BLOOD CELL SAMPLE
PROLOGUE
A Month Ago:
Leo Jimenez was not the type of man who was often seen smiling. He didn’t smile when he won a bet, or when men followed his orders. He didn’t crack a grin when he saw his enemies arrested on the news. But he’d smile for days after he killed a man. On Tuesday, he was smiling a lot. He smiled when he saw the morning news report, and the article above the fold in the local paper. He was particularly happy with this kill not only because of the sheer number of people that were dead, but also because Leo was now so powerful that he could kill with a phone call. He had killed seven of his enemies and never even had to get out of his hot tub. That was worth a smile. It was worth a shit-eating grin.
He read the paper with his morning coffee, which he drank with the mug tilted slightly to the left because of a deep scar that crossed his lips on the right side. With the scar on his face and his obvious Latino heritage, Leo assumed quite correctly that people called him Scarface behind his back. He was proud of that fact, proud to look like a gangster. With his scar and his well-practiced crazy-eyed stare, Leo could scare the shit out of anyone just by entering the room. And he often did. Nonetheless, he was a self-conscious man who demanded respect, as anyone referencing a certain De Palma movie in his presence was bound to discover.
Leo was the de facto leader of a gang called the Eighteenth. The name had been around long before Leo, and really didn’t apply since the gang had long since left Eighteenth Street behind. Gang members died, the name remained. A year earlier, the gang’s real leader, Santos Vega, was locked up for beating up the dealer who sold ecstasy to his little brother. After a decade getting away with crime, the cops busted him for actually doing the right thing. Santos was in Pittman, maximum security, and Leo took over while he was gone. At first, Leo was a proxy, taking orders every week in a visit or a phone call. But six months before Leo sat down and smiled, he stopped visiting. And three months later he changed his phone number. Santos was going to be gone for a long time, and the boys answered to Leo anyway. It was best that Santos be forgotten so the gang wouldn’t be tied down by old ways of thinking. In fact, they were so loyal to Leo that he could tell them to go to war with the Dirtbags and they would actually go.
And so it was that on this Tuesday, Leo was drinking his coffee and reading about how a gang war had left seven members of the Dirtbags dead. Leo’s captain, J.D., had already told him the story, but it was nice to read about in the paper. It was nice to see that the police had leads, but had not taken action yet. Which meant that in reality, they had no leads. Because J.D. had been good enough to kill all the Dirtbags and leave no evidence behind. None of his boys had been shot, none were dead. They wore gloves and they left the guns behind for the cops so nobody would get caught with a murder weapon.
With the Dirtbags now reminded that they belonged outside of the city, Leo was now the uncontested king. So he smiled. Nothing could touch him.
On Thursday, a woman came forward with the fact that she had seen a gang of Latino street thugs go into that apartment where the murders happened. She was asked to flip through some photographs.
On Friday, J.D. Castro was arrested for murder. So was everyone else who happened to be in his house at the time, among them a kid called Franc. Franc didn’t like the idea of prison very much. A night in jail showed him he didn’t like the reality either.
On Saturday, Leonardo Jimenez was booked for an impressive number of charges, including conspiracy to commit murder and membership in a gang. He was the big fish. The detectives had made a deal to let Franc go, despite the fact that Franc had actually killed one of those Dirtbags, in exchange for testimony against Leo, who was fifty miles away from where the murders happened.
Cops like to gloat when they catch gang leaders like Leo. They liked sitting Leo down in the interrogation room, at the end of a long steel table, to tell him just how fucked he was. Detective White was the one who had put the cuffs on Leo. He was the one who came into Leo’s home. The other one, Detective Colson, had guarded the back door. They stood at the other end of that big rectangular table and bragged about their big arrest. Like their detective skills had anything to with that old lady coming forward. All the other cops, the uniforms who had surrounded Leo’s house like it was a donut shop, were coming in and out of the viewing room on the other side of the glass. The cops even left the lights on in there, so Leo could see them watching him through the glass. The motherfuckers laughed.
They brought him that runny shit they call coffee in police stations, served in a Styrofoam cup. It was hot, so he sipped it.
“Hey White, look at poor Jimenez drinking out the side of his mouth.” Fucking Colson laughed.
White looked Leo in the eye and spoke in baby talk: “Aww, poor wittle Scaw-face can’t dwink through his scaw?”
It was really their own fault for not cuffing him to the chair. He was already looking at fifteen or twenty years, so at that point killing a cop did nothing but give him a better reputation to take into the pen. Leo waited for detective White to step over to the side of the table, then Leo leapt up, put his head down like a linebacker, and charged. He took the detective down in one good motion, then slammed his fists on opposite sides of the cop’s neck. The chain between his handcuffs hammered the cop’s windpipe, which might have been enough.
By then, the other detective had time to react and came around to the side of the table to pull Leo off of his partner. Leo saw him coming, and pushed himself upward as fast as he could, driving the back of his head into Detective Colson’s jaw. The blow was enough to faze him, allowing Leo to take the sidearm from Colson’s belt. He put two shots into Detective White’s face and threw the gun away. By the time the cops from the viewing room had come around to draw down on him, Leo was unarmed and they couldn’t get away with shooting him.
He looked to Colson, while still kneeling on his dead partner, and asked “Can’t poor wittle White take a buwwet in his brain?”