Shatter Read online

  He looks away. “I loved her. I can’t talk about this anymore.”

  He’s gone before I realize he’s suffering over the loss of Carrie and I accused and interrogated him anyway. Shame rolls over me.

  I head to my locker. I pass Mr. White who gives me a manila envelope identical to the one he gave Cordero. Apparently he has one for each team leader. Didn’t he say the addresses of all the team members were listed inside?

  When I get a few yards away from my teacher, I tear into the envelope, my fingers shaking as I scan the top page.

  “147 Benjamin Road,” I say when I get to Cordero’s name. I could go to his house, question him there.

  I stand and gaze at the athletic field in the distance. I should be at the track already. Slate’s headed there. I could make it to Cordero’s house around the same time as him if he’s walking.

  I type 147 Benjamin Road into my cell. Left on Main Street, 1.8 miles, it says. I stash my backpack into my locker and settle into my distance pace.

  I get to Main and run until the sidewalk ends in a crumble of concrete. My phone says to keep going north, but Main Street is one leg of my standard training route. Noticing a small gap of patchy asphalt next to a store made of pink stucco, I continue forward, my breath coming in long draws.

  I reach the gap and look left. A street appears from nowhere.

  Dilapidated homes are strewn in no order. Spanish-tiled houses smack in the middle of downtown—a world inside a world. Rap and mariachi music compete from open windows.

  I turn onto the road, passing a tricked-out Cadillac and a chicken coop. The exotic surroundings play on my fears. Even the chatter of children is foreign. Their rapid Spanish dialogue is nothing like the plodding, stiff lines my classmates and I repeat.

  I reach the porch of a crumbling two-storied manor.

  147 Benjamin Road.

  I knock, and the door swings slowly open of its own accord, bringing a waft of stale smoke. I blink at the dozen teen boys inside. Shirtless ones, lounging in filth. Old mattresses spill their stuffing onto concrete subflooring. Costco-sized boxes of cigarettes. A carton of milk in the corner oozing something gray. Cordero is nowhere in sight.

  No one notices me, too busy laughing while one of the tattooed men tells a story. His mouth is pulled into an exaggerated frown for his audience—the face of a clown.

  I recognize his defeated eyes and chubby frame. I remember the first time I saw that face. The most recent time too. I was terrified in both instances.

  The man notices me, locking his gaze on mine. I freeze.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DAY TWO

  Iwas sitting with Dad in a neighbor’s kitchen the day after Carrie died. Officer Haynes was there with a grainy picture.

  Dozens of shirtless males posed for the camera, making gang symbols with their fingers. I scanned the photo, recognizing a man frowning like a clown.

  “This one.” My voice sounded strange. I hadn’t used it since seeing the charred house with Carrie’s body still inside. All that crying.

  “You recognize him?” Officer Haynes asked.

  “From school a long time ago. Is he the one who tagged her car?”

  Officer Haynes shook his head. “That’s Oscar Garcia-Joya. He’s been in prison for a few years, scheduled to get out next week, actually. One of the bosses. He goes by El Payaso.”

  I translated the word automatically.

  “The clown.”

  PRESENT DAY

  Standing on the porch outside the house on 147 Benjamin Road, I stare in terror at El Payaso inside. He’s still chubby, but more hardened than before. I doubt he recognizes me from school all those years ago.

  In a burst of foreign yelling, El Payaso drops his comical expression and rushes toward me, gesturing for me to leave.

  Carrie said I was the strong one.

  El Payaso grabs the front door to shut it, but I dart into the house first, feeling a rush of air as the door bangs shut beside me.

  “I’m looking for Cordero,” I announce to the gang members’ menacing faces. My voice reverberates through the sagging stairwell.

  One of the shirtless boys stands. I step back, colliding with the doorjamb behind me, but he’s not coming at me. No one is. One by one the figures head to the back of the house. It’s like a man with a megaphone yelled “Cut!” but more organized because there’s no man and no megaphone. Just teens who know exactly what to do in case of interruption. Teens who don’t overplay the seriousness of the interruption.

