Phoenix Noir

Bull by Jon Talton

Downtown

I should have been suspicious when Logan said it was a routine job. It wasn’t that there were no routine jobs, only that Logan lied routinely. He was a short man with toad lips and a head that was bald and blotched except for a small tuft of dark hair just above his forehead. Always sitting behind his desk made him appear even shorter.

“Get out to Twenty-seventh Avenue, know where it is?”

He knew I did. I was one of the few people who had actually been born in Phoenix. I tamped out my Lucky Strike in the big ashtray on his desk. “It’s just fields out there.”

“Yeah, well, they found a foot at milepost 903.”

That sounded pretty routine. People fell under trains and lost things. It had been a lot worse a few years ago, during the Depression, with all the bums and alkie stiffs.

“The Golden State will drop you off.”

My suspicion made me light up another cigarette. “The Golden State Limited is going to slow down to let a bull get off two miles from here?”

He pulled the cigar from his mouth. A string of saliva kept it tethered to his fat lips.

“Bull. I hate that shit. You’re a special agent for the Southern Pacific Railroad. Have some pride.”

I took a drag and drew it down to my shoelaces. I walked to my desk, opened the drawer, and pulled out my Colt .45 automatic, taking my time about slipping on the shoulder holster and replacing the jacket.

“Go, you son of a bitch!” he hollered, spitting tiny tobacco leaves across the room. At the door, I heard his voice again: “And be on good behavior for a change. Got it?”

I got it, all right. I took the back stairs out of Union Station, avoiding the mob of young guys in uniform in the waiting room. I crossed the brickwork of the platform and made it to one of the dark green Pullmans on the Golden State just as the whistle screamed highball and the big wheels under the cars started moving. I flashed my badge at the conductor and he let me on, giving me a vinegar look. He didn’t want to be slowing down for any damned bull. I let him brush past me and I stayed in the vestibule. It wouldn’t be a long ride. The town passed by out the door. Over the red tile roof of the Spanish-style station, the Luhrs Tower marked downtown. If I turned the other way I could have seen the shacks and outhouses south of the tracks. Warehouses and freight cars gradually gave way to open track.

Five minutes later, I dropped off the train into the rocky ballast and found my footing. The air tasted like dust and locomotive oil. There wasn’t much out here: the single main line that ran through the desert to Yuma and Los Angeles, a few Mexican houses, the Jewish cemetery. Then there were the fields, regimented rows of green with lettuce, cabbage, and alfalfa running out along the table-flat ground until it met the mountains and the sky. Stands of cottonwood bordered the irrigation canals where I used to swim on the oveny summer days. Now, in January, the air was dry and cool and familiar. I couldn’t believe it was already 1943.

The town was changing. It had slept through the Depression like a kid in a fever dream, but the new war had brought Air Corps training bases, a new aluminum plant a ways from town, a camp for Kraut POWs, and endless streams of troop trains. Patton had trained his tank corps down by Hyder. The paper said Phoenix’s population was now an unbelievable 65,000. Out here Van Buren petered down into a two-lane road, concreted over by the WPA. I could see somebody had gotten past the shortages and rationing to throw up some temporary housing a little north of the tracks, ratty little one-story jobs made of cinder blocks. They would probably tear it all down once the war ended.

I adjusted my hat and tie and walked toward the crowd a hundred yards back down the tracks. It didn’t look good. Too many suits, and not the Hanny’s special I had on, but nice ones, and men in them who were all looking at me. Fifty feet away, on the other side of the track, stood a new Lincoln and, outside it, four tough-looking guys carrying Thompsons. Just a routine job. Before I got far, Joe Fisher walked up, moving fast on his wide, thick legs.

“Bull, what’s all the company about?” He nodded toward the men in suits.

“Beats me, but looks like Espee brass.”

“Your problem,” Fisher smirked. His face wasn’t built for it. It was thick and immovable, the color and texture of adobe.

“Who are the ones with the Tommy guns?” I asked.

“I was going to ask you that.”

Fisher was a Phoenix homicide dick, and he wasn’t a bad guy when you compared him to his pals, one of whom awkwardly crossed the tracks and poked me in the chest.

“Jimmy Darrow.” He spoke my name accusingly. “This ain’t a railroad problem. Take a powder.”

Frenchy Navarre’s coat was open so you could see the two revolvers he carried in shoulder holsters. He wanted you to see them. He had a failed boxer’s face and a killer’s heart. I’d seen a lot of guys like him in the war, the Great War. My war. I pushed his hand away just slowly enough, tossed aside my cigarette, and walked past him.

More railroad honchos than I’d ever seen in little Phoenix, Arizona, surrounded me. The introductions were perfunctory: the general manager, a vice president, the head of the mechanical department, and the chief special agent. Names I had only seen on company stationery and timetables.

The chief special agent did most of the talking. “Darrow, you need to work with these local officers to get this cleared up, and I mean soon.”

“Sure,” I said. Best behavior. “Any dope you can give me on this?”

Heads shook adamantly.

“Son, we need you to double-check everything on this line, make sure it’s shipshape.” This was the basso of the general manager.

“Yes, sir.” I stood awkwardly, waiting to be dismissed.

The chief drew me aside. He had the type of kindly face that I had grown to hate on sight.

“It’s wintertime, see, and all the bosses are here for the nice weather,” he said conspiratorially. “So they have nothing to do but go out and do our jobs for us, get it?”

“Sure.”

In a louder voice, he said, “We need to make sure this line is secure. I want a report by tonight. Let’s make it 8 p.m. Sharp.

I’m at the Hotel Adams.” I said my yessirs all over again. The chief took my arm. “Remember, serve in silence.” I waited for them to climb into a shiny black Caddy, then I lit a Lucky.

Another train trundled slowly by, the big grimy 2-8-0 locomotive making the ground shake. Southern Pacific Lines, proclaimed the tender. It must have had twenty cars, old Harriman coaches, faded black from smoke. Through the open windows, I saw the passengers. Black and brown faces in olive green. Colored troops. They looked with curiosity at our little party. The locomotive smoke sent me into coughs that made my lungs feel like they were on fire. For a moment, I bent over with my hands on my pants legs while my head stopped spinning. I felt better when I took a drag on my cigarette. After the train passed, I crossed over to where Fisher and Navarre had parked their Ford.

“Here it is,” Fisher said, standing by the open trunk.

He pointed to an old citrus crate. Big Town Oranges, the label said. Inside I found a bulging, bloodstained towel. They let me unwrap it.

“You find it this way?”

“No, genius,” Frenchy said. “We gotta save it. Evidence. You see that train, Fisher? More niggers than in Nigger Town and they’re giving ’em guns.” His small, dark eyes focused on me. “What the hell are you doing here, goddamned bull? Go roust some lowlifes down at the yards.” He stalked off.

“It was found in the middle of the tracks, right back there.” Fisher pointed to where the brass had been standing. “Cut off neat as can be. Mexican found it.”

It had been a pretty foot once, pale, petite, with tiny well-shaped toes and the kind of ankle that gives men the shakes when it’s attached to a live woman. It was held in a new strap-around black shoe, with a medium heel made of leather. And all had been sliced off at the shin. A railroad car will do that. This was no hobo.

“Where’s the rest of her?”

Fisher spat into the dust. “Beats the hell out of me. We’ve been a mile up and down the tracks in either direction, looked in the ditches, nothing. There was blood on the tracks but no woman. Trail of blood didn’t even go as far as the road.” He pulled out a handkerchief and ran it over his forehead before replacing his fedora. “She musta been a looker.”

The Westward Ho Hotel was the tallest building in Phoenix. It had sixteen stories and refrigeration. When I walked in a little after noon, the lobby was crowded with men in pricey suits and expensive cigar smoke. There wasn’t a single uniform. You’d think the world was at peace and nice girls weren’t getting their feet cut off by trains. Actually, I wasn’t sure she was a nice girl, which was one reason I had come to the hotel. I crossed the lobby and told the elevator operator, an ancient colored man, to take me to the eighth floor. I walked down the hall past three doors on carpet so soft it massaged my feet through the soles of my shoes. I put my hat in my hand and knocked on the fourth door once.

Strawberry Sue might have struck you as the prettiest girl you’d ever seen, if you saw her from behind and the dress fit right — and maybe twenty years ago it would have been true from the front too. But the sun had ravaged her skin, leaving her face rough and cut with lines and creases. Her face looked like the desert. I thought her figure was nice, but it went out of style in the ’20s. She was small, so thin I could almost touch my middle fingers if I wrapped my hands around her waist, and her hair was bright orange, worn unfashionably in a ponytail like the child of the ranch she was. Her real name was Ruby, but she hated it. The radio was talking about the big Allied landings in North Africa. I asked her to turn it off. She poured me a Scotch while I took off my shoes. As I sipped the drink, she pulled down her hair and took off my tie real slow.

Afterwards, we lay on the soft bed and I stroked her hair while she had her head in the notch where my neck met my shoulder. “My spot,” she called it. She didn’t seem to mind the scar there that looked exactly like the shape of the Grand Canyon. I had to smoke Chesterfields because that was what Sue smoked and I was out of my brand.

“You could fall asleep and get some rest, Stuck-On,” she said. “I’d take care of you. You wouldn’t have to be scared of nothing.”

“I’m doing good, Sue.” I let out a long blue plume of smoke and talked a little business.

“She doesn’t sound like the kind of girl I associate with.” Sue was like that, using big words, reading books, trying to better herself. I admired it.

“She looked like she could have been a high-end call girl, from what I saw of her. Nice shoe. Pale, nice skin.”

“Why would she end up under a train?”

“Maybe she steamed up a certain friend of yours.”

She made a small, indeterminate sound.

“He’s done it before, when a girl crossed him,” I said.

She stroked the hair on my chest with her small hands. “Don’t talk about that now, Stuck-On... You know why I call you that?”

I knew why but just ran my hand against the softness of her red hair and tapped some ash in the direction of the ashtray.

“Cause I’m stuck on you, silly,” she said. “Why don’t you get a real job and we can run away?”

Instead of answering her, I climbed out of bed and walked to the window. It faced north and I studied the palm-lined streets below, where neat bungalows had crew-cut lawns. They gave way to citrus groves and fields, dairies and livestock, and finally the desert. Camelback Mountain was miles away but it looked like I could lean just a little out the window and touch it. Phoenix was an oasis. It was a shame, some of the people an oasis attracts.

“What about it, Sue?”

She lay there naked, her small arms wrapped around her smooth young-girl breasts. “I haven’t heard anything, Stuck-On. Honest. I’d tell you. There’s lots of new people in town. Maybe it was the Japs?”

I looked back out at the crisp blue sky. “Most of the Japs are gone, you know that. They sent ’em to the camps. Their land’s just dying out there.”

“Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with call girls, or him.”

I used her fancy shower and felt better than I had in a month. Downstairs, I stopped at the smoke shop and nearly made it out the door. But he was fast for a fat man and suddenly his big saggy face was inches from mine.

“Well, Frank Darrow’s son. How’s Strawberry Sue this fine day?”

I moved back a step so I didn’t have to smell his cologne. “I’m sure she’s good.”

He laughed, a disconcerting gurgling sound, and offered me a cigar. I shook my head. Duke Simms was in his fourth term as a Phoenix city commissioner, but he wore suits and smoked cigars that didn’t come with a municipal paycheck. I wished I’d never met him.

“Who are all these people?” I indicated the crowded lobby.

“Businessmen, entrepreneurs. You know what that word means?”

“Friends of yours?”

“Yes, indeed. This is a business-friendly city, Jimmy.”

“Why the hell aren’t they in the service?”

“Now, don’t be that way. They’re supplying the air bases, building our defense plants.” His chest swelled and he ran his stubby fingers down his lapels. “This town is changing, son. You’re not even going to recognize it.”

I shook my head and tried to walk past him, but he blocked my way.

“Come outside, son,” he drawled, “I was just thinking of you.” He wrapped an arm around me and steered me out onto the sidewalk, far enough away from the door to give us some privacy. Simms wore a bright red tie and had a matching handkerchief in his coat pocket. An American flag sprouted from his lapel. “What’s going on down at the Espee these days?”

“What do you want, Simms?”

“Such a blunt young man, and after having had a good time just now.”

My fingers ached from making a fist.

“I need a little reciprocity,” he went on. “Just a little shipment coming to the freight station tonight.”

“Things are different,” I said. “It’s wartime.”

The gurgling came again from the back of his throat. “Is that why I had to pay to bring in thirty new clean girls from Texas and Oklahoma? Wartime, yes, indeed. Now, son, we have an understanding.”

“Tell me about a girl who had her foot cut off by a train west of town.”

He ignored me and put his hand on my bad shoulder, digging his fingers in. I set my face so the pain wouldn’t show. “Our understanding is you get to be entertained by Miss Sue complimentary, and you do some things for me. It’s worked out well. And it’s not as if Strawberry Sue is a spring chicken. Get it? If you went back on our deal, who knows...?”

He released my shoulder and the sensation of knitting needles probing somebody else’s flesh replaced the pain. I managed, “You’re a son of a bitch.”

“I am,” he agreed. “But you have to live with certain disagreeable realities.” He smiled through yellow teeth. “Here’s what I need.”

I rode a crowded streetcar back downtown, then waited for a long string of boxcars to be pulled along Jackson Street before I could walk the block to the depot. They told of faraway places: Baltimore and Ohio, New York Central, Pennsylvania, Frisco, Missouri Pacific, Burlington, Denver, and Rio Grande Western. Anywhere but here. The station sat at the end of the street, gracefully reigning over the surrounding hotels and warehouses. Mail and Railway Express Agency trucks crowded before the long building adjacent to the waiting room.

The Western Union sign hanging from one arch of the building was like a beacon for me. I wasn’t sure what the hell the brass wanted me to do about the girl attached to the foot, but I could send wires to station agents east-and westbound from Phoenix. Had anyone reported a passenger who didn’t arrive? Had any conductors noticed anything funny on their trains? Later, I’d take a car and check the rail yards, the Tovrea stockyards, Pacific Fruit Express icing docks, the bridge over the Salt River — make sure the line was secure, whatever the hell that meant. It didn’t seem to have much connection with the severed foot. Logan was conveniently gone.

When I was finished, I walked back downstairs to the waiting room which was nearly deserted. Out on the tracks, a switch engine was moving baggage and mail cars, but the next passenger train wasn’t due to depart until 4:30. The high ceiling of the room held a fog of cigarette smoke and dust, caught in the rays of the sunlight. Over by the newsstand, a couple of young GIs were horsing around, their uniforms new, their faces untouched by death. For just a second I saw myself in a magic mirror, May 1918, and my shoulder throbbed and everything in the world seemed broken. A bird colonel brushed past, glaring at me as if he expected to be saluted. The big wooden benches looked lonely. On one of them, a bum pretended to snooze under a sweat-stained Panama hat. One of the ticket agents watched me from under his eyeshade, then cocked his head as if he were trying to toss it as a shot put. From that direction, two women were coming my way.

