Phoenix Noir

Dead by Christmas by David Corbett

Tempe

I’ll tell you what ruined my marriage, and it wasn’t gambling or drink or chasing skirt. Our son, Donny, was walking home from a friend’s house when a LeSabre blew the stop sign, ran the poor kid down in the street and dragged him twenty yards, then fled the scene.

Seven years old, Donny was. And he fought, or his body fought, half the night, until the ER surgeon came out with that look on his face, to talk with Barb and me.

All I remember of the next two weeks is I went on a mission — horning my way into the loop as every department in the valley tracked down the driver, even tagging along when the arrest came down in Apache Junction. They put two men on me, to make sure I didn’t take my shot as they dragged the guy out. His name was Phil Packer, an insurance adjustor with a DWI sheet ten years long, bench warrants in four counties — he’d been hiding in his girlfriend’s trailer.

After that, every time Packer shuffled into court from lockup for a hearing, I was right there, front row, eye-fucking him and his wash’n’wear lawyer. None of which made a difference, of course, nor was it anything close to what Barb or our baby girl needed from me. That wasn’t part of the mission.

My wife called me out on all that one night — it was late, she’d had a few, her face streaked with mascara from sitting in the dark with a bottomless cocktail and her son’s ghost. Melodie, the baby, lay asleep in her room. I’d been out in the car, driving around, something I did a lot.

Seeing me there, Barb stood up and tottered closer, into the light. Her eyes were puffy and raw. “I’m sorry. Do I know you?” She had that tone.

I said, “I had to finish up some work.”

“No. I called. You left hours ago.”

I had a lie ready. “A CI called, he wanted to meet. They didn’t tell you?”

She laughed acidly, inches from my face now. “You’re such a coward.”

Looking back, I think of the things I might’ve done, might’ve said, but all I could come up with in the moment was, “How many have you had?”

“Not nearly enough.” She shoved the glass into my hand, a dare. “You know, Nick, disappearing isn’t the same as dying.”

I remember feeling cold all over. “You’re not talking sense.”

“You’re jealous of Donny.” Her eyes, glistening in the light, turned hard. “Somehow you think staying away is going to make me miss you. The way I miss him. Christ. Are you honestly that pathetic?”

Some scientist should measure the speed at which shame turns into hate. I’ll never forget that sound, never forget the feel of the glass shattering in my hand or the sight of her crumbling in front of me, no matter how much I try. There’s some things “sorry” won’t cure, no matter how many times you say the word, or even how much you mean it.

It’s said that only one in five marriages survives the death of a child, and maybe I should take comfort in the numbers. Regardless, it was my divorce that turned me into a workhorse, not the other way around.

This was the early ’90s and I’d rotated into robbery, great place to get lost, the numbing paperwork, sixteen hour days if you want them. There were four of us from different departments — Phoenix, Tempe, Scottsdale, Mesa — meeting once a week to share intel. We’d had twenty restaurant take-downs around the valley the previous six months, all the same guy. He came in at closing, when the back door was propped open by the kitchen crew — that’s when they dragged the rubber mats out to the parking lot for the nightly hose-down. Meanwhile, inside, the money was getting counted and bagged for deposit.

The robber wore dark coveralls, gloves, a ski mask, and he always slipped in and out within minutes, which meant he knew the business. Brandishing a snubnose, he’d prone out the manager, tie him up with plastic cuffs, the kind they use for riot control, then snatch the night deposit. Right before leaving, he’d grab the manager’s wallet, dig out the driver’s license. “You’re gonna say some wetback did this,” he’d whisper. “I know your name. I know where you live.” Even after we found out the guy was white, we still had vics swearing to our faces he was Mexican.

Finally, luck stepped in, as it does more times than most cops care to admit.

Two cars responded to a domestic here in Tempe — how’s that for poetic? One cop grabbed the husband, the other took the wife, separated them, different rooms. The wife — eye swollen shut, cracked lip — she bawls to the cop there with her, “You know all the restaurant jobs around here the past few months? That asshole in the next room, he’s the one you’re after.”

The woman wouldn’t swear out a statement, though, so the uniform tracks me down in robbery at the end of his shift to give me a verbal. I’m Tempe’s case agent on the restaurant spree. You can imagine, he lays out the scenario, I’m cringing a little. Everybody on the force knew my business. Even so, I should’ve been thrilled, right? Finally, a suspect.

The guy was Mike Gallardi, his wife’s name was Rhonda. Together, they ran a hole-in-the-wall called Mike’s Place out on Baseline Road in South Phoenix. You could get a coronary just reading the menu but the place was clean, with a small counter and maybe a half dozen booths.

Here’s the thing: They catered to cops. You walked in, one whole wall was dedicated to fallen officers. Flash a badge, your kids got free sodas with their meals. Come in on duty and no one’s around? Boom, wink, you ate free.

I’d been at their place just once, a couple years before, taken there by a buddy of mine in traffic division. Rhonda worked the register and counter, a shy, chesty, bleached-out woman in her thirties. Mike was the talker and he came out from behind the grill to toady up, all shucks and gee-whiz.

How to say this — I don’t trust people who backslap cops. They always want something. Not that I made much headway on that point when I broke my news to the robbery roundtable.

“No way Mike’s the suspect.” This from Cavanaugh, the detective from Phoenix. “I can name fifty guys right now, this minute, who’ll vouch for him.”

“His own old lady handed him up.”

“After he batted her around, yeah. Go back, now that she’s cooled off. I’ll bet she admits it’s crap.”

He had a point, of course, domestics being what they are. But something about the way he said it made me think what he meant was: What would your wife say about you, Boghossian, if we gave her the chance?

Thankfully, the four commanders overseeing the roundtable agreed with me and ordered surveillance. The teams worked in rotation, each department on for three days then making way for the next detail. But Mike was smart. He made our guys early and burned them in heat runs, crazy Ivans, every kind of stunt you can imagine to flush them out. Once he just stopped in traffic, walked back to the unmarked car, and said, “Why are you following me? I haven’t done anything.”

I could just picture him, over one of those free burgers or shrimp baskets he doled out, pumping guys for information on tail jobs: C’mon, tell me, I’m just so doggone curious. And cops — hated by damn near everybody, grateful for someone who actually gives a rat’s ass — I’ll bet they couldn’t tell him their stories fast enough.

It got to me, sure. We were the ones who’d trained this guy — inadvertently, granted, but he was smarter than he should’ve been because of us. He was pulling out our wallets, whispering our names and addresses. And yeah, like everybody else he’d chumped, I felt ashamed.

Two weeks later, I got a call from surveillance: “Boghossian, get this. Gallardi and his wife locked up their place as usual but didn’t head home. They checked into a hotel on the frontage road along I-10.”

I knew the strip, we all did: a line of restaurants flanked that part of the freeway.

As I drove on over I thought about Rhonda’s tagging along. It surprised me, I’ll be honest. Maybe Cavanaugh had been right — I should’ve gone up to her early, asked her to confirm what she’d said that night Mike trashed her. And even though I knew that would’ve tipped our hand, now she wasn’t just keeping mum, she was joining in. I felt responsible, like there’d been a point in time when I could have saved her. No surprise, I felt like that a lot back then.

I met the team at the hotel and, sure enough, after 11:00, Mike came out of the room in dark coveralls, a day pack around his waist. He walked down a side street to the parking lot of an Applebee’s, then hunkered down in a patch of oleander to watch the kitchen crew do its thing. The radios started to buzz — we had our man, no more doubts. After a half hour, Mike eased out of the bushes, retraced his steps, and slipped back into his and Rhonda’s hotel room.

The next day, when I called the robbery roundtable together to report, Cavanaugh went from looking like he’d lost his dog to acting like he meant to kill somebody.

“Okay,” he said finally, “I’m in. If Mike Gallardi’s our guy, he’ll get no favors from me.”

I volunteered for surveillance at Applebee’s, even though it meant staying alert for hours on end with the windows rolled up in hundred-degree heat, drinking warm Coke and pissing it all back into the empty cup.

At 9, our eyes at Mike’s Place reported that Rhonda had left, heading toward home. An hour later, Mike locked up and followed suit. A collective moan went out over the radio. He’d called it off. Then, not long after, we heard that Mike and Rhonda were on the move again, leaving the house together. They were on their way toward us.

The voices on the radio perked back up — this was the night, we could feel it. And we knew we’d have to watch the whole thing play out, let him go in, rob the place, or it’d come apart in court. But what if he sniffed us out? What if he took a hostage?

Rhonda drove down one of the side streets and parked, then Mike hopped out, headed for the parking lot. I slouched in my seat, a drunk snoring off a bender. Through slit eyelids I watched him saunter toward the back of Applebee’s, and for an instant he looked straight at me. It was dark, some serious distance separated us. Even so, I sat stock-still, wondering if I’d been made.

He turned away and ducked inside the concrete dumpster enclosure. Two other men with eyes on the door reported they had visual, and we had a man out front too, in case Mike tried to run that way. Surveillance units got in position to take down Rhonda when the time came.

At half past 11, the kitchen crew trooped out, propped the back door open, and dragged out their slimy black mats, sudsing them up, hosing them down. I kept up my ruse, dripping with sweat but not moving, sipping air through the window crack. Mike stayed put too, even after the kitchen crew vanished again, leaving the door open as they mopped the floors. After midnight they humped on out again, collected their mats, and dragged them back inside.

A whisper crackled on the radio, “What’s he waiting for?” Another whisper snapped back, “Off the air.” We were all raw from the heat, testy from sitting still so long. Over the next hour, the employees came out in ones or twos, lingering for at most a smoke before driving away. Finally, the manager trudged out, locked up, not carrying a deposit bag — he’d left it in the safe — then got in his car and left.

Mike waited another fifteen minutes before sliding out of the dumpster enclosure. Hands in his pockets, he meandered across the parking lot, shooting one last glance in my direction. Minutes later, surveillance confirmed that he and Rhonda were headed back home.

We waited in place another two hours. Mike might come back, I thought, try to burglarize the place, clip the trunk line on the alarm, pop the safe. Finally, I called in to Rooney, the graveyard sergeant, to report. “I want everybody to stay put, Roon. The money’s all there, he’s coming back in the morning when they open up.”

“I’m calling it off,” Rooney said. “Your guys have been stuck in their cars for six hours now. It’s still what, ninety-five degrees outside? Besides, from the sound of it, you got made.”

“The sound of what? You’re not sitting here.”

“I need a team to report to the rail yards. Call just came in. Somebody made off with two dozen cases of Heineken.”

I almost spit. “You’re pulling my guys off because a pack of kids rifled a boxcar?”

“We’ve got a squeaky victim.”

“Meaning who?”

“Meaning the Westbrook family.”

The Westbrooks, wholesale distributors throughout the state, in-laws at the statehouse, a cousin in Congress. Somebody asks you what it’s like to be a cop, I thought, tell them this story.

I got home to my apartment about 3, showered the sticky grit off my skin, and crawled into bed. I still wasn’t used to sleeping by myself back then and I lay awake awhile, puzzling the whole thing through. Get a cop alone, find him on a day he wants to be honest, he’ll tell you the cases that bothered him most always involved a suspect who someway, somehow, reminded him of himself. And I knew Mike Gallardi pretty well, I thought. Down deep, where it mattered, he was weak. That’s why he liked power, not just over Rhonda but the people he robbed — gunpoint, the terror in their eyes. Do what I tell you. Like a cop, or his bent idea of one: a guy who gets what he wants, even hammers his wife, and never pays. I was going to change that. I’d be the one who finally made sure he suffered, if only for the chance to tell myself I was different. I was better.

