Lights were coming on far down the street as people came out to see what had caused the explosion. She got into the car and started it. As she drove the black SUV away from the area, she hoped that whatever was on the thumb drives was worth almost dying for. Then she realized that was too much to ask. Most people died for nothing.

22

For the rest of the night and part of the morning, Leah stayed in bed in her hotel room, sleeping off the effects of her first meeting with a live hand grenade. After the rattling of carts in the hallway woke her a third time, she got up, showered, dressed, and ate, and then returned to her room to see what was on the thumb drives she had taken from Ortega’s house.

She plugged one into her laptop and saw a picture gallery of miniatures, six to a row. There were hundreds of them. The drives seemed to be where Ortega kept his personal photographs.

Many of the pictures had been taken at the small single-story yellow house where she had found them. There were pictures of families, both parents heavily tattooed, lovingly holding babies and toddlers. There were about a hundred shots of boys about ten years old engaged in Little League baseball games. The pictures were always a team with blue uniforms against a variety of opponents, most of the games played on a field with fences painted green and then plastered with the ads of sponsors, like in the professional stadiums. In the distant background there was a high earthwork that looked like some ancient monument but was probably related to railroads.

She scanned each of the drives methodically, using a pen to mark each for contents—“LL Baseball,” “Friends and Neighbors,” etc. As she went on, she began to see things she had not been expecting. There was a picture of Ortega that had to be recent.

In his prison pictures, Martin Ortega had a shaved head with the number 13, representing the letter “M,” tattooed on his skull. This picture showed a man with graying hair about three inches long that covered the spot where Ortega’s tattoo would have been. He was sitting on a motorcycle in front of his house in Pacoima, with four other men standing around. They all looked Latino, and they had many tattoos, including a couple of full sleeves, but if there was any gang symbolism, it was too difficult for Leah to read.

Leah took a few seconds of staring for her impression to grow from a resemblance to Martin Ortega to an assurance that this was Ortega. She realized she could have walked right up to him and not recognized him in time. Maybe the thumb drive had saved her life.