Hailey's War Read online




  Hailey's War

  Jodi Compton

  Twenty-four-year-old Hailey Cain has dropped out of the US Military Academy for reasons she won't reveal. She has had to leave Los Angeles and it would be too big a risk for her to return. Now working as a bike messenger in San Francisco, Hailey keeps a low profile, until her high school best friend Serena Delgadillo makes a call that will turn her whole life upside-down. Serena is the head of an all-female gang on the rough streets of LA. She wants Hailey to escort the cousin of a recently murdered gang member across the border to Mexico. It's a mission that will nearly cost Hailey her life, causing her to choose more than once between loyalty and lawlessness, and forcing her to confront two very big secrets in her past…

  Jodi Compton

  Hailey's War

  The first book in the Hailey Cain series, 2010

  Dedicated to the memory of

  Stuart Compton, 1921-2009

  Author’s Note

  Hailey’s War is a work of fiction and takes the usual liberties with the nonfiction subjects its story touches on. I drew on multiple sources in researching all of these subjects. However, I want to note that Hailey’s reflections on the history of the Golden Gate Bridge are largely derived from Tad Friend’s article “Jumpers” in the October 2003 issue of the New Yorker, a fascinating piece that also inspired the documentary The Bridge.

  prologue

  JULY 4

  The moon rises over the mountains of central Mexico, a nearly full moon in a sky the deep blue of an hour past sunset.

  Get up.

  I’m lying on a slope just down from a rural highway, lying in a mix of slate and grass and dirt that is damp with blood. There is dirt in my eyelashes and blood in what little of my hair I can see. There isn’t much pain, but I’m very, very tired.

  Get up or you’ll die here.

  My memories of what happened are inexact. I remember driving on a narrow highway through the mountains and into a dim tunnel with rough stone walls. Then this, looking up at the mountain ridge and the sky. I don’t know how I got from the tunnel to here. It seems impossible, but I think I was shot.

  I search my memories for some explanation. A rough voice: You’re one of our most promising cadets. I hate like hell to see this happen to you.

  No, that was too long ago.

  A younger voice: Pack up just what you need, I’m getting you out of L.A.

  That’s not it, either.

  I’m so tired, I just want to close my eyes. Except for that moon. It’s getting brighter and higher, like God lifting his lamp, looking for his lost sheep.

  I think the highway is up the slope, above me. If I were nearer to it, someone might see me. It might make a difference.

  I get to my hands and knees, swaying, and put the waxing moon in my sights.

  On your feet, soldier. You can do this. You’re made outta this.

  Then I stand up.

  Part I

  one

  NINE DAYS EARLIER

  “Do you ever think about Jonah?”

  “Jesus, is that my Bible? I haven’t opened that thing in years. So you’re talking about the guy that was swallowed by a whale?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I’d have to say I don’t think about him. I wouldn’t think you would, either. I didn’t take you for particularly religious.”

  “I’m not. That’s my point, though. When you’re not raised religious, you think of Jonah as the swallowed-by-a-whale guy, like Noah is the ark guy. But when you actually read the Book of Jonah, it’s not what you expect.”

  “You read the whole book?”

  “It’s three pages long.”

  Morning in San Francisco. Jack Foreman, tall and thin, in his early forties, with a premature streak of gray in his light brown hair, was across the room, already dressed at quarter to eight, already having cleared away last night’s Ketel One bottle and two glasses, showered, dressed, and fixed and consumed breakfast and an espresso. He was now scanning the headlines of both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times, and at the same time keeping an eye on CNN with the sound off. I was still in his bed, naked, with my hair half raveled in the braids I forgot to take out last night, reading his Bible for no particular reason other than that it had caught my eye while Jack was still in the shower.

  “The thing that’s strange about the story is, Jonah doesn’t seem to be scared of anything, even when he should be.”

  “No?”

  “No. The story goes that God tells Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh to preach, and Jonah doesn’t want to, so he gets on a ship for Spain. God sends a violent storm, and the ship’s crew is scared. But when they go down to the hold to find Jonah, he’s sleeping.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sleeping. Through a storm that has veteran sailors scared. So they wake him up and tell him, ‘We’re pretty sure we haven’t done anything to anger our gods, might you have done something to anger yours?’ And Jonah suggests that if they think this is the case, maybe they should throw him overboard.”

  “Huh.”

  “They’re way out at sea. Jonah’s effectively asking to be drowned. The crew says no at first, but later they decide he’s right, and they throw him over, and then comes the whale part that everyone knows about. That’s what it takes for him to finally decide that maybe he’s in trouble. He prays to God-it’s kind of a pretty poem, by the way-and God intervenes, so the whale spits him up onto dry land. And then he does go to Nineveh, and everyone in Nineveh really gets with the program, from the king on down. They repent in a big way. And Jonah isn’t happy about it. He gets mad. He goes out in the desert and argues with God about destroying Nineveh.”

  “He wants Nineveh destroyed?”

  “Yeah, but the bigger point is, he’s arguing with the God of the Old Testament, the all-powerful white-beard guy who used to strike people dead. Doesn’t that seem a little insane? Shouldn’t Jonah be a little more afraid?”