“You’re the railroad police?”

I said I was. The question came from a short, stooped old woman in a blue dress that was too light for the season, even in Phoenix. With her was a younger woman, blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned, and pretty in a damaged way, like a china bowl that had been shattered but carefully glued back together, the cracks showing only on close examination.

“That man said you could help us. It’s our Mary.” The old woman stared at me as if I should understand, and somewhere something crawling in my gut winked at me.

“It’s my sister Mary,” the blonde said. “She was coming home from Los Angeles. She’s been in school, you see, and she was coming home for a visit. She was supposed to be on the train last night. She sent us a telegram telling us to expect her.”

The old woman grabbed my sleeve. “We’ve been here all night waiting!”

“She never showed?”

Two heads shook in unison, and I wondered if it could be that easy.

“Do you live here in town?”

“We live out a ways,” the mother said, sticking her chin at me. “In Palmcroft.”

I nodded: nice big houses by the new city park. She wanted to let me know money was involved. She didn’t bother with anything so unsavory as introducing herself to me. I sat them down on a bench.

Fifteen minutes later, Joe Fisher and Frenchy Navarre walked in and heard the story for the second time. Mary Becker took a train out of Los Angeles, due to arrive in Phoenix just past 9. The girl was nineteen. The younger woman, Anna, did most of the talking, with the mother nodding. Becker. I knew the name. They owned big cotton farms west of town.

“She’s a very sweet, innocent girl,” Anna said. “I just can’t bear to think that anything could have happened, that someone might have taken advantage of her.”

“Wouldn’t have been the first time,” the old lady said.

“Mother!” Anna looked at the two cops, then me. “You have to help us.” She reached in her handbag and passed us a photograph. It showed a pretty girl with curly dark hair and large, knowing eyes. She was standing on a pier, smiling at the photographer. “That’s Mary.”

Navarre took it and studied it, handed it to Fisher, who tucked it in his pocket. “Go up to the station house and make a missing person’s report,” Navarre said. “We’ll see what we can do. But you gotta understand, it’s wartime. Lot of people coming through, lot of people on the trains.”

“Maybe she was just delayed,” Fisher said softly.

The cops rose in unison and I followed. Navarre turned on his heel once we were through the front doors. “I can’t believe you’d waste our time with this shit.”

“I dunno, Frenchy. You have a missing girl and so do they. Maybe that’s too complicated for you.”

He pushed up his chest, showing the crossed shoulder holsters. “Don’t think you’re special because you’re with the railroad, you cocksucker. Any time you want to find out, let me know.” He strode angrily to the car.

“Show them the shoe, Joe. That’ll settle it, one way or another.”

Fisher looked at me sadly and said, “He thinks he’s got a lead. What’re you gonna do?” He handed me the snapshot.

I went back in and sat down with Anna and her mother. The benches were starting to fill up for the afternoon Santa Fe train.

“Anybody in Los Angeles you can call? Any friends of Mary’s?”

“She lived with three other girls in a very nice apartment,” Anna said. “We talked to them long distance this morning. They drove her to the depot and saw her get on the train.”

I asked why she was coming home. The old lady’s face had hardened into a sullen mask while Anna and the cops had talked. Now she looked at me fiercely. “That’s none of your concern. My daughter is missing from one of your trains. That should be your concern.”

Anna touched my arm. “Mother is very tired. Mary was coming home on family business. It’s nothing.”

I found myself studying the blonde’s ankles. She probably thought I was just being fresh. They were nice ankles, naked thanks to the nylon shortage. I pulled out my smokes and offered them. Anna took one and I studied her face while I lit her cigarette. It looked like a face that might tell me things if the mother wasn’t there. Then I asked her what her sister might have been wearing on her trip home.

After I left them, I made a few checks with the dispatcher. He was already in a bad mood. Extra engineers and firemen had been called in and he didn’t know why. The section foreman had been out all day on the line. “Nobody gives me the word,” he mumbled. After a few minutes of commiseration, he told me that the train Mary Becker boarded in Los Angeles had arrived on time the night before. It had been divided into three crowded sections, the last one coming in shortly after 10. It stayed fifteen minutes then departed for Tempe, Mesa, Tucson, El Paso, and points east. Next I went to the baggage room through the double doors just beyond the ticket counter. Anna had described Mary’s luggage: a matching suitcase and overnight bag, burnt-yellow and streamlined, with three brown stripes. The baggage men let me be: they were loading carts for the Santa Fe. It only took a few minutes of prowling to find the set. It looked almost new and the tag said, M. Becker, with an address in Los Angeles. I told the head baggage man to set them aside and headed back to the waiting room.

The women were gone.

It would have to wait. I needed to check the line and report to the chief at 8 o’clock “sharp.” I pushed through the front doors and heard a woman yell. She sounded a lot like Anna Becker. Looking around an archway, I spotted her with a man, standing beside a roadster with the top down. The car glistened red in the afternoon sun. So did Anna’s golden hair. She was in an agitated conversation with the man, chopping the air with her hands. Twice I made out the name Mary, said with urgency. They couldn’t see me. The thick pillars and archways of the station portico concealed me. Anna moved enough that I could take him in: dark hair in a crooner’s hairstyle, a kid’s face but the muscular body of a twenty-five-year-old. He was wearing a leather jacket and driving gloves. I didn’t see many able-bodied men his age around, and I wondered how he’d bugged out of the draft. He didn’t look like 4-F material, but you couldn’t tell. He sneered at something Anna said and she screamed, “How could you! What kind of man are you?” That’s when he hit her, so hard that the sound echoed in the portico.

That was enough. I knew what kind of man he was. But when I stepped out, the car was already speeding up Fourth Avenue, Anna’s blond hair fluffing out in the wind. I tapped the roof of a taxi and got in. In only seconds the cabbie had caught up. They paused at the light at Jefferson, then turned right. I didn’t know what I was doing. At that moment, I would have showed the kid in the leather jacket what it was like to be hit by somebody his own size. By the time we reached Second Street, however, I had hold of myself again. They turned south and parked. I sent the cab half a block past, paid him, and got out.

We were a long way from Palmcroft. The sidewalk was filthy and broken. The buildings were seedy single-story affairs with fading paint and dark entrances, broken up by seedier three-and four-story hotels. It was the heart of the Deuce, where the bars, brothels, hock shops, and flop houses intersected with the remains of Chinatown and the busy produce warehouses. It had enough to interest soldiers on liberty, Indians, old cowboys without pensions, off-duty farmers, miners, and railroad men. The street was crowded, so Anna and the kid didn’t notice me. He walked around to the passenger side, opened the door, and yanked her arm sharply. She came out of the car flashing a pale leg up to her thigh. Then they disappeared into a doorway. I didn’t need to walk close to see where they’d gone. It was a bar I knew well, the Phone Booth, and it was sure as hell a long way from Palmcroft. A cop walked by twirling his billy, a reminder that I could mind my own business, the railroad business I got paid for. I lit a cigarette and leaned against a brick wall, covering up the Pepsodent ad, hating some of the things I knew. One was that the Phone Booth was quietly owned by Duke Simms, and that he used a private room in the back for special meetings. I hated knowing about those too. Even with 65,000 people, Phoenix was still a very small town.

I walked out of the Hotel Adams at 8:15. A dry chill was drifting in from the desert and the sidewalks were jammed with soldiers and airmen in town on liberty. I was wearing a fresh shirt and tie, and the chief special agent seemed pleased with my report. To me, there didn’t seem much to it. I had checked the line through town, run some bums out from under the Tempe bridge, and looked over the blocks of boxcars down at the SP yard, searching for broken seals on the doors or other signs of pilferage. I had left word for Joe Fisher where he would find Mary Becker’s luggage. I carried my own kind of bag and it was full of questions, maybe even a little kit of suspicions inside. Who was the punk who had slapped Anna, and why had she been so upset? She had yelled at him and said the name of her sister. And she had ended up at a place nice girls shouldn’t even know existed in this town. Now all I could do was buy an evening paper and read it as I walked vaguely in the direction of the depot.

I was about to cross Jefferson Street when a car nearly ran me down. I jumped back and recognized the familiar black Ford. I followed it into the driveway by police headquarters. It was full dark, but the streetlights showed Frenchy Navarre getting out of the backseat, then pulling out another man. The handcuffs on the man’s wrists glistened under the light. He was a kid really, a colored kid in fatigues, and his head and body slumped against the car. Navarre leaned in close and was talking to him. When the kid’s head came up, I could see a bloody membrane where his lower jaw should have been. Then Fisher came around from the driver’s side and they led him into the station. I let them get inside, and followed.

Navarre had the kid at the booking desk when he looked around and saw me. “Get lost, bull.” He momentarily turned back to his prisoner to punch him in the kidney. The boy crumpled in agony. Navarre’s hand looked odd, but then I saw it, a seven-inch blackjack protruding, and it had fresh blood on it.

“Here’s your murderer,” Navarre said. “Nigger playing soldier, really trying to rape a white woman.”

“No, sir, I swear I didn’t... don’t know nothing ’bout this,” the boy pleaded with me, slurring his words through his ruined mouth. He spat a bloody tooth to the floor.

“Well, how you explain this, nigger?” Navarre held out an ankle bracelet. It had dried blood on it. “Tried to pawn it after you raped that girl and put her on the train tracks.”

“No, no...”

“Wasn’t too smart coming into Phoenix, was it, boy? We make our niggers behave, keep ’em south of the tracks. So the government gives you a uniform, gives you a gun, makes you think you’re special. You’re just a black nigger, you murderous son of a bitch.”

“Gotta call my commanding officer,” the kid said.

“Shut up!” Navarre roared, his eyes bright and primal like an animal’s.

I tried to catch Fisher’s eye. This seemed all wrong. Anna Becker had mentioned nothing about an ankle bracelet.

“Did you find the body?” I asked.

Navarre brandished the blackjack toward me. “We don’t need anything more than what we got to send this nigger to the gas chamber. Now get the hell out, bull.”

With that he advanced on me in three fast strides, raising the sap with one hand and reaching inside his coat with the other. I took a step backward and I was faster. He had a .38 Police Positive in his left hand, but it was frozen uselessly in mid-air. My Colt .45 was five inches from his broad, veiny, ugly nose. His eyes were obsidian, dead.

“Kill him!” Navarre commanded, but his voice shook.

Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.

“I’ll kill you, Darrow!”

But his arm remained where it had been, the pistol pointed out into the room.

I aimed, staring at him down the heavy barrel of the automatic. “You like to hurt people... you like it...” Those were all the words that would come out.

Then I felt Joe Fisher next to me and the spell broke. “Let it go, Jimmy.” A stocky desk sergeant pushed Navarre away and I holstered the Colt.

“James, you’re walking like an old man. That’s not right.”

I turned to see Mose, resplendent in his immaculate sleeping-car porter uniform. We stood at trackside, and it was oddly quiet. The usual call of train whistles was silent. My eyes roved over the station tracks and saw spikes and blocks of wood driven into the switches that connected the array of tracks to the main line. Alarm shot through me: Secure the line.

“Why are the tracks spiked? No train can switch off the main line.”

“You’re gonna see, boy,” Mose said, his teeth huge and white.

“What are you doing here anyway, Mose? You should have departed an hour ago. Nothing seems to be moving.”

He gave his deep, melodious laugh. “Some things moving. The pilot train came through twenty minutes ago, right on schedule.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Mose clapped me fondly on my good shoulder. “Son, you would be the only person on the Espee who don’t know.”

I was going to protest more but a thick, sharp whistle echoed through the dry air. I leaned over and could see a headlight in the distance. I pulled out my nearly empty pack of Luckies, offered one to Mose, and lit them both.

“I’ve got to go to the freight station, do Simms’s dirty work.”

Mose stared toward the black masses of the South Mountains. “You got your reasons, son.”

Now the train was close enough that I could hear the engineer start to sound the bell.

“There’s no goddamned justice in this town.” I said it in a conversational voice, to no one in particular, drowned out by the locomotive’s approach.

“You just finding that out?” Mose shook his head and laughed. “Oh, Jimmy, you a piece of work.”

Then the train was on us, passing quickly. It was double-headed, with two powerful steam locomotives. Then a pair of baggage cars rolled by, one with an odd set of antennae on top, followed by a pair of sleepers. The last car rumbled heavily. It had new dark green paint that glowed under the plat-form lights and fresh lettering on the side said, PULLMAN, but unlike every other car it had no number. The shades were down. Yet the rear window had light, and there... right there inside. The familiar patrician head, the jaunty jut to the chin, even the cigarette holder in his mouth, just like in the newsreels. He looked at us. Mose stiffly saluted.

Then the train was gone. Nothing was left but the red marker on the last car, which quickly went around the slight curve and continued east.

Mose put his arm around me. “On his way home from a tour of bases on the coast, and the Espee handled it all the way,” he said proudly. “See, boy, happy days are here again.”

I walked toward the freight station and the song was in my head. But my head played it too slow, like a dirge.

The eighth deadly sin by Charles Kelly

Hassayampa Valley

Father Carty O’Toole could see the hard-knocked Dodge pickup beating down on him from a half-mile away, dust huffing from its tires and settling on the mesquite, a tiny torpedo tracing the western edge of the White Tank Mountains. Walberto must have the goods today. Sweat clutched at O’Toole’s crotch beneath his black robes, his heart bounced. The buzzing of the cicadas in the crazy heat tweaked his nerves. He had a Colt .357 Python stuffed full of potential detonations hidden in the confessional. Fine. But the varnish smell of the sin-box was cut through by the stringency of Hoppe’s No. 6 gunpowder solvent, and that could give away O’Toole’s play. He steadied himself, fought for faith. Surely, God would not let that happen, assuming God wasn’t taking a day off. That happened from time to time in the Hassayampa Valley.

O’Toole stood well back in the shadow of the vestibule of Mission Santa Dolores, taking what comfort he could from the relative coolness offered by the packed-earth walls. Built in the 1920s, a replica of older and more-honored antiquities, the church had been long abandoned, replaced by a modern church twenty miles away with the soaring lines of a department store. The mission was too old and shabby and isolated to serve the spiritual needs of the population oozing westward from Phoenix, but O’Toole had not let it languish. Carrying out a bit of personal penance, he had set himself the task of dusting and polishing the pews, swabbing down the tile, cleaning the plaster angels and cherubs that festooned the reredos behind the altar. In this heat, it had been exacting work for a fat man pushing sixty. But the police were so bothersome in this part of the world. Better to stay out of their way.

He’d had to break the lock on the door to get in, but of course that was no problem for him. He’d been at the cleaning for a week, while he waited. It gave him a cover story if someone came by, but nobody did. And aside from the psychic payback it offered him, it was something to do. There was no television or even a radio in the abandoned priests’ quarters out back, his comestible needs and water supplied by a Coleman camp refrigerator, his literary cravings fulfilled by some dusty paperbacks replete with the adventures of hard-nosed men and abandoned women. A small electric generator fed the battery that kept his cell phone alive.

