My phone woke me up fifteen minutes before my alarm. I reached to the table next to the couch, grabbed the ringing phone and saw another one of mom’s friends calling. I’d had to talk to six of them the night she died. Why this one was calling at this time of the morning was beyond me. I let it go to voice mail, setting it back down and turned my computer on, opening up the news feed.

“I’m here at the scene of the murder to have taken place over the night,” Vanessa the reporter was saying, standing outside the Palmera Aldea apartments, “which the police are saying was perpetrated by the notorious MS13 gang.”

“Does this mean the ceasefire is off between MS13 and the Crips?” Dan, the anchor in the studio asked.

“I talked to the d...

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