  El Payaso glares at them. Then he rolls his eyes. “We was done anyway,” he says, rubbing his shoulder. He’s not wearing a shirt.

  I can barely breathe. “Does anyone know Cordero?” My voice is small.

  I’m nothing to these people. My self-doubt begins to set in. I wanted answers from Cordero but expected to find him in a small trailer or a one-roomed home. Now I’m inside a massive house filled with possible gang members. This was not a good idea.

  Half a dozen brown-haired children spill into the front room, like they were waiting to re-occupy the space. El Payaso sits on an overturned bucket near the front door, head in his hands.

  “El Payaso,” I say, desperate.

  The man looks up. He’s got thick, wavy black hair.

  “Wait, you don’t got the wrong house? Serious?” Confused, he looks behind him. “Yeah, like there’s some other El Payaso, huh?” His laugh is big and contagious. He’s in no hurry to make me leave. I wonder if he lives here too, like Cordero. Maybe they all live here, even kids too.

  “I’m trying to be clean, you know?” He looks at me and spits on the wooden floor. “You don’t know. Forget it.”

  His accent is Cordero’s soft consonants tainted with backstreet, crass English. I assume he’s talking about being clean from drugs, but he’s nothing like the addicts I’ve seen on TV. He looks healthy and pudgy, like a big, brown baby.

  “I’m looking for Cordero,” I repeat.

  El Payaso stands. “Who are you?”

  “Salem Jefferson.”

  Grunting, he stretches, giving nothing away. A preteen girl with a toddler on her back races with other children around a couch situated smack in the middle of the room, like the walls didn’t want it. Officer Haynes said El Payaso was in prison when Carrie died, but he might have heard something about her anyway. Does he understand my connection to her by my last name?

  “I think Cordero knew my sister,” I say.

  El Payaso tilts his head like he’s accessing an old memory. “Jefferson. Carrie Jefferson?”

  I gasp. “You know her?”

  The front door opens, hitting me in the shoulder. Cordero Vasquez walks inside, sucking the air I’d been breathing right out of my lungs. He fills the room with his unusual height and his demand for deference.

  He lets his gaze linger a moment on my face, his only hint of surprise. The children laugh as they run. From outside, a car engine’s faint rumble plays under their song.

  El Payaso collapses onto the couch. “Man, why you always be comin’ late?”

  A thud sounds against a back wall that partially separates the once grand room from the kitchen. A small, compact noise. Hard. The whole house heaves, stilling in an instant.

  A breeze that hadn’t existed before comes into the room from an open window.

  “Oh, no, no, no!” El Payaso tosses screaming kids behind the couch, rushing at them with his monster-clown face. He waves his arm at me. “Down flat!”

  Cordero flat-out sprints away from us down the hall, no explanation.

  Two more thuds. Thud. Thud. A window behind me breaks.

  Screaming, I drop my nose to the wooden floor. Bullets fly around us. A girl begins shrieking. She’s next to the couch, barely old enough for kindergarten. The front of her lavender shirt disappears into a slick, liquid stain that spills through her fingers in heavy drops.

  Thud, ping, thud.

  The girl’s anguished cries make thinking impossible. Footsteps dr
um toward us from the hallway. Cordero rounds the corner and throws open the door, bringing a handgun to shoulder height. He squeezes off rounds, disappearing out the door.

  “Help!” El Payaso yells before lapsing into a string of Spanish.

  I get my cell from my pocket and crawl toward the children. Car tires squeal, fading into nothingness. The thudding stops. But the yelling continues.

  “… said get down!”

  At El Payaso’s command, I drop and army-crawl on my elbows. When I’m within reach, he drags me behind the couch by my upper arms, snatching the phone. El Payaso speaks to the 911 dispatcher. He peels children off him and scoops the injured girl into his lap, wrapping thick arms over her like he’ll be able to force all the blood back inside. I’m on the floor shaking.

  This can’t be real. I can’t be listening to her die. Not like I listened to Carrie die.

  A Hispanic woman with a tight ponytail runs into the front room and tries to wrench the bleeding girl away from El Payaso. They argue. Another adult, a Caucasian man, staggers in on jean-clad legs so thin only a drug-addict could maintain them.

