Earth Angels Read Free

Payaso.
    Stepanovich had grown up in East L.A. and had spent his entire nine years in the Department assigned to the area. There were few members of the more than thirty street gangs in the division he didn't know by sight. Stepanovich knew that Eastside gang members lived and died in their respective gang territory like peasants in a feudal state. He'd figured out long ago that knowing their cars, nicknames, girlfriends and hangouts was critical in solving a gang murder. Locked into their respective turf, the White Fence, Frogtown, Maravilla, Happy Valley, Clover, Third Street and Alpine Street gangs were easy to find. Even if they fled to Mexico to hide out with relatives after committing a murder, in a few months they usually returned to their home turf.
    This special talent for being able to interpret and predict the activities of the street gangs had earned him a call from Captain Villalobos of Hollenbeck Division to brief the East Los Angeles Rotary Club on the problem. When questioned about the prognosis of the gang situation in general, he was smart enough to evade any direct answer rather than betray his true feelings, that the only way to solve the problem was to lock up each and every gangbanger and throw away the key.
    A balding, taciturn paramedic whom Stepanovich had seen at the scene of the six other East L.A. gang shootings during the last month extended a clear plastic tube from a plasma bottle and attached it to a hypodermic needle. He lifted Payaso's right arm and stabbed the needle into a bulging blue vein that snaked between tattoos of a three dimensional Latin crucifix and the word "VIDA LOCA" just above it.
    Payaso's eyes rolled back in his head, and his jaw hung slack as white spittle leaked from the corner of his mouth. He didn't appear to feel a thing.
    Stepanovich stepped back and, moving his hand into a pillar of blue light streaming from a stained glass window, checked his watch. He took out a pen, noted the time on a leather-covered notepad given him as a police academy graduation gift by Nancy. She'd filed for divorce when a marriage counselor suggested that marrying a cop might have been a mistake for a dependent personality who needed a spouse around nights and weekends. Stepanovich ambled to a cluster of policemen and tan uniformed coroner's deputies kneeling in the aisle.
    Raul Arredondo, a husky, hawk faced young detective who often worked with Stepanovich, came to his feet and stepped back to allow Stepanovich a view of the tiny corpse on the floor: a girl whose age Stepanovich guessed at about nine years old, dressed in pink taffeta, white panty hose, and shiny patent leather shoes. There was a small, bloodless opening below her chin and an enormous, gaping exit wound on top of her head, exposing wet brain tissue. Her wide brown eyes and small mouth were open in death. A few feet away, a woman Stepanovich guessed to be the child's mother was being restrained by two other women as she rocked back and forth, sobbing hysterically.
    A feeling beyond anger overwhelmed Stepanovich. Like many cops, he'd become inured to violent death: gory gang murders, suicides, blood splashed traffic accidents, and drowning victims staring up at him from the bottom of swimming pools. The sight of a dead child, though, still pierced him to the core. "Damn," he heard himself saying.
    "She caught a stray round," Arredondo said, trying to hide the emotion in his voice.
    Detective Captain Bob Harger passed Stepanovich and stepped up onto a nearby pew. Only a few years older than Stepanovich, he was attired in a short-sleeved white shirt and pleated trousers secured by a black weave pattern leather belt. On the belt were two four-inch barrel revolvers in zebra skin holsters.
    "Officers, take your commands from me!" Harger shouted in a foghorn voice that reminded Stepanovich of the officer survival lecture Harger regularly gave to police academy recruits. He pointed his right hand as if it was a gun: "I want a rope