Ditch Rider Read online

  Ditch Rider

  A NEIL HAMEL MYSTERY, #8

  Judith Van Gieson

  DITCH RIDER

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1998 Judith Van Gieson.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole

  or in part, by other means, without permission.

  First ebook edition © 2013 by AudioGO.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-468-3

  Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9499-8

  Cover photo © Mi Keledray/iStock.com

  This book is dedicated to attorney Alan M. Uris, my old friend and legal adviser, and to the girls and the boy in my hood

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Paige, Marisela, Liz, Nedia, Sharon, Michelle, Jessica, Tony and Emilio.

  I couldn’t have written this book without you.

  ******

  Ditch Rider

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  MORE MYSTERIES BY JUDITH VAN GIESON

  1

  I HAVE THE only house on Mirador Road with a courtyard. It’s my buffer between the living room and the street. My neighbors live in cinderblock houses and trailers; their only buffers are the cars and trucks parked in their scraped-bare yards. In my hood the smaller the house the greater the number of vehicles parked in front of it. The neighbors have chain-link fences and an occasional rosebush or plum tree. I have a weed that grew into a Siberian elm and shades my courtyard in summer. In the winter the bare branches mark time on the wall with their shadows. My courtyard has a banco (an adobe bench) growing out of the wall, a brick floor and a struggling rosebush planted by a previous owner. The adobe wall snakes across a wooden door that has a chevron pattern to the boards. There’s enough space between the V’s to see the outline of who’s coming, but not the details. When the bell rings, it can be someone trying to sell me black-market t-shirts or just checking to see if anyone’s home. Or else it’s Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons on the conversion trail. This time it was a small person with a halo of blonde hair.

  “Who’s there?” I asked before flipping the latch.

  “Cheyanne.”

  She sounded harmless, so I opened the door. My visitor had a mane of blonde curls pulled high above her head and tumbling down her back. She wore shorts and an extra-large Chicago Bulls t-shirt. Her skin was the color of vanilla ice cream, something you notice in my neighborhood. Her fingernails were painted blue, her lipstick was black. She held a candy bar in one hand. The other hand cradled a baby wrapped in a blanket.

  “I’m selling candy for my school,” she said, showing me the candy bar. Her nails were bitten down and there was white space at the cuticle where the blue had grown out. “WORLD’S FINEST CHOCOLATE,” the candy bar wrapper read. “FUND RAISERS—THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT.” Behind the girl a boy on a bike pedaled slowly down the street.

  “How much?” I asked her.

  “A dollar.”

  “A dollar for that?” The candy bar was no wider than two pencils, no longer than Cheyanne’s finger.

  She shrugged. “It’s for the school.”

  “What school?”

  “Taylor Middle.”

  “All right. I’ll take two.” One for me. One for my live-in lover, the Kid. “Come on in. I’ll get you the money.”

  She kicked the door shut behind her, followed me across the courtyard and into the living room looking around at my beehive-shaped adobe fireplace and at the vigas in my ceiling. I went in search of my purse.

  “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 GOOSEBUMPS. 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.

  2

  CHEYANNE STARTED SHOWING up now and then with Miranda cradled in her arm. She liked to hang out at my house and search for guys on the computer. Whenever she asked if she’d overstayed her welcome, I said not yet. I didn’t meet many teenagers in my line of life, and teen talk was a break from the adult wrangling I usually dealt with.

  One Saturday Cheyanne came to the door with another girl who had the same blue fingernails and big hair, only the other girl’s hair was dark and her Chicago Bulls t-shirt was an extra small. Every time the subject of having to wear school uniforms comes up in Albuquerque, teenagers complain loudly, but it looked to me like they were already wearing uniforms—Chicago Bulls t-shirts in summer, Chicago Bulls jackets in winter.

  “Hi,” Cheyanne said. “This is my friend Patricia.”

  “Hi,” I replied. “Where’s Miranda?”

  “Home with my mom.”

  “Do you have one of those bogus babies, too?” I asked Patricia.

  “No way,” she said.

  The Kid had taken the day off and was in the driveway washing his truck.

