Free Fire Sale by Sara Paretsky

osie lived with her mother—and her older sister and her sister’s baby, and her two young brothers—in an old building on Escanaba. As we drove over, Josie implored me not to tell her mother she’d been punished. “Ma, she thinks I should go to college and all, and if she knows I been in trouble over basketball maybe she’ll say I can’t play no more.”
    “Do you want to go to college, Josie?”
    I pulled up behind a late-model pickup parked outside her building. Four speakers stood in the bed, with the volume cranked so high that the truck itself was vibrating. I had to lean over to hear Josie’s response.
    “I guess I want to go. Like, I don’t want to spend my life working as hard as Ma does, and if I go to college maybe I can be a teacher or coach or something.” She picked at a loose cuticle, staring at her knees, then burst out, “I don’t know what college is, what it’s like, I mean. Like, would they be all stuck up, not liking me because I’m Latina, you know, and growing up down here. I met some rich kids at church, and it’s, like, their families don’t want them to know me, on account of where I live. So I’m worrying college would be like that.”
    I remembered the church exchange program that Billy the Kid had mentioned. His choir had been singing with Josie’s Pentecostal church choir. I could well imagine families as rich as the Bysens not wanting their children getting too friendly with girls from South Chicago.
    “I grew up down here, Josie,” I said. “My mother was a poor immigrant, but I still went to college up at the University of Chicago. Of course, there were morons there who thought they were better than me because they grew up with a lot of money and I didn’t. But most of the people I met, students and professors, all they cared about was what I was like as a person. If you want to go to college, though, you’re going to have to work hard on your studies as well as your basketball. You know that, right?”
    She hunched a shoulder and nodded, but the confidence was over; she undid her seat belt and got out of the car. As I followed her up the walk to the front door, I saw five youths lounging around the truck, smoking reefer. One of them was the guy who sat morosely in the bleachers with his and Sancia’s children during practice. The other four I hadn’t seen before, but Josie clearly knew them. They called out to her, something taunting that I couldn’t hear over the booming speakers.
    Josie yelled back, “You better hope Pastor Andrés don’t come round—he totally fix that truck for you like he did before.”
    The youths shouted something else at her. When it looked as though she was going to stay to fight, I pushed her up the front walk. The noise followed us up the stairs to the second floor; even though the Dorrados lived in the back of the building, I could still feel the bass rocketing inside my stomach as Josie unlocked her front door.
    The door led directly into a living room. A girl was sitting on the couch, dressed only in a baby-doll T-shirt and underpants. She was watching television with a ferocious intensity, her hand moving from an open chip bag in her lap to her mouth. An infant lay next to her on the plastic-coated cushion, staring vacantly at the ceiling. The only decorations in the room were a large, plain cross on one wall and a picture of Jesus blessing some children.
    “Julia! Coach is here to see Ma. Put some clothes on,” Josie cried. “What you thinking, sitting around naked in the middle of the afternoon?”
    When her sister didn’t move, Josie walked over and yanked the potato chip bag from her lap. “Get up. Get out of this dreamworld and into the daylight. Is Ma home?”
    Julia hunched over, so that her face was only a yard from the screen, where a woman in red was leaving a hospital room; a man accosted her. The conversation, in Spanish, had something to do with the woman in the room behind them.
    Josie stood between the set and