Last Summer of the Death Warriors Read Online Free PDF

you’re going to say.”
    “Is it true then? What he said about Rosa?” He could feel the blood rush to his face.
    “I don’t know.”
    He took a deep breath. “He said she did things for money. What did he mean?”
    She covered her eyes with the palms of her hands and then brought her hands together as if she were praying. “Pancho, there’s no need to go into this.”
    “Tell me. I want to know.”
    She squirmed in her chair. “This was a while back, when she first started working here. She’d go outside during her breaks. Boys, you know, high school kids, would sometimes wait for her out back, by the kitchen. It was just kid stuff. She didn’t know any better. It wasn’t like it was dirty to her or that it meant anything.She was getting some attention. It was just touching, you know, necking, petting.”
    He remembered what Reynolds had told him, just before he broke his jaw. I knew your sister. She’s one of them ten-dollar sluts at the Green Café.
    “Jesus Christ,” he said. “You didn’t do anything?”
    “I’m sorry,” she said. He had his elbows on his legs and was resting his head on his hands. She touched his head as if to bless him. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I really am.”
    “Yeah, me too.” He stood up and headed for the door.
    “Pancho, wait. Take the money.”
    “Keep it,” he told her.

CHAPTER 6
    H e left the bike outside of St. Anthony’s where he had found it, drank from a faucet sticking out of the ground, and went into the building. D.Q. was in the storage room, holding a thin black book in his lap. “There you are,” he said without looking up. Pancho waited to be asked where he had been, but D.Q. was absorbed in the book. He grinned and shook his head. “Look at this.” He handed the book to Pancho. “That little kid in the bottom picture. That’s me the first year I got here.” The picture showed a smiling, wide-eyed boy in a white shirt and skinny black tie. Pancho looked from the picture to D.Q.’s face. It took some effort to see the resemblance. “St. Tony’s has a rule that you have to be at least fourteen to live here. I was the first exception. That’s because even at ten, I was old and wise beyond my years.”
    Pancho ignored D.Q.’s wink and gave the book back to him. His T-shirt was sticking against his skin and his head was still burning from the bike ride. He sat on the upturned bucket. “What now?” he asked.
    “We move these boxes to Lupita’s office and let her go throughthem. She’s the ultimate arbiter of what is kept and what is tossed. You never did see the library, did you? After we move the boxes, I’ll take you there and show you what we got.”
    “I don’t read.”
    “Not even comic books? We have the best collection of comics anywhere. Imagine kids saving all their comic books since this place opened in the 1950s.”
    “I don’t read comic books either.”
    “But you can read, right?”
    “I can read.”
    “Good, because later, when we become friends, I want to show you something I’ve been writing.”
    D.Q. kept flipping through the pages of the yearbook, apparently unaware of what he had said. Pancho stared at him. He had never heard anyone speak the way D.Q. spoke. And what made this Anglo kid think the two of them would ever be friends? D.Q. closed the book and laid it on his lap. He went on, “This book I’m writing, I call it the Death Warrior Manifesto. You know what a manifesto is, right?”
    “No.”
    “It’s a declaration of intention. In the case of the Death Warrior, it is a public declaration of how the Death Warrior is going to live his life.”
    Pancho took a deep breath. He thought about the thirty bucks a day he was going to be paid and knew it was way too little if you took into account the effort of trying to understand D.Q. On the other hand, he had been fortunate in getting those clues about Rosa’s boyfriend, and nothing could lessen his sense of goodluck. He decided to let D.Q. speak.