The truck was closer now, growing larger, a Dodge Ram driven with more enthusiasm than sense — that was Walberto’s way. Slipping through thirsty desert scrub and sandy dirt, it looked shallow and indistinct. Twenty-five yards away, the snarling of its engine snapped off. It clanked and stopped near a paloverde on the perimeter of the dirt-track turnaround. Was there a passenger? Hard to tell because of the dazzling brightness. Apparently not, for only Walberto emerged, closing the door with a thunk. His hands were empty, no package. Disappointed, O’Toole examined the rest of him. A black ball cap, a Dallas Cowboys warm-up jacket over a white T-shirt, jeans, cowboy boots tooled in Texas. O’Toole didn’t like the warm-up jacket, not one bit. In this heat, it must feel like a microwave on full power. He examined Walberto’s bony outline, but the jacket flapped loosely, showing nothing. Walberto darted forward, swift without effort, merging with the darkness of the vestibule.

“You’re hiding, Father,” Walberto said, smiling into the shadow as his eyes adjusted, his mouth slashed across by gapped teeth.

“It’s the heat,” O’Toole said.

“The heat, of course.” He fell silent, making O’Toole ask.

“Did you bring it?” He glanced over Walberto’s shoulder at the pickup. Was there someone else?

“Sure,” said Walberto, stepping in front of O’Toole to cut off his view. “It’s in my pocket.”

O’Toole scanned the outline of the jacket. Those pockets seemed quite small. Without taking his eyes off Walberto, he jerked his head toward the darkness beyond them.

“Come in,” he said. “Let’s go deeper into the church.”

“Sure,” Walberto said. He moved closer, so his whisper would carry. “I had to kill the man.”

O’Toole’s heart went cold, and he cursed his own greed. This is what his self-imposed mission to the illegal migrants had come to. As if he hadn’t known it all along. Two months ago, he’d been at loose ends in Buffalo. No parish for him, nothing he could sneak into at any rate, even with the Catholic Church in America desperate for priests. Then he got a call from an old friend in Arizona. Opportunities existed. Migrants being held in safe houses in Phoenix — indeed, all over the Valley of the Sun — needed to hear the word of the Lord. The smugglers liked the idea — a dose of religion helped the migrants accept the rotten conditions — and the money for a bit of spiritual soothing was good, very good. The smugglers’ money, Walberto’s money.

O’Toole swallowed, but couldn’t lubricate his throat. His voice was a dry wheeze. “Let’s go deeper into the church.”

The black-robed man turned, and his feet clattered on the tile. He listened for Walberto’s feet. At first O’Toole heard nothing, and the sweat on his forehead gathered and flowed. His knees almost buckled, but he kept moving. Then he heard the tick-tock of the cowboy boots, and regained his movement. It’s all about appearances, he thought. Act strong, be strong. And get to the Python.

O’Toole was making for the shadowy alcove just short of the altar. That was where the confessional reared up, encompassing two upright boxes — one for the sinner, one for the dispenser of penance. But Walberto’s voice, very quiet, stopped him.

“Let’s talk here,” the coyote said. “I don’t like to get too far from the daylight.”

O’Toole turned, and Walberto waved to one of the splintered pews. Trying to think of a reason not to, O’Toole shuffled to a seat and settled down. He half-turned as Walberto slipped into the pew behind him, but the coyote put a firm hand on his shoulder and waggled his head. “Face front, Father. Kneel. Act like you’re praying. I’ll do the same. I’ll do my best, but you’ll probably be better than me. You’ve had more practice.”

O’Toole complied, clacking the kneeler down and settling heavily into place, though it was a pointless charade. The likelihood of anyone coming to this abandoned place, anyone who needed to be fooled, was quite remote. He was acutely aware of Walberto kneeling just behind him, like a Mafia assassin in the rear seat of a car. O’Toole knew that situation. The man in front had to pretend everything was all right, or the bullet would come quicker. But in facing front, the target had to fight the panic of not knowing. The muscles in O’Toole’s neck bunched. I’m getting a headache, he thought. Why? Will that help me survive? The stupidity of his bodily reactions confounded him.

Walberto’s breath poisoned the air. “Tell me the story again.”

O’Toole was incredulous. “You mean the story about the relic?”

“Umm-hmm. The relic. The reason I killed the man.”

Wonderful. Story time, as they both sat in the shadow of the gallows. Or was it the shadow of the lethal-injection gurney? Who cared? The result was the same: O’Toole on a slab. He found his voice, heard himself wheedling: “You were to pay him a little, promise him more when we did the deal.”

“He didn’t believe me, he thought I was going to stab him. He was right.”

O’Toole’s breakfast — a stale ham sandwich — rose dangerously. “That wasn’t necessary.”

“Sure it was. Tell me the story.”

And O’Toole did, just as he had told it to strengthen the faith of migrants stashed away in Buckeye, Phoenix, Glendale, even Scottsdale, eating take-out sandwiches, drowsing with the curtains drawn, waiting for the next stage of their journeys. They thought it emerged from deep theological study O’Toole had pursued in shadowed monasteries. In fact, he’d done most of his research online.

The True Cross, the Cross of Golgotha, on which Christ was nailed, disappeared for centuries after the Crucifixion. In AD 326, it was discovered by the mother of Constantine I, the Empress Helena, on a journey to Israel. In a place adjoining the tomb where Christ was buried, she found three ancient crosses in a cavern. A sick woman, placed on one of them, rallied.

“It restores health, then,” Walberto breathed with satisfaction.

“So it is said,” O’Toole agreed, and continued.

The True Cross was kept in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem until the year 614, when it was taken in a Persian raid. It became a prize in the wars between the Romans and Muslims, changing hands often. Still held by Muslims at the time of the Third Crusade, it disappeared. But bits of the cross that had come off were collected and returned to Europe. Some fragments were enclosed in altars, some placed in tiny golden reliquaries. But some had surfaced even earlier and were considered special for their size and mystic powers.

“Any relic larger than a toothpick is quite potent,” said O’Toole.

“And one as long as five or six inches...” Walberto whispered, like a child who knows a story by heart.

O’Toole completed the thought, “... would be a stunning find.”

Walberto remained entranced. He said, “Radegunda, Queen of the Franks, obtained from the Emperor Justin II, in 569, a remarkable relic of the True Cross.”

O’Toole was amazed. It was almost the exact wording of the Catholic Encyclopedia, a volume from which O’Toole could quote extensively, and had quoted to Walberto. The coyote, whose typical reading consisted of the ingredients lists from the backs of Campbell Soup cans, had remembered.

“Yes,” said O’Toole. “This was one of the relics catalogued in 1870 by the Parisian scholar Rohault de Fleury in his masterly Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion.”

Walberto tapped impatiently on the pew in front of him, his massive signet ring making a sound like a door-rapper. “And how did it get here, all the way from France, after all that time?”

“The provenance shows that,” rejoined O’Toole. “Stolen in France, carried to the new world, treasured for centuries in a monastery high in the Sierra Obscura in northern Mexico, then spirited away fifty years ago to the mission in Magadalena, then...”

“... brought to Phoenix two weeks ago by Jorge Canto, a muralist in that mission...”

“... to pay his passage across the border.”

“Jorge Canto, who now lies dead of seven wounds in his chest and back on a bed in Room 23 of the Painted Robin Motel in Buckeye,” Walberto concluded with some relish. “A crucifix on his forehead.” O’Toole could hear him tapping his head, as if trying to spring loose a thought. “What’s that prov thing?”

“Provenance,” said O’Toole. “The papers you stole from Canto last week and gave to me. That’s why I told you to get the relic. They prove it’s authentic.”

“Oh, sure.”

O’Toole was put off. “You don’t believe it?”

“Faith is very hard, Father. You know that.”

“Yes.”

“A man is easily tempted. You’ve heard of the seven deadly sins?”

O’Toole felt a surge of annoyance. Was this Dallas Cowboys fan really trying to instruct him on matters of faith?

“Yes,” said O’Toole. “The seven deadly sins — lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, anger, envy, and pride.”

“Sure,” said Walberto. “Luxuria, gula, avaritia, acedia, ira, invidia, and superbia. In Colombia, the priest taught us in Latin.”

Jesus, this was too much.

“I know Latin,” O’Toole said heavily.

“Of course. But do you know there is an eighth deadly sin?”

O’Toole sighed.

Walberto’s laugh crackled. “The eighth deadly sin is over-confidence. I don’t know how to say it in Latin.”

Touché. It occurred to O’Toole that “Walberto” was a name of Germanic origin, meaning “one who remains in power.” The coyote had the upper hand now, and O’Toole had to get it back. “I can market the relic,” O’Toole said. “I have a buyer. I told you that. In San Francisco. One hundred thousand dollars.”

He half-turned to see if Walberto was now holding a weapon, but the coyote’s hands were empty, and he waved O’Toole back to the front. “One hundred thousand dollars,” said Walberto. “No, I think it’s worth more now. Here, see what you think. Don’t turn around again, just put your right hand out to the side, palm up.”

O’Toole did so, and felt a hard scrap thrust into his grip. His pulse hammering, he brought it up before his eyes. A sliver of pine wood, seven inches long at least, calcified by age. He could see places where other slivers had been torn away, and he looked back through the centuries, thinking of the remnant being passed from hand to hand, hidden under cloaks, enclosed in velvet and leather cases, being spilled rudely on a carpet by burglars, slipped into pockets foul with tobacco, held reverently up to the light of forgotten dawns, always on the move, its destiny to wind up here, in his hand.

Walberto’s voice was urgent. “Put your finger in the blood.”

There was a crusty black splotch — not large — near one tip of the large splinter. O’Toole tried it with a thumb, and the surface broke and wept red. Hastily, he wiped his thumb on his robe, his heart beating faster.

“The blood of Jorge Canto,” intoned Walberto, “shed by us for the forgiveness of sins. And, I think, for two hundred thousand dollars minimum.”

O’Toole turned the remnant over to hide the red spot, and noted older, darker stains on the wood. He thought of Christ’s hands, torn by the nails, and the spear that had slashed into his side, bringing forth blood and water. Could the blood of Golgotha really have survived all these centuries, locked in the fibers of the wood? His faith urged him toward that conclusion, but Walberto had a different interpretation.

“You’re beginning to see it now, aren’t you, Father? Plenty of dudes like Jorge have died for that relic. That’s what makes it valuable. The price went way up the second I slipped that knife through his ribs.”

The coyote paused, and O’Toole could not bring himself to reply. He felt a crawling sensation between his shoulder blades, and envisioned Walberto’s knife blade, plunging again and again through skin, scraping bone, exploding blood vessels, releasing scarlet geysers of life-juice. Silence fell as they knelt there in the sweaty heat, with the shadows of the church smothering them. Then, somewhere outside the church, O’Toole heard a light scraping sound.

“Shit!” whispered Walberto. “There’s somebody out there. Let’s take this into the sin-box. We don’t want to be seen together.”

A happenstance visitor? O’Toole didn’t believe it. He hadn’t heard a vehicle engine since Walberto had pulled up, and even the sound of moving feet — some hiker extending his distance over desolate territory — would have reached them in the dead quiet within the church walls. Most likely it was a wild dog or an actual coyote, some beast that could have made the approach without attracting notice.

“All right,” O’Toole whispered back. He rose quickly, his big legs twitching, and started for the priest’s side of the confessional.

Walberto took his arm. “Let me go in that side,” the smuggler whispered, grinning. “I always wanted to try out that priest’s seat. Besides, maybe you have a sin to confess.”

O’Toole felt tightness in his throat. His mind blanked. Dumbly, he nodded, thinking desperately about favorable possibilities. The pistol might not be easy to see. Out of caution, he had tilted a missal up against it when he’d placed it on the small shelf next to the priest’s seat.

He made his way to the penitent’s door on the confessional and creaked it open. It stuck a bit. Things in the church had never worked exactly right for O’Toole. He wondered about that. On the other side, he could hear Walberto bumping around, then settling down. O’Toole knelt on the hard bench, his face inches from the mesh that covered the square hole between them.

The coyote’s breath rippled the cloth. “Aren’t you going to say it, Father?”

“Say what?”

“What you’re supposed to say — Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

Despite his nervousness, O’Toole felt anger rising in his throat. “You’re not a priest.”

The coyote was unfazed. “And are you a priest, Father? For sure? You sure do some slick things for a man of the cloth.”

“A man has to live,” O’Toole replied.

“Yes, that can be a problem.” Walberto seemed to be shifting around in the enclosed space. One of his elbows thumped the thin wall between them. “But once a priest, always a priest, even if you’re an asshole, right?”

O’Toole thought about his sins. Miserably, he replied, “Yes.”

“This is supposed to be a confession,” Walberto said, his voice now cheerful. “Have you been guilty of the eighth deadly sin, overconfidence? I think so. You thought you’d get this relic from me easy. But you won’t. The price goes up when somebody dies. And it would go up crazy for a priest.”

O’Toole heard metal clanking on wood from the other side of the confessional. His mind raced. His fatness in the confined space locked him in, he’d never be able to shift and lunge through the door in time. He was like a doomed cow in a butcher’s chute, waiting for the electric knife to buzz and slash its carotid arteries away.

“Look,” said Walberto teasingly, “there’s a gun in here.”

O’Toole could see the round muzzle of the .357 poking at the mesh, could see Walberto mockingly pushing his own face into the cloth right next to it.

“There’s a gun in here too,” O’Toole said, sweeping the tiny Beretta M21A from under his robes and firing twice. Blood bubbled on the screen as the .22-caliber long-rifle bullets punched into the coyote’s forehead. The hard chunks of meat that had been Walberto clanked and vibrated against the confessional. Then there was silence.

O’Toole reholstered the pistol and put a hand to his chest. It took him some time to calm his pounding heart, some time to get his breath down into the range in which it no longer whistled and strained. He was sweating like a man in a steam bath. He tilted his head against the cool wood next to the penitent’s window, let his headache subside, and, eventually, composed himself.

At last his thoughts turned to the relic and to spiritual duties. There was one more thing he had to do for Walberto.

He crossed himself, compressed his hands, and leaned forward.

“Oh Lord,” O’Toole prayed, “be merciful to him, a sinner.”

Dirty Scottsdale by Diana Gabaldon

Desert Botanical Garden

It was high noon, and 110°. The cops were in shirtsleeves, the homeowner was wearing plaid bermuda shorts and a wtf? expression. The body floating facedown in the swimming pool was wearing a navy-blue wool suit, which was odder than the veil of blood hanging like shark bait in the water.

The girl by the pool was more appropriately dressed — if you could use that word to describe the triangles of turquoise fabric that covered her nominally private parts.

“The poor dope,” I said, shaking my head. “He always wanted a pool. Well, in the end he got himself a pool — only the price turned out to be a little high.”

