Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot - By Jodi Compton Page 0,3

go, the second driver, a woman, spoke. “I don’t know how you live with yourself.”

“Deb, shhh,” the man said.

I stopped and looked back. “The company you work for has made record profits off its erectile-dysfunction drug, which was only a minor variation on impotence drugs already on the market,” I said. “How much of that money did they put into research on malaria or the rarer cancers? They did find money in the budget, though, for research on a new weight-loss drug.”

The woman said, “That’s not a justification.”

“I’m not in the justification business,” I said.

I scrambled up the steep side of the ditch, then turned back, adding something I knew they wouldn’t understand. “That duty-and-honor thing? I’m over it.”

2

I’ve never had strong feelings about the God-versus-Darwin debate, but if I ever doubt that humans evolve, I have only to look back at my life. I’m only twenty-four, and already I’ve left a series of selves behind me: Army brat, West Point cadet, aimless L.A. twenty-something, San Francisco bike messenger, and now, second-in-command to a rising Latina gangster.

I know where you probably got hung up: Go back to the part about West Point—what was that? Yeah, it’s true. I don’t recommend it, but here’s how, in five easy steps, you get from being in the top fifteenth percentile of your class at the United States Military Academy to jacking trucks in the desert.

Step One: Get diagnosed with a tiny but inoperable brain tumor that severely blunts your fear and compromises your judgment, thus disqualifying you from Army service and wiping out all your plans for the future. Step Two: While sober and obeying all traffic laws, accidentally hit and kill a child who darts from between parked cars on Wilshire Boulevard. Step Three: In an attempt to make symbolic amends for that death, get involved in protecting a pregnant runaway from a mobster. Nearly get killed, twice. Step Four: Survive that and come home only to get slapped down by the one person you’ve loved and counted on since childhood.

That was my cousin, known to the world as Cletus Mooney, the Grammy-winning music producer. To me he was simply CJ. We’d been born ten days and nearly a thousand miles apart, and met for the first time at the age of eleven, when my mother and I, shortly after my father’s death, had moved in with his family in their farmhouse outside Lompoc, California. CJ and I had taught each other to kiss in the shade of the willow tree outside his parents’ home. It wasn’t right to say we were “inseparable,” because I’d gone to West Point and he’d gone to L.A., to find a way into the music business without a single contact. But our emotional bond had been unbreakable. Until New Year’s Eve and that disastrous phone call.

Here’s the difference between rich people and the rest of us: When most of us have arguments with the people we love, we slam out of the house, let the screen door bang shut behind us, and walk around the block a couple of times until we cool off. But when you’ve got the kind of money CJ now had, you don’t have to stop at a block or two. You can let the screen door bang shut behind you and be halfway across the world. Which is basically what he did. At first CJ had been back east, recording at a friend’s studio in New York City, but now he was in Africa, traveling and looking for talent in the music clubs of Dakar, Nairobi, and Accra. No one knew when he planned to come back. God knew he hadn’t left any contact information for me. I’d sent him a postcard with my new address on it but hadn’t gotten any response.

Which brings me to Step Five: Go lick your wounds with an old friend, a career criminal whose antisocial ways increasingly make sense to you.

That was Serena. When it came to personal evolution, she made me look like a piker. If you knew me at twelve, you’d recognize me at twenty-four, and not just because I still have the same port-wine birthmark high on my right cheekbone. That couldn’t be said of Serena.

When I’d first met her, back in the seventh grade near Lompoc, she resembled the telenovela character Betty La Fea, with harsh black bangs cut straight across her forehead and braces her immigrant family went into debt to afford. She’d also had an unbecoming layer of baby