Eventually, I drifted off and dreamed I stood in the doorway of a house off in the desert somewhere. A wounded dog limped toward me through the moonlit chaparral. As it drew close, I looked into its eyes, and saw my son looking back at me.

The next thing, the phone was ringing.

It was Rooney. “I don’t know what to say, Nick. Apple-bee’s got hit this morning, 8 o’clock.” Some throat-clearing. “Just like you said.”

I rubbed my face, checked my watch. 8:30. “How much?”

“Twelve grand.”

Hardly a take worth risking your freedom for, I thought. But this wasn’t just about money. I wondered if Mike had driven back alone, or if he’d dragged Rhonda along with him again. And maybe she didn’t feel bullied at all. Maybe, for the first time in a long, long while, she felt married.

“We’re never gonna catch this guy without a wire.” I was laying out my case to John Tally, the county attorney. “He’s getting cocky — cocky crooks get sloppy and that’s when people get hurt.”

Tally tented his hands, rocking in his chair, sunlight flaring in the windows behind him. An ASU man, politician to the bone, he was tan and fit, pompous, cutthroat. “I’ll approve a wire,” he said finally. “And a task force, but I want hard numbers on bodies.”

“Phoenix and Tempe’ll pony up ten men apiece,” I said, guessing. “Scottsdale and Mesa half that each, an even thirty.”

“You’re lead agent,” he said pointedly. “Team up with Tom Kolchek for the wire affidavit. And don’t be fooled by his looks. He’s the smartest guy I’ve got.”

I stood up to leave. “I want to call off the surveillance, make the target think he’s in the clear.”

Tally glanced up, like I’d already become a bother. “I told you,” he said. “You’re lead agent.”

Tally was right, Kolchek looked like your Uncle Monty — thick all over with thinning hair and sad-sack eyes — but he was one of the sharpest cops I ever worked with. The affidavit came to a hundred pages and was airtight, detailing every job, how Mike came to be our suspect, the ensuing surveillance, the continuing robberies, everything. We argued that, given Rhonda’s new accomplice role, phone communications between the house and the restaurant could prove fruitful. The judge granted us thirty days for the wire, with a re-up possible for another thirty if the need arose, which would carry us through the holidays. But if we didn’t have results by then, tough. We’d have to bag up and go home.

We notified the phone company of our target lines and anticipated start date, so they could build the parallel circuits for the wiretap. Two days later, they called back to tell us Mike had disconnected his home phone. He’d done it the same day we submitted the affidavit.

Kolchek hung up and sat there, thinking it through. Finally, in an oddly sunny voice, he said, “We’ll bug his house.”

“You don’t get it,” I told him.

“I get it,” Kolchek said. “So? We tighten the circle of who knows what, rewrite the affidavit, wire up his house. Maybe we’ll get lucky. You get any better ideas, let me know.”

I didn’t get any better ideas, of course. And every time I tried to imagine who might be tipping Mike off, I could never convince myself I had the right man. Cavanaugh was the first and obvious choice, given how long he’d stuck up for Mike, but he was a hard cop and I’d seen the betrayal in his face before the Applebee’s job. Besides, like he’d said, fifty cops would vouch for Mike in a heartbeat — any one of them could be our leak.

Kolchek and I reworked the affidavit, kept the wire on the restaurant phone, and asked for three transmitters for the residence — one in the living room, one in the dining room, one in the bedroom — sensitive enough, at ten thousand dollars a pop, to catch voices throughout the house. The judge signed off and Kolchek introduced me to a tech for the county attorney’s office named Pritchard, who’d go in and actually set things up.

“I’ll go with,” I told Kolchek.

“No, I will,” he said. “I’m a pretty good lock pick and we only need two men inside.”

“What about the dog?”

Kolchek cocked his head. “Dog?”

“A white shepherd,” I said. “It’s in the surveillance reports.”

“Right. I remember. What’s your point?”

“I used to work canine. The white ones are unpredictable, you don’t want to go in there alone.” That was mostly crap, but there was no way I wasn’t going with them. I wanted a look inside that house.

The next day, when Mike and Rhonda were at the restaurant, Kolchek headed up their front walk and took a Polaroid, then went to the hardware store, bought an identical door, and set it up in his office, practicing till it took only forty-five seconds to pop both locks.

Meanwhile, I scoped the neighborhood for the best spot to place the undercover van. Mike and Rhonda lived in a mazelike community of town houses grouped in quads, and the geometry of the place was all wrong; there was nowhere within a hundred yards of their unit to park the van and not stand out. Then I saw there was a unit for rent one quad over. We could set up the wire room in there, as long as we kept a low profile.

I hit up Tally’s office for the rent and two days later, when Mike and Rhonda and most of the neighbors were off to work, we moved our guys in. Me, Kolchek, and Pritchard headed over for our entry to plant the bugs, while a ram car took up position on the street to force a fender bender, stall for time, if Mike or Rhonda came back while we were still inside the house.

When we got to the front porch, though, we found a brand-new security gate with two additional locks, barring access to the door. Kolchek just stood there, staring, holding his lockpick tools. “This isn’t happening.” He glanced at his watch and swallowed hard. Inside, the dog was barking like the place was on fire.

I started heading for the back of the house. “Bet you’re glad you brought me along now.”

There was a privacy wall around the patio in back and I scaled it, dropping down onto the pavers. A sliding Arcadia door led inside, with an insert for a doggy door. I got down on the ground, reached through, and flicked aside the dowel lodging the door in place. The dog realized what was happening then, and as I slipped inside he turned a corner and charged toward me, hackles raised, fangs bared.

I reached frantically in my pocket for the syringe of Isoforane I’d brought along to knock him out, only to sink my thumb into the needle. “Goddamnmotherfuck!” I played air banjo with my hand for a second, then, glancing up, saw I wasn’t the only one to miscalculate. As his paws hit linoleum, the dog lost traction, sliding toward me helplessly. Stepping forward, I caught him under the jaw with a kick so fierce he cartwheeled backwards.

“Get in the goddamn bathroom!”

The dog sulked off, mewling, as I checked my thumb, hoping adrenalin would ward off any grogginess. Suddenly, I remembered my dream from weeks before — the lonely house, the wounded dog. A chirp from my radio broke the spell.

I clicked on. “Yeah?”

“We heard that, detective.” It was one of my guys in the wire room. In the background, laughter. “Punt the pooch — that what they teach you in canine?”

I switched off my radio and searched out the front door. When I got there I found out the security gate was locked from inside, requiring a key. “This nails it,” I told Kolchek through the grating. “Somebody’s tipping this guy off.”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Kolchek whispered, standing exposed with Pritchard on the porch. “Get us inside.”

Kolchek lacked the physique to scale the privacy wall, so I found a window in a small utility room near the back for the two men to crawl through. Once everybody was inside, we headed to the living room to set up shop. Kolchek got busy taking Polaroids of the room so we could put it back the same way we found it.

“Look at this,” I said, pointing to the couch. There were sheets, blankets, a pillow. “Christ, she’s kicked him out of bed. They’re in the middle of another fight.”

“Get to work,” Kolchek said. He was testy and pouring sweat. It dawned on me then that, despite a first-rate mind, Kolchek lacked any serious operational experience. The glitch with the locks had rattled him.

Pritchard hooked up his transmitters to the phone lines. Even though the service had been cut off, the wires still held voltage. We set them up in the three different rooms as planned, and Pritchard asked me to contact the wire room to see if we were live. Only then did I realize I hadn’t switched my radio back on after that crack about my canine prowess. When I flipped the button, a voice came through almost screaming. “Jesus, Boghossian, where’d you go? We’ve been trying to contact you for ten minutes. The wife’s on her way, just west of Pepperwood. You’re lucky she stopped for smokes. Move!”

We rushed to test the transmitters through the wire room and got an all-clear. Kolchek’s hands shook so bad from nerves he couldn’t screw the plates back on the phone plugs, so I took the screwdriver from him, told him to pack with Pritchard, I’d close up.

They scrambled out the utility room window and I locked it behind them. Turning back to finish up, something caught my eye, something I’d overlooked before.

On a shelf near the door, a small day pack rested among some other odds and ends.

We had no warrant to search the house or its contents, but I took the day pack down regardless and opened it up: A ski mask. A pair of black garden gloves. A .38 snubnose and a dozen plastic cuffs.

There was a desk in the room and I laid the contents out, retrieved the Polaroid from the dining room, and took a picture. This was a trophy, not evidence — I wouldn’t even tell anybody about it, let alone show them the picture. The whole investigation might vanish down a hole if guys started jabbering. I packed everything up again and put the day pack back where I’d found it, but then my curiosity got the best of me and I searched the desk. In the bottommost drawer, I found a snapshot — Mike with Cavanaugh, up in the mountains somewhere. They were hunting together, carrying shotguns, the best of friends from their smiles. Rhonda, I guess, had snapped the picture. I took another Polaroid. This too, of course, wasn’t evidence, and I told myself it didn’t really prove anything. It was just a reminder — my reminder — of what I might be up against.

I ran back to the dining room and was just about finished putting things back in place when the voice came through my radio again: “Boghossian, she’s at the corner.”

I barked into the mouthpiece, “Ram her!”

I was making one last check, comparing where everything was with the Polaroids, when I heard the collision outside. It was about fifty yards from the house, some undercover cop plowing into Rhonda’s back end at the stop sign. I opened the bathroom door and told the dog to stay, then headed toward the patio, fit the doggy door insert into place, and reached through to slip the dowel back onto the runner.

Beyond the glass of the sliding door, I saw the large white dog slink into view. Our eyes met. He flinched a little, tail lodged between his legs. Ashamed, like everybody else.

It was up to the boys in the wire room now. I checked in as often as I could, but the days went by, nothing. Mike knew we’d been in there — tipped off by Cavanaugh, I supposed, something I had to keep to myself. Besides which, just like I’d thought, Mike and Rhonda were in a tiff, the two of them seldom speaking.

As time passed, though, I felt strangely encouraged. I knew the dynamics of the simmering fight. I heard the cues — the caustic one-liners, the icy silences. Somehow, some night, something would set them off. And the words would come boiling out, things they’d regret forever.

As it turned out, that night came right before Thanksgiving. And the somehow and something of it proved, to my way of thinking anyway, too apropos.

The surveillance team trailed Mike to a porno arcade near the airport. We’d watched him visit smut shops and strip clubs all over the valley, not sure if he was casing the places or had just grown tired of not getting any at home. This time, though, according to the cop watching from the parking lot, Mike came out wobbly.

“I may be wrong,” the radio voice reported, “but I think our boy just had himself a little love.”

When Mike got home he wasn’t inside five minutes before he launched into Rhonda — a fight over nothing, but so blistering that everybody in the wire room shuddered. When one of the cops reached out to turn off the recorder, though, honoring the minimization guidelines, I told him, “Wait.” We’d gotten our first lead in this case after a brawl between these two. I could justify listening on the grounds there was a reasonable expectation that, in their fury, one of them would say something useful. Accusing.

The voices kept rising, more and more shrill and cruel. And sexual. One Mormon on the wire crew blushed, but everybody kept listening, each of us wondering what we should do if, at some point, one of them tried to kill the other. And yes, finally, we heard scuffling. I reached for the phone to dial dispatch as I heard Rhonda stammer oddly, “M-Mike, n-no. No!” The yelling turned to muffled cries, then rhythmic, whimpering moans. Gradually it dawned on us that Mike had decided on a little show’n’tell, to demonstrate for Rhonda what had happened earlier that night, during his encounter at the porn hole.