  “You think Jonah was suicidal.”

  “No. I mean, not necessarily.”

  “Then what’s your theory? You sound like you’ve been putting a lot of thought into this. You must have one.”

  “No, sorry. I’m just a bike messenger. I don’t get paid enough to theorize.”

  “Hailey…” he said, his tone a change of subject in itself.

  “I know. You’re ready for work. I’ve got to get up and dressed and out. I’ll hurry.” I was already sliding his Bible back onto the bookshelf.

  Jack was a newsman for the Associated Press, a Midwestern transplant to California by way of, apparently, everywhere. Photographs on the far wall of his studio, Jack’s own amateur work, attested to the width and breadth of his reporting career. Fellow reporters, editors, photographers, and other acquaintances looked out from pictures taken in the world’s capitals and war zones, places Jack had been a correspondent.

  He and I had crossed paths several times at the courthouse, where he covered motions and trials and I, a bike courier, dropped off and picked up legal papers. But we didn’t get to know each other until the Friday night I’d literally backed into him in a tiny, crowded Asian grocery. When, after a few minutes of conversation, he asked me if I wanted company for dinner, I surprised myself by saying yes. Maybe it had been so long since I’d seen a guy who was neither a metrosexual nor a pierced and dreadlocked bike messenger that he had been exotic to me.

  He was the first guy I ever slept with who wore boxer shorts. I didn’t tell him that, our first night together. Guys have lost erections over less.

  Now, as I was pulling on my long-sleeved thermal shirt and cargo pants, Jack said, “Are you hungry? There’s bagels.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll eat later.” It was my day off, and a small plan for the
morning was forming.

  I sat on the floor to put on my boots. When I looked up, Jack was watching me.

  He said, “Every time I see you lacing up those boots, I think I’m sleeping with an undercover DEA agent.”

  Bates Enforcers, heavy-soled black lace-ups with a side zip, draw a lot of attention.

  “They’re comfortable, is all.”

  Jack had never seen the gun. It was a.38 caliber Smith & Wesson Airweight, easy to conceal. Just five shots, but the kind of trouble I was likely to get into was the up-close-and-personal kind, and if I couldn’t get out of it with five rounds, I wasn’t getting out of it at all.

  I stood and gathered up my single-strap messenger bag, putting it over my shoulder, when the newspapers on the counter caught my attention.

  “Are you done with this?” I asked, indicating the Los Angeles Times Calendar section, its front page dominated by a profile of a young white hip-hop producer. “Can I have it?”

  “Sure,” Jack said.

  I slid the section of the paper into my bag, then walked ahead of Jack into the entryway, where my bicycle-it was my private transportation as well as my livelihood-leaned against the wall.

  We emerged into the cool gray of June in San Francisco, me wheeling the bike and Jack holding the keys to his old Saab. He stopped for a moment, tapping a cigarette out of a pack, his first of the day. While he lit up, I looked downhill, toward the rest of the city. Jack’s studio was at the edge of Parnassus Heights, and the view was fantastic.

  It’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t find San Francisco beautiful, and I couldn’t argue. I had been in San Francisco nearly a year. I had ridden every inch of its neighborhoods, the storied ones like Chinatown and North Beach, the quiet ones like the Sunset and Presidio Heights. Late at night, I had watched the lights of great containerships as they ghosted into the port of Oakland, across the water. I had seen this city in the rain, the sun, the fog, the moonlight, on moonless evenings illuminated by its own city lights. San Francisco seemed to pose for you endlessly, proving it could look beautiful under any conditions. People came from all over the country and paid exorbitant prices to own or rent a tiny part of San Francisco.

  Only a philistine could stand on a hill, look out at San Francisco, and wish she were seeing the overheated sprawl of L.A. instead. But I did.

  Jack had gotten his cigarette going; I could smell the fragrant-acrid smoke from behind me. I turned back to him and was just about to say, I’ll call you sometime this week, when he spoke first. “Hailey?”

  “What?”

  “When you say you’re going to get something to eat later, you mean later this morning, right? Not late this afternoon?”

  “Yeah,” I said, baffled. “Why?”

  “We had a lot to drink last night, but I didn’t see you eat anything. You’re getting thin.”

  “Jack, my job burns, like, eight thousand calories an hour. I couldn’t do it if I wasn’t eating enough,” I pointed out.

  He was not appeased. I said, “Something else on your mind?”

  He said, “You treat yourself with a certain amount of disregard, Hailey. I’ve known you for six months, and how often in that time have you been injured on the job? First those stitches in your eyebrow, then that thing with your wrist-”

  “That was an old break. The bone was weak,” I argued. “Look, I’m a bike messenger. I’ve been the top-earning rider for my service nearly every month since I hired on. I couldn’t do that without taking some risks. There’s a lot of competition.”

  Jack closed his eyes briefly, then said, “You don’t want to be the most reckless bike messenger in San Francisco, Hailey. That’s like being the town drunk in New Orleans.”

  “I didn’t know you cared.”

  “You ever think about school?”

  “I thought I mentioned that before,” I said. “I did a little school back east. It didn’t work out.”

  “And you can never go back?”

