Ditch Rider Read Free Page B

earring in one ear. The police were working up a sketch. The body hadn’t been found until 2:00 A . M .—too late for the Saturday Journal. Crimestoppers was offering a reward, and the witness would get it if the shooter and the description matched. The case was likely to be handled by my buddy in the District Attorney’s office, Deputy DA Anthony Saia, who’d been put in charge of gang violence. Some details of the crime were revealed; some were not. The APD can’t give away too much or the DA will never get a conviction.
    The Kid bit into his burrito and the chicharrones crunched. I ate my bacon. The little girl’s parents told her to get away from the water, waking her from her dream. Her foot dipped into the pool and the water splashed all over her pink dress.
    â€œJuan Padilla’s body was found at two A . M . yesterday morning,” I told the Kid. “A witness said it was gang-related and the shooter was a white teenager around six feet tall.”
    â€œGangs,” the Kid said. “The big girl was right about that.”
    â€œAre there gangs in this neighborhood?” I asked him. I hadn’t seen the telltale signs, like graffiti tags all over the walls, pants that went beyond baggy or the t-shirts with Old English letters and comedy and tragedy masks that gang members wear to mourn their dead.
    â€œSure. They have cars. They can go everywhere. They can go to any high school they want to—if they want to go to school. If they go to the D Home or prison they teach everybody else what they know. It’s La Vida Loca, the crazy life. Sometimes I fix their cars for them.”
    â€œWhat are they like?”
    â€œDon’t worry about them, chiquita. They go after each other, not us.”
    I was interested in how gangs had co-opted the symbols of another time and place, the way Elizabethan England had resurfaced in twentieth-century Albuquerque. “Those masks they wear on their t-shirts are the faces of comedy and tragedy,” I said. “What does that mean to them?”
    â€œSmile now, cry later,” he said.

3
    O N M ONDAY THE police sketch appeared in the Journal. The suspect had a thin face with high cheekbones, a long, straight nose, narrow eyes. He had curly blonde hair and wore an earring in one ear. What distinguished him from your average white dude was an expression of total malice.
    â€œI wouldn’t want to run into him in a parking lot at night.” my secretary Anna said when I showed her the picture.
    â€œMe neither.”
    â€œHow old, do they think?”
    â€œSixteen or seventeen.”
    Anna studied the sketch. “He wouldn’t be bad looking if he wasn’t giving somebody the stinkeye.”
    He did have the even features that pass for good looks in our society. “He was shooting a fifteen-year-old boy when the witness saw him. Maybe the sketch artist was trying to recapture the moment.”
    â€œIf he looked like that all the time he should have been locked up long ago,” Anna said.
    It turned out that the suspect had been arrested several times, but he was Teflon-coated—none of the charges had stuck. On Tuesday, his name, Ron Cade, appeared in the paper. The police said he was a member of a Heights gang. By now they had a photo and the Journal ran it. The witness had given the police a near-perfect description of the perp. The photo was very close to the sketch, except that Ron Cade’s lips had a ripple of a smile in the photo. As might be expected, he hadn’t been seen since the shooting. Ron Cade might have run away to live out his life in Mexico or California, or he might already be dead and rotting somewhere on a mesa or in a ditch.
    ******
    I got home around seven that evening. It had been a boring day, and I’d spent most of it in my office pushing paper. The ice-cream truck was parked on Mirador, and some bike riders were gathered around it eating Popsicles. I waved to them