The girl looked at me. She had a hot-pink towel clutched dramatically to her mouth, eyes wide above it. Turquoise eye shadow to match her suit, and a lot of waterproof mascara.

“Tom Kolodzi,” I said, with a jerk of the head toward the uniformed cops. “I’m with the police.” You notice I didn’t say I was the police. “You know the guy in the pool?”

Her eyes got wider, and she shook her head. I took out my notebook and flipped it open, turning to shield it from the cops.

“Your name?”

She blinked, and lowered the towel. Her mouth was blurred with red, and she looked like a little kid who’d been eating a popsicle, breast implants notwithstanding.

“Chloe Eastwood.”

“Any relation to Clint?” I smiled, friendly.

“Who?”

I should have flipped a coin and said, Call it, friendo. Instead, I asked, “Do you live here?”

She nodded like a bobble-head doll, her eyes going back to the body. “I just... I just came out to tan, and... there he was.”

“You called it in?”

She shook her head, blond ponytail swishing over baby-oiled shoulders.

“I screamed and Cooney came running out, and the yard guys and everybody.” She waved vaguely toward the house where three nervous-looking Mexicans were clustered. A Mexican woman too, with a blond boy of five or six clutching her leg. “I guess Cooney called.”

Her eyes went to the homeowner: Mr. Bermuda Shorts, shoulders hunched in aggression. One of the uniforms caught sight of me and opened his mouth to order me out. The two uniforms exchanged a quick look, though, then stared right through me before turning deliberately toward the pool.

I relaxed a little. I’d been doing a ride-along — you always want to get acquainted with the cops in a new place — when the 410 call came through. They’d told me to stay in the car, of course, but didn’t lock me in. It could get up to 140 in a parked car, and they didn’t want to explain a dead reporter in the backseat. They didn’t want to explain a live reporter in their crime scene, either; if I kept my mouth shut, they’d pretend they had no idea how I got there, and leave it to homicide to throw me out.

There was a sudden hum, and a whoosh made everybody jump. A timer had come on, and water was rushing down a pile of rocks at the end. It sounded like Niagara Falls, and Gonzales turned and started yelling at the homeowner, who looked confused and belligerent, like a bear in the underwear aisle at Macy’s.

“Cooney doesn’t know how to work the pool stuff,” my new friend said, contemptuous. “My mom always has to do it.”

I took out my cell phone and snapped as fast as I could while everyone’s attention was distracted. The blood in the water was beginning to eddy away from the floating body.

I nodded to Chloe.

“Be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

I stepped behind a pair of palm trees, and hit 1 on my speed dial.

“Paulie?” I said, low-voiced as I could over the artificial falls. “Where are you?” She was supposed to be at Scottsdale and Shea, shooting a traffic accident; if she was still there...

“Kolodzi?” Her voice was outraged. “Are you calling me from the men’s room? That’s just gross!”

“No. Get this — 10236 North Forty-eighth Street. Body in the pool.” I saw the fresh-sawed stubs on the palm tree by my face and had a brain-wave. “There’s a ladder lying on the ground out front—” The Mexicans had been trimming the palm trees; I’d seen the dead palm fronds on the curb. “It’d be a killer shot from the roof.” And maybe the cops wouldn’t see her before she got it.

The click in my ear coincided with silence; somebody’d turned off the falls. I pocketed the phone and rejoined the party.

One cop was missing; so was the Mexican woman. The palm tree trimmers were edging slowly toward the side of the house, eyes focused on the cop talking to Cooney. The little blond boy had joined Chloe on the lounger — not willingly.

“I wanna see!”

“Knock it off, Tyrone! Mom’ll be here any minute! Get back here, I said! The cops are gonna put you in jail if you get near that pool!”

“Aw, will not, fuckface!”

“Don’t talk to your sister like that,” I said. I don’t have kids myself, but I have nieces and nephews. I learned the Voice of Doom from my siblings.

Tyrone gave me a startled glance.

“Siddown,” I said, in the same tone of voice.

He did, muttering “Crap” under his breath.

“See?” his sister hissed at him.

Sirens were coming. I could hear the roar of a fire engine over the scream of an ambulance. 911 was taking no chances.

A minute later, the pool gate clanged open and four EMTs charged in, intent on rescue. One grabbed a pool skimmer and began trying to snag the body with it.

“Hey!” The cop grabbed his arm. “The guy’s dead, god-damnit! This is a murder scene!”

“He’s not dead till a doctor says so,” a female EMT informed him.

“Back off!” He’d wrestled the skimmer away from the EMT and stood with it braced like a quarterstaff, daring any of them to mess with his body. “He’s fuckin’ dead!”

“He will be if you don’t let us get him out of there!”

“What. The. Fuck. Is. Going. On. Here?” said a voice behind me. Whoever it was had a pretty good Voice of Doom too; it cut through the argument like a hot wire through ice cream.

I turned to see a tall blond woman in a sun hat, Hawaiian shirt flapping open over a white bikini. Chloe and Tyrone’s mother; the breast implants must be hereditary.

“Cooney!” she barked. “What are you doing? What’s—” She caught sight of the guy in the pool and stopped dead, her mouth hanging open far enough for me to see that one of her molars was gold.

Cooney came trundling over, sweating and apologetic.

“It’s okay, Pammy—”

“Don’t call me Pammy! Who are you?” she demanded, swiveling a laser eye on me. “Are you in charge here? Who’s that in my swimming pool?”

“Tom Kolodzi, ma’am,” I said, offering her a hand. “Do you know the man in the pool?”

“Of course not!” she snapped, taking my hand by reflex. Hers was cold and damp and covered by a latex glove. She let go fast, peeling the glove off with a snap. “Sorry. I was drowning squirrels in the garage.”

“Squirrels?”

“Ground squirrels,” she said through her teeth. “They eat the goddamn plantings. Are they going to get that — him — out of the pool?” Her eyes kept sliding toward the water, where the body had resumed its dead man’s float. Another siren — police, this time.

Slamming car doors and a radio crackle, and the brass was with us. The homicide lieutenant didn’t glance at me, and made short work of the EMTs, who retreated, muttering, under the edge of the patio roof, from which misters had begun to spray. The Mexican tree trimmers had evaporated during the cops’ confrontation with the EMTs. The scene-of-crime people arrived on homicide’s heels, and a police photographer was taking shots of everything in sight, including me and the squirrel-killer. I wanted to look up at the roof to see if Paulie had made it, but didn’t want to draw attention to her if she had.

The dead guy beached, flotsam in a navy-blue wool suit. Everybody leaned forward to look at his face — not least, Pammy.

I was looking at her, and saw the blood leave her face and her mist-on tan go yellow. Saw her glance, laser-sharp, at Chloe. Chloe’s mouth fell open, and her mother grabbed her shoulder, fingers digging in, before she could squeak.

“Take your brother in the house, darling,” Pammy said, in a pleasant mommy voice. “He doesn’t need to see this, and neither do you.” Chloe nodded like a robot, and took Tyrone’s hand. He didn’t resist; he’d seen the dead guy’s face too, and was the color of skim milk.

Nobody looks good soaking wet and dead, but this guy probably wasn’t a GQ model on his best day. Maybe fifty, with a good-sized gut, long strands of graying hair on a balding head. Weak chin, and a nose that was trying to make up for it.

There was a little black hole in his shirt front. The shirt was white, pasted to his body; I could see the curly black hairs on his chest through the cloth. I looked away in time to see Cooney, who was talking to one of the plainclothes people, glance in my direction and shake his head with a puzzled frown. Time to go.

The dead guy’s chest filled the screen of Paulie’s Mac. The black eye of the bullet hole sat in a vortex of water-swirled chest hair. She zoomed in so all you saw was the hole, then pressed something and the picture went from black-and-white to full color.

“Guh!” said MaryAnne, recoiling.

“Isn’t that cool?” Paulie asked me, ignoring the editor. “See the shades of blue all around the hole?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Really cool.” It was, but my stomach agreed with MaryAnne, who had clamped a hand to her mouth.

“We can’t run that!” she said, removing the hand and then putting it right back.

“I know, I know,” Paulie said impatiently. “Don’t worry, I got plenty more. Thanks for the tip, Kolodzi,” she said, giving me an eye. “I almost died of heatstroke on that roof, but it was worth it.”

She looked like she’d been boiled alive, even after an hour in the chill of the newsroom, but she’d used her time well.

There were some prize-winning shots of the body in the pool, as well as close-ups of Chloe, Cooney, Pam — several focused on her chest — and a heartbreaker of Tyrone, looking small and stricken and not saying “Crap.” Still better, Paulie’d heard everything said on the pool deck.

“Nobody knew the dead guy — or that’s what they said. But look at this.” She tapped a key and a soggy white rectangle popped onto the screen. A zoom in and I could see it was a wad of stuck-together business cards.

Howarth ap Gruffydd, PhD, one read. Director, Llangeggel-lyn Botanical Institute.

“Damn,” said MaryAnne. “What the heck is a Welsh botanist doing dead in Cooney Pratt’s swimming pool?”

“Maybe the gardener did it,” Paulie speculated. “He’s gone.”

“What, one of the guys with the ladder?” I asked.

She shook her head, cheeks sucked in to get the last dregs of Mr. Pibb through her straw.

“Nope, those guys were door-to-door palm tree trimmers. You know — cash only, and probably illegal.” A good bet, given the way they’d faded at the sight of the police. “There’s a regular yard guy, though; a guy named John Jaramillo. He should have been there today. But he wasn’t.” She popped the lid off her cup and tilted it up, sloshing ice.

“The cops asked for his phone and address, of course,” I suggested. She gave me a smug look and held out her arm. She’d scribbled the numbers with what looked like eyeliner.

Harvey, the new intern, came hustling in, a sheaf of printouts in hand. I’d sent him to do a quick search on the Pratts.

“I sent a lot of stuff to your e-mail, but I thought you’d like these... Jesus, is that guy dead?” He goggled at the screen, where Paulie’s best shot of Dr. ap Gruffydd had replaced the business card.

“No, it’s a YouTube video of Hillary Clinton after the Democratic primary,” MaryAnne said. “Can’t you tell?”

I made Harvey give me the quickie version on the Pratts, which he did, pausing occasionally to gape at the screen, where Paulie and MaryAnne were busy choosing shots.

Cooney Pratt was a real-estate developer; he’d made his money bulldozing desert and putting up tract homes, having either the good judgment or the luck to get out before the housing market collapsed. Pam was his third wife, occupation: housewife.

“No shit,” I said, eyeing a close-up of Pam’s chest before dropping my gaze back to the paper. The Pratts were rich and social; there were several shots of Pam, veneers gleaming, arms linked with two or three other low-cut ladies, laughing their heads off in support of some worthy cause. Harvey had helpfully compiled a list: the Pratts were benefactors of everything from the Phoenix Symphony to the Desert Botanical Gar—

“The Desert Botanical Garden?” I looked up and Mary-Anne’s eyes locked with mine. I shrugged; why not? Where else would you expect to find a botanist?

They had three of the pictures I’d sent from my cell phone up now, discussing which one to use.

“That one,” MaryAnne said, pointing. She had one eye closed, the other squinting. “What if we zoom it?”

“Crap up close is just close-up crap,” Paulie said, shaking her head. She zoomed it, though. Her hand hovered for an instant, then dropped again to zoom out.

“Maybe the other way? Yeah. Yeah, that’s better.”

The shrinkage didn’t improve the definition, but the picture now was arresting. The body hung like a jellyfish, doing its dead-man’s float in the midst of a distinct red nimbus.

“Jesus,” I said. MaryAnne was making approving noises, and Paulie took my remark as praise for her artistic acumen too, but that wasn’t why I’d said it. I sighed.

“Subpoena time.”

Paulie put a possessive hand on the computer in reflex.

“Run it first,” I said, and she relaxed a little. “But I have to call; the cops can estimate time of death from that.” I touched the screen, at the edge of the blood cloud. “Look. I don’t know if he drowned or died from the gunshot, but if it was the shot, it didn’t kill him right away. He bled a lot after he went in the pool.”

“So?” said MaryAnne.

“So you put any liquid in any other liquid and don’t stir it, the first liquid will still move — slowly — at a constant rate. Diffusion?”

From wariness to blankness. I sighed.

“You can figure out what that rate is, roughly. The pool water wasn’t disturbed until the waterfall came on; the cloud of blood was intact — and you can see the edges of it in the photo. So you can tell about how long it would have taken for blood to spread that far through the water after it stopped pumping out of Dr. ap Gruffydd.”

“They teach you that in the Boy Scouts, Kolodzi?” Mary-Anne asked.

“High school physics. We need to give it to the cops,” I repeated. “You want to do it, M-A? Or me?”

She shook her head.

“You. They’re gonna want to talk to whoever took the picture. See if you can trade it for an unofficial time of death. Then see if the Desert Botanical Garden is missing a visiting botanist. Fast.”

I didn’t see a patrol car in the DBG parking lot, but a small knot of employees was clustered between the Membership table and a glass-fronted Admissions booth, talking excitedly — the cops were here.

“Director’s office?” I asked the woman at Membership, polite but authoritative. “I’m here about Dr. ap Gruffydd.”

She was flushed from the heat, but pinked up even more with excitement.

“Oh! Oh. Yes, of course. I think they’re all at the main office, that’s up behind Dorrance Hall — go past the cactus and succulent houses and turn right, there are signs. Oh, no — wait!” She snatched a sheet of little purple stickers, each one adorned with a butterfly, and affixed one carefully to my lapel. “There you are.”

I thanked her, and flashing my purple butterfly at the gate, went in. It wasn’t just the employees who were buzzing; the trees were full of cicadas, and the whole place hummed like it was electrified.

A big thunderhead passed over, and I breathed shade, grateful. The monsoon rains were coming, but not here yet. I passed the cactus and succulent houses, side-by-side series of huge metal arches covered with steel mesh, and wondered whether they were a lightning hazard; I could see the flicker of heat lightning over the Superstitions to the east.

I shucked the jacket I’d worn to impersonate authority. My shirt was sweat-soaked, but dried almost instantly; clouds or no clouds, the humidity was maybe six percent. Yeah, it’s a dry heat. Meaning that instead of being poached when you walk outside, you’re flash-fried.

I turned up the Quail Path and blinked at something — a cactus? It had stickers — that looked like an orgy of underfed octopi, skinny bewhiskered tentacles writhing over twenty square feet of ground and up into the branches of the nearest tree. And that wasn’t even the weirdest thing I passed.

The administrative offices were in a discreet building above a little café with an enclosed patio. I was about to crash the party when I caught a glimpse of the Scottsdale homicide lieutenant from the Pratts’ pool deck and went down to the café instead.

I bought a bottle of water and asked the girl behind the counter if she knew where Dr. ap Gruffydd’s office was.

“Oh, are you with the police?” she breathed, excited. “Isn’t it just awful?”

“Yes,” I said. “Did you know the doctor?”

