderful simplicity. Done right, it would take about five minutes. Serena would know exactly what she needed from the truck, what was resellable and what wasn’t. She had been robbing pharmacies back when I was still … well, back when I was still sincere.
After we’d pulled back the spike strip, it didn’t matter if a car came along before Serena was finished unloading. The delivery truck was safely off the road and the SUV parked well to the side of that, lights off, in the shadows. People drive past stalled vehicles all the time. Samaritans are rare.
The driver, lying in the ditch with his head turned to the side, said, “My older daughter’s in an Easter pageant on Sunday.”
“Be quiet,” I said.
What I wanted to say was, For God’s sake, I’m not a serial killer. You don’t have to flood me with biographical information so I’ll see you as a person. But I didn’t, because that was a little too lighthearted and reassuring. When vics get reassured, they get overconfident, and then they do stupid things. I didn’t want this guy fantasizing about getting some kind of special commendation from the company after thwarting a robbery, up in front of a whole auditorium full of applauding executives. That would be bad, because if this guy acted up, I knew I couldn’t shoot a union-card-carrying hourly employee whose daughter was going to be in an Easter pageant. But Serena, across the road, might.
Then my cell phone crackled again. “Ecce,” Serena’s voice said. Loosely translated, Heads up.
There was a second pair of headlights coming down the road. The same size, the same shape.
I’d done some scouting on this location, but my observations hadn’t indicated that the trucks ran on any sort of schedule. The plan tonight had been to simply wait until one came. I certainly hadn’t been expecting a second truck so soon.
I raised the radio: “Voles?” I asked Serena. You want to?
“Faciamus,” she said. Let’s do it.
I couldn’t leave the first driver unwatched to go get the second from Serena, so I added, switching to Spanish, “Cuando traigas el conductor aquí, seas tierna.” When you bring the driver over here, be gentle. I’d switched to Spanish because Serena’s Latin wasn’t very advanced yet, and I didn’t want there to be any confusion, not when people could get hurt.
“Claro,” she said, and her dark silhouette moved quickly and lightly across the highway to get the spike strip. She bent and sent it skating across the asphalt, and we were ready for the second truck’s approach.
Ten minutes later I heard Serena slam the cargo door of the SUV, finished with the loading. I waited for her to pull onto the highway before I spoke to the two drivers lying on the ground. “Count to a thousand before you get up,” I said. Serena had taken their keys. They’d be out here awhile. “I don’t want to see either of your heads prairie-dogging up into my line of sight before I’m out of here, okay?”
As I turned to go, the second driver, a woman, spoke. “I don’t know how you live with yourself.”
“Deb, shhh,” the man said.
I stopped and looked back. “The company you work for has made record profits off its erectile-dysfunction drug, which was only a minor variation on impotence drugs already on the market,” I said. “How much of that money did they put into research on malaria or the rarer cancers? They did find money in the budget, though, for research on a new weight-loss drug.”
The woman said, “That’s not a justification.”
“I’m not in the justification business,” I said.
I scrambled up the steep side of the ditch, then turned back, adding something I knew they wouldn’t understand. “That duty-and-honor thing? I’m over it.”