The In Death Collection Books 26-29 - J.D. Robb [279]
“Your mark.”
“The kill mark. I couldn’t be upper level until I did a kill, until I’d made my mark.”
“You still wear the Soldado tattoo,” Eve pointed out. “It doesn’t include the kill mark, the X below the cross.”
“No, I never made my mark. I didn’t have it in me. I didn’t mind a fight, hell, I liked fighting. Get out there, get a little bloody. Blow off steam. But I didn’t want to kill anybody.”
“And still, you and Lino were friends,” Eve prompted.
“Yeah, or I thought we were. Lino used to razz me about it, but . . . just like guys razz each other about shit. I guess that’s why I didn’t know what he had going, what he set up.”
“He didn’t tell you about the bomb.”
“He never said anything to me. He said how he’d meet up with me there, at the dance. The bomb at the dance, when it went off, I was right there. Right there. Ronni Edwards got killed. She went up ten feet away from me. I knew her.”
He stopped, and rubbed his hands over his face. When he dropped them again, Connie took one in hers.
“I knew her,” Joe repeated. “Since we were in kindergarten I knew her, and she blew apart in front of me. I never . . .” He lowered his head, fought for composure. “Sorry.”
“Take your time,” Eve told him.
“It went—it went to hell in seconds. Music’s playing, kids are dancing or hanging. Then it went to hell. The noise, the fire. More kids got hurt, and then they’re running around, crazy scared, and more get hurt in the trample. Lino and Chávez and Penny, they’re hauling kids out like heroes, and saying how it was the Skulls, the motherfriggin’ Skulls.”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “But they weren’t there, not when it went down.”
“Lino, Steve, and Penny weren’t there,” Eve qualified.
“Yeah. I mean no, no they weren’t there when the place exploded. I’d been looking for Lino. I had a couple guys who wanted in—wanted in the gang, so I was looking for Lino. Nobody’d seen him. Just minutes before it blew, nobody’d seen him or Penny or Steve. He never missed a dance. I figured, well, he was just late getting there. And probably lucky for him, I thought that after. Lucky for him because we figured he was the target. It was later when I realized he was the one making the noises about being the target.”
“Were you hurt in the first bombing?”
“Got some burns, cut up some from the stuff that was flying around. Not real bad. If I’d been standing where Ronni was . . . I thought about that. Thought about that and how Ronni had just blown. It got me up, got me thinking, yeah, those Skulls needed some killing. So I’m up, think I’m up to get my mark because of that, and I hear Lino and Penny talking.”
“Where were you when you heard them?”
“We had a place we used, like a headquarters. This basement in a building on Second Avenue, right off 101st. Big basement, the place was like a maze. Rattrap,” he said with a sour smile. “They fixed it up about ten years back. It’s apartments now. Nice apartments.”
“Just for my curiosity, do you know who owned it?”
“Sure.” He looked puzzled by the question. “José Ortega—the old guy—kind of a big deal in the neighborhood. José was one of us. Soldado—I mean the old guy’s grandson was one of us. But the fact was, Lino said it was our place.”
Ripples, Eve thought. “Okay. So you heard Lino and Penny talking when you went into the basement, into the headquarters.”
“Yeah, like I said, it was a big place, lots of rooms, and corridors. I was heading for the war room. I was up, and I wanted in on the retaliation. Hell, I wanted to lead the charge. But I passed one of the flop rooms, and I heard them talking about how it worked. How planting the boomer at the dance got the community—that’s how Lino put it—the community involved. How they’d hit the Skulls now, and everyone would cheer. The Soldados would be heroes because everybody thought the Skulls attacked, the Skulls brought blood to neutral territory.