  “What’s with you today?” I asked him. “The thing I like most about you is that you’re free of all the middle-class rhetoric, and now suddenly you’re doing a guidance-counselor thing.”

  Jack sighed. “I’m not trying to make you angry.”

  “I’m not,” I said, relenting.

  “Really?” He threw down the cigarette and stepped on it.

  “Really. I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll get together, I’ll eat a whole pile of food. You can watch.”

  Besides, I hadn’t been lying when I said I was planning on having breakfast. Just not right away.

  I didn’t own a car, which wasn’t supposed to be a problem in San Francisco. It’s said to be one of the world’s great walking cities-fairly compact, with temperate weather and beautiful neighborhoods. All true, but even so: forty-nine square miles. In my first weeks here, I’d chronically underjudged the time it was going to take me to walk places. Now, of course, I had my bike-an old silver Motobecane, very fast, with drop handlebars and paint rubbed off the top tube where someone had probably kept a chain wrapped around it.

  I’d been a messenger for eight months, long enough to develop the cyclist’s long, flat ellipse of muscle in my calf-I didn’t have that even back east in school, when I’d thought I was in the best shape of my life. Now a short, easy ride brought me to my destination, the Golden Gate Bridge. Ever since I’d come out to San Francisco, it had become something of a habit of mine to come up here when I didn’t have any big plan for my day.

  If you’ve driven in California and visited the Bay Area, the bridge you most likely drove on was the Bay Bridge. It connects San Francisco to the East Bay. It is heavily trafficked, double-decked, beautiful in an industrial way. But it isn’t an icon. The Golden Gate Bridge is, largely due to its location: It serves as a kind of borderline between the enclosed waters of the Bay and the open water of the Pacific, between the American continent and the rest of the world. It is open to cyclists and to pedestrians, many of whom are dazzled tourists. In its most mundane sense, it is the bridge between the city and the Marin headlands. But to twenty or more people a year, it is the bridge to eternity.

  The Golden Gate Bridge is America’s foremost suicide destination.

  The first suicide off the bridge was a WWI veteran who appeared to be out for a stroll until he told a passerby, “This is as far as I go.” That was three months after the bridge was opened; it was still in its infancy. Sometimes I wondered: If that man had stayed home and stuck his head in an oven instead, would it have changed the bridge’s destiny? Without his precedent, would the next person and the next have reconsidered, until it was understood that jumping off the Golden Gate just wasn’t done? There are other bridges in America that are as accessible and potentially fatal but have virtually no history of suicides, apparently because it just didn’t become a tradition.

  Psychologists know there is a contagious aspect to suicide-not merely the destructive impulse itself, but also the where and the how of it. In Japan, they’ve had to close public attractions because they’ve become magnets for suicides. One person jumps into a volcano and more people get the idea. In other countries, the authorities intervene. In America, land of the individual destiny, not so much.

  Cops who try to prevent suicides up here will tell you that they’ll see a pedestrian with that end-it-all look and ask them if they’re thinking of jumping. The pedestrian denies it and the cop has to take their word for it and move on. Then they’ll look back and the guy is just gone. It’s that quick. You don’t even hear anything. I know, I’ve seen it, too.

  I asked a patrolman once how he recognized someone with the suicide look. He told me, “You’ll know it when you see it.” And I do. It’s in what they’re not looking at. Unlike the tourists, they’re not looking at the city skyline or the Marin headlands. They’re looking at the water. Or at nothing, because all their attention is directed inside, replaying the past and seeing the bleak endless nothing of the future.

  That’s the thing I don’t un
derstand: How exactly do they choose their spot? What says to them, This far but no farther? I’ve never asked a potential jumper how they choose their spot. It’s too flippant, and when I’m up here, I’m very, very careful. It’s probably the most careful I ever am.

  There was a man standing by the railing ten feet ahead of me. He wasn’t even a particularly hard guess. He was pretty obviously homeless, skin leathery from sun and wind and maybe drug use. He wasn’t looking at anything in particular, and he was too caught up in his internal weather to notice me approach.

  The men were usually easier than the women. They could usually be softened by a young woman taking interest in them. The women were sometimes hostile. They told me that someone like you couldn’t understand their problems. It was never quite clear what they meant by someone like you.

  “Hey,” I said quietly.

  He was a big man, maybe six-foot-six, with shaggy hair and a shaggy beard. I could imagine him, at a happier point in his life, dressing as a pirate for Halloween, scaring little kids and then making them laugh.

  “Are you hungry?” I said.

  He looked at me flatly. “No,” he said.

  So much for the easy way, getting him off the bridge first, under a pretext. I said, “I thought you might want to get something to eat.” I paused. “You know, instead of jumping.”

  He blinked, startled.

  “I’m sorry to be so blunt,” I said, “but that’s the plan, isn’t it? Jumping?”

  “So what?” he said, and it wasn’t hostile. He was probably too depressed to get really angry anymore. At least I hoped so. He was big enough that even if he wasn’t in shape anymore, he could still pick me up and throw me off the bridge without much effort. I thought of the edged ripples of iron-colored water below, of Jonah’s prayer: You cast me into the deep, and all the flood surrounded me.