“I know,” Lara said, chewing her gum hard. “And I’m sorry. Really sorry.”
“If you were one of my girls, you’d take a pretty good beatdown for lying to me, but lucky for you, you’re not,” Serena said.
Lara shifted as if to get up from the couch right away, but I held up my hand.
“One last thing, Lara,” I said. “Stay alert. If the old man knew about you, he’d probably have sent someone much earlier. But be careful. You see anything, you even feel anything’s not right, call Warchild.”
She nodded.
Then I said, “Other than that, try and forget about this stuff. You’re supposed to be on your way out of this story, not deeper in. Out is the smart direction here.”
Lara nodded seriously and got up off the couch and left, as if she’d been dismissed from class by a teacher.
Serena said, “Now what?” She and I were still headed deeper into this story, the wrong direction.
“Call Payaso,” I said. “Have him bring over the guys he trusts. It’s time for a war council.”
thirty-two
Two hours later, I was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, notepad on my leg. Serena was nearby, on the couch.
Lara had confirmed my theory, and yet I had mostly given up on the idea of finding Nidia by finding a doctor fallen from grace; even if I trolled extensively through Medical Board of California records, there was no effective way to follow up a hunch about which ones might have been receptive to a Skouras overture. My plans, for now, were fixed on finding out where Skouras held property, particularly individual properties in isolated areas.
Serena got up to answer a knock at the door, and came back with Payaso and his 24-7’s, his most trusted homeboys, Deacon and Smiley and Iceman. A few minutes later, Trippy and Risky and Heartbreaker came in. Not that the girls were going to be in on this mission, but Serena said they could listen.
“They might as well learn,” she’d said. “Even if they’ll never be able to use this shit. Think about it, Insula. This is the kind of thing people like us are part of maybe once in a lifetime. If that.”
She’d sounded awestruck. I hoped she didn’t think this was going to be a harmless adventure, like the movies. She’d seen too much to be thinking that way.
Maybe, though, she was being romantic precisely because what we were doing was so different from the usual banging. Saving Nidia and her child, it was honorable. So I didn’t say anything to bring her down.
Serena, Payaso, and the crew settled down in positions around the living room. Heartbreaker was adding rum to a half-full two-liter bottle of Coke, and passing ice and glasses around.
“Okay,” I said. “We’re not ready to plan the mission itself yet, because that can’t get done until we’ve learned where Nidia is and checked out the layout and all that.” I sipped a little of my rum and Coke and went on: “We need to figure out the smartest way to proceed. In other words, how to find out where Nidia is without drawing attention to ourselves in the process.”
Payaso said, “What’re you thinking?”
“There are two things I’m sure that Skouras needs right now: a corrupt doctor willing to take care of Nidia extralegally, and an out-of-the-way place to keep her. Getting a line on the doctor is going to be next to impossible, given that there’d be no paper trail. So right now I think we should concentrate on finding out where he owns property.”
“And then we go get her,” Payaso said, “Trece style.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But after that, we can’t really stand down. When we have Nidia, we’re going to be in essentially the same situation that Skouras’s guys are in now. They’re going to be looking for her, so we’ve got to keep her under wraps, safe, and healthy. And she’ll need medical care during the last weeks of her term.”
“And someone’s gotta birth the baby,” Payaso said.
“Yes,” I said. “We have a couple of choices there, none of them ideal. The best choice is probably to take her to an ER. If we’ve lain low enough, and Skouras’s men don’t know where we are, he can’t have every maternity ward in the state being watched.”
“What about computers?” Heartbreaker said. “Could he have people in his organization who could hack into, you know, hospital computers?”
I hadn’t thought of that. “Beats me. But I don’t think it’s going to help us to start thinking of this guy as the master of the universe. We’ll get too paranoid to plan anything.”
“But if we can’t go to the ER,” Payaso said, “maybe we could jack a doctor, get him to birth the baby. I heard about some vatos that did it for a gang member who got shot. They let the doc go afterward. They didn’t hurt him.”
I’d heard those stories, too. “That’s one way,” I said slowly, “but I’m not wild about sticking a gun in the face of someone who’s spent his or her life trying to help sick people. It’s a cliché, but I don’t want to become like Skouras to defeat him.”
I watched Payaso, to see how he took this rejection of not just his idea but his gangster ethics. He didn’t look mutinous.
“Speaking of that, though, there’s a middle way,” Serena said. “You said there’s got to be a doctor who’s looking after Nidia. If he’s there when we come in and grab Nidia, we could take him, too, keep him until her due date.”
“One-stop shopping,” I agreed. “Tempting, but the problem with that is controlling the doctor over a period of days or even weeks. I know some of you guys have jacked people before. What’s the key to controlling a vic in that situation?”
“Fear,” several voices said.
“Right. So the key to keeping the doctor in line would be keeping him-or her, I guess-pretty well psychologically traumatized, as well as never giving him any privacy in which to escape. You may think you’re ready for that, but there’s a difference between keeping a jacking victim under control for two minutes, and keeping someone intimidated for two weeks. You may not be as prepared as you think. You may not like who you have to become.”
There was a moment of silence around the circle. Then Payaso said, “What about us delivering the baby? No doctor. Women have been having babies for centuries without help.”
I exchanged glances with Serena. People loved to say that about childbirth, and they never seemed to apply it to other medical situations. No one ever says that people have been having infections for centuries before we had antibiotics. I only said, “That’s something else to think about.”
I didn’t want to oppose Payaso too much in one meeting. There’d be time later to argue against that idea.
Another conversation in Serena’s bed:
“So, prima, you gonna tell me where you got that ten K?”
“No.”
“I thought we were familia now. No secrets between us.”
“Everyone’s got secrets,” I said. “You have secrets from me, I’m sure.”
“Like what? Ask me what you want to know.”
I rolled onto one elbow. “When you were in high school, with your head shaved, dressed cholo, you did a lot to prove you were one of the guys. You told me that.”
“Sure.”
“When teenagers are banging hardest, that’s usually when they do their killings. They walk into parties or up to porches and blast away. Often they get away with it.”
“That’s what you wanna know? If I did that?”
“I’m just making a point,” I said. “That’s something I’ve never asked you. So we do have secrets between us.”
“You’re assuming the answer is yes,” she pointed out. “If I didn’t, then I don’t have a secret, do I?”
“That’s true,” I said, “but it’s not an answer.”