  “That’s your guy out there. Right?” Cheyanne said.

  “Right,” I said.

  “He’s never here when I come over.”

  “He works a lot.”

  “Can we meet him?” Patricia asked, looking up at me from under heavily made-up eyelids.

  “Come on in.” They followed me inside.

  “Baaad house, huh?” Cheyanne said to Patricia.

  “Real baaad,” Patricia agreed.

  I’d mastered the CD-ROM and Radio Austin was playing on the D drive. The girls started giggling, line dancing and doing a wicked imitation of a big-haired country-western singer. They mouthed the words, snapped their fingers, shook their tousled heads.

  I went out back to round up the Kid, which took a few minutes because he wanted to get the soap off the truck before the sun baked it in place. The music had stopped and Cheyanne was showing Patricia Digital Schoolhouse when we returned.

  “That stuff’s for children,” Patricia said.

  “I play the music for Miranda. She likes it.” Cheyanne laughed.

  “She’s not a real baby, you know.”

  “I know.” Cheyanne’s laugh turned into a pout. Her moods changed as fast as the weather did on cloud cam.

  “You stole that doll from the school.”

  “I didn’t steal it. I only borrowed it for a few days.”

  “A few months, you mean. What’s gonna happen when they catch you?”

  “They’re not gonna catch me.”

  I broke up the quarrel and introduced the Kid.

  “That’s your shop on Fourth Street, right?” Patricia asked. “The one with the flying red horse sign outside?”

  “Right.”

  “I hear you have a parrot there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s its name?”

  “Mimo.”

  “Does it talk?”

  “Mas o menos,” he shrugged. “It says hello and pendejo.”

  It said pendejo (asshole) a lot more than it said hello. Mimo liked the reaction it got to pendejo. Patricia laughed, then lowered her lids and looked at her blue nails. “There was a shooting over by t
here last night,” she said. “In the strip mall on Ladera. Did you know that?”

  The Kid shook his head. “No.”

  “A guy named Juan Padilla was killed.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “How old was he?” I asked.

  “Fifteen,” said Patricia.

  “How did it happen?” asked the Kid.

  Cheyanne had been tugging the tail of her t-shirt and doing a little dance while Patricia told the Kid about the death of Juan Padilla. There was something she wanted to say and she’d been waiting for the chance to say it. She planted her feet, let go of her t-shirt and blurted it out. “It was like this, see. Juan and this other guy, they had a fight. They weren’t brothers exactly but they were like that. Juan got scared and he pulled a gun. He didn’t want to shoot the other guy, he was just scared, but the other guy didn’t know that, see, so he shot Juan first.”

  “Did you know Juan?” I asked her.

  “He went to Valley High. I didn’t really know him.”

  “That’s not the way it happened,” Patricia put her two cents in. “It was gang shit. Juan dissed somebody and he got offed for it. It was a power play. The guy that shot him was showing his colors, making his name come out. That’s what really happened.”

  “Which gang?” I asked.

  “What difference does it make?” Patricia flipped her hair over her shoulder. “They’re all the same. No matter what color they carry, they all bleed red.”

  “It could make a difference to the APD.”

  “Anybody who killed Juan will be dead before they get him,” Patricia said.

  She had a point. Gang justice was swifter and more effective than the APD’s.

  “It didn’t happen the way you said,” Patricia told Cheyanne. “Those guys were nothing like brothers.”

  “Maybe they were alike on the inside. Everybody wants the same things, right?”

  “Or they want somebody else’s things.”

  “I guess,” Cheyanne said in a small voice.

  “Are you thirteen, too?” I asked the world-weary Patricia.

  “Fifteen in December,” she said. “I’m in high school, but Cheyanne and me, we’ve been friends for a long time from when she used to live on my street.” They were close in chronological age, but Cheyanne had a few months of childhood left and Patricia appeared to have none, the effect, maybe, of high school. Patricia started as if she’d been stung by a bee, then she pulled a beeper out of her pocket. “It’s my mom. We have to use the ones that vibrate now,” she explained, “because of school. They take them away if they beep and you don’t get them back till school’s out.”