“One good pipe-cleaning deserves another,” somebody cracked.

“Turn off the machine,” I said, knowing we’d get nothing of any use now. Adding insult to injury, Mike moved back into the bedroom that night. So that’s how you make your marriage work, I thought, hating him even more.

The first thirty days played out, no results. We got an extension but none of the departments would pony up the manpower like before. They put rookies on the line-of-sight details. Once, after letting a tail car pass him, Mike chased the cop all the way down Central Avenue, flashing his brights, just to embarrass the kid.

Meanwhile, the wire crew was going batty listening to nothing and more of nothing. We were back where we’d started — we’d never catch Mike Gallardi except red-handed, coming out the back of a restaurant. And everything we knew about him said that if that happened, he’d make us kill him.

“The man’s gonna be dead by Christmas,” someone quipped, and it became the unofficial slogan of the whole operation, until I told everybody to knock it off. “If you’re right, and we take him out, you don’t want to have to explain that little mantra to Internal Affairs.”

Given where we stood, though, I decided it was time to tickle the wire. I went to Tally again, told him we needed to put some pressure on the couple, inflict a little fear.

I showed up at Rhonda’s front door when surveillance con-firmed Mike was at the restaurant alone. I came in a marked unit, the strobe spinning out at the curb, and the uniform who’d driven stood with me on the porch. No more avoiding the neighbors — we wanted their attention now. Inside, the dog went off when the doorbell rang, then went still, dropping his tail, when he saw me beyond the grating.

Rhonda deadpanned, “Gee, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you and the dog knew each other.”

I pulled the subpoena from my jacket pocket and gestured for her to open the security gate. “Rhonda Gallardi, you’re to appear before the grand jury on December 5th. You’re not to discuss your scheduled appearance or the subject matter of your testimony with anyone except your lawyer — not even your husband. Understood?”

She looked taken aback but hardly stunned — some fright in her eyes, but a baiting grin too. I wondered if that was how she looked right before Mike hit her.

“What if I don’t open the door?”

“I’ll just set it down on the porch here. Either way, you’re served.”

The grin faded a bit, her fear quickening into anger as her eyes checked the cop behind me, then slid back. “This is harassment.”

“Guess how many times a day I hear that.”

“Because you’re a prick?”

I nodded for the cop to head back to the car. Once he was out of earshot, I said, “Know what I think? You’ve been trying hard for a long time to make things work — your restaurant, your marriage. I admire that. But the point where things were gonna change is gone for good.” I stuck my hands in my pockets, to look harmless. “You want to turn that around, now’s the time.”

Women who’ve been hit more than once have a look — sad and yet defiant, almost mocking, but defeated all the same. Come on, I thought, invite me in, talk to me. I knew, given the chance, I could open her up, end this thing. But her eyes turned hard and far away again. “Leave your papers on the porch,” she said, then shut the door.

In the wire room, we listened when Mike came home that night. Apparently, what I’d said registered, at least a little, because the good wife unloaded.

“No more! I’m done.”

“Shut up, Rhonda.”

“I’m not gonna lie under oath for you! I never wanted—”

“I said shut the fuck up, Rhonda!”

The sound of scuffling came again. I grabbed the phone to dial dispatch. But a minute later, they were outside the house, walking the dog. The perfect couple — Mike with his arm around Rhonda’s shoulder, holding her close, loving, protective, whispering into her hair.

Rhonda got coached well for her grand jury appearance. All her answers reduced to: I don’t remember. I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I don’t know.

“He beat us,” I told my guys afterward, like I was confessing to some crime of my own.

A week later we went in to pull the wires, and I was hardly shocked to see they’d put a three-piece console in front of the wall socket where we’d planted the living room transmitter. They’d been a step ahead of us the whole time. Took us an hour, though, to take the knickknacks down, drag the big thing away, claim our bug, then push the monster back and make sure all the junk was in the right place again, even smoothing the carpet so you couldn’t tell anything had moved.

The operation got bagged, departments couldn’t justify the manpower anymore. We went around to restaurants, schooling them on smarter ways to close up at night — it was all we could do at that point. Maybe Mike would decide his luck had played out. Or maybe he’d get reckless, hurt somebody, and the whole thing would heat up all over again.

On Christmas Eve, I visited Barb and our daughter for the annual holiday torture — unwanted presents, forced smiles. And no talk of Donny, as though the only thing that could keep the pain at bay was a punishing silence.

But then, walking to my car, I heard the front door click open behind me. Turning, I saw my daughter — she was five then — running toward me in her red velvet dress and green tights. Behind her, Barb waited in the doorway, a silhouette.

Melodie scooted up, gripped my hand, and pulled so I’d bend down. In a solemn whisper, she said, “Don’t be sad, okay? It’s Christmas.”

“I’m not sad,” I lied, but she’d already dropped my hand, spun around, and fled back toward her mother who let her back in, then closed the door.

Later, at my own place, drinking Scotch as I flipped through the channels, I got the call from dispatch. A steak house up in Paradise Valley got hit right at closing. I was on my way to the scene when the second call came in. Shots fired. The address made my stomach drop.

By the time I got to the condo the place was alive with cops, strobes spinning around the complex, mingling eerily with the Christmas lights. I got out of my car and pushed through the crowd of neighbors outside. The cop with the entry/exit log took my name and badge number, then waved me in.

Techs and detectives ambled about. A spindly tree stood in the living room, sagging with ornaments and tinsel. One of the guys from homicide pointed me back to the kitchen.

In the breakfast nook, I found a uniformed cop standing guard over Cavanaugh, who sat gripping his head. He glanced up just long enough to catch my eye, his gaze frantic with calculation.

To the uniform, I said, “Do everybody a favor and stand back a little. He makes a grab for your gun, you may both wind up dead.”

From the kitchen I made way toward the utility room. A body sheet covered a sprawling form on the floor, a pool of drying blood trailing out from underneath. Spray patterns hazed the walls. A handprint smeared the doorframe.

In the bedroom, wearing an undershirt and cargo shorts, Rhonda sat with hollow eyes, stroking the shepherd who lay at her feet whimpering. A female officer stood guard, one hand on her sidearm, as though she intended to shoot the dog if it so much as moved.

It took a second for Rhonda to sense I was there in the doorway. Glancing up, she blinked, took me in. Her hair was a mess. She looked ashen and lost.

Cavanaugh would take the fall, pleading out to manslaughter. His story — I can’t say whether it’s true or not, though I tend to believe more than I doubt — was that he and Rhonda, his cop-crazy buddy’s wife, were lovers. The night Mike found out, he knocked Rhonda around awhile, then went out, got coked up, and took down his first restaurant. He’d been pumping Cavanaugh for information on robberies for ages, claiming he just wanted to know how to protect his own place.

Mike came back from that first job in an odd heat, feeling invincible — the man he was meant to be — and told Rhonda that, if he ever went down, he’d hand up her lover as the man who’d taught him everything. Cavanaugh had to protect him then, to protect himself, protect Rhonda. He began tipping Mike off on the robbery investigations, staying away from Rhonda once the surveillance began but getting messages through by using the guy who washed dishes at their restaurant as a go-between. That went on until Rhonda’s grand jury appearance, after which she told Mike she’d dime him out herself if he didn’t stop, she didn’t care who got hurt. And Mike obliged her — until Christmas Eve.

He missed it, that nervy heat when he slipped in, pointing the gun. The fear. The begging.

As soon as he left the house for Paradise Valley, Rhonda picked up the phone, dialed Cavanaugh, told him she was leaving for good, she’d had it. He told her to wait, he’d be right over. They meant to be gone by the time Mike got back but — here again I’m not sure what to believe — he surprised them, slipping into the house unnoticed. It was self-defense, if you looked at it right, though Cavanaugh knew better than to take that to trial.

But all of that was yet in the telling as I stood there in the bedroom doorway. The dog ignored me for once, still whimpering, its ears pricked up. It was Rhonda who stared right at me.

“You’re the one whose wife walked out,” she said finally. She left the rest hanging, but her voice was accusing. She wouldn’t be gloated over, not by the likes of me.

I don’t know how to explain it. Despite her contempt, despite everything, I felt for her. And I could afford to be gracious, not because I was different or better or even because it was Christmas. I remembered my daughter’s words, whispered in my ear: Don’t be sad, okay? I had a piece of something back I’d thought was lost for good. It felt a little like being forgiven.

“My wife had good reason to leave,” I said, thinking: Why lie?

But Rhonda just turned away. With a soft, miserable laugh, she said, “Like that’s all it takes.”

I lingered awhile, waiting her out, but she said nothing more, just leaning down now and then to console the dog.

With profound thanks to Detective Jay Pirouznia, Tempe PD (Retired).

Whiteout on Van Buren by Don Winslow

Van Buren Strip

What it is is it’s hot.

Beads of sweat pop onto Jerry’s forehead the second he steps out the door of his motel room. Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200, Go Directly to Jail, my man. Like there is no transition period between the air-conditioned chill of the room and the outside world of Phoenix — it’s just like wham, the heat hits you like a punch in the chest.

Last night the noisy old air conditioner in the cheap motel had forced him to choose between not sleeping because of the banging of the machinery and not sleeping because of the stifling heat. He’d chosen not sleeping because of the noise.

August in Phoenix, Jerry decides as he walks out onto Van Buren, is a bitch.

Who comes to Phoenix in August?

Well, me, he thinks.

And Benny Rosavich.

And what’s Rosavich doing here in the summer, anyway? God knows the slick prick has money, he could be anywhere, why did he have to pick the freaking desert? Aren’t Russians supposed to like snow, and sleighs and ice hockey and shit like that? Go after an Israeli, you expect to find him in the desert, not a Russian.

Maybe he’s a Russian Jew.

Jerry forgot to ask.

Like it matters.

This stretch of Van Buren is empty at noon. A ghost town. Nobody is out there who doesn’t have to be. One or two meth whores with shriveled chins like crones on the slow stroll, trying to stay on the shady side of the street. Ain’t no shady side at noon, ladies, Jerry thinks. The sun is straight above and burning down on our heads like the glare of an angry God. Burn right through you.

The pro he picked up last night wasn’t bad. Skinny with no tits, but the price was right for a half-and-half. Guys who’d been down here before had told him Van Buren was thick with working girls, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting one in the ass, but there hadn’t been so many. She was all right, though, she did the dirty deed. Strictly speaking, it was against established procedure, picking up a girl, especially a pro, but he has a hard time sleeping the night before a piece of work and it helps to get the snake charmed.

He walks down the street toward the motel they told him Rosavich is at. He’s at a motel on Van Buren, you can’t miss it. Hate to tell you, boys, but there ain’t nothing but motels on Van Buren, a lot of them closed and boarded up, though. This was supposed to be a happening place back in the day, but that must have been a lot of days ago. He’s been on the street, what, two minutes, and the back of his one-size-too-large baby-blue polo shirt is already soaked. Nice. He takes off his ball cap and wipes his brow with the back of it. A Yankees cap, because it’s distinctive, people remember it. Let them go chasing around New Yaaawk for him. He’ll toss it in the nearest dumpster on his way out. He has uncles would beat him half to death they saw him with a Yankees cap on, but this is a do-what-you-gotta-do-to-get-by world.

Long freaking walk to the Tahiti Inn. The freaking Tahiti Inn. Tahiti?! Ain’t that like an island with swaying palm trees and cool ocean breezes? Brown-skinned women with small firm breasts and coconut drinks in their hands? What is it, like a joke or something?

