Blackjack Read Free

hair set off a Madonna’s face, aglow with impending motherhood. The man’s cowboy hat had been custom-made from skins of the Gila monster. It both shielded his eyes and veiled their message. His long duster was casually draped over a candy-orange silk shirt buttoned only at the throat, the better to display a single heavy-linked gold chain.
    Soon a diamond would be added to that chain—the baby his woman was expecting would be his first.
    A candy-orange ’64 Impala stood arrogantly at the curb. A two-door hardtop with rectangular black panels inset on the hood, roof and trunk, each intricately over-painted in a delicate white floral pattern, the quintessential low-rider was fully dropped to the limit of its air-bag suspension.
    The Latino’s pose was a perfect, albeit unconscious, imitation of the Great White Hunter’s. Whatever he surveyed, he owned.
    Under the hat’s brim, his eyes swept the street, relentless as a prison searchlight. He registered the approach of three young men, but kept his face expressionless.
    One of the trio had covered his head with a candy-orangedo-rag. Another sported long black hair tied behind him in a ponytail and held in place by a headband, also displaying the gang’s color. The third was a heavily muscled individual in a candy-orange wife-beater T-shirt. His head was freshly shaven, glistening in the sun.
    Let other gangs fly multi-colors,
Los Peligrosos
needed only one to distinguish itself. Various tattoos marked them as well, obedient to the decades-old tradition of “ink to link.”
    To wear the gang’s color without its name permanently etched in one’s body would have been unthinkable. Flying gang colors might be prohibited inside the prisons which awaited them all and disgorged some, but they would carry their skin-branding to the grave. Although they never spoke it aloud, all knew that their life offered only one final alternative to incarceration—a ceremonious burial.
    The tall man took a long, ostentatious toke from the cigarillo-blunt in his left hand. He did not offer a hit to his woman—she was pregnant, how would that look? As he patted the
chola
’s bulging belly, his left hand brushed the outline of a semi-automatic pistol in his coat pocket. Touching his future with each hand, not knowing which would come first: birth or death.
    The crew formed a rough circle, standing so that they could listen to their leader and watch the street at the same time.
    Time passed, as it does in such places.
    “You want to roll, you got to pay the toll,” the tall man schooled the youth with the shaved head. “These streets test a man. You know this when you coming up, just making your first little baby-move. Me, now, I passed that test. I can
make
a life”—he bends, quickly and gracefully at the waist, to plant a showy kiss on his girl’s belly—“and I can
take
a life. You hear me,
ese?
”
    “Always hear you,
jefe
.”
    “I don’t mind dying. That’s what it takes, you want to be out here every day, walking with your head high,
sí?
”
    “Dying comes quick out here,” the youth wearing the headband solemnly intoned.
    “So?” the tall man immediately challenged. “To die quickly, that is
nothing
. A sheep can be slaughtered, but a sheep cannot kill. So, when it dies, it is always a quick death.
    “Only when you go Inside do you face that
final
test of a man. Inside, that is dying
slow
. Every day, dying. The days pass; nothing changes. The only thing that happens fast is when it comes time to stick a pig.
    “But Inside, even a blade will not always mean death. I have seen men survive
thirty
stab wounds—in prison, that’s the one thing the infirmary is good for. If you don’t get wheeled in DOA, you probably live.
    “Not out here. On the boulevard, you point your pistol, you pull the trigger, and death follows the bullets. Inside, to kill, you must be close to
el enemigo
. To shoot, yes, that takes heart. But to stab, that is what takes the