“Oh, not really.” She looked torn between regret and relief. “He’d only been here three months or so, and he wasn’t around most of the time because he kept going down to Tucson to see people about orchids — the Mexican government wouldn’t let him go in anymore, something about his visa, so he’d have these orchid hunters come meet him at the border.”

That was interesting; Harvey hadn’t had much time, but you don’t get a lot of random hits on a name like Howarth ap Gruffydd. He was an expert on the orchidaceae of Latin America; had written two books on orchids, contributed to botanical journals, and otherwise seemed not to have gotten his name in the media. The girl was still talking.

“I helped with the catering for the reception for him up at the Wildflower Pavilion, though, and he talked to me a little bit then.”

“Yes? What did he say, do you remember?”

She giggled, but then put a hand over her mouth, shocked at herself.

“Oh, I’m sorry — I didn’t mean to laugh! It’s just — he was talking Welsh to all the ladies; it was so cool. And he said something to me in Welsh too, and he smiled and winked so I think it was a compliment, but I don’t really know what he said, you know?”

A few minutes further conversation got me the information that Dr. ap G had had a temporary office behind the herb garden, to which she helpfully gave me directions.

The herb garden wasn’t hard to find. Aside from signs and the pungent smells of everything from oregano and pineapple sage to ten different varieties of mint, it was marked by a fifteen-foot turquoise metal sculpture that looked like a twisted tree trunk, until you got close enough to see that it had feet, rudimentary wings, and several openings out of which live rosemary plants were growing. St. Earth Walking, read a bronze plaque behind it.

“Yeah, if you say so,” I said to it, and walked up to the office building as though I owned the place.

It was empty, all the office doors locked. A board near the entrance listed the occupants; Dr. ap G’s office was near the far end of the hall. It was locked too; the cops hadn’t arrived here yet, but it wouldn’t be long. There were a few cartoons about orchids taped to the door — and seven or eight snapshots of the reception the refreshment girl had mentioned; there was an open-sided pavilion, the hills of Papago Park visible in the background.

Most of the people looked the same — round white faces with manic grins. But one open-mouthed blond laugher had a gold tooth showing — and a hand possessively on the sleeve of the Welsh botanist, who must have been telling her something side-splitting in Welsh.

Voices outside. I wanted to grab the snapshot, but I knew better than to take evidence, especially if I might get caught with it. I made it out the far door just as the one I’d come through opened.

Outside, the thick blanket of heat settled over me. I took a wrong turn and ended up panting like a dog on a path above the gardens, where five or six... things... stood like a prehistoric village. They were made of twigs and branches, twisted together and shaped into giant balls, with openings that might be doors or windows. It was getting late — the clouds over the Superstitions were black, and the mountains themselves glowed a weird, intense lavender. I stepped inside one of the balls and pulled out my cell, debating who to call.

Paulie first, to check in. My voice mail. Next, John Jaramillo. I’d called his number on my way to the gardens, and got his voice mail. I punched in the code to block caller-ID and tried again.

“Hello?” said a voice that didn’t sound like a Mexican gardener.

“May I speak to Mr. John Jaramillo?” I said in my best telemarketer voice, pronouncing it Jar-a-milo, rather than Har-a-meeyo.

“He’s not here. Who’s this?” Definitely a cop.

“This is Sean with Mesa Verde Time-Shares,” I said chattily. “I’ll call back later.” I pressed the button and stood still, evaporating. A hot wind was coming up, big thermals pushing the clouds up into thunderheads a half-mile high, the air underneath them rushing in to fill the space. From here, I could see a good chunk of the area where Scottsdale runs into Phoenix, urban sprawl beyond the gardens’ border.

Pam Pratt? No. My chances of getting to her before the cops did were nil.

One avenue left to try, before I adjourned to Rosita’s for a cold beer or six and a plate of chicken enchiladas. I flipped the phone open again and hit 12 on my speed dial.

The phone on the other end picked up after one ring. The only reason girls of that age don’t pick up right away is that they’re already talking to somebody else.

“Callie?”

“Uncle Tom! What’s happening?”

“I need a friend, Callie,” I said to my eldest niece. “Think you can find me someone on Facebook who knows a Chloe Eastwood?”

The morning brought several items of information: a callback from the police lab with an unofficial time of death — between 2 and 3 a.m. A discreet call to one of the original uniforms, who reluctantly told me that the adult Pratts had been at a party, which they hadn’t left until 6 a.m.; socialites had more fun than I realized. Chloe hadn’t been home either — her best friend, two houses down, was also having a party. The only people home between 2 and 3 a.m. had been Tyrone and his nanny, both asleep.

Paulie had called around to her photographer acquaintances and ended up in possession of e-mailed photos of Dr. ap G’s blowout. These not only confirmed Pam Pratt’s prior knowledge of the doctor, but yielded another nugget — an of Cooney Pratt, drink in hand, shooting daggers at the Welshman, who was in the act of slipping some sort of wild-flower, stem first, into Pam’s cleavage.

And finally, a call from Callie, with the results of her Face-book research: JRose, who was on the “friend” lists for both Callie and Chloe Pratt.

“She says she’ll meet you at the Coffee Plantation by the Shea 14,” Callie said. “You know where that is?”

“Sure. Thanks, Callie. Have you ever met this girl in person?”

“Of course not,” she said, sounding surprised. “But she likes historical fiction and her pictures are cute.”

JRose was cute in person too. A shapely redhead with big blue eyes and a breezy manner, more than willing to help out her friend Callie’s Uncle Tom. She hadn’t been at the party on the night of the murder, but would try to find out how long Chloe had been there.

“Discreetly,” I said.

“I can do discreet,” she replied, and lowered her lashes in illustration.

“You know Chloe well?”

“Not that well, but I know her f2f. She doesn’t usually go to parties like that,” she said, twirling a straw in her caramel macchiato. “She parties, but it’s mostly at the clubs. I’ve seen her now and then, with her mom. Her mom’s a coug,” she added, scornful and amused.

“Coug — what, short for cougar?”

“Rowr,” she said, clawing one hand and showing her canines. Then laughed, her face going back to sweetness. “Older ladies, like married with kids. They go to clubs and hit on younger men. Cougs are ladies who are way too old to be wearin’ what they’re wearin’, and doin’ what they’re doin’.”

“What are they wearing?” I asked. My informant cupped both hands in front of her chest.

“Big fake boobs. And like miniskirts with no Underoos.”

“Yeah? You can tell?”

She rolled her big blue eyes at me. “Oh, everybody can tell! They get all drunk and fall around, and everybody’s like, ‘Oh, put it away!’”

This was beginning to sound entertaining.

“Chloe and her mom. They hang out, you said... like, what places?”

“Oh, the Devil’s North, that’s the big hangout for cougs. Or at Eli’s, down by Claimjumpers on Shea.”

“Devil’s North?” I’d heard of Eli’s, but—

“The Devil’s Martini,” she explained, and paused for a slurp of her macchiato.

“You said, ‘too old to be doing what they’re doing.’ What are they doing?”

“I told you,” she said promptly. “Hitting on younger men. There was this photo on DirtyScottsdale.com, this coug right up with this little kid celebrating his twenty-first, and the caption says, Oh, you’re twenty-one? Well, I’m twenty-seven — I don’t think that’s too much difference, do you?” She laughed.

“Only she was maybe thirty- seven! That’s just gross.”

“But there are older guys who hit on younger women in clubs, aren’t there?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Isn’t that a double standard?”

“Oh, totally,” she agreed cheerfully, and gave me a look of appraisal that was a lot older than she was. I lifted a finger for the bill, hoping 37 wasn’t flashing on my forehead.

I’d heard of DirtyScottsdale.com, but hadn’t had occasion to look at the site before. It’s a do-it-yourself local tabloid covering the club scene; people take pictures of each other drunk, behaving badly, in unflattering or compromising positions, and send them to the site, usually anonymously, often with scurrilous captions.

Some of them were truly funny; some were embarrassing, like the shot of a young woman, very drunk, urinating in a parking lot. All of them were vulgar and most were kind of sad.

I found Chloe in the archives, leaning up against the wall next to a door that said Ladies. Her eyes were unfocused and there was a sloppy smile on her face. The tie of her halter dress had come undone — or been untied on purpose — and she was clutching the fabric to one of her breasts. The other one was left to fend for itself, and with thoughts of Callie, JRose, and girlish innocence, I paged down fast.

“Whoa.” I paged back up, even faster.

Dr. ap Gruffydd looked a lot better alive, though with the scraggly ponytail, he still wouldn’t do better than tenth runner-up in the Llangeggellyn beauty pageant. He was laughing, holding up a woman who was draped over him like a honeysuckle vine on a trellis. One of his hands cupped her butt — literally; she’d slid down him, and her short shiny red skirt had ridden up on one side, and damned if JRose hadn’t been right about the Underoos.

I called Paulie and asked her to clip the two photos and make me decent prints. They might come in handy.

I came back from lunch to find a message from Pamela East-wood Pratt. Would I meet her at 3 o’clock for a quick drink at Bloom? Mrs. Pratt had tracked me down and gotten my number pretty quick. Which also meant that she knew what I did for a living. Why would a socialite murder suspect want to talk to a journalist?

I turned the possibilities over in my mind as I drove — anything from a front-page confession to a clumsy attempt to redirect suspicion elsewhere by planting a story. Or given what I’d been finding out about Chloe, maybe an attempt to warn me away from her. I touched the pocket where I’d stashed the photos; whatever Mrs. Pratt had in mind to tell me, those might steer her closer to the truth.

Bloom is an upscale restaurant with floral stained-glass panels, circular blue-leather booths, and excellent food. It’s mobbed for lunch and dinner, but if you go between 2 and 5, you can hear yourself think. And the wine list is good.

“Mrs. Pratt,” I said, sliding into the booth opposite the lady in question.

“Call me Pamela,” she responded, making a face. “Pratt — what a godawful name.”

“Sure. Pam—”

“Pamela.” She smiled. “Pam is nice, and Pammy...” She waved a hand, dismissive. “Well, that says oatmeal cookies and and flannel jammies with dancing kittens. Pammy is... you know. Beige.”

“Whereas Pamela...” I said, obliging.

She leaned back in her chair a little, giving me the full benefit of her cleavage. She already had a glass of red wine, held carelessly by the stem.

“Oh, Pamela... now, Pamela says Tanqueray martini, hold the vermouth, red silk, hot jazz and hotter men, don’t bother to take your boots off at the door, and you can leave the lights on, mister, cuz I left shy behind in kindergarten.” She laughed, and I caught a glint of gold molar.

“Pamela.” I lifted my water to her, and we smiled at each other. Then she set her wine down; to business.

“I Googled you,” she said abruptly.

“That makes two of us,” I said, and she blinked, but then steadied. She’d already Googled herself; she thought there was nothing unfit for public consumption. DirtyScottsdale.com didn’t always have names attached to their photos; the shot of her as an anonymous cougar wouldn’t show up.

“If I say this is off the record...?” One plucked eyebrow rose.

“Then it is.”

Some people think speaking to a reporter “off the record” is like speaking to an attorney or a priest. I wouldn’t quote her. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t make use of whatever she told me.

“I want you to find my gardener.”

“What do you think I am, an employment agency?”

The cougar glinted briefly in her eyes, but she kept it on the leash.

“John Jaramillo. He’s been supplying my daughter with drugs from Mexico. Now he’s gone and I have a dead botanist in my swimming pool. Think there’s a connection there, Sherlock?”

“Yeah. Maybe not the same one you’re thinking of, though.” I took the photo out of my pocket and laid it on the table.

“Crap,” she said, sounding exactly like Tyrone. She frowned at the photo. “I really need to get to the gym.”

“Connection?” I prompted. “Like between you and the good doctor?”

She made a pfft! sound and flicked the photo back at me.

“He was better in bed than you’d think from his looks,” she said. “I hadn’t seen him since the night this was taken, though, until he turned up in my pool.”

“Right. And you don’t think the cops would like to know about this?” I tapped a finger on the photo, and the server, who was setting down my glass of Riesling, glanced at it.

“Wow,” he said. “Nice butt.”

“Thanks, sweetie,” she drawled, leaning back in her chair and giving him a laser eyeball. He glanced from the picture to her, and did a double-take.

“Is that you? Er... ma’am?”

“Meet me in the parking lot after work and find out.” The cougar stretched voluptuously, flexing her shiny pink claws. The server, who might have been nineteen, turned purple and fled.

She laughed, but was dead serious when she looked back at me.

“The cops know. I was rattled when he turned up in the pool, but once I had a minute to think, I realized that as soon as they identified him, they’d head for the DBG and find out I knew him. So I called them and fessed up. I didn’t know about that—” She cast a displeased glance at the photo. “And if I get my hands on the little shithead who took it — but never mind...” She waved a hand. “It’s Chloe.”

“Chloe took the picture?” It hadn’t looked as though Chloe were in any shape to hold a camera.

“No.” Pamela gave me a sharp look. “Chloe is why I want you to find John Jaramillo.”

Noticing that Chloe’s glazed eyeballs coincided with Chloe’s clubbing, Pamela had figured logically that she was getting drugs at one or another of the clubs, and thus had put on her cougar costume and gone prowling with her daughter.

“What did Chloe think of that?” I asked.

She shrugged. “If I didn’t go, she didn’t go. Besides, I took dates along—” She glanced at the photo of herself and ap Gruffydd. “I wasn’t following her around all night. Or at least I didn’t let it look that way.”

I’d already figured that Pamela was much shrewder and more observant than I’d originally thought. She was shrewder than Chloe too, and it didn’t take long for her to tumble to the fact that Chloe wasn’t getting drugs at the clubs — she was taking drugs to the clubs.

“I caught her dealing in the restroom one night.” Pam was rolling her empty wine glass slowly between her palms, looking down into the dregs. “Dragged her out into the parking lot and... made her tell me where she was getting it.”

“From the gardener.”

“Yep.” She looked up, fixing me with a hard gaze. “You have a reputation for digging things up, Kolodzi. And you’re a little less sleazy than the average private detective.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“And you want to know who killed Griff.”

“Griff?”

She sighed impatiently.

“It’s spelled Gruffydd, but it’s pronounced Griffith. He didn’t like Howarth.” For the first time, her voice betrayed a little emotion over the Welshman’s death. I was a long way from trusting her, but I was beginning to like her a little.

She shrugged. She was wearing a sleeveless pink top, and the hairs on her forearms were standing up in the chilled air.

“So. You find John Jaramillo, the cops convict him of murdering Griff, he goes down, Chloe’s source dries up, and you get a story — a story that doesn’t include Chloe.”

I considered that — but the other picture, of Chloe by the ladies’ room, bleary and undressed, with her sweet young breast adrift and vulnerable, was still resting in my pocket.

“Okay,” I said. Reminded of photos, though, I pulled out the third one I’d brought — the shot of Cooney Pratt glaring at ap Gruffydd. “You seem pretty convinced that Jaramillo’s responsible. And I could see it happening by accident, maybe — the Welsh guy comes by to see you, and stumbles into the middle of a drug deal, maybe. But your husband would seem to have an actual motive.”