He guesses he could have taken a cab but that just leaves one more witness. Cops always talk to cabbies and he already had one who brought him in from the airport. Better than renting a car, though, that just leaves a paper trail and more people who’ve seen you. So better to walk, even in this heat.

Couldn’t have done this in the wintertime, right? When the snow is blowing sideways into your eyes, your toes feel like they’re going to snap off, and a flight to fun in the sun is just what the doctor ordered? Sit out by the pool with a piña colada in your mitt and pity the poor bastards scraping frost off their windshields back home? Noooo, you have to come in freaking August.

They say it’s a dry heat, but so is an oven. He reaches around and feels the handle of the pistol tucked into the back of his jeans. It’s still there, nice and snug. Last night he’d stopped by the pawn shop they’d told him to go to, and the counter guy slipped him the gun, no problem. A nice clean work piece that won’t hold a print.

He walks for another minute and then stops in his tracks.

Jerry feels dizzy for a second. The sun is so bright and hot it drains the color out of the world. Like the whole world goes white.

A whiteout, he thinks.

Abe likes the sun.

He goes out onto the little balcony — just big enough for a lawn chair — at the motel where he has a permanent room on the second floor. He’s bare-chested with faded lemon-yellow Bermuda shorts, white socks, and sandals. He likes to feel the sun on his chest. The docs have lectured him about skin cancer but for crying out loud he’s eighty-three years old and the prostate is going to kill him before the cancer will.

Old men get cold, and the sun feels good.

Abe feels like he’s always cold these days, what with his bum circulation. His feet are always chilled, and his chest is like an old icebox. Death itself. He sits down with his grapefruit juice and vodka and looks out at the street. Nothing much to look at now, but it was something back then. It’s still beautiful in the movie that rolls through his head in bright old Technicolor.

Back then, when you drove into Phoenix from the east, this was the main street, the highway, and the motor hotels lined it on both sides. Beautiful places too. He remembers the names — the Rose Bowl, the Winter Garden, the H&R, Camp Joy. Pretty places with free ice water and swimming pools. One of them — which one was it? he asks himself, cursing his memory — had a big-screen outdoor movie you could sit and watch at night. Those soft desert winter nights.

They were good times. Him and a few of the boys would come to relax, get away from it all, and you could do that in those days because Phoenix was an open city, no funny business allowed, no blood spilled. It was good to come down from Detroit, especially when they were fighting it out back then, the Jews and the guineas. Good to come down and soak up some sun, have a few drinks, a few laughs, eat Mexican food you couldn’t get back then in Detroit. Get laid.

The women in those days, Abe thinks as he watches the two sad whores across the street. Secretaries, receptionists, and nurses would come down on the train from Detroit, Chicago, Omaha, and they were here to let their hair down and have a good time too. You’d loosen them up with a few drinks and take them to eat at Bill Johnson’s Big Apple where there was a chance at seeing a movie star or two who would maybe recognize you from Las Vegas and come over and say hello and that would cinch the deal with the girl, all right. You could bring her back to your room at the Deserama and in the morning lie in bed and watch her roll her stockings back up her long legs and you’d say, “See you, kid,” and there would be no complications.

Now he remembers bringing Estelle here on their honeymoon, on the way to the Grand Canyon. That was just down the street at the old Sands. He remembers her perfume, the way her black hair touched her shoulders, how she took her slip off and hurried under the sheets. But she was game in bed, Estelle — bucked like a champion. That was a long time ago, he thinks, when a breeze would give you a hard-on, and now Estelle is gone and the Sands is a homeless shelter.

A homeless shelter.

He leans back in his chair, closes his eyes, and feels the sun on his face.

Her feet sweat in the tight shoes.

What’s bothering Evie more than anything right now. Her feet are swollen from the heat and the damn shoes are too tight anyway. Red Fms and skintight jeans that grab her harder than a fourteen-year-old boy in the back of a car. Sunlight glistens off the sequins on the body shirt that shows her stomach, not as tight as it used to be after two kids.

What she’s doing out on VB at noon, two kids, a pimp, and an ice jones to support, you put in the hours. Got popped by vice just two nights before too — her third bust so she’s headed for a stretch and needs to make some before she goes. They gonna take her kids too, ’less she can get her auntie to take ’em first. Except auntie ain’t gonna take no kids unless they come with a little cash attached. She got troubles of her own, her own rent to pay, and the liquor store don’t give the vodka away.

Evie keeps an eye out for the cops. They’re everywhere these days — “cleaning up Van Buren.” They already closed three of the motels where she took johns. The rest are closing on their own, anyway. Won’t be nothing left of VB soon, it’s just fading away.

Van Buren, Van Buren.

Used to be a girl could make a living here, you call it living. She looks down the street and sees the guy coming. Black ball cap, big old blue polo shirt hanging loose over new jeans. One more middle-aged white guy trying to hide his thinning hair and spare tire. She’s looking for a john to jack and he could be the one. Take him in the alley behind the dumpster and while he’s busy thinking about her mouth on his thing and all those sweet noises she’ll be making that wallet will pop out his back pocket like that button on the turkey when it’s ready at Thanksgiving. Even if he wakes up, what’s he going to do? She has a blade in her back pocket and can fillet him like a fish. Johns don’t go to the cops neither, because what they gonna say? Cops will put in about one second flat, worrying about that wallet. What you deserve, you go looking to nut on Van Buren. Take that back to New York. “You wanna date, honey?”

Man keeps walking, like he can’t see her, like she’s invisible. She walks alongside him.

“Honey, you wanna date?”

“Not today.”

“I’ll show you a good time.”

“I’m sure you would.”

“You can be sure.”

“Another time, baby. I’m busy.”

I ain’t your baby, baby. I ain’t nobody’s baby, baby baby baby. “What other time, baby? I’m out here all day.”

The man just keeps walking. Walking and sweating. Maybe she’ll see him on the way back from wherever he’s going, he’s so busy.

Her feet hurt.

Itching in the heat.

Jerry finds the Tahiti Inn.

Just in time too, because another two minutes he might have passed out. Last freaking job I take in the desert, he thinks, in the summer anyway. They want some guy taken off the roster in Phoenix in August, they can call somebody else.

The money is good, anyway. Do the job, hit the airport, fly back to Providence, and take Marcy on a little weekend to Block Island, like she’s been bugging him. Not much to ask, and she’s a good baby, Marcy, she don’t make too much trouble.

He walks past the big sign with the goofy tiki mask. The main office is shaped like a Tahitian hut, or what they think it looks like, anyway. Jerry doesn’t know — he’s never been to Tahiti or even Hawaii. Maybe he should spend a dollar and take Marcy to Hawaii, might not be a bad idea to get a little distance after this. Sit on the beach, watch the girls do the hula, maybe get Marcy fired up a little to lose those last five pounds.

Room 134.

They told him Rosavich is in 134.

Good. No stairs to go up or down.

He finds 134, pulls out the gun and holds it behind his back, then knocks on the door.

Abe dances with Estelle.

In his waking dream, the sun having lulled him into semisleep. In this dream that is not a dream, he’s in the old El Capri Ballroom, whirling her around, little dots of perspiration on her neck as she looks up at him and smiles. She wears a cornflower-blue dress and a string of pearls.

They had come down to Phoenix after the thing with Sol Hirsch went bad. Poor, stupid Sollie, hanging from the rafter in that loft while they took baseball bats to him. He finally told them what they wanted to know, but Abe had felt sick after that, and tired, so he’d said to Estelle, “Let’s take the new Buick down to Phoenix, stay on Van Buren. Do some dining, some dancing, get a tan.” She wouldn’t sit out in the sun, though, she said she liked her skin white and so did he. The few minutes she would sit out with him she’d wear that big floppy sun hat, even in the pool; she did the breast stroke and kept her head above the water. Then she’d go into the room, into the cool dark, and read paperback books and nap until he was ready to go to dinner.

That night at the El Capri she was so pretty.

He was young and handsome.

Van Buren was beautiful.

He sees Sollie Hirsch, his hand jerks, knocks the glass of grapefruit juice over, and he wakes up. Wonders where he is and then sees he’s on Van Buren under a white hot sun.

She don’t find nobody.

Cars go by but don’t even slow down to take a look. No one walks by — everybody has found a cool, dark place to be.

Everybody except me, she thinks.

Ain’t no cool, dark place for me in this bleached-out world.

The door opens and Jerry steps into a world of darkness.

So dark after the bright sun that he can’t see Benny Rosavich spring cat-quick with the knife.

Rosavich plunges the blade into Jerry’s leg and then slices sideways, severing the femoral artery. Jerry screams and backs out the door, which slams shut in front of him. The pistol falls from his hand and clatters on the baked concrete. He grabs his leg, trying to hold the blood in, but it pours around his fingers as he staggers out past the goofy sign and the Tahitian hut, onto Van Buren Street.

Abe looks down from his balcony and sees the man stumble up the sidewalk. A disgrace for a man to be drunk this early in the day. A disgrace and a shame. The man stops as if he’s lost and Abe wonders for a moment if he has sunstroke, then he sees the trail of blood and the man pirouette in an almost graceful dance before he staggers on.

Evie sees him come back.

Walking all goofy, like he’s messed up on glue or paint or something. She looks for the gold ring around his lips but doesn’t see any and then she realizes that he’s really messed up, his pant leg all bloody. He looks at her and this time he doesn’t call her “baby,” he just says, “Help me, please,” and topples at her red shoes.

Evie looks around, don’t see nobody but some old man trying to stand up on the motel balcony. She reaches down and slips the wallet from the man’s back jeans pocket where it was all snug and tight against the new fabric.

Then she walks up the alley into a thin slice of shadow.

Jerry rolls over.

Toward the sun.

Feels it in his face. It’s warm, and good now, because the rest of him is cold and he’s shivering.

He looks up at the sweet sun and smiles. Then the world goes white.

By the time he got to Phoenix by Dogo Barry Graham

Christown

Luis wanted to go and get Catboy, but he knew he couldn’t. The cops might be watching the apartment, and even if they weren’t, they would certainly have forced their way in by now. They would either have taken Catboy to the pound or just ignored him, in which case he would be on the street. Luis fought a temptation to drive around and look for him.

He knew he’d better get out of town right away. At first he thought that the cops would think he’d left by now, so it might be safer to stay put and hide. But where would he hide? Too many people knew what he looked like and might call the cops as soon as they saw him. He knew there would be many vatos getting pulled in for questioning and fingerprinting on the off-chance that they might be him. Once he was far from Santa Fe he’d be safer, and safer still when he was out of the state. They’d be looking for him to head for Mexico, but that was okay with him because he wasn’t going to Mexico...

The place Vanjii moved into was in an apartment complex on Phoenix’s west side. There was a public phone out front with a sign that said, in Spanish, YOU CAN CALL MEXICO FROM HERE. Someone was always using it. Most of the people in the complex had jobs, some had phones and some didn’t, and none of them had any money.

Vanjii shared the apartment with two other people. Carlos, who’d been introduced to her by an old high school friend, had come to Phoenix from Santa Fe to learn to be an auto mechanic. He was hardly ever home. School and work kept him busy during the days and evenings, and he spent many of his nights at his girlfriend’s place.

The other roommate was Jaimie. She was a native of the city, and had been doing well in her life until she’d suffered a head injury when a stranger stomped her for no reason that anybody knew of. Now she was frightened all the time, and never left the apartment unless she had to. She would often forget what she was talking about in the middle of a sentence. She worked part-time as what she called a “telephone actress,” talking dirty to men who called a phone sex company which patched the calls to her home number.