  “This ain’t right,” the man says, dazed.

  The Hispanic woman gets the upper hand on El Payaso and drags the girl from him in a trail of blood. Tears splash down her face.

  “Mi niña!” she screams. The front door opens and slams shut. Cordero rushes around the couch to the shrieking girl.

  “Your sister,” El Payaso shouts.

  The woman stands and shoves the girl at Cordero, screaming at him. Sweat glistens on his V tattoo. The gun hangs at his side. Expressionless, he refuses to look at the woman with her straight frame, so like his. I see the resemblance. The woman is Cordero’s mother. The girl is his bleeding sister. 147 Benjamin Road, his address.

  Cordero’s mom screams at him. She holds the girl with one arm so she can slap him with the other. I cringe. Each movement is punctuated with awful, urgent cries from her dying daughter. They’re intolerable. Around us, everyone is yelling. I pick up meaning from the Spanish in snatches.

  “… because of you they did this!”

  “Mommy!”

  “… hear? She needs pressure … come, come!” El Payaso grabs a towel from the pile of laundry, shoving it against the dying girl. He tosses my phone back to me, and the girl’s body convulses.

  Silence.

  The woman howls and collapses to the floor, taking the girl with her. Sirens clamor in the distance. My upper arm is caught by an iron grip. I look up.

  Cordero has me.

  He drags me across the wooden floor, into the kitchen. He waves the gun, backing me into a wall next to a window missing its glass.

  I suck in my gut. I can’t breathe.

  The gun.

  I dart sideways, muscles like springs. I’m fast. I don’t know how Cordero catches me by the waist. For once he’s not calm. He gets in my face.

  “Get out! Get out of here!” He pushes me out the back door.

  I land hard on my butt in a patch of weeds behind the house. I get my feet under me. I run.

  Past a rundown, Spanish-tiled pool.

  Over a livestock fence. Across a short stretch of horse-manure-laden pasture.

  In my terror, noises play on repeat in my head—foreign sounds, screaming. Carrie. El Payaso knew her name.

  Beyond the pasture, I hit the sidewalk on Main Street, my feet flying.

  Cars zoom down the five-lane road. A guy in a chicken suit advertises a fast food restaurant at the corner. Men in khaki shorts, families unloading babies from car seats, the mortuary we coordinated with when Carrie died.

  We had a funeral. We buried all the bits of her they’d found. But most of Carrie wasn’t Carrie anymore. She was tiny floating particles of smoke. Pure carbon imprinted on house rubble. A collection of images and audio recordings indented on my brain.

  Knees driving high, I change my course and head toward the police department. The sirens of cop cars and ambulances fade long before I arrive and go inside. My eyes adjust slowly. There’s a bench and a counter with a glass panel crisscrossed by metal for security. The secretaries behind it don’t look up. I lean heavily on the lip of the counter, my pulse pounding in my ears.

  “I’m … I need … to talk to … Officer Haynes,” I say through a hole in the glass.

  A black woman nods for me to sit. “Gonna be a minute, hon. There was some drive-by shooting just now. Media’s already there.”

  I might throw up. I run to a drinking fountain, water spilling over my chin. I gulp and gulp. I’ll never be filled.

  “Your lucky day,” the secretary calls.

  Drenched down the front, I straighten to look at her.

  She hits a button on the wall to her left and a green light starts flashing over the door leading into the station’s interior. “He says your dad’s already here.”

  Dad?

  I race to a large room full of busy policemen. Stacks of paper are piled over desks, file cabinets, and printers. Officer Haynes has a straight-backed chair waiting for me next to the one Dad’s in.

  I run to it, but don’t sit. “Dad—there was this Primero—”

  Dad stands. “Salem?”

  “Are you okay?” Officer Haynes sets a coffee cup on the desk he’s seated on.

  I stop in my tracks. “You—” I look from the officer to Dad and back. “You didn’t arrest Dad, did you?”

  “No one’s been arrested,” he says.

  I start breathing again.

  Dad puts a hand on my shoulder. “They’ve ordered a forensic expert. He’s coming in two weeks.”

