Someone is painting bodies on Philadelphia's Broad Streetone more boldly
drawn chalk outline every time another life is lost to the violence of
the drug wars. A sixteen-year-old dealer; a priest; a nine-year-old
girl. The images pile through the summer and fall, moving closer each
day to the doorstep of City Hall. Ofelia Santoro rides her bicycle over
the bodies and through the dark, decaying streets of the neighborhood
known to police as the Badlands. She is looking for her
fourteen-year-old son, Gabriel, who disappeared a month earlier. His
father skipped two years ago, and she's been losing her boy ever since.
Gabriel got his first job when he was twelve, as a lookout, spotting
cops for the coke sellers working the car trade. Now he's a dealer
himself, the youngest guy in the Black Cap gang, holding down the most
dangerous corner and hiring his own lookouts. He feels guilty getting
kids involved the same way he got involved, but he needs them, or he'll
be caught. Gabriel tries to outrun the neighborhood, taking cover with a
drifter who is the father he might have had. But Gabriel is already
trapped, at the mercy of Diablo, the ugliest of the dealers, a man who
kills for fun. Steve Lopez's plot, dialogue, and pacing are masterful.
With searing precision, he portrays a world of evil so routine that its
seems inevitable. Yet Lopez endows his characters with such humanity
that redemption and radiance lighten this darkness. Third and Indiana is
an extraordinarily compelling and powerful debut.
