“I work about half a year. I’m laid off half a year. I save my money. I travel. I want to travel. I went to Guatemala for the first time about three years ago. Poorest place I’ve ever been. We got to make these connections. Working people. Imperialism. Racism. We have to struggle.”

I knew where I had heard that before. On the frontlines, the demos, from Vietnam to Central America. Dare to struggle. Dare to win.

¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!

I imagined a swelling crowd.

Although I had marched and shouted slogans, these people were actually trying to live it! I knew then what Cathy Vega, the failed actress, was going to do with the money. She was going to use the five thousand dollars to buy weapons! I felt giddy with admiration for her.

She’d planned all along to take Monica Fullbright’s money and run with it. I didn’t think she was crazy enough to try to buy the arms herself. Either she had gone to Mexico to turn the money over to someone who would buy them or she was running the drugs in an effort to make more money for the revolution. If she was going to turn the drugs herself here in LA, she had to be sure she could get rid of them without Monica Fullbright knowing she was back in town. She would need someone she trusted or someone she could control who’d take the drugs off her and get the money back to her. I didn’t think she would go to Rudy Sancerre. He didn’t seem smart enough or honest enough, but that might explain why the Cuban had been in Mexicali.

“She was going to buy guns with that money, wasn’t she?”

“No!” He looked stunned, as though I had read his mind, as though he had just thought of this himself. “When she asked me to help her, she said it was for medical aid. If it was guns, she was acting on her own.”

I slowed my step. “There had to be someone from Casa Guatemala working with her. Like you.”

“Then it must be Emma! I should have known it!” he exclaimed, stopping in his tracks. “She’s a fucking Trotsky.”

I was strangely thrilled that women were taking the dangerous lead in the struggle for justice and the taking up of arms. This must be the conflict, the basis of the fight for leadership between Emma Garcia and Tony Guerrero. Politics does make strange bedfellows. And a lot of animosity when the screwing stops.

“You trying to tell me she was acting out her own script?” I sneered, turning back in the direction from which we had come

“She was a little crazy, a little off balance. She had a deep need to prove herself.” He hastened after me.