  “What? Why not now?”

  “Scheduling.”

  I can’t organize my thoughts. We’ll know if Carrie was killed. We’ll know. I turn to Dad. “Dad—he knew her name—Carrie’s name. This gang banger guy. I couldn’t ask how he knew her because the little girl—”

  “Salem, calm down,” Dad says.

  “—was shot but I said ‘my sister’ and he said, ‘Carrie’—I am calm!”

  “Sit down,” the officer says.

  “But—”

  “Sit down.” He steps between Dad and me to push me into an office chair. “You were at the drive-by on Benjamin Street?”

  I nod. Dad’s face goes slack.

  “Do you need an ambulance? Are you hurt?” The officer’s questions keep coming. Did I see shooters? The car? Do I know what shock is? Dad somehow has my hand in his.

  “So you left via the back door?” the officer verifies. He’s writing everything on a yellow pad.

  “Yes.” I think of Cordero yelling at me to get out. Threatening me, holding a gun.

  “What were you doing there?” Dad asks.

  “What were you doing there?” the officer repeats calmly.

  “No one will tell me what’s going on. So I … I got Cordero’s address and …” I realize too late I should have lied. I should have made up a reason.

  Dad leans to catch my eye. “Oh, Salem. Did you call the police when you heard shots?”

  “Yeah. El Payaso talked to them. He’s the one who knows Carrie. He used my phone.”

  “El Payaso?” The officer puts a finger up and grabs a radio from his belt. “Dispatch, report of a 1340,” he says into it. “Suspect Oscar Garcia-Joya, wanted for parole violation. A witness puts him at 147 Benjamin Street.”

  Static cracks and he turns off the radio.

  “But El Payaso helped the bleeding girl,” I say, troubled. Police shouldn’t be after El Payaso. He was in prison when Juan died and when Carrie’s car was tagged.

  The officer waits for me to look at him. “Salem, El Payaso is dangerous. If you see him again, call. We’ll send every vehicle in town to you.”

  I nod. Every vehicle in town.

  “And don’t go anywhere near that house again,” Dad lectures, crouched on the floor next to my chair.

  “Fine, but I want to hear everything about Carrie’s case,” I say, nodding at the officer.

&nb
sp; Haynes sits on his desk. “We sent officers for a preliminary investigation. They took a look at her vandalized Volkswagen. It was burnt out from the fire, but they came across a can of black spray paint found almost undamaged near the collapsed wall of the garage. Carrie’s fingerprints were on it, which means we now have proof she vandalized her own car. She told dispatch about a death threat, but changed her story. Whether anyone actually threatened her or not—killed her or not—I don’t know.”

  “But … what if the vandal was wearing gloves?” I run my hand over the sweat-damp hair at my temples. My ponytail loosens, already a mess.

  “Either way, an expert is coming.”

  “If Carrie painted her own car, she put that symbol there as a message,” I insist.

  Haynes takes another sip of coffee. “Well, we’ll find out in a couple weeks.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The next day, our team—the prosecution—is supposed to meet in the gym during political science. I’m not sure Cordero will come to school after what happened yesterday. I want him to show up and I don’t want him to. He knows more about Carrie than I do, but I’m terrified of him. I’m terrified of his gun and him yelling at me and gang members in general.

  I searched news sites this morning and learned his sister was expected to live. The article said that the day before, some websites had mentioned the Primero symbols found on Juan Herrera’s body. Police think their enemies, the Últimos, figured the victim was one of their own and went on the warpath in retaliation, shooting up the house and hitting Cordero’s sister.

  I was blissful at the news. Jealous. Carrie didn’t live. The little girl did live—a drop of innocence in gang-infested waters.

  I’m almost to the entry of the gym when a guy in a black backpack cuts in front of me, blocking my path. It’s Cordero.

  “Salem, I want to talk with you,” he says, his vowels open, his smile less so.

  Flinching, I back away from him. “Go away.”

  I don’t meet his gaze, but I notice everything—a scar twisting through the dark of his forearm and the ribbing of a white undershirt stretched over his chest. There’s stale cigarette smoke and something sweet coming from his skin.