After paying her rent in advance, Vanjii had less than forty dollars. Her father had given her the money for the rent and the bus trip to Phoenix. She knew it wouldn’t be hard to find a job, but she didn’t have a car, and the bus service was a joke.

The apartment was on Seventeenth Avenue and Highland, about a mile away from the Spectrum Mall. On her third day in Phoenix, Vanjii walked to the mall and talked a clothing store into hiring her.

The walk to work was dreamlike. Some of the streets had no sidewalks, so she walked in the gutter. Everything seemed too huge, fast, and loud to be real. The cars blasted by, the drivers sometimes yelling at her just because she was walking. She felt so tiny. The only other people she saw walking were homeless, and they always came up to her, and they always said the same thing. Hey. Hey, I ain’t panhandling. It’s just that my car ran out of gas a couple miles away, and I lost my wallet, and my wife and kids are in the car, and... Vanjii had nothing she could give them.

The heat didn’t seem too bad while she was walking. But when she headed into the mall, with its air-conditioned chill, and sat down, the sweat came out so fast she felt like it was spurting out of her pores. She’d go into the restroom, take off her shirt, and wipe herself down with paper towels, then put on some deodorant. She’d work all day, stopping only to eat the lunch she’d packed. When she walked back home, it would be getting dark and she’d be nervous, but she knew it wouldn’t be long until she’d have saved a few hundred dollars and could buy a car.

Vanjii wondered about Luis, but it all seemed so far away that it didn’t hurt as much as she’d thought it would.

Luis had been in a bar on Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe when it all started to go to shit. He was talking to a guy about selling a little pot, something to make some quick money, to keep eating and maybe pay next month’s rent. It was about 7 in the evening, happy hour in the bar. The place was crowded, and the parking lot was full, so Luis had parked in a small lot across the street.

Luis crossed the street in the darkness and walked into the lot. When he reached his car, he saw that it had been wheel-clamped.

He stood and looked at it. Then he got in the car and sat there. “Fuck!” The word came out on a breath of laughter, but his face was wet with tears. He wiped his face with his hands and sat breathing quietly, trying to get ahold of himself. Then he stepped out of the car and walked around the building, hoping it was still open. It wasn’t.

As he moved back to his car, a white man approached him.

“Is this your car?”

“Yeah.” Luis pointed to the clamp. “I don’t get this.”

“I did it. I’m Dan Ward, I’m a partner in this company—”

“What company?”

He pointed at the building. “This company. We’re a security company. This parking lot’s private property.”

“I didn’t know... Sorry. I didn’t see no sign.”

“It should be obvious that this isn’t public parking.”

“Yeah. Sorry. I had to meet a guy in the bar over there, I couldn’t find a place to park. I didn’t see nobody here, so I thought it’d be okay.”

“Well, you can see that it’s not.”

“Can you take that thing off my car and I’ll go?”

Dan Ward nodded. “Sure. If you want to pay me your fine now.”

“What?”

“There’s a forty-dollar fine for parking here.”

“Bullshit. You can’t do that. You can’t just decide to fine somebody. You can tell me to get out of your parking lot, that’s all.”

“I’m not interested in a legal debate. I’m telling you there’s a clamp on your car, and it’s not coming off until you give me forty dollars.”

“I don’t have forty dollars.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Honest to God, I got about twenty, and I need that. It’s all the money I got.”

Ward looked at him and said nothing.

“Look, how about if I give you my address and you can—”

“Yeah, sure.” Ward laughed. “How about if you come back here when you’ve got the money, and you can have your car back.”

“Okay,” said Luis. “Okay. I’ll give it to you now. Here...” He reached inside a pocket of his jacket.

When he had the knife out, Luis swung it in a big circle, holding it with both hands, like someone swinging a baseball bat. It went into Ward’s body with such force that Luis felt the impact like a car hitting a wall. The momentum threw Luis to the ground and he held onto the knife and tore it across Ward’s lower abdomen and then slid it out. Luis jumped back up, still holding the knife, and saw that Ward was running away from him, letting out a noise that sounded like a mule braying. Ward made it a few steps, trying to ignore the things that were spilling out of him. But some of his intestines were trailing on the ground, and when he stepped on them his head seemed to shatter in a scream that never made it past his lips as he fell and the pain swallowed him.

Luis stood over Ward, raised the knife, hammered it into his spine, and left it there. Then he walked to the car, unlocked the door, got in. Blood was dripping from his hands. His body was shaking but he felt calm. He opened the glove box and removed a few things — sunglasses, the break-up letter from Vanjii, the Bulldog .44 she had hated. He put the sunglasses and letter in his jacket pocket and stowed the gun in the waistband of his jeans.

He walked out of the parking lot into the street. As he moved, he felt his wet shirt chafe his skin. There was a 7-Eleven a couple blocks away. It had a phone outside. Luis dropped two quarters into the phone and dialed Miguel’s number.

He got voice mail. “Hey, it’s me. Something just happened... you’ll probably hear about it. If you can, come and meet me tomorrow morning at the place where you hurt your ankle that time. Bring me some clothes. Come at around 9 o’clock. If you don’t want to, that’s okay. Later.”

He hung up the phone and walked away. After a few minutes he stopped, turned around, and walked back to the 7-Eleven.

The guy behind the counter was named Randy. He was twenty-two. There were no other customers in the store when Luis walked in, trembling, clothes bloody, blood in his hair, head swiveling, glancing around the place.

“Hey, man, you okay?” Randy asked. “You need an ambulance or something?”

Luis pulled the Bulldog and pointed it at him. “Open the register. Give me the money. Don’t touch an alarm or I’ll fucking kill you.”

“Please don’t fucking kill me.” Randy opened the register, started taking the cash from it and putting it on the counter.

“Hey! What the hell!”

The voice came from behind Luis. He turned, saw a young woman who had come in the door and was now on her way back out. Her name was Laura, and her two-year-old daughter was outside in her car, fastened into the child seat. Luis pointed and fired. The sound of it concussed the air in the room. The bullet propelled Laura out the door — went in through her lower back, tore through her bladder, and exited through her side. She lay on the asphalt and cried for her child as the life leaked out of her.

“Please don’t fucking kill me,” Randy said again, but he was leaning over the counter, terrified, pawing at the gun in Luis’s hand. Luis fired again, and most of Randy’s face came apart.

Luis pocketed all the bills from the register and left the store. He knew where he was walking to, but he didn’t know if he would get there before a cop grabbed him. It would depend on how long it took before somebody found the bodies at the 7-Eleven, or the body at the parking lot. Even if that happened soon, he might still make it. He would have to elude the patrol cars, but there was a strong wind blowing, so there would probably be no police helicopters cruising tonight. It was out of his control, so there was no use in worrying about it. Better just to keep walking, stick to the dark residential streets wherever he could, just keep walking, and either he would make it to Hyde Park or he wouldn’t.

The stew was bubbling on the stove. Vanjii stirred it with a wooden spoon. It contained beef, carrots, tomatoes, and potatoes, and was seasoned with pepper, garlic, and cumin. Luis had shown her how to make it.

Carlos was out with his girlfriend. Vanjii was going to share the stew with Jaimie, who was in the living room taking a phone call that had been forwarded by the sex line. Vanjii could hear her talking in a put-on, lisping, little girl voice. “Yeah, honey... Feel me contracting my ass around your cock... Oh, yeah...”

Vanjii stuck her head in the living room, looked at Jaimie, and mouthed, Contracting? Jaimie grinned and shrugged. She had been watching TV when the call came, and she was still watching it, though she had muted the sound. The show was Beavis and Butt-Head.

Curled under a bush in Hyde Park, Luis thought it would be funny if he froze to death during the night.

The place was a preserve of mountain and forest right there in the city. Luis made it there without seeing a cop, and had spent an hour hiking up the mountain in the dark. He stopped near a spot where Miguel had sprained his ankle while walking with Luis about a year earlier. He hoped Miguel would understand his message and show up there in the morning.

It was now around 11. Luis’s intentions were simple. He was going to try to rest, and hope he didn’t die in his sleep. When he woke, he was going to talk to Miguel, if Miguel showed. If Miguel didn’t show, he would have to make another plan, but that was all he had right now.

He was shivering, huddled in his jacket, arms wrapped around himself. Coyotes howled off in the darkness somewhere, and Luis wondered if they would eat him if he died here. He didn’t know if he would be able to sleep in such cold, but he soon felt the shivering stop and the drowsiness come. That should frighten him, he thought; Luis had read that people who freeze to death feel like they’re pleasantly falling asleep. He knew it should frighten him but it didn’t. If this was a taste of the grave, it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t bad at all.

When he woke up he was cold, but he was alive. He looked at his watch. It was 7 in the morning. He stood up, stretched, took a piss. He wished he had a book to read, something to pass the time. He was still tired, but not tired enough to sleep anymore. He walked around in the woods, sometimes jogging a little, until he was warm. He wasn’t hungry, but he was very thirsty.

He wondered if Miguel would come. He wondered why he had told him 9 o’clock, rather than earlier or later. It had just come out of his mouth like that. Several minutes before 9, he headed back to the spot where Miguel had fallen. He wondered if Miguel would remember exactly where it had happened.

Then he heard his friend calling his name.

“Hey,” he yelled back. A moment later, Miguel came in sight.

They stood there in the grass among the trees and looked at each other, Miguel in his suit and tie, Luis in his bloody jeans and jacket.

“Jesus Christ, man,” Miguel said.

“You hear what happened?”

“Yeah. I didn’t know what the fuck you were talking about when I got your message, but it was on the news this morning. Three people, shit... Did you really do it?”

“Yeah.”

“What for, bro?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. You kill three people but you don’t know.”

“One guy clamped my car...”

“Yeah, it said so on the news.”

“And then I robbed the 7-Eleven. But I really don’t know.”

“I don’t even know what to say.”

“Thanks for coming here.”

“Fuck you. What am I supposed to do, just forget about you?”

“I didn’t know if you would.”

“That’s because you don’t know shit.” Miguel started to cry.

“I need clothes,” Luis said.

“I brought you some, like you asked. They’re in my car. Wait here and I’ll get them.” Miguel walked to the road, got a backpack from his car, headed back into the woods. Luis was now sitting on the ground. Miguel dropped the backpack in front of him.

“Thanks,” Luis said.

“You better head for Mexico. There’s no way you can beat this. They got you on video at the 7-Eleven, and they got a body laying next to your car. White people. You’re looking at death row for sure.”

Luis didn’t say anything.

“Get to Mexico. You can just disappear there, they’ll never find you. The narcos’ll cover your ass if you work for them. But go. You gotta go.”

“I know. I’m gonna go.”

“How?”

“I’ll steal a car.”

“You know how to hot-wire?”

“No.”

“You gonna kill somebody to get a car?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Miguel was crying hard. He took out his car keys and threw them at Luis. “Asshole. Asshole. Take my fucking car.”

“Miguel...”

“Shut up. Take the fucking car. I’m still paying it off, so I guess insurance’ll cover it, maybe. I’ll wait a couple days before I report it stolen. At least you won’t get pulled over driving a hot car.”

“Thanks. You know the cops’ll probably figure it out that you helped me.”

“Fuck them. They got to prove it.” Miguel sat down on the ground beside Luis. “Asshole. What happened? I thought I was gonna be best man at your wedding for sure.”

“You would’ve been.”

“I know. And you would’ve been my best man. Oh my God. My God.”

They sat there together for a few minutes, not looking at each other and not saying anything. Miguel stopped crying, wiped his face with his tie. Then Luis said, “Hey, Miguel?”

