Ditch Rider by Judith Van Gieson Page A

I WOKE up again the Kid had left for work and the bullet and gun were still in the drawer. On my way downtown I drove past the D Home. A bunch of gangsters in baggy clothes were standing outside waiting for their probation officers. In order to get in and out of this place you had to run a gangbanger gauntlet. I called Saia as soon as I got to my office and made an appointment to see him that afternoon. I was holding up the plastic bag and looking at the bullet when Anna walked into my office.
    â€œWhere’d that come from?” she asked.
    â€œCheyanne. She says she picked it up off the ground after it went through Juan Padilla and ricocheted off a wall.”
    â€œYou really think that little girl shot somebody?”
    â€œMaybe it wasn’t a cold-blooded, calculated shooting, but frightened, in self-defense? Who wouldn’t be capable under those circumstances?”
    â€œIf you have a gun in your hand.”
    â€œA lot of things are possible when you have a loaded gun in your hand.”
    â€œShe seems so innocent.”
    â€œSometimes. Sometimes she doesn’t seem innocent at all.”
    â€œWhere’d she get the gun? Steal it from her mother?”
    That was one road I hadn’t traveled down yet. “Maybe.”
    â€œGangs use semiautomatics, don’t they?”
    â€œUsually.” One advantage to semiautomatics is that you can get so many rounds off so fast that accuracy hardly matters. You can spray your opponent into oblivion. The disadvantage is that semiautomatics can leave an all-too-easy-to-trace casing on the ground. But when it comes to shootings, gang members don’t often worry about evidence and what comes after. Their motto seems to be shoot now, think later.
    â€œWhat are you going to do?” Anna asked.
    â€œTurn it over to Anthony Saia,” I said.
    ******
    When I got to Saia’s office that afternoon every hair was slicked in place. His eyes were bright with a prosecutor’s zeal, but that was a fire I was about to put out. “What’s up?” he asked.
    â€œ I have the bullet that killed Juan Padilla.” I handed over the plastic bag.
    â€œHow’d you get this?”
    â€œFrom my client, a thirteen-year-old girl named Cheyanne Moran.”
    â€œHow’d she get it?”
    â€œShe picked it up off the ground after it went through the victim.”
    â€œYou’re going to tell me she was a witness, right?”
    â€œWrong. I’m telling you she wants to plead guilty to manslaughter in the case of Juan Padilla.”
    That took the light from his eyes and the spray from his hair. His clothes already looked like they’d been through the wringer. “You’re giving me a thirteen-year-old shooter?”
    â€œI am.”
    â€œWhat the hell can I do to a thirteen-year-old girl?” It was a rhetorical question; he knew the answer better than I.
    â€œPut her in the Girls’ School for two years.”
    â€œShe comes from a broken home? Right? Absent father? Mother works all the time or takes drugs? Fatherless, godless, jobless and hopeless.”
    â€œSomething like that.”
    â€œThe Girls’ School will seem like summer camp.”
    â€œThat’s a possibility.”
    â€œI could go for consecutive two-year terms and hold her over until she is twenty-one.”
    â€œYou won’t get away with it.”
    â€œLet’s say she was an accessory. Cade’s her boyfriend and she’s covering for him. She’s crazy about the guy and she wants to save his neck. I can put him away for life, but she’ll only get two years. So she pleads guilty for him.”
    It was one scenario.
    â€œIf she gives him up I’ll deal,” Saia said.
    â€œWhat are you offering? A trip to Europe? A new car? A father? A new life?”
    â€œI would if I could.”
    Avoiding the Girls’ School didn’t seem to be any bargaining chip with my client. “I’ll run