Pamela stared down at the wildflower in the photo, then flicked the shot back at me and stood up.

“Forget Cooney,” she said, and putting a hand on my shoulder, leaned down and whispered confidentially in my ear, “He really is a prat, you know.”

Not much happened for two days. The police released driblets of information, nothing helpful. A crane fell into a hole on a light-rail construction site. The D-Backs lost two games in a row. And Cooney Pratt’s alibi developed holes big enough to swallow a backhoe.

Pamela’s alibi was solid; she’d been at a killer bridge tournament at the Hyatt Regency Gainey Ranch, in sight of eighty other people. But Cooney had been with the noncombatants, who’d spent the night in the lobby bar, the spa, the giant heated pool... or one of the bedrooms. People had seen him, all right — but there were gaps. And it was a five-minute drive from the hotel to his house.

Meanwhile, John Jaramillo had dropped off the face of the earth. His wife refused to be interviewed, though gossip in his neighborhood said she wasn’t that broken up over his absence.

I was debating whether to try some of Jaramillo’s other gardening clients, or invite Cooney Pratt out for a drink and show him pictures, when the phone rang.

“I’ve found him!” Pamela’s voice was high, and nervous, for her.

“Who, Jar—”

“The gardener, yes.” She swallowed, audibly. “Do you want a story? Come right away — meet me at my house. Come now.”

“It was the damn squirrels,” she explained, leading me down her front drive. “I kept trapping more and more of the little buggers, and finally realized they were coming from the house next door, crawling through the breeze blocks in my wall.”

“Yeah?”

“So I looked at the house next door.” I looked too. The next-door house was vacant, with a realtor’s sign.

“And?”

“The morning it happened? The murder? I had a hangover, and I was drowning those fucking squirrels in the garage, and I was so irritated by the racket from the air conditioner next door. Then, of course, there was lots more racket from the pool deck, and I forgot all about it.”

I looked up at the roof. The AC unit now was off. The yard of the empty house was spiked with fried weeds sprouting through pink gravel. There wasn’t a soul in sight, bar a garbage truck cruising slowly, picking up the big round turquoise dumpsters, tossing the trash, then slamming them back on the pavement. Half the dumpsters had fallen over from the impact and lay on their sides, wheels spinning.

“Class warfare,” Pamela said, seeing me look. “The garbage guy hates rich people. Wait till he’s gone.”

We did, and she filled me in rapidly on her deductions. The house wasn’t being shown; nobody would show a house with the yard in that condition. But if the house was empty — why run the air conditioner?

“Jaramillo,” she said, narrowing her eyes at the empty house. “It’s got to be him. That’s where he keeps the drugs.”

It was possible. Obviously nobody was there now; not with the AC turned off. On the other hand, the cops took a dim view of breaking and entering. I mentioned this, and Pam pulled out a key, flourishing it under my nose.

“We traded keys with the people who used to live here — you know, in case of emergencies.”

The key was for the kitchen door. The house was unfurnished and silent, but I stopped dead, the back of my neck prickling. I’d thought she was imagining things, but she wasn’t. The air was thick and stifling and probably at least 115°, but it didn’t have that dead feel that abandoned houses have.

What it did have was one very bad smell. I thought it was time to call the cops right then, but Pam had gone ahead of me, through a door, and she gave a strangled scream.

I went after her and found myself in a narrow room furnished with a washer, a dryer, and a corpse.

There were flies and he’d been dead long enough that the flesh was sagging off his bones and had a greenish tinge. Pam was standing behind the body, holding a gun.

“Told you I found him,” she said.

“Yeah. Let’s put the gun away, shall we, and call the cops.”

She swallowed, and pointed the gun directly at me.

“Oh, come on!”

“I’m sorry,” she said, though she didn’t sound sorry. “I can’t let Chloe be arrested for killing him. Everybody knows you’ve been looking for him. So you found him, and he shot you, and you shot him. By the time anybody finds you, nobody will be able to tell how long either of you’s been dead, and...” Her voice was shaking, and so was her hand.

A shadow behind the door moved. My eyes flicked to it, and Pamela made a little throaty noise. “Oh, don’t even try that...” she began, and then went “Uk!” as a slender Hispanic guy in dark jeans and a black T-shirt stepped out and hit her on the head with the butt of his gun.

Pamela’s weapon spun out of her hand as she went down and hit the washing machine with a booming noise, but I didn’t try to dive for it.

“Who the hell are you?” the Hispanic guy said, looking me over.

“A newspaper reporter. Should I ask who you are?”

“No, that wouldn’t be a good idea.” He spoke good English, but it wasn’t his first language. He glanced at the body and shook his head, then peered back at me, thoughtful.

“Okay,” he said, making up his mind. “You going to help me get him out of here, all right?”

“Er...” I raised an eyebrow at Pamela, who was groaning on the floor.

“Yeah, right. Put the lady in the closet.” He waved the gun toward what looked like a broom closet — though you don’t usually see broom closets with deadbolts on the outside.

Pamela was bleeding from her scalp, and vomited when I dragged her up onto her feet. It was a messy business, but I got her in the closet and the door bolted. I was streaming with sweat by the time I finished, and wondered whether there was any air in the closet. Then I looked up and saw small holes drilled through the wood — ventilation.

“For troublemakers,” the guy said with a shrug. “Just in case, you know?”

I looked at the body, and wiped the back of my hand across my mouth. His stomach had swelled up like a balloon, and it was too damn easy to imagine what it’d be like if he popped.

My friend was thinking along the same lines.

“Garbage bags,” he said, gesturing with the gun toward the door to the garage. “Move slow.”

The garage was crowded with filled garbage bags, some of them broken and spilling. Fast-food wrappers, fragments of stale tortillas, empty refried-bean cans. Several small furry things scuttled out of the pile, and the guy kicked at one but missed.

“Rats,” he said with a shrug.

“Ground squirrels.”

My pal shrugged and motioned to an open box of giant leaf bags. I took two, and, holding my breath and keeping a grip on my belly muscles, slipped one over Jaramillo’s head and the other over his feet. The guy with the gun tossed me a set of keys.

“Back the truck into the driveway.”

The truck might have been Jaramillo’s; it was a pickup with a ratty trailer made of white wire mesh, rakes and shovels in holders at the back, piled with garden trash. I wrestled Jaramillo’s body into the trailer, then got behind the wheel, at my friend’s urging.

“Drive.”

Within ten minutes we were headed south on the 101. The pickup had good AC and my hands and arms were freezing in the blast of cold air, but I was still drenched in sweat.

“How did you get them in there?” I asked at last, breaking the silence. A SWAT negotiator I’d interviewed once told me that what you do in a hostage situation is get the perp talking. Keep them talking, because if they’re talking, they aren’t shooting.

My captor blinked.

“The illegals,” I said. “You’re a coyote, right?”

“Yeah,” he said softly.

“Heck of an idea. Hiding them in Scottsdale, I mean. How’d you get them in and out of the house?”

He lifted one shoulder, off-handed.

“Yard trucks, hoopties. You drive a truck like this down any street in Scottsdale, three, four Mexicans in the back — who looks at yard guys? Everybody’s got yard guys. A beater car pulls up at the end of the street, two women get out — domesticas, nannies.” He smiled, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “They belong here.”

“How many people were in that house when the cops came?”

“Sixty-three.”

“Jesus.” Sixty-three people huddling in that house, afraid to move for fear of making a sound. Probably afraid of more than the cops too.

“Was he—” I jerked a thumb toward the trailer behind us, “in there, then?”

He sighed and shifted his weight a little. “Yeah.”

“Dead?”

“Yeah.”

Conversation lapsed until we hit the 202 and turned west.

“You kill him?” I asked, trying to keep it casual.

“No.” His eyes widened a little in surprise, and he shook his head. “I don’t kill people. Unless I have to,” he added.

I figured a coyote probably had to, sometimes. I hoped he wasn’t figuring this was one of those occasions.

“Who shot him?”

“My partner. Go I-10, south.” He waved the gun at a highway sign. A big raindrop hit the windshield with an audible splat! and we both jumped. I pressed, to keep him talking.

“Did he stumble into it — Jaramillo? If anybody was going to notice extra yard guys in the neighborhood, I’d guess it would be a gardener.”

My friend made a little sound, maybe surprise, maybe contempt. “No, he was part of it. How you think we found those — that house?” He’d started to say “houses.” There were more of them.

“Dangerous, wasn’t it? For him, I mean. Having it so close?”

“Yeah, it turned out pretty dangerous for him.” He glanced through the rear window at the trailer. It was starting to rain in earnest now, and I switched the wipers on.

“He had an angle?” I guessed. “He was using your... er, your business, to bring in drugs?”

The guy stiffened a little. “If he did, I didn’t know about it,” he said, sounding defensive.

“What, you got morals about drugs?”

“What you think I am, chingadero?”

“Fine, you don’t smuggle drugs. Just people.”

“You think it’s the same?” He sounded incredulous, and I had to concede that he had a point.

“Nope. Just trying to figure out how Jaramillo got dead.” We were well out of the city by now. The rain was pelting down, and I had to slow the vehicle.

“Him,” he said in disgust. “You’re right, he got his own deal going, he don’t tell us. But not drugs. Flowers.”

What with everything, I’d temporarily forgotten about Dr. ap Gruffydd’s murder, but that word brought it back with a bang.

“What kind of flowers?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Like this.” He pushed the button on the glove box. It fell open, and I glimpsed a bundle of brown burlap, with something yellow sticking out of it. I figured it was an orchid, but couldn’t take my eyes off the road to make sure.

“Where’d it come from?”

“One of the guys we bring over. Most of them, they’re from Sonora, Sinaloa, Michoacán... This guy, he’s from Quintana Roo. In the jungle.” He nodded toward the road ahead. “I don’t know where Johnny finds him, but he puts him in touch with... with my partner.”

The orchid smuggler had joined the group of illegals and been brought to the house in Scottsdale, next door to the Pratts. Jaramillo’s plan, insofar as my companion knew, had been to work late, then sneak into the supposedly empty house and get the orchid, which he’d take to the botanist.

But the good doctor had been too anxious to wait, fearing that his precious orchid would perish before he’d got his hands on it. So he’d picked up Jaramillo from his house and gone with him to the Pratts’ at night, sneaking into the backyard under cover of the nearby party. Ap Gruffydd had waited by the pool while Jaramillo hopped over the wall and went to get the orchid.

“But the guy who had it, he wanted his money, and Johnny, he don’t got it yet, because the guy — the other guy, who wants the flower — he couldn’t get it from his bank, because it was night.” He shrugged again.

So Jaramillo had hopped back over the fence to tell ap Gruffydd; and the botanist, inflamed by the nearness of an orchid, had declared that he’d go talk to the fellow himself, at least see the flower.

Jaramillo had tried to stop him, but couldn’t, and next thing anyone knew, the Welsh botanist was face to face with sixty-three illegal Mexicans — and a couple of alarmed — and armed — coyotes. The unnamed partner had pulled his gun, and Jaramillo, seeing his deal going south, had lunged to intercept him.

“So that’s how Johnny got dead,” my companion said with a sigh. Ap Gruffydd had run, of course, and made it back over the wall, but had made the mistake of turning — whether with thoughts of going back to rescue his orchid or just to see whether anyone was coming — and been shot in the chest by the coyote, aiming from the top of the wall.

“Over a flower,” my friend repeated, shaking his head. “Get off here, okay?”

We took the exit ramp toward Eloy, but within a few minutes of leaving the highway, he directed me down a dirt road. The lightning had been following us, snaking across the sky in big white bolts. Now the storm started to catch up, and the thunder came louder and more often. It didn’t matter much; we’d run out of conversation.

The truck lurched and splashed along, the trailer bouncing from side to side. I could see Eloy off in the distance, tiny flickers of light that disappeared every few seconds in the blinding flash of the lightning.

Where the fuck were we going? I wondered. Actually, I wondered how far I was going, because I didn’t think my friend was planning to head back to Mexico with me in tow. I was still sweating, and the truck was full of the tin-can reek of fear.

“Why—” My mouth was dry, and I had to work my tongue to make words. “Why did you go back? Why not leave him—” I jerked my head backward, “leave him there?”

The coyote looked surprised.

“I couldn’t leave him there to rot. He’s married to my—” he cut off sharp, frowning. “He’s family,” he said, and repeated, “I couldn’t leave him there.”

Two miles farther and we came to a gate, where another dirt road led off toward the mountains. Far south, I could see the outline of Picacho Peak, stark in the lightning flashes.

“Turn it around here,” he said, moving the gun in a small circle. “Aim it back the way we came, then get out.”

This would be it, then. The truck lurched into the ruts of the road we’d just traveled, pointed back toward Phoenix. I was looking for something to say, anything, but not one word came to me. There wasn’t anything but the smell of ozone and fear, and the small vivid details that I knew I’d remember forever because they were the last things I’d see: the cracked gray dash, a plaid dish towel somebody’d left on the seat, the coyote’s wrist watch, a Swatch with a green metal band.

“You got a phone? Leave it on the seat.”

I fumbled it out, dropped it on the seat, and following the motion of his gun, opened the door into the rain. Run, I thought, putting a foot on the side board. Drop, roll, stand up, and run. I couldn’t make it, I knew that. But I’d try.

“Hey,” he said behind me, softly. I glanced over my shoulder, and he tossed something at me. I caught it by reflex. The orchid, in its burlap wrapping.

“Name it for your girlfriend, okay?” he said, and gave me a very small smile. His feet came up and hit me in the ribs. I fell out and landed on my knees in the mud. An arm wearing a Swatch reached out, grabbed the handle, and pulled the door shut. The roar of the engine shocked me out of numbness and I stumbled to my feet just in time to avoid being run over.

The truck bumped slowly away.

I stood there with lightning striking all around me, and watched him drive off. One more of all those wonderful people out there in the darkness.

Growing back by Robert Anglen

Apache Junction

Eddie Keane came screaming out of the motherfucker of all bad dreams. He could still feel the blood coating his belly, arms, and face. A dry and crusty scab, it filled his mouth with copper, sealed his eyelids, glued him to the bed sheets. Eddie lay trembling on the narrow bunk. He couldn’t get over how real the shit seemed, like this meth-and-dust concoction he’d once needled off a biker’s spike. Toxic crystal kept him bouncing five days straight and some freakish creatures had gotten into his skull before he crashed.

Eddie figured this was worse. His brain was stuck on sleep, caught in the bloody cocoon of his subconscious. He waited for the dream to die. Except it didn’t. Slowly, he became aware of the stillness around him, the strange and utter silence. Not possible. Noise was built into this place; it lived in the walls. The rattle of pain, fear, and tormented prayer hummed 24-7 through the tiers of steel cages, a living current fed by 450 inmates locked into a brutally dull routine.