“What?”

“Listen, it’s gonna be all right. I’m gonna be all right.”

“Sure you are.”

“No, I mean it. I don’t want you to be worried. I don’t want you to worry about anything. It’ll be all right.”

Miguel stood up, and then Luis did the same. Luis held out a dirty, bloodstained hand, and Miguel squeezed it. “You gonna be in touch sometime?” Miguel asked. “At least let me know you made it?”

“Don’t worry about anything.”

“You got money?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit. You got it from the 7-Eleven.”

Miguel walked away. He didn’t look back.

Luis opened the backpack and searched inside it. There were two pairs of jeans, two T-shirts, a thick shirt, a wool jacket, boxer shorts, socks, a pair of running shoes. He stripped off his own clothes, the cold making his teeth chatter, and put on Miguel’s. The shoes were a little bit too big, but they would do. He spat several times on the shirt he had taken off, and used it to wipe his hands and face. He bundled his discarded clothes together and hid them under a bush. Then he picked up the backpack and walked to the road.

Miguel’s car was a white Camaro. Luis got in and looked at himself in the rearview. There was still some dried blood on his face and in his hair. He licked his fingers and rubbed it off his face, then ran his fingers through his hair, brushing the red flakes away. Then he put on his sunglasses and started the car.

As he drove down the road into Santa Fe, he saw Miguel walking quickly. He honked the car horn, and Miguel waved a little. Luis watched him in the rearview until he couldn’t see him anymore.

He drove at the speed limit to Albuquerque. The car had a quarter tank of gas left. He wondered whether it would be safer to stop at a busy gas station there in town where he might be recognized but probably wouldn’t be noticed, or in a quiet one outside of town where he was less likely to be recognized but more likely to be noticed and remembered. Somehow it felt as though a gas station in town would be safer, but he just didn’t want to get out of the car, so he pulled onto the I-40 going west and filled up with gas at a place about ten miles out of the city.

He kept thinking about his apartment, about the things it contained, his plates and cups and skillets, Catboy. His life with Vanjii. He wished he had asked Miguel to take care of Catboy.

In the early evening, he crossed the Arizona state line. When he reached Flagstaff, he got on I-17 and headed south, until the pines gave way to cacti.

When Vanjii got home from work, Jaimie told her that her dad had called twice. She called him back, and he told her what he had seen on TV. Vanjii yelled at him, then said she was sorry. She hung up. Then she found Miguel’s number and called it. Miguel didn’t want to talk because he was afraid his phone might be tapped. He didn’t tell Vanjii that, he just said he had to go out somewhere. She was angry with him, but he called her from a public phone about ten minutes later and they talked for a long time.

By the time he got to Phoenix, it was around 8 in the evening. Luis exited on Seventh Street, turned onto Roosevelt, and followed it to Grand. When he saw the Bikini Lounge, he wanted to stop there just because it was someplace he had heard of.

The place wasn’t busy, even though you could get some brands of beer for a dollar a bottle, and a pitcher for three dollars. A guy was deejaying, playing soul standards from the 1970s. Luis ordered a beer and sat at the bar and listened.

At the beginning of a Curtis Mayfield song, a woman and a man got up and started to dance, standing right in front of the deejay’s booth. They danced slowly, holding each other close. The man was balding and the woman had gray in her hair and Luis somehow knew they had been together for years. It felt like a knife in his spine.

Jaimie was in the living room working the phone, talking to men as they jacked off. Carlos, as usual, wasn’t home. Vanjii was in the kitchen drinking coffee and staring at the table. She hadn’t told Jaimie anything, and didn’t think she was going to. She didn’t even know how to tell it to herself.

A fly landed on the table. It sat there, eyes sending images to the brain, lungs receiving oxygen, heart beating with certainty. Vanjii didn’t think, she just slapped with her hand, coming from behind so the fly saw nothing, and then the fly was crushed flat, just a stain on the wood. Vanjii washed her hands and made more coffee. She wondered when she’d be able to cry.

When Luis left the bar, he walked around for a few minutes. At 1 in the morning, it felt hardly less warm than a summer afternoon in Santa Fe. A person slept in every other doorway. Luis wanted to walk farther, but he could find nowhere to head to, so he went to his car.

He was almost out of gas. He stopped at a Circle K on First Avenue and Van Buren. As he was pumping the gas, a guy came up to him. “Hey. Excuse me...”

Luis looked at him and didn’t say anything.

“Listen,” the guy said. “I need a favor. My little girl’s sick, and she’s on East Fillmore, and I need to go there and see her tonight, but I got no car. If you can just give me a ride up there, I’ll give you five bucks for the gas.”

Luis didn’t question the guy’s story, because he could see right through it. The reason the story wasn’t more credible or better explained was because the guy was junk sick, and he wanted to go visit his dealer.

“I been asking lots of people, and they all said no. I really need to see her, man.”

“Okay,” said Luis. “I’ll take you there, but I ain’t got time to wait for you and bring you back.”

“That’s okay, that’s no problem. I just need you to take me there. Thank you.”

The drive took about five minutes. The guy clumsily tried to make conversation, and Luis went along with it. “Okay, right here,” the guy said, pointing to an apartment complex. Luis slowed down and the guy got out. “Thanks a lot, man. Really.”

“Sure,” said Luis. The guy tried to pay him for the gas, but Luis shook his head and drove away.

The neighborhood was nicknamed Gangs R Us, and the cops were going there more and more often, trying to show a presence. Luis passed a police car waiting at a corner. When the cop saw the New Mexico plates, he thought Luis might be either a visitor who’d gotten lost or a drug dealer doing some interstate networking. Either way, he fell in behind him and turned on his lights.

When Luis saw the lights, the panic rose up inside him like vomit, and he fought to control it. He knew Miguel hadn’t reported the car stolen yet, but even if it was just that he had a light out or something, the cop would ask to see a driver’s license.

Luis pulled over and turned off the engine. He watched the officer get out of the car and walk toward him. When the cop was almost to his window, Luis started the car and took off.

He turned a corner, hit the brakes, jumped out of the car, and ran. He heard the cop car approach behind him. Luis ran harder, shrieking air into his lungs, looking for cover, a place to hide. There wasn’t any.

“ Hey, asshole! Stop right now or I’ll shoot!”

Luis stopped. Raised his hands. Turned around.

The cop had gotten out of his car and was pointing a gun at him. “Lie down and put your hands behind your back.”

The concrete warm against his cheek. The handcuffs closing around his wrists.

Madison Street Jail was only a short distance from the bar where he’d spent the evening. He was booked in and finger-printed and put in a cell.

It was known as the Horseshoe, and it was like no jail Luis had ever heard of. People would be rotated from cell to cell so that they lost track of time. The cells they put him in were completely covered with men. There were men sleeping curled around the toilet that had shit dripping off the sides and piss all around the floor. Men were sleeping on top of other men. Some were using toilet rolls as pillows. They lay on the trash that was scattered everywhere from the sack lunches that were provided. The smell was like a kick in the face by a dirty foot.

No one is sure how long Luis stayed there, but it wasn’t very long.

Jeremy Ruvin should have been a cop. He loved cops, and cops loved him. Like many veteran cops, he was a legend in his own lunchtime. But Ruvin wasn’t a cop. He was a reporter.

He had spent twenty years at the Phoenix Weekly, a free sheet that was distributed throughout the city. It was part of a national chain of weekly papers, and it regarded itself as the only real news outlet in the valley. This wasn’t much of a boast; Phoenix was a city without a real newspaper. The main daily, the Arizona Republic, was almost devoid of news and existed to further the interests of the corporations that were developing the city. Its rival, the Tribune, had a publisher who openly supported the banning of reporters — including the paper’s own — from government meetings to discuss whether public money should be given to aid corporate development. A famous local swindler once observed that in Phoenix, when you try to sell people out, they take the first offer.

The Phoenix Weekly was a tabloid full of long, turgid stories that few people read. But Ruvin’s stories won Arizona Press Club awards every year, and had been doing so for as long as anyone could remember. Although his stories were as slanted as those of his peers, they were packed with lurid detail. The cops gave him access that they gave to no one else. Because, no matter what the facts might be, Ruvin would always make them look good.

This was something they needed. Phoenix was among the leaders of the country when it came to unjustified police shootings. The city had to pay out millions in lawsuits, and more were pending. But in the world of Ruvin, every cop on the force was a heroic figure who only shot or beat up unarmed civilians when it was strictly necessary. He never actually lied in print — he just stayed away from stories that might show the police department as it really was.

Ruvin had few hobbies. The only thing he cared about was his identity as a reporter, and the only people he hung out with were the cops and prosecutors he wrote about. In his mind he was famous, his world a black-and-white movie in which he wore a raincoat and fedora with a tag that read PRESS, and talked out of the side of his mouth. He imagined the raincoat and fedora so vividly that when you were in his presence you felt like you could almost see them.

When the cops realized that they had Luis, then realized that they didn’t have him anymore, the first reporter they called was Ruvin.

Ruvin and Detective Zack Blantyre had been friends for years. Blantyre had asked Ruvin to write a biography of him, and Ruvin had been sporadically working on it. Now they sat in Durant’s restaurant on Central Avenue, and Ruvin asked Blantyre what had gone down.

“We don’t know what happened,” Blantyre said.

“Zack. You find out you have a triple murderer in your jail. Then you find out he’s not in your jail anymore. And you’re telling me nobody knows what happened?”

“Okay, off the record — for now, okay...”

Ruvin nodded.

“We do know. He just walked out of there, him and four others. Somebody forgot to lock a door, and five of them just walked. We know it happened, we just don’t know how it happened.”

“No matter how I write it, you know that’s not going to look good.”

“No shit. No shit. I mean, it’s not like it’s the first time this kind of crap’s happened at the jail... but a fucking three-time killer? You know as well as I do, most of the guys in the jail are in there because they’re fucked in the head and got no money... but you get guys like this sometimes. I’ve been saying for a long time that something like this was gonna happen down there someday if they didn’t start hiring people who know which way is up.”

“He’s from New Mexico?”

“Yeah.”

“So what did he come here for?”

“How should I know, Jer? While we’re asking stuff, what did he kill three people for?”

“I’ll sit on this,” Ruvin said. “But I can’t for long.”

“I’m not asking you to. I just wanted to let you know about it first.”

“Appreciated. Look, I’m not gonna wait and eat lunch. I’ll get something on the run. I’m gonna head out to New Mexico today.”

Luis didn’t expect it to work, but when the other guys started to walk out, he simply followed them. And when nobody stopped them, they kept walking. And when they were outside on Madison Street in the sunshine, and the cops who were entering the building ignored them, they split up and kept walking.

Miguel was in his pajamas eating toast for breakfast when the cops knocked on his door. He let them in, they asked him about Luis, and he lied. Then they asked him where his car was, and he knew he was fucked. They let him get dressed before they put the handcuffs on him.

Luis knocked on the door. Vanjii opened it. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt with the name of the store she worked for on it. She had been getting ready to head out to work.

Her first impulse was to close the door, but Luis pushed it open with his foot and stepped into the apartment. They stood there in the living room looking at each other.

“You gonna kill me?” Vanjii said, her voice breaking.

“What?”

She began to sob. “I don’t want to die...”

“What would I kill you for? Why would I do that?”

“You killed those other people... I don’t know...”

“You think I would hurt you? You’re scared of me?”

“... Yeah.” She looked so small, her face crumpled, tears and snot everywhere.

“You said you knew I loved you and you’d take that where you could get it...”

