Hotshots (23 page)

“Baaad house,” she said when I came back with the money.

“Thanks.” I gave her two dollars. She gave me two candy bars. “Where do you live?” I asked.

“In the double-wide down the street. You have a computer?”

She'd noticed the Equus that the Kid, a mechanic, had taken in trade for fixing somebody's truck. I'd been trying to do research for my law practice when Cheyanne rang the doorbell. “Yeah.”

The surf box was on the screen. “You're on the Internet. Cool. My girlfriend's dad has a computer but he won't let her on the Internet. He says she'll cost him too much money.”

“I was trying to use it for work myself.”

“Whatta you do?”

“I'm a lawyer.”

“Downtown, right?”

“How'd you know?”

“I see you go by in the morning.” She stared at the computer. Her fingers seemed hungry for the keyboard like a musician's drawn to the sax or piano. “Would you mind…?”

“Go ahead,” I said.

She put the baby down on the sofa.

“Boy or girl?” I asked.

“Girl. Her name is Miranda.”

She sat down at the computer. Her fingernails skipped across the keys and pulled Teen Chat up on the screen. “Any
hueros
out there?” she typed, sending her message onto the information highway.

“You know what
hueros
are?” she asked.

“White dudes,” I said.

“
Right.” She laughed. “You, me and my mom, we're the only
hueras
who live on this block. Did you know that?”

I'd suspected, but I hadn't actually known. Leave it to the kids to know who everybody was in the hood.

“That's a fine guy you got living here. He reminds me of Carlos Leon.”

“Who's that?”

“The dude Madonna's had a baby with.”

Older, younger, lighter, darker. As far as I was concerned, that was where any resemblance to Carlos and Madonna ended. No baby on my horizon. No big bucks or personal trainers, either.

The private room message came up on the screen, the place one teen can talk to another privately. “What's your name?” it asked.

“Cheyanne,” she typed.

“What do you look like?”

“I have blonde hair.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.” Going on sixteen. Maybe. The baby on the sofa began to cry. Cheyanne continued to type, but the baby wasn't going to be ignored. Her cries escalated in volume. Cheyanne spun around. “Shut up, you little brat,” she screamed. “Can't you see I'm having fun?” The baby couldn't see or didn't care. Cheyanne left the keyboard and stomped across the room. She lifted Miranda and held her high like she was preparing to give the baby a good, hard shake.

“Don't even consider it,” I warned.

“You're right. I'd never get away with it.” She unwrapped the blanket, flipped the baby onto its stomach, turned a key in its back and shut the crying off.

“That's a doll?”

“Kinda. They give us these babies in school, see. We have to feed 'em, take care of 'em when they cry, and not rough 'em up. One day they'll have one that pees, and then we'll have to change the diaper. It's got a computer inside so if we don't take care of it the teacher will know. It's supposed to make us not want a real kid.”

“Is it working?”

“I guess. Some of these dolls act like babies born on drugs. They're smaller than the other babies. They cry for fifty minutes and they shake all the time. Even when you hold them they shake. They're real expensive, so we don't get to take them home.”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Thirteen.”

“
What grade?”

“Eighth.”

Eighth grade wasn't what it used to be, and neither was thirteen. I'd thought I was bad when I was thirteen, but that was many years ago and bad isn't what it used to be either. Having taken care of Miranda's programmed needs, Cheyanne went back to the computer and found the box of Digital Schoolhouse CD's that had come with the system. I hadn't opened the box because it sounded educational.

“You have Schoolhouse!” Cheyanne said. “Cool! Would you mind?”

“Go ahead.”

“You're sure? I mean, I'm not overstaying my welcome, am I? My mom says not to do that.”

“I'll tell you if you do.”

Cheyanne took a CD out of the box, placed it in the D drive and loaded it. The copyright information came up, tinny music played, a spider appeared in the corner of the screen and spun a web. Cheyanne sang along with the music. Her head kept time and her blonde curls bobbed. “Itsy-bitsy spider went up the waterspout.” Her fingers left the keyboard and made a spider's climbing motions.

The phone rang and I answered it. It was a guy from Celestial Dry Cleaners offering me a special on upholstery and carpet cleaning.

“I don't have any upholstery and I don't have any carpets,” I replied. The guy hung up.

“What time is it?” Cheyanne asked.

“Around three.”

“A la! I gotta go. My mom'll kill me.” She logged out of the nursery rhymes, put the CD away and picked up the bogus baby.

I walked her across the courtyard and opened the door. The boy on the bike—who was not a
huero
—had parked across the street. His hair was slick and black. He wore a t-shirt with a logo that read G
OOSEBUMPS
. He had a souped-up bike, the low rider of bikes, with a polished brass chain and tassels that dangled from the handlebars.

“Cool bike,” I said.

Cheyanne yelled, “Danny, you dork. Stop following me!”

The boy put his feet to the pedals, the rubber to the road and rode away with his head down and his elbows poking into the street.

******

When the Kid came home I told him about my visitor. “I've never seen her,” he said.

Then I told him about the boy on the bike. He didn't know who Danny was, either, but he knew
about
the bikes. “There's a club here,” he told me. “They work on the bikes like the big boys work on cars. Sometimes I fix things for them. It keeps them out of trouble, out of gangs.”

“How old are the boys?”

He shrugged. “Nine. Ten.”

“Isn't that a little young for gangs?”

“Not anymore. They like to rank in the little ones they call peewees. Peewees will do anything to be accepted.”

“The Church used to say ‘Give me a boy until he's nine and he's mine forever,'” I told him. The Kid had grown up in enough Latin American countries to know all about that Church. “Now it's give me a boy when he's that age and it's gangbang forever?”

“Yeah,” the Kid said. “The boys ride their bikes along the ditches. I can see them from the back of the shop.”

It would give the boys a special point of view—the backyards, the faces that people hide from the world. Everybody sees their neighborhood differently. Cheyanne had seen the Kid and I, but we hadn't noticed her. I had noticed the boy. The Kid had noticed the bikes.

“Cheyanne knows who you are. She told me a fine guy lived here.” The Kid laughed. He was slightly sweaty from work and looking pretty good to me right now. “How come she knows about us and we don't know about her?”

“She's a little girl and they are home more. They have the time, you have the power. You always notice what the people with more power do.”

“I have power?”

“You own a house. You work downtown.”

“That's not much.”

“It's enough here,” the Kid said. I gave him his candy bar and watched him roll down the wrapper. What kind of power did he have? I wondered. He was tall and skinny, had thick, curly hair and could fix things. That was part of it. A guy from a middle-class Argentine family that had been forced to emigrate to Mexico, he'd taken the immigrant's route of starting his own business once he reached the U.S.A. In his journey through the Americas he'd taken a turn that led him to believe in himself. Sometimes that's power enough.

I looked out the window at the herb garden behind my house—also the work of the previous owner, who'd planted the mint, oregano, sage and catnip. All I do to keep it green is turn the drip irrigation on in the spring and off in the fall—my idea of gardening. An orange and white tabby was nibbling on the catnip and getting a fix.

You
can find more of Judith Van Gieson's mysteries as ebooks :

North of the Border: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#1)

Raptor: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#2)

The Other Side of Death: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#3)

The Wolf Path: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#4)

The Lies That Bind: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#5)

Parrot Blues: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#6)

Hotshots: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#7)

Ditch Rider: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#8)

The Stolen Blue: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#1)

Vanishing Point: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#2)

Confidence Woman: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#3)

Land of Burning Heat: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#4)

The Shadow of Venus: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#5)