Los Angeles!
The helicopter veered toward a huge building, hovered, then descended to its roof. A sign in front of the building: Good Samaritan Hospital.
Tino remembered his mother reading him the story of the Good Samaritan from a Bible with pictures. Robbers attack a man walking along a road. They beat him and take his clothes and money. No one will stop and help the man. Someone from the Samaritan tribe comes along. He bandages the man's wounds, takes him to an inn, feeds him, and gives him money. And Jesus says that's how you get to live forever.
A really nice story. Except the stuff from the Bible never happens in real life. In real life, if you're lying by the road, bleeding, someone comes along and steals your shoes.
My Reeboks!
Tino untied his laces, pulled off his right shoe, removed the insole. There was the crumpled card his mother had given him. 'J. Atticus Payne, Esquire.' A very important man. One of the biggest lawyers in Los Angeles.
'If anything bad happens and I am not there, go see Mr. Payne.'
Tino studied the address. Delano Street. He had no idea how to get there. No money. No papers. But his mother had taught him to be brave.
' You're my little valiente.'
He looked left. Looked right. Then he started walking.
Cars went by, but few people were on the sidewalk. When he spotted an Anglo woman, he asked in English where he could find a bus station, but she stepped off the curb to avoid him.
Two hours passed. The sleepless night began to take its toll. Fatigue crawled up his legs. Hunger gnawed at his gut.
A police car rolled past. The cop eyed him, suspiciously. Tino fought the urge to run. The police car kept going.
He stopped in front of a small, neat house and watched as a man with hands stained the color of carne asada fertilized a flower bed. The bed was filled with plants taller than Tino. Stems topped by purple and orange flowers shaped like birds' beaks.
'Flor ave del paraiso,' the gardener told him.
Birds of paradise.
Beautiful. Tino had seen them once before, surrounding the house of a rich family in Caborca.
The gardener wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and offered cold water from a cooler. When Tino told him he was hungry but had no money, out came a chicken tortilla wrapped in foil. And then another. The gardener was from Loreto in Baja. He had been here seven years without papers, and that made Tino feel better. He showed the man the card of Mr. J. Atticus Payne, Esquire.
'Van Nuys. I can tell you how to get there,' the gardener said, proudly. 'The subway station is within walking distance for a strong boy.'
'I didn't know there was a subway here.'
'Most gabachos do not know, either.'
The gardener gave him directions to the Wilshire-Vermont station, with instructions to ride to Universal City. There, he would take a bus to Van Nuys. The gardener could not tell him exactly which bus to take, but a smart boy can figure it out. Then he gave Tino money. Winking, he said there are no toll collectors on the subway, so save a dollar twenty-five and buy a Coca-Cola. Use the rest for the bus.
Tino thanked the man and headed toward the subway station. Soon, he thought, he would be speaking to one of the most important lawyers in all of Los Angeles. A good man who had helped the poor mojados cooked in that trailer truck. As he walked, Tino grew more confident. J. Atticus Payne, he concluded, must truly be a Good Samaritan.
NINETEEN
Payne imagined swinging Adam's baseball bat.
Smashing Manuel Garcia over the head. Crushing bone to splinters, tissue to mush. Luxuriating in each crack and squish. Reveling in the blood, feeling no more guilt than a kid stomping a grasshopper.
But could he really do it? Thinking about killing was one thing. Watching the life seep out of a man was another. That was the debate raging inside him.
Payne had left Sharon at the restaurant, her face pale with worry. She had buckled him into the front seat of his Lexus, as if he were a child, giving him a little peck on the cheek. A charity kiss, to be sure.
His body aching from his run-in with the protect-and-serve crowd, Payne headed west on Wilshire. He had a notion about stopping at the La Brea Tar Pits. He used to take Adam to the museum there. All boys love dinosaurs and fossils. Adam would spend hours drawing pictures of the mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, whose remains have been preserved in the tar.
A few minutes into the drive, Payne saw a Home Depot, and by instinct, swung into the parking lot. Two dozen Hispanic men in dirty jeans, T-shirts, and ball caps squatted on their haunches or sat on the curb, smoking, talking, hoping for an honest day's work. Keenly appraising the shoppers exiting the store with lumber, plywood, paint. Offering their services in an eager Spanglish.
'Buen trabajador.'
'Puedo arreglar todo bien rapido.'
'?Barato!'
Not a green card in the bunch, of course. A good deal for the homeowner too scared to clean his own roof gutters, too cheap to pay a licensed contractor.
The odds were great that Manuel Garcia wasn't within five hundred miles of here. But didn't Payne have to look, anyway?
Garcia was the driver of the blazing red Dodge Ram truck. An SRT-10 with the 500 horsepower Viper engine. Not the rusted-out Chevy pickup you'd expect an illegal immigrant to drive. Garcia was a solid citizen… of Mexico. Without papers, he'd landed a job on a sardine boat on the Monterey docks. He stayed out of trouble, manned double shifts, and with overtime was paid more than most schoolteachers. He sent money home to his wife and kids. He made a down payment on the Ram truck three weeks before driving to L.A., when the sardine boat went into dry dock for maintenance.
So it was by chance that, on a gray and misty Saturday morning fourteen months earlier, Jimmy and Adam Payne crossed paths with the hardworking and hard-drinking mojado. A man who would flee on foot from the crash, leaving behind his new truck and a dying boy.
Eight weeks after Adam's funeral and one day after the cast came off his leg, Payne drove upstate and waited for the sardine boat to return to port. He stood on the dock, a copy of Garcia's driver's license photo in his pocket. He watched the boat, Fish Reaper, enter the harbor, a blizzard of cawing gulls tailing it. Garcia was not aboard. The crew hadn't seen him. The boat's skipper said he'd been a solid crewman, nimble with the nets. Never missed a day's work. Never gave anyone any problems, not even when he put away a case of beer on a Sunday night. A clerk at the cannery said Garcia had not picked up his last paycheck.
Payne drove inland and found Garcia's trailer in the little town of Spreckels.
No one home.
Payne broke the flimsy lock. The place clean, the air stuffy. Clothes folded. Small TV on a table of cinder blocks. Letters from his wife. Payne copied down the address from an envelope. The city of Oaxaca in Mexico.
For the next month, Payne haunted the Parker Center downtown. Each day, he'd drop in, taking the homicide detectives to lunch, following up with tips, rumors, ideas. The police couldn't find Garcia. A friend in Homeland Security got Payne a meeting with the regional director of the Border Patrol. No record of Garcia coming in or going out.
Payne carried Adam's aluminum baseball bat in his car. Each evening, when he should have been sitting home with Sharon, holding her, consoling her, he drove through the barrios of East L.A. One night, in Boyle Heights, he thought he saw Garcia walking out of a 7Eleven. Payne yanked the car into the parking lot and jumped out, waving the baseball bat. 'Remember me, asshole? You killed my son!'