He reached out to touch her. She was too frightened to pull away, so she closed her eyes and cringed violently when he put his hand on her shoulder.

Jaimie came out of her bedroom “Vanj? What’s wrong? You okay?”

Luis turned like an animal and ran.

He walked, not trying to hide himself, not trying to stop the sun from burning him. He walked along Camelback until he reached Seventh Avenue, and then he headed south to En-canto Park. It was only a few miles, a distance that would have meant nothing to him in Santa Fe, but the heat of Phoenix made it seem like he was wading through hot water. When he reached the park, his head was spinning and his mouth was as dry as the ground.

He lay down in the shade of a tree and kept still until his vision came into focus. Then he moved around, looking for someplace to get water. The cops had taken all his money. He went up to people and asked them if they’d buy him some water; one guy gave him a couple dollars and told him there was a vendor at the children’s play area, Encanto Kiddie Land. He went there and bought a bottle of water and then lay down under another tree and drank it all.

He remembered how Vanjii had looked when she’d cried. He didn’t know it, but his own face now looked like hers had, twisted like it might come apart, bawling, snorting, so frightened. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t known she would be afraid of him. Who wouldn’t be afraid of him? He thought about the life he always pretended to himself that he had: cooking, listening to music, driving his car, reading books, talking to his friends, falling in love with Vanjii, taking care of his cat. And he thought about the life he really had: people scared, people hurt, people dead.

Vanjii was sitting on the couch and Jaimie was holding her while she cried. She kept trying to explain what had happened, but Jaimie’s head condition made it hard for her to follow because she couldn’t remember things. She just kept stroking Vanjii’s hair and saying, “It’s okay. Nobody’s gonna hurt you.”

Ruvin didn’t have to spend long in Santa Fe. He talked to the cops and asked if they’d let him talk to Miguel, but they weren’t Phoenix cops so they wouldn’t. Then he walked around the barrio, knocking on doors. Some people told him Luis didn’t exist, that he was just a ghost, a legend, a scary story for late at night. Other people gave him names and addresses. He was soon talking to Luis’s mother. She didn’t have much to tell him in terms of facts, but she gave him plenty of color he could use in his story. About an hour later, he was sitting in a living room talking to Vanjii’s father.

As soon as Ruvin left that apartment, he pulled out his cell phone and called Blantyre. He got voice mail. “Zack, it’s Jerry. I’m in Santa Fe. Listen up, I’ve got an address for you...” He recited it twice. “It’s the address of the kid’s girlfriend. They used to live together, and she moved to Phoenix a few weeks ago. He must have gone there to see her. I’m just gonna head to Albuquerque and fly home, so do me a favor — don’t do anything until I get there, okay?”

He put the phone away and got in his rental car.

Luis lay on the ground for most of the day, sleeping on and off. He stayed there after the park closed and it got dark. Then he got up and started to walk. It was hard to move. Each step hurt. He knew he needed more water, but he wasn’t going to ask anyone for money, and he wasn’t going to hurt anyone for it. He walked for two hours, falling a few times, always getting up and walking on.

The apartment door seemed to explode as the cops forced it open. Vanjii, Jaimie, and Carlos were sitting in the living room, and when the cops saw Carlos they pointed their guns at him and screamed at him to get down on the floor. Van-jii and Jaimie screamed back at them. From a safe distance, Ruvin took notes.

Luis couldn’t walk any further, and he’d never known where he was heading to anyway. He saw a public phone outside a liquor store, went to it, fumbled in his pocket for the change he had left after buying the water in the park. The call would cost fifty-five cents, and he knew he had a little more than that. He found it and fed it into the machine and dialed.

“Hello?” said Vanjii.

“It’s me. Listen, I’m sorry I scared you. I don’t want you to be scared...”

“Okay,” she said, and he heard it in her voice.

“The cops are there, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m so sorry, honey.”

“I know. I am too.” Pause. “You don’t sound good.”

“Don’t worry. Can I talk to the cops?”

“What’re you gonna do?”

“I’m just gonna keep on loving you, that’s what. That’s the only thing I can do. And nobody’s gonna get hurt no more. You don’t need to be scared no more.”

She said something to someone else. He couldn’t hear what it was. Then a voice said, “This is Detective Blantyre.”

“Yeah, hey, bitch. Fucking listen. Here’s where I’m at — Eleventh Avenue and Roosevelt. There’s a lot across the street from the liquor store. I’ll be waiting for you there.”

“What are—”

“Shut your fucking hole. Come on down here so I can kill your white ass.” Luis hung up, walked slowly across the street to the empty lot, and sat on the ground.

Vanjii. Vanjii. Vanjii. I’m so scared. I love you and love you and I’m so scared.

A homeless guy wandered into the lot. He came over and tried to talk. “You better get out of here,” Luis said. “The cops are coming. It’s gonna be bad.”

The guy didn’t believe him, thinking he just wanted the lot to himself. But then he heard the sirens and knew it was true, and he ran.

There were six cars. Luis was sitting with his back to the wall; the cops stood behind the cars, forming a semicircle around him. They all had guns aimed at him.

Vanjii. Vanjii. He kept bringing her face into his mind, remembered how she looked when she was smiling in the bathtub in candlelight and loving him.

“LIE DOWN ON THE GROUND AND PUT YOUR HANDS ON TOP OF YOUR HEAD! DO IT RIGHT NOW!”

He stood up, flipped them off with one hand, and reached in his pocket with the other, pretending he was grabbing for a gun. He didn’t get his hand out of the pocket before the bullets hit him, turning him weightless and throwing him against the wall. It hurt and it didn’t hurt and then it hurt again. The cops kept on firing until there were bullet holes even in the soles of his feet, but he didn’t know that. He thought about Catboy, and hoped that nobody would be mean to him.

Confession by Stella Pope Duarte

Harmon Park

Big Boy’s real name was Edward Ornelas, but nobody ever called him Edward, because by the time he was ten he weighed in at over 150 pounds. He lived east of Nineteenth Avenue, in the Central Projects, close to the neighborhood where the girl disappeared last October. Big Boy lost twenty pounds once he was put in juvie at age eleven, for shoplifting at Woolworth’s, taking things you could buy for nickels and dimes, Batman and Robin plastic figures and a Batman car. The reason he got a term at juvie was because one of the clerks said he had seen him several times lifting things, but couldn’t prove it, so due to suspicious behavior, and to teach him a lesson, he was given six months at Boys Town.

His mother Luz, who subscribed to the Catholic Monitor and attended meetings of the Sodality of Mary at St. Anthony’s, was so ashamed of him, she wouldn’t visit him. She had the entire church pray rosaries for the salvation of his soul, and kept a photo of her son on her dresser with a candle burning in front of pictures of saints including one of St. Michael the Archangel with his foot planted on the Devil’s neck. Luz’s sister, Nena, who didn’t subscribe to the Catholic Monitor, and could have cared less about sodalities or saints, went to see him with her daughter Atalia, who was a sophomore at Phoenix Central High. Atalia insisted that Big Boy was innocent of stealing the Batman and Robin figures and had been mistaken for another boy, a huge Indian kid nicknamed Squirt.

“He didn’t steal anything!” Atalia told her mother as they drove to see Big Boy. “All he had in his pockets were toothpicks and bubble gum. That guy at the store had it in for him... he’s always watching the Mexican and black kids. I tell you, this time it was an Indian kid... I saw him. Big Boy’s nothing but a cry baby. He’s probably crying every night in juvie. We should talk to the judge.”

“Never mind,” Nena said. “Nobody will believe you, just leave it alone, he’ll be out soon.”

Big Boy was freed from the detention center exactly six months later; thinner, sullen, and reinvested in his life, as his PO, Howard Franco, described it. “Done his time,” Franco said at the court hearing. “Now he’s ready to take his place in the community, finish eighth grade and move on to high school. Right, Ornelas?” Franco never called him Big Boy, as he didn’t think the kids should be identified by anything except a number or their last names.

Luz was there, sitting next to Franco, watching her son one chair away from her. Her eyes filled with tears as she thought of how thin Big Boy had gotten. Maybe she had been too hard on him. After all, he had always been close to her, maybe too close. She worried he didn’t like girls, and now she worried maybe he had a boyfriend in juvie. She worried that other boys his age wouldn’t be stealing Batman and Robin plastic figures, and maybe his cousin Atalia had been right in the first place — the store clerk had it in for him. She cursed the day Big Boy’s father, Edward Sr., had walked out on her to get together with an older woman, a barmaid from the American Legion Hall, the place that boasted a dark, musty bar where Edward Sr. drank himself into a stupor every Friday night. Her boy needed a male figure in his life, she reasoned, and decided to call up Father Leo at St. Anthony’s, the most saintly man she knew, to stand guard over her son’s life.

Father Leo had a huge bald head, and a smile that went from ear to ear when he was in a good mood. When he was in a bad mood, he shook his fist at whoever happened to stand in his way, assuring them they were all headed for Hell if they didn’t take their religion seriously. He could be seen at night walking up and down the sidewalk in front of the church, reciting litanies to honor saints and supplicating for the souls of his disobedient parishioners. It was rumored he had a crucifix in his room with a Jesus hanging on it with real glass eyes that shone in the dark and kept Father Leo company as he lay on his bed weeping over the sins of the world.

When Luz approached Father Leo about taking Big Boy under his wing, he told her he would hear his confession, then asked her to pay the two-dollar fee so he could join the St. Anthony’s Boys Club. Most of the club members were altar boys, and were also part of Father Leo’s baseball team. Big Boy wasn’t athletic, so he told the priest he’d rather just be an altar boy and not play ball, and the priest told him that confession was the first requirement for becoming an altar boy, as boys with ruined souls were unacceptable.

In the dark box that represented the confessional, Father Leo prepared to hear Big Boy’s confession one Saturday afternoon, with two skinny girls and their grandmother waiting in line outside the thick curtain that covered the doorway of the chamber. Big Boy’s legs felt like two iron rods glued to the vinyl-covered kneeler with its seam ripped open on one end.

The screened panel opened with a sound that made Big Boy jump, and in the dim light he saw Father Leo’s profile leaning up against the wire mesh.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” His mouth went dry as he fumbled for the rest of the words. “Ah... this is Big Boy.”

“Don’t tell me who you are!” said Father Leo impatiently. “You’re a sinner, that’s the only important thing, God doesn’t care about anything else.” On the other side of the thick curtain, Big Boy heard one of the skinny girls laugh, and he wondered if they were standing close enough to hear what the priest had said. “Now tell me the truth, did you shoplift at Woolworth’s? As you know, Thou shalt not steal is one of the Ten Commandments.”

“No, Father, I didn’t steal, but I wanted to... sometimes.”

“Well, wanting to is just as bad as doing it. You have to live clean from your heart. The Devil wants your heart, don’t you understand?” Then there was a pause, and Father Leo moved closer to the wire mesh screen. “Never mind about Woolworth’s,” he whispered. “What about that girl who disappeared last year, what do you know about her? She was one of your friends, wasn’t she?”

“Who? Nanda?”

“Yes, Nanda. I know how you boys looked at her... and now she’s gone.”

Big Boy’s face got bright red in the dark confessional. He felt hot, and shuffled on the kneeler. He knew who Nanda was, all the boys did. She wasn’t afraid to let the boys touch her breasts, two huge mounds that grew on her chest, on summer nights at Harmon Park. Usually one of the older boys would end up taking Nanda around the backside of the bathroom stalls, behind bushes that grew next to the concrete wall, and spend time touching her in the dark and doing things that all the other boys wanted to do. Even Simon the Freak had put his hands on Nanda, and he was a kid who didn’t even get a hug from his own mother. The boys didn’t have to worry about Nanda’s father and mother coming by to get her, as her parents were the neighborhood drug dealers. Both were junkies and most nights they were busy entertaining some thugs who drove a black Oldsmobile with a Nevada license plate.

