Scramble
Copyright© 2025 by Lumpy
Chapter 33
After the annoyances and bad revelations of the weekend, I was happy to be back at school and my regular Monday morning schedule. So far, there wasn’t anything I could do about Josh or Mom. All I could do was focus on myself and keep my eyes open for opportunities while I hoped some ingenious plan better than ‘tell Dad I know the future’ came to me.
Practice that morning had gone well and we were all headed to the field house so the guys could shower and I could grab my school stuff. Not needing to shower at school was a benefit of not having to actually participate in the workouts.
“Hold up a second,” Eduardo said, grabbing my arm as I started to follow the group.
I gave him a questioning look, hoping this wasn’t about him dating Li again. More power to him if she felt the same way and they hit it off, but if it imploded, I wanted to be as uninvolved as possible and hopefully keep both of my friends. I’d tried to wave him off once and he’d ignored me, so that was all I was going to do.
Eduardo looked around all conspiratorially and said, “I’ve been thinking about our conversation, about Raf and everything, and I think I figured out the perfect person we can use to get the information to him.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“His name is Tito Navarro. Most people in the gang call him Thimble, though. It’s this joke Raf made about him years ago that just stuck.”
There was no way a nickname like ‘Thimble’ was a good nickname. It was more like the kind of thing that starts as an insult and sticks.
“With a nickname like that, I assume they don’t get along well?”
“That’s an understatement. They hate each other. I mean, seriously hate each other. From the stories I’ve heard, Tito is constantly the butt of Raf’s jokes and the other guys kind of feed into it, but they hated each other before the gang. They grew up in the same neighborhood, went to the same schools and I don’t think they ever got along.”
I said it would be best if we found someone who had a grudge against Raf, and this guy sounded like he had plenty of reasons to have one.
“Sounds perfect. He’s still in the gang?”
“Barely. When Raf started moving up, gaining more influence and respect, he made sure Tito moved down. Like, really down. Every time there was a chance for Tito to prove himself or take on more responsibility, Raf would step in and sabotage it.”
“Are you sure he’s still in the gang enough to be able to get the info to him?”
“I think so. Yeah, he’s barely considered a member anymore, but he’s still in it, and as far as I know, always looking for a way to get more respect. He has almost no friends among the other guys; Raf made sure of that. He pushed Tito to the margins and keeps him there just because he can.”
“Okay.”
“I was thinking that if I approach Tito with this information about the police training, he’d probably jump at the chance to use it somehow. Maybe as leverage against Raf, try to have his own score that he can shove in Raf’s face.”
“Okay, but they’re not friends. How does Tito looking for a score get the info to Raf. Getting the runt arrested doesn’t help us or Mateo.”
“That’s the other thing. From what I’ve heard, Tito’s not very bright. He’s a little slow, doesn’t think things through, and doesn’t see problems before they come up. It’s why it’s so easy for Raf to constantly get one up on him. The odds are he’ll slip up and Raf will eventually find out about the information. And more importantly, if Raf thought he could steal this opportunity away from Tito, he’d definitely act on it. Raf loves the chance to take anything away from Tito, especially if it’s something that could make Raf money or give him status.”
“Plus, if Raf is taking the information away from Tito, he’d be more likely not to look too closely at it.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“So how do we get the information to Tito?”
“Everyone knows that Raf and I have a beef after what happened at that Christmas party. So I can present this as a ‘I don’t want to be involved with Raf anymore, but if you want to do something that might hurt him, here’s some information’ kind of thing. I’ll tell him I play sports with a deputy’s son at school and I overheard him talking about this specific day when most of the police force will be at some training thing and off the streets. I might have to connect the dots for him a little bit, explain that it would make a good chance to pull some kind of job, that he could take it to the others and present it as his idea from info he picked up, look like the hero, and maybe use that to hurt Raf for a change. Tito will jump at it, trust me.”
“That will work.”
“Yep.”
A group of cheerleaders walked past us on their way to the main building, and we both stopped talking until they were out of earshot.
“Okay. So you tell Tito about it, and Tito makes a plan that Raf gets wind of and takes over, setting it up as something that will benefit him, no problem,” I said once they were gone. “But how do we find out Raf’s plan once he takes it over from Tito?”
“I thought about that too. I’m going to tell Tito to let me know what day they’re planning to act because Raf is trying to recruit my little cousin Mateo, which everyone knows, but I still think I need to connect the dots for Tito. I’ll tell him I want to make sure Mateo is busy that day because he’s too soft for that kind of life and I don’t want him to get involved with Raf and I don’t want him getting dragged into something dangerous.”
“You think Tito would tell you?”
“I think so. After Raf takes the plan away from him, Tito’s going to have more reasons for wanting to hurt Raf. Even he’s smart enough to connect the dots that it helps him to not have Raf recruit another family member into the gang, and failures in recruitment look bad for Raf.”
“Man, there are a lot of ifs in this plan. If Tito takes the information to the rest of the gang, if he keeps your and my names out of it, if Raf finds out and takes it from him, if Tito remembers to tell you what Raf has planned after all of this. That is a ton of variables.”
“I know, but what choice do we have? We’re trying to set up a trap for Raf without Raf knowing we’re involved, on a specific day, using someone else as an intermediary. Of course there are going to be a lot of variables.”
He had a point. This kind of thing required finesse, and finesse always meant complexity.
“Yeah, okay.”
“So we’re doing this?”
“Yeah, we’re doing this. But I want to be there when you meet with Tito.”
Eduardo immediately shook his head. “Blake, you can’t. I can’t bring a white guy to that kind of meeting without raising all kinds of suspicions. People would want to know who you are, why you’re there, what your connection is to all this. It will make Tito think twice.”
“I get that, and I don’t want to go into the meeting itself. I want to be nearby as backup in case something goes wrong.”
“Okay. I can work with that.”
We shook hands on it, and I felt this weird combination of excitement and nervousness settle in my stomach. I really needed this to work. Getting Eduardo out of the gang wasn’t enough, which really only left getting Raf out of the way completely. Short of shooting him down in the street, getting him in jail was the only real option.
“When are you going to approach Tito?”
“Soon, maybe this weekend.”
“The police training is in less than three weeks. We don’t have a lot of time to waste.”
“I know. I’ll get it going as fast as I can.”