All Involved Read Free Page A

sink when he was done. I wasn’t there, but I heard.
    â€œYou know me,” Fate’s still going, “I just army-crawl my ass over to the nearest tree so I can look out to see who’s shooting.”
    I must’ve heard Fate’s story two hundred times. We all have. By now it’s like call and response. It’s our story, we all own it, and when it gets told, you gotta ask questions at the right times.
    As I crawl to my room I say, “Could you see who it was, like faces or whatever?”
    The knock comes again, slower and heavier this time. Bam. Bam. Bam.
    Fate blinks. I’m hunched down by the door to my room, running my hand along the baseboard for the rifle my little brotherhides there behind the nightstand. He does that. Hides one in every room, two in the bathroom.
    â€œIt was Vikings . Leaning all out over the hood of that cop car, headlights off, letting go of shots, man, just squeezing!”
    That’s Lynwood. We got our very own neo-Nazi sheriff gang. I wish I was lying. I’m not. We heard they even got tattoos. Minnesota Vikings logos on their left ankles. The law don’t matter to them. Their idea of fixing gang problems is rolling up in a neighborhood with their lights off like Fate said, then loosing shots at whoever even looks like a gangster before rolling out, hoping to set off a gang war where we kill each other cuz we think another gang shot at us, not sheriffs. That’s some criminal police work right there. But to them, if you’re brown or black, you’re worth nothing. You’re not even human. Killing us is like taking out trash. That’s how they think.
    With nail polish in one hand and one of them application things in the other, Lorraine pokes her head out my room with a curious look on her face, a big, dumb look with her high school chichis jiggling at me underneath it. She’s not even wearing a bra, and only three toes out of ten are done up in blue glitter. Obviously, she got interrupted.
    My glare stops her cold. I mouth the words, Puta, get back .
    She looks mad at first, but she sinks back into the darkness of the room as I wrap my finger around the butt of the rifle and draw it into my lap. It’s a light little thing in my hands, a .22. I only ever shot it twice at targets in my life.
    I check it’s loaded. You know it is.
    Clever’s whispering at Fate, looking at the closed-circuit monitor that shows every angle of the house outside, “Got nothing on video. It’s the Serrato kid.”
    â€œAlberto?”
    â€œNah, the youngest. I don’t know his name.”
    The knock comes again and it’s loud as fuck. Hard to imagine a twelve-year-old kid hitting my door that hard. That’s when mystomach drops like I’m riding a Knott’s Berry roller coaster. See, that’s when I know something’s real wrong. Something that maybe can’t get fixed.
2
    Fate’s on the phone, doing the smart thing: calling across the street, calling two houses up, two houses down, to make sure the avenue is clean, carless, nobody lurking. You never know who they might use to get you to open a door. Could be kids, could be anybody. Gotta have eyes everywhere. He nods slow before handing the piece to Apache. Clever backs him up.
    Clever’s toothpick thin. A real palillo . He keeps the chain on the door but turns the knob and cracks it so Apache can slide the snub-nose .38 to the metal grating of the security door, a few inches from the boy’s face. “You need something, lil homie?”
    The kid is dead out of breath, coughing a little, not even looking at the barrel or even looking up. “Miss Payasa, I . . .”
    Lupe Rodriguez. That’s been my government name if you need to know. Not that it matters. It’s not my real one. I’ve changed it twice already. But it’s Payasa since I been all involved. (That’s the polite way of saying I’m into some gangster