Now nothing. Dreamland. Then a crazy thought. Maybe this wasn’t a dream. Eddie panicked, struggling to get up, wake up, seized by the conviction that if he rolled over and opened his eyes he would no longer be in his jail cell. He’d be home again, lying in bed next to the body of his wife. Same as the night he beat her to death with a bottle of Old Granddad.

Eddie remembered the white-hot hatred pumping through his veins. Her lying there, head propped on one hand, as if what she’d said wasn’t the whackiest thing to ever come out of her mouth.

“You pregnant, Cheryl?” Eddie’s high instantly lost. “That it?”

“No, honey. I’m just saying, wouldn’t it be nice? Us making something good.”

Good? Two hours ago she’d been fucking an aluminum pole at a Van Buren syphilis shack, working her cooze overtime to snatch up dollar bills from businessmen too shit-faced to tell talent from tweak.

Now she was talking about wanting a kid.

“That’s speed talk, Cheryl. Nonsense,” he said. “You’re too stupid to breed.”

Her expression crumpled into a humiliated wad. She sat up, smearing a tear track. “Goddamn. Why you gotta be so mean?” She struck him loosely. Spat. Hit him again. “Admit it. You’re just afraid. Of what will come out. Well, you oughta be. Cause ain’t nothing good’s ever coming out of you.”

Eddie finally understood what the jigs were always going on about. She’d gone Oprah on him. Well, he knew how to change the channel on that action.

Cheryl’s eyes went double-ought, her mouth still working but no sound coming out, the red imprint of his hand fading across her cheek. Thing about cunts, no matter how many times you smack them, they always look surprised the next time.

Eddie lay back and groped around for the whiskey bottle on the floor. Cheryl would suffer him out for a few minutes, then she’d do that stupid laugh thing, make like she’d been pulling his chain. He would apologize. They would fuck. Love all around.

He never saw her coming. She hit him hard enough to send the bottle skidding across his gums. He lashed out and caught a wad of her hair. Pulled her face into his fist. Blood splattered. Bones crunched. Broken teeth rattled against the wall. Eddie straddled her, not thinking, just swinging. He let the Fury work through his muscles with each satisfying thunk until his rage was spent. That’s when he looked down and saw that he was still holding the bottle. Unlike Cheryl’s face, it was intact. Goddamn. Old Granddad sure knew his stuff. Eddie tipped back the bottle and took a long hard pull before passing out.

So maybe he hadn’t meant to do her all the way. Wasn’t like he could take it back. And damned if he was going to start crooning like a fish on his first night in stir, begging for a second chance. Accident or not, Eddie knew if he were given another chance, he’d beat the shit out of her a second time.

Judge knew it too. That raven-eyed executioner sat high up on his throne, hair so slick and shiny he might have been wearing a cowl over his long black robe. Even his smile was more warlock than magistrate, a greedy thing that seemed to anticipate the inevitable sentence.

Eddie held the judge’s baleful gaze, unflinching, grinning at his inquisitor through the old scar that split his lips. Eddie craned his neck so the swastika brand showed over the collar of his white shirt and kept his fists bunched on the defense table, blue-inked knuckles facing forward: FURY.

The judge gave Eddie a look of pure indulgence.

“Tell me, Mr. Keane. What made you this way?”

“What way is that, Your Honor?”

“Maybe it’s better you don’t know. You’re twenty-eight years old. What if I give you twenty years to come up with the answer?”

“Wow,” Eddie aped. “That’s like a whole ’nother life.”

Something sharp and dangerous flickered behind the judge’s opaque eyes. For a fleeting second Eddie actually felt the stab of it, an invisible hook piercing deep.

“Exactly,” the judge said. “Another life.”

Prison sounds pushed out of the darkness, a jumble of clangs, shouts, and overlapping voices that dissolved the mocking tone of the judge’s voice. Life? Fuck you, Hoodoo Man. Prison don’t scare me.

“What you saying, bitch?” The terse shout exploded in Eddie’s ears. Without warning a pair of hands slammed him backwards. “I cut you, puta. Then we see who’s scared.”

Eddie crashed into a wall of bodies. More hands caught him, kept him from falling. He jerked around to see a blur of hard, half-remembered faces yelling encouragement. A flat steel object was shoved into his palm. “Take the greaser out, Eddie! Shank his ass!” He was propelled toward his opponent, a squat Latin killer stripped to the waist, La Eme brands and prison tats stretched over exaggerated muscles. And Eddie realized he was standing in the middle of a memory.

The men surrounding him weren’t the ones doing time with him now; this place wasn’t the Special Management Unit where he spent twenty-three hours a day in lockdown. None of this was now. It was four years ago, Florence, Central Unit. Small-time drug dispute between gangs on the outside, Eddie tapped by the AB to settle it inside.

Mind reeling, he watched the Mexican bob and weave in front of him, stick razor flashing. He remembered the spic’s name. El Gato. But unlike the first time they squared off, Eddie’s reflex was disbelief. “No way this is happening.”

“Oh, it’s happening, ese. Tell me you don’t feel this.” The Mexican lunged and Eddie screamed, the blade slicing across his face. Liquid fire filled his mouth. The meat of his shredded lips bounced against his teeth and puffs of air seeped through a hole in his cheek.

“Now, I cut that teardrop off your face, pendejo.”

This isn’t real! It’s the past! Eddie’s brain screamed. But the pain was real. Same for Eddie’s reaction, the surge of strength, the narrowing of vision, and the dark detachment as the Fury took over.

He let the spic have his second of victory, then struck from a crouch, twisting his own blade into the Mexican’s middle. El Gato looked down, mystified, battle forgotten as astonished fingers tried to rejoin the severed green lines of tattoos over a bulging white ribbon of muscle. Eddie charged. Stick, stick, stick! He followed the Mexican to the cement. Shouts erupted. A siren went off. Someone yelled, “Guards!” Eddie shook off the warning and rose over the spic’s body. He coughed up a ball of blood and tissue, spat the clotted mess onto the dead guy’s upturned face. “Gato, shit!” he screamed. “Pussy!”

Eddie’s mind unzipped.

The kill scream was still tearing out of his throat when his senses went black and a ripping sound filled his head. Shit just opened up, Eddie thought. Reality evaporated. Gone went the fight scene, the mad crush of inmates, the warble of alarms. One instant Eddie was breathing blood over the spic’s body, the next he was back in a cell, staring into a mirror.

And crazy stared back at him.

Eddie leaned into the strip of sheet metal above the cell’s sink, not trusting the reflection. He recognized the face but it belonged to someone else, some other Eddie.

The knife wound was gone.

No bloody track. No itch of stitches. No trace of the jagged white scar. He could still feel the icy kiss of El Gato’s razor. Remembered the patchwork repair job by prison docs and the forever-after taste of antiseptic.

But the reflection face was unmarred, as if the fight never happened.

“Keane! Visitor!” Eddie jumped away from the mirror. The CO stood three paces from the bars, khaki-bland, indifferent. “Stand your gate. You know the drill. Move before you’re told, you forfeit your privilege.”

“Who?”

“Says he’s your father.”

Eddie barked a laugh. “Right. My father’s—”

He’d been about to say dead — before memory stopped him: The old man stooped over a plastic visitor’s chair, humiliated and embarrassed, talking about death. Cancer. Eating him from the asshole out. Sitting there, too selfish to beg sympathy, too full of pride to realize that’s what he was doing. Looking into that bulldog face, Eddie had experienced an overwhelming urge to embrace his father, to let go all of the history and hate between them. Because for the first time his father was here, reaching out to his only son.

Then the flash of judgment in those rummy eyes, the same smug look on the old man’s face that had chased Eddie out of childhood. And bitter realization. His father hadn’t come to make peace. He was making a point. Like a miser arranging bundles of cash in the bottom of his coffin. Preparation. Telling Eddie death didn’t change anything. I own you.

Eddie felt the hurt, fresh. Which made zero sense. The old man was five years dead and gone. Cancer had done a bang-up job. Turned his body into a busted stack pipe that kept leaking until the guy in the unit below complained about raw sewage dripping from his ceiling.

So, anyone care to explain how the old man could be waiting to talk with him?

Slowly, Eddie swiveled back to the mirror. The face — stripped of its hardest time and wounds — was his. Only years younger. And Eddie knew he hadn’t been remembering events. He’d been reliving them.

Growing backwards.

“C’mon, Keane,” the guard pressed. “Enough preening. Let’s go.”

Eddie wanted to scream in protest. He could already hear the old man’s voice, the leathery gloat roughing its way past Redman chaw.

“See you got yourself branded. Didn’t take long.”

“Thought you of all people would understand.”

“I understand fine, boyo. Skinheads made you their punch.”

“I’m nobody’s—”

“You’re everybody’s punch, Eddie. Always been, always be.”

Eddie shook his head against his father’s words. Told himself that if he refused to leave his cell, his father would stay a memory, stay dead. The face in the mirror told him different. Against his own volition, Eddie let the guard take him — to what?

His past.

The dark cord of memory dragged Eddie toward its umbilicus. Time warped as his life played out in reverse. Days and weeks compressed into emotions, tight fistfuls of grief and rage that pummeled Eddie with savage intensity. Single events stretched out in slow-second madness, suspending him in acts of cruelty and degradation. He fought to reassert his indifference, tap into the Fury’s narcotic rage. But Old Granddad had left the building. And Eddie fell victim to his own torment.

Zip.

There was the kid’s face, fear flushed with betrayal and begging Eddie not to let it happen. Eddie backed out of the showers as the crew of Level 5 meat packers moved in. He had sold the kid’s drug debt to the faggots for pennies on the dollar. Call it a refinancing plan. Watching the attack, the men throwing themselves at the quivering and mewling flesh, Eddie got a hard-on. He imagined his dick as a knife. Not fucking. Cutting.

Zip.

DT demons whispered in Eddie’s ears. He was in the hole. A sensory-deprivation chamber where the Arizona Department of Corrections turned out snitches and bitches. Eddie fought the voices. He talked over them, yelled, sang, recited goddamn Motörhead lyrics until he ran out of words and gushed gibberish. They had dropped him cold turkey into an SMU II isolation cell. All Eddie needed to do was renounce the brotherhood. Roll over. Three days later the detox demons came, ripping his insides, twisting his spine, loosening his bowels. He blew chunks, gagged air, shouted at the walls. Then he beat on them, hitting the concrete as if working a heavy bag. Each blow accompanied by the mash of gristle and Eddie’s roar. “You!” CRUNCH.“Don’t!” CRUNCH.“Own me!”

Zip.

Flesh burned, sizzled, and popped. His skin came off in searing layers, filling the cell with a burnt-onion stench. It took two of them to hold Eddie down as the heated metal blade worked a dollar-sized patch on his neck. “Cross’s got six sides,” the knife-man said. “We’re three down.” From the corner of his eye, Eddie saw the knife pass through a guttering flame. He sucked in a lungful of the crispy air. He was kindred now. Full-fledged AB. Silently he repeated the pledge that he’d just said aloud. My life is this and this is for life.

The car baked in the dirty sunrise, a primer oven. Eddie sat behind the wheel, windows down, stewing in sweat. He could taste the grit trapped in the heat haze rising above the rows of battered single-wides. The vial of crystal death lay on the passenger seat, all sparkle and sunshine. Eddie cranked up the radio on some rage metal and tried to stave off the shakes. He didn’t want to be here. Scrunching his eyes shut, he fiercely tried to make believe this backwards bullshit was part of a monstrous bad trip. But Jackyl’s hammer-jammer guitar clash — “Mental Masturbation!” — removed any doubt about where he was or who would soon come stumbling out of the mud-colored trailer.

Here was the Wagon Wheel Mobile Home Park, another artifact of Apache Junction’s dismal Western heritage. The city had tried everything to cash in on cowboys short of issuing Stetsons and spurs to the hookers on its greasy main drag. Probably would have if the hookers had been willing to stick around.

You could still find actual Indians on the Apache Trail, usually pulling all-nighters in stop-and-robs or passed out in bars named Rooster Cogburn’s. The redman Eddie sought operated an auto salvage yard to front a methamphetamine distributorship. He was too glazed on his own product to care that Eddie greeted him as “Tonto” or ask why Eddie dropped twenty extra for a corroded car battery.

Eddie spent the next hour scraping the terminals onto a sheet of butcher paper and cutting the acid into the crystal, creating the ultimate shot of high test. He spent the rest of the night sick over what he planned.

Still wasn’t sure he could go through with it.

But he knew that he would. Because, let’s face it, this was the past. He saw the trailer’s door swing open. At the same time, a hand drew back a piece of foil blocking the front window and a familiar wedge of blond hair appeared. Her eyes found his. She nodded. A second later, Wade Gramble stuck his face through the side window of Eddie’s car, his greeting stretching all the way back to grade school: “Edddieeeeee Spaghetti!”

Eddie once again saw his best friend for the last time. Knockoff Ray-Bans over that fuck-a-duck grin, undiminished by a junkie-thin frame and the chemicals oozing from his pores and soaking his Doctor Who T-shirt.

“Got us a caper, bro,” Wade said, dropping beside Eddie and extending his fist for a bump. “Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. Scoping VIN numbers off junkers, waiting in line at the DMV. Dude I know, his sister’s into some Armenians who’re tossing out serious Franklins for bogus registrations.”

Eddie had gone schizophrenic. He had become two people. Inside Eddie wanted to grab Wade by the shoulders, bust the remaining Chiclets out of his grille, and scream at him to run. But Outside Eddie was doing the talking. Cool and laid back, an actor ghosting through lines perfected in a single performance six years ago.

“Maybe I got something better,” Eddie said.

“Better how? That’s like free money, bro.”

Eddie opened his hand on the vial. “This do?”

“Dude! Beats waiting in line every time.”

She straddled his lap, backlit by purple neon, grinding as the Red Hot Chili Peppers caterwauled about Californication. Her face was so close he could taste butterscotch from the candies she chain-popped between sets. They were in a private VIP booth, their love lounge.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Cheryl said, voice husky. “You can make me yours, for all of the time.”

“You don’t belong to me,” Eddie said. “You’re Wade’s. He loves you.”

“Wade ain’t like you, Eddie. He’s weak.” Cheryl arched her back. “I hear things. I’m afraid he’s going to get you busted. Or worse. He’s not the friend you think he is.”

It would take Eddie years to wise up to Cheryl’s lies and manipulations. He couldn’t see his hands in the dark. But he knew how his fists would one day smash her face.

“You always get what you want?” he said.

“What I deserve, you mean.” She stroked him.

Eddie closed his eyes.

“Open your goddamn eyes, boyo!” the old man barked. “You owe her that much.”

Eddie obeyed, blinking into focus a cheap pine casket atop a floral-strewn dais. Inside, rose-colored satin framed his mother’s deflated features, rouged and painted into a plastic sheen. He and the old man were alone in the mortuary. “She looks pretty much the same as the last time you beat her,” Eddie said. “Only happier.”

“Is that why you came here? To lay blame?”

Eddie really couldn’t say. He wanted to mourn her, but the only genuine sentiment he’d been able to summon for his mother was conflict. A fitting eulogy. “Guess I wanted to make sure she was finally safe from you.”

“Jesus, but you’re a weak sister.” Eddie could hear the alcohol burn in his father’s pitiless voice. “No way you came from me. I knew the moment she spat you outta her cunny lips I wasn’t your father. But I gave you my name anyway. Know what they call that? A legacy.”

“Swell legacy, Dad. Look what you did for her.”

“What about what you did, Eddie? The shame you put her through. The way you took advantage of her. You forget about that? Need me to remind you?”

“Shut up!” Eddie swung at the old man, who deflected the punch and clamped Eddie’s jaw in one meaty hand. Squeezing, he pushed Eddie against the casket, crashing over vases, toppling arrangements, and scattering blossoms across his mother’s body.

“Let me clue you in, boyo. I gave your mother what she wanted. You call it battery. She called it love. We made our peace a long time ago. How about you?” The old man pushed Eddie’s head toward his mother’s, crushing his face onto her lipstick-encrusted mouth. “Here’s your chance, Eddie. Tell her you’re sorry. Kiss her goodbye.”

Pink underwear kept Eddie from escaping America’s toughest jail. Well, maybe escape was overblowing it. Security was so loose he could’ve walked out the front gate.

But then he wouldn’t have access to pink underwear. He couldn’t believe the money he was making off the things. Hell, he was wearing three pairs at a time just to keep up with demand. And supply? Eddie was kicking back to the laundry crew so they’d keep quiet on the count.

Putting inmates in pink underwear was the brainchild of the Maricopa County Sheriff, who thought degrading men by forcing them to eat green bologna sandwiches, watch the Disney Channel, and work on chain gangs made him America’s Toughest Sheriff.

Of course, the sadistic fuck also built a jail out of tents on the floor of the goddamn Gila Desert. And on that one, Eddie had to give the sheriff props. Satan’s front porch had nothing on a thousand men crammed ten to a tent in 120-degree summers.

Eddie processed into Tent City a couple of months after his nineteenth birthday, which he’d celebrated by racking up a misdemeanor assault charge and causing a near riot at a Mesa bar. Charges would have been worse except when police arrived Eddie was being stomped into the ground by a group of seriously pissed off vatos. Seems Eddie had inflicted a grievous insult to their culture when he cold-cocked one of their homies then shoved his hat under the pachuco’s ass and asked if that was where the candy came out.

Eddie thought he should send the greasers a complimentary pair of pinks. He’d gotten the idea for his underwear caper from a stroke rag, some freak of nature writing about how she got off when her boyfriend gave her the Dirty Sanchez. If chicks were willing to brag about licking their own shit, what would they be willing to shell out for an inmate’s dirty drawers?

Anybody could sell clean boxers. In fact, Eddie was pretty sure the sheriff had a side business doing just that. What he offered was lived-in stuff. Pissed in, shit on, cum-filled and bloody, the messier the better. He had Wade set it up with a classified and a post box. First week, they got a dozen orders. Doubled it the next week. Finally had to bribe a couple of deputies to get the boxers out.

Eddie felt like a captain of friggin’ industry. Escape. Are you kidding?

“Knuckles, bro? Fury. That some kind of promise?”

“A reminder. Finally stood down the old man.”

“Righteous. He back off?”

“Nah. Kicked the shit outta me.”

They were barreling west on U.S. 60 in a Lexus that Wade had boosted from a movie theater parking lot, where they had just seen Starship Troopers for the upteenth time. Wade geeked over science fiction. Eddie didn’t mind. It gave them somewhere they could go together and disconnect. For them, sci-fi wasn’t a theme. It was a place.

“Remember when we use to fly paper airplanes off the Alma School overpass?” Eddie said. “Like we were X-wings making a run on Death See if we could make it to the pavement before getting crunched.”

“Yeah. Till you taped an M-80 to one. Nearly caused that trucker to jackknife.”

“Man, I’ll never forget that dude’s face.”

“Funny stuff, Eddie. Long time ago.”

“Not for me.”

Eddie’s body devolved. The pain was exquisite. He saw his muscles thin out and flatten. His limbs shrank. Broken bones snapped fresh, bulging under his skin, then fused together as if they had never been broken at all. Tattoo blue vanished. He could literally see his manhood fade as he slipped into adolescence, his life clicking away like slides in an old-style View-master, the selector switch set to suffer.

He tore through the boy’s pod, his clothes, books, finally fingering the three-by-five picture under the mattress. Eddie hated the boy. He was a pampered puss, a crybaby. One of those kids who didn’t think he belonged in juvie, no matter his crime.

The picture proved it. Family Vacation 101. Silly smiles backdropped by Arizona red rock, the boy front and center, arms draped around a bored little sister and brainiac brother. Mom and Dad flashed peace signs over their heads.

The boy treated the picture like a piece of magic, rubbing it through his pocket, peeking glances and talking to it when he thought no one was watching. It only made Eddie hate him more. It confirmed that whatever the boy had done, it would eventually be forgotten. Not so for Eddie. The picture people knew it. Their smiles ridiculed him.

Eddie dropped the picture on the floor between his feet. He unbuttoned his pants and began jacking off.

The old man came out of Eddie’s bedroom wagging a pipe and baggie. He was dressed in his police uniform and he put the weight of the badge behind his voice.

“You’re a walking felony, Eddie. Guess it’ll be Christmas in Durango for you,” he said. “I’ll process you through intake myself.”

Eddie held the old man’s eyes. Kept quiet even as his father shoved him bodily into the back of the patrol car. What could he say? The pipe wasn’t his. Neither was the dope.

“Go ahead, Eddie. Cry entrapment. Tell them how I planted the evidence. Nobody’s going to hear anything you say.” The old man cranked his head back and laughed through the metal cage. “Done you same as we do the niggers. Nobody hears them either.”

Desert twilight crept like a sepia claw toward the end of the hallway where Eddie cowered outside of his parents’ bedroom. He strained to hear the voices on the other side of the door, primed for violence.

He knows. Eddie screwed his mind down on the thought, rejecting it. Impossible.

Then the door opened and the old man loomed over him in the shadows. Eddie tried to look past him to where his mother waited in the room. Surely she would defend him. He was just twelve. How could it be his fault? “Mom?”

She averted her gaze, giving him up to the old man.

“Shhh, boy.” His father’s face cracked into an indecipherable jigsaw of emotions. Eddie could see anger, fear, and hate clamoring to escape. “She can’t talk to you.”

Slowly, the old man raised his fist, showing Eddie the torn and frayed lamp cord coiled around it like a whip. “This is going to hurt you a whole lot more than it will me.”

The old man let it out then, a shrieking fit of laughter that grew louder with each successive crack of the cord, until even Eddie’s screeches were lost to it.

“I’ll protect you. I swear.”

“Just hold me.”

“Like that?”

“Put your hands down. Lower.”

“Here?”

“Lower. Oh, that’s nice.”

“Can I kiss you?”

“Please. How does that feel?”

“It tickles, kinda.”

“Now?”

“You’re soft.”

“Don’t stop.”

“Why are you crying?”

“Because you make me feel beautiful.”

“You are beautiful.”

“And you won’t ever hate me, Eddie?”

“Never.”

“And you promise you won’t ever leave me?”

“No. I love you, Mom.”

Eddie crouched beside a yucca, unable to pull his eyes from the girl’s window. He’d imagined squalor and Third World filth, a ghetto repackaged into an East Mesa ranch house. But the girl’s room shined pastel princess beneath decorative fixtures, all canopy, ruffles, and lace.

It looked, well, normal. They lived better than Eddie. Not like niggers at all.

The girl, whose name was Rhonda and shared Eddie’s sixth-grade class, glided through the pink and white fairy tale, her face a caramel question mark beneath a frizz of black hair. Eddie resented the fluttery feeling she gave him. He wished she were white. He’d followed her home to prove to himself that she wasn’t worthy of his affection, to see the urban decay her kind would bring to his neighborhood, the way his father always said.

Voices charged him in the darkness. “Peeping mother-fucker! Get him!” Eddie was lifted off his feet and thrown into the yucca’s spiny fronds. He could see faces in front of him. Black faces. “Whatcha doing perving on my little sister?”

Eddie’s heart hammered with the old man’s warnings. The niggers were flesh eaters. Savages. They had tricked him with their pretty house, pretty girl. But he could smell their violence, the blood and mud from where they spawned. He struggled to break away and a voice growled, “Keep doing that and we’ll fuck you up more, white boy.”

Eddie started crying. “Daddy, I’m sorry.”

The blond skank jitterbugged in the spotlight.

“Vampire,” Ed Keane, Sr. said, chasing her with the beam. “Turn to ash if she don’t suck pipe before sunup.”

Eddie cringed at the palsied ghoul-whore. But he was excited too. “Shouldn’t you arrest her or something?”

“What for? She’s no threat. Except to your dick.”

Saturday morning ride-along. Eddie in the shotgun seat of his father’s shop, touring Mesa’s underworld. The only time he enjoyed being with his father. Before the day, and the drinking, got hot. They were in the avenues off Mesa Drive. A menagerie of stucco and cinder block fortified with iron bars and junked cars. Speed bumps that once protected kids at play now protected drug dealers from police raids.

“Real people used to live here. Families. Back when I was a kid, before old Mesa High burned down and the mud people took over.” The old man hit the steering wheel. “Politicians have turned their back on the city. Call it good growth. It’s abandonment. Of course, they’ll deny it. Hold out their little Main Street shops as proof. Expect us to defend it.”

Eddie loved watching the old man work the streets, holding dominion over the freaks and the loons. Bust them or blast them, help or hurt. Decided on an arbitrary scale that his father called justice. The old man patted his leg. “Can I tell you something?”

“Okay.”

“You remember when I shot that guy last year?”

“The rapist. Yeah.”

“What if I told you I shot him in cold blood?”

“I thought he came after you. With his knife.”

“He had a knife, all right. But he wasn’t holding it when I shot him.”

“So you killed him for no reason. Why?”

“Because I could. It gave me satisfaction.”

Eleven-year-old Eddie did not see the fire in his father’s eyes, only the power of its glow. He swelled with pride at the knowledge he’d been entrusted to guard.

“Are you still one of the good guys?”

“I’m still wearing the badge, aren’t I?”

“You think maybe when I grow up I can be a police?”

Eddie sat ramrod straight, arms folded in his lap. His mother sat across from him at the table. They stared at each other over their untouched plates of food. Had been that way since his father sat down at the table, pulled out his handgun, and set it beside his utensils. “I’d appreciate a little quiet time tonight,” he said.

A domestic-violence lullaby put Eddie to sleep. Woke fast when the book bag tied to his doorknob rustled. Early Daddy Defense System. In the light from the hall he saw his mother slip into the room. She knelt before his bed, face pitted from abuse. She kissed his forehead, sobbed, kissed his mouth. Her breath was copper-hot with blood and alcohol. Awkwardly, Eddie tried to embrace her.

That first time couldn’t really be called sex. But as she pressed herself against him, Eddie saw relief spill into his mother’s features. Terror replaced by a strange and haunting nothingness. Eddie decided he would do anything to see that look of peace on his mother’s face. In the morning he wasn’t sure if he had dreamed the episode.

“Eddie, get out of bed,” she called. “Oatmeal’s getting soggy.”

The puppy’s neck had been twisted so severely that its dead eyes were staring back at its haunches. Its body lay on the patio next to a scattering of dead leaves. A stain on the carpet and the smear on his father’s polished shoe told the story.

“I asked you to start picking up after your dog!” the old man yelled. “Now pick up your dog. Trash bag and shovel are waiting for you.”

His dog’s name was Bandit. Eddie had carried him home on his bike from the store, made a house out of cardboard and towels, snuck him in at night, and let him chase his toes under the covers. He tried not to look at the creature, whose only crime had been reliance on Eddie. Tears filled his eyes.

“Don’t you dare cry, boyo,” his father said. “Dog’s a lesson. Everything gets taken away.”

The house breathed pain. The wrongness of it stopped Eddie cold at the back door. Bandit must’ve sensed its threat too.

The dog sniffed and nipped at Eddie’s shoes, growling defensively as he tried to get past.

Eddie bent down and stroked Bandit’s fur, overcome by sadness at what was to become of his little friend. He thought of how the spade vibrated as he tamped down the dirt around the trash bag. He picked the dog up and pressed his face into its fur.

It took a moment for the significance of the gesture to register.

Eddie knew the horror show that awaited him inside. He was eight years old again, home from a half day of school with plans to dump his bag, snag a juice, and get gone.

He remembered the frigid blast of air-conditioning that froze the sweat on his back and legs, the gurgle of the fridge, and how the light from the boxed windows formed a floating cage across the kitchen. He saw the empty whiskey bottle on the table and his father’s gun belt slung over one of the chairs. He passed quietly through the light bars, aware that a low keening had interrupted the preternatural stillness.

It was coming from the end of the hall, his parents’ room, where Eddie found his father choking his mother blue. The old man was sitting astride her on the bed, still dressed in full uniform. Beneath him, his mother’s naked body writhed. She snorted for air, blowing snot and blood in an arc that reached almost to the ceiling. Her arms and legs pinwheeled and her bony ass bucked off the mattress.

Eddie remembered standing there, transfixed, doing nothing.

But in his memory he had not stopped to pick up the dog. Something had changed. For the first time since beginning his macabre descent into the wayback, Eddie had no compulsion to follow his past. He stepped out of it. Instead of walking through the kitchen, he went to the table and lifted his father’s gun from its holster.

The automatic was heavy. He held it two-handed, the way his father had demonstrated: Got to hold firm on those jigs. Eddie carried it like that down the hall, Bandit at his heels the whole way.

Eddie didn’t stop at the bedroom door this time. He raised the gun. “Get off her.”

The old man spun around, surprised and angry at Eddie’s transgression. “Do yourself a favor, boyo,” he said. “Whatever you’re doing, undo it. Pronto.”

“I’m trying.”

“You must be stupid sick—” The old man stopped when he saw the gun. “What in the fuck-all name of Christ are you thinking?”

“Ending you.”

Eddie backed away as his father rolled off the bed. His mother didn’t move. “So that’s your plan? You’re going to shoot your own father?”

“Y-Yes,” Eddie said.

“R-R-Really? You fucking whelp. I own you.” Booze fused with rage in the old man’s eyes. “Are you listening to me? You’re mine. I made you. Now drop that gun. Do you hear me?”

Eddie didn’t hear. He was twenty years away, in a courtroom, staring down the black-cowled judge. He again felt the scorn of that penetrating gaze and the righteousness of the single question the judge had posed. What made you?

“I know,” Eddie answered, and snapped back to the old man. He fired three times, center mass. His father’s face vanished in an explosion of smoke and gore. Eddie wondered if his sentence was over.

He’d served his time. Done life.