“Were you one of the boys who touched Nanda?”

“No. But I gave her a gift once... a little cross.”

“The one you stole from Woolworth’s?” “No! It was my sister’s, but she didn’t want it anymore.”

“Well, you still stole it if it belonged to your sister. And why did you give it to Nanda? What did you want? Did you think nasty things about her?”

Big Boy felt his hands sweating, and his heart thumping against his T-shirt. “Yes, I guess I did. But I gave her the gift because she was my friend.”

“All the boys were her friends!” said Father Leo. “Don’t get smart. Now say ten Our Fathers, and ten Hail Marys as penance. And don’t let me hear that you’ve been stealing again, or thinking nasty thoughts about girls.” He mumbled an absolution, and raised his hand in the dim light, blessing Big Boy. Then, with one quick motion, he shut the screened panel.

The next day, Big Boy walked by Nanda’s apartment and noticed the black Oldsmobile with the Nevada license plate parked outside on the street. He peaked inside the car and saw a girl’s jacket in the backseat. Through the tinted windows he couldn’t tell if it was Nanda’s. He thought of the girl, of her soft, fleshy breasts, and felt guilty for lying to Father Leo. He had touched Nanda, and had never forgotten how beautiful her skin had felt under his hand. He had kissed her too, because she had told him he could. He had looked into Nanda’s dark eyes, stared deep into the luminous pupils, shiny as if she had just shed tears, and he had seen her sadness. Instinctively, he had looked up at the sky, as it seemed to him that a part of Nanda had suddenly taken flight. She had stood in front of him that Sunday night when he was still in seventh grade and she was already in eighth. Just stood there, watching his hand on her breast, as if she was a mannequin, and he could have done anything he had wanted to do. Big Boy had gently smoothed back her hair and hooked the chain with the tiny silver crucifix around her neck. She had smiled at him then, and it was the first time Big Boy had seen the dimples on her cheeks.

Big Boy dismissed the memory of the silver chain from his mind... the one he had stolen at Woolworth’s. Another lie he had told Father Leo. The clerk had been right, he had indeed lifted things from Woolworth’s, including the silver chain he had given to Nanda. She had been happy wearing it, and Big Boy didn’t regret taking it.

Nanda wasn’t in school the next day, and nobody gave it a second thought. She had been absent many times, and Monday was one of her favorite days to stay home. There was talk that she wouldn’t be able to graduate, and would have to repeat the eighth grade. Big Boy hoped she’d fail, so she could be in his class, then he’d get closer to her, maybe be the one who took her behind the bathroom wall at Harmon Park.

Nanda’s parents were unconcerned by her disappearance, saying she had the habit of running away to her sister’s in Los Angeles and hiding out. She’d be back soon, they said. The truant officer from school stopped by, but could get nothing more from them. They weren’t worried, they said, she’d come back, this was normal for her. But the girl didn’t come back. She had simply disappeared and people in the projects talked about it every day for months. The girls were glad she was gone, now they had more control over their boyfriends, and their mothers were glad to be rid of her, now their daughters wouldn’t be plagued by Nanda’s loose ways.

“She’s probably pregnant,” Atalia told Big Boy one time when she visited with him at juvie. “She’s probably somewhere having a baby, and she’ll be back after she has it.”

“She never told me she’d be leaving,” Big Boy replied.

Atalia frowned at him. “I didn’t know you were that close to her. Why should she tell you?”

“We were kind of friends,” Big Boy said, squirming in his chair. Across the room he saw one of the boys who had touched Nanda one night, pulling down her underwear and making her cry. He looked away, remembering how she had run away, with the boy holding up her underwear like a flag and laughing.

Nanda didn’t come back to school, and Big Boy missed her. She had slipped her hand through his after he had linked the chain with the cross around her neck, and leaned into him. “You’re my best friend,” she had whispered. Big Boy remembered her voice, distant somehow, and still sensed the pressure of her hand in his, the palm warm, delicate to his touch. He’d thought of Nanda every night he spent at juvie, and now that Father Leo had asked him about her, he had started thinking about her all over again.

Being one of Father Leo’s altar boys meant there would be many rules to follow. Big Boy had to be sure there were enough hosts for the masses he served, and that the wine was ready in the chalice when the priest walked into the sacristy. The door to the priest’s closet containing his vestments was to be unlocked, the candles on the altar had to be lit, and the Bible Father Leo read from placed on the altar and opened to the reading of the day.

Big Boy felt as if Father Leo could look right through him. He sometimes saw the priest kneeling down in front of a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus before mass, his face in his hands. He seemed like he was praying, maybe listening to the voice of Jesus in his head. Big Boy felt as if the priest was watching him around the girls who came up to receive Communion during mass. He had ordered him not to think nasty thoughts, and since that time, that was all Big Boy thought about. He remembered Quincy, a black kid from juvie, who had told him all there was to know about girls, and that real men did it to them, and didn’t ask any questions. Big Boy wasn’t sure what “did it to them” meant, but he was hoping to find out, maybe from Ernestina, one of Nanda’s friends.

Big Boy had gotten into the habit of watching Ernestina at school every chance he got, noticing how her sweater plunged into a V, showing the smooth skin of her neck, and lower still, to the outline of her breasts, almost identical to Nanda’s. He got his courage up one day at lunch and talked to her at the drinking fountain, towering over her, even though she was a year older than him.

“Have you seen Nanda around?”

“Nah, she’s gone. Her mom won’t say where. I think she went to California.” Ernestina took a drink from the fountain and the water dribbled from her lips to her chin and onto her chest. It took all of Big Boy’s strength not to reach over and brush the drops of water from her chin and kiss her. She watched him, suddenly tossing her head and laughing out loud at something somebody said to her, then she walked past Big Boy like he wasn’t even there.

“I’m so proud of you,” Big Boy’s mother said to him one Sunday morning at breakfast. “My own son, serving mass! Maybe someday you’ll be a priest... Yes, I want you to think about it.” She picked up Big Boy’s three-year-old sister in her arms. “Lizzie can get married and have kids someday, but I want you to be a priest, a saint, like Father Leo. If it weren’t for him, I don’t know where we’d be. He brought me a food box the other day and had the sodality help me pay the rent. I tell you he’s a saint! Now he’s watching over you. Franco called him the other day to see how you were doing, and Father gave him a good report.”

“Why did my PO call Father?” Big Boy asked.

“I told him Father Leo was as good as your own dad, and better because he’s really taking an interest in you, so he put him down as your mentor. I tell you, God’s blessing us!”

Big Boy trudged to St. Anthony’s that morning to serve 10 a.m. mass, and thought of Father Leo looking through him, reading his thoughts, and now he was talking to Franco.

Walking home after mass, Big Boy decided to go by Nanda’s apartment. He walked past the bakery and El Toro Restaurant to cross Central Avenue and get to Nanda’s, all the while watching out for any of the boys who normally hung around that section of the projects. Maybe one of them would want to challenge him for coming into their territory, then he’d need a good excuse, or he’d have to fight to get out. He saw no one. It was a spring day, the weather warm. He saw kids playing a baseball game at Harmon Park in the distance, and caught sight of the park’s swings, the old rusty merry-go-round, and the bathrooms, the faded walls marked up by gang signs, and he longed for Nanda. He longed to see her one more time, look into her sad eyes, watch her take flight, then catch her in his arms again and fill her with kisses, slowly caressing each breast.

Big Boy noticed the black Oldsmobile parked in front of Nanda’s apartment and peered into the car’s window, this time not spotting the girl’s jacket. He saw boxes in the backseat, luggage and papers strewn around.

“Hey!” yelled a man coming out of Nanda’s apartment. “What do you think you’re doing? Get away from there!” The guy was tall, over six feet, wearing a jacket in spite of the warm day. He had sunglasses on, and wore a beret cocked at an angle.

“I’m not doing anything,” Big Boy answered, “I was just wondering... if you’ve seen Nanda.”

“And who would be wanting to know?” asked the guy, walking leisurely up to Big Boy, lighting a cigarette.

“A friend.”

“She ain’t got no friends... cousins maybe, but friends?”

Big Boy felt his stomach cramp as the guy leaned next to the car, puffing on his cigarette. He stuck the cigarette in his mouth as he rolled up his sleeves to show off his tats, blue webs that climbed up his arms.

Big Boy wanted to walk away, disappear like Nanda had, but now that he was so close to this man who had just walked out of her apartment, he was determined to get some information from him.

“Are you from Las Vegas?”

“Yeah, and who wants to know?”

“Big Boy.”

“You ain’t that big. Nobody’s big, we’re all the same size. Ain’t nobody can outrun a bullet.” Then he laughed as he saw Big Boy’s face turn pale. “Want a cigarette?”

“Nah, that’s okay.”

“Ah, yeah, Nanda. Now, there’s a girl, if you know what I mean. Now, she’s big in all the right places.” He laughed again, gruffly. “Right, Big Boy? Is that what you want? Some action?” The guy sneered, then reached into his pocket to take out his car keys. “I gotta go,” he said. “Ain’t got no time to be talking to big boys who are full of shit. Is Franco your PO?”

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

“Been on the streets all my life. Tell that son of a bitch he owes me. He owes Chano, and I ain’t forgot.” Then he climbed into the Olds, and Big Boy stood watching the car creep down the street, thinking how Nanda would have looked sitting next to Chano, smoking a cigarette.

Months went by, the whole summer, and other girls joined the boys at Harmon Park — Ernestina and Yvette and a few others who were loud and bossy and played hard to get, but let themselves be caught in the end. Atalia visited Big Boy and told him to stay away from Harmon unless he wanted to get involved with narcos and floozies who did it with everybody. No matter what she told him, Harmon Park drew Big Boy like a magnet, leering at him with memories of Nanda, soft, fleshy breasts, rich warm places inside her he’d like to get to. Sometimes tears crawled down Big Boy’s face late at night as he thought of Nanda disappearing like a puff of smoke, and everybody moving on with their lives, as if it didn’t matter at all. Maybe she was living in Las Vegas — dancing at a casino. But she was too young for that... or maybe she was dead. When Big Boy said the word dead in his mind, he flinched, as if he had been hit in the face. Dead, her body lying out some-where in the desert. Big Boy closed his eyes tight to block out the thought.

On the anniversary of Nanda’s disappearance, Father Leo called Big Boy into his office.

“Stop moping around about that girl,” he said nonchalantly. “I know you’re trying to figure out where she is. If I were you, I’d drop it. Clean heart, remember? I think you need another confession, you’re way overdue. Confession on Saturday, at 2 p.m. Be there.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Oh, by the way, Franco says you’re almost ready to be released from probation, and I told him you were totally repented — no more shoplifting at Woolworth’s. Right, Big Boy?”

“Right.”

“You don’t want to follow in the footsteps of Chano — you know, the guy who visits Nanda’s family sometimes.”

Big Boy looked up at Father Leo, surprised that he knew anything about Chano. Maybe he had visited him in prison, or heard his confession. Then he saw Father Leo smile broadly, as if he had just caught Big Boy sneaking a sip of wine from the chalice. He pulled open the drawer on his desk and reached in, taking out a silver chain with a small cross. He watched Big Boy closely, saw the fear in his eyes as the boy glimpsed the chain he had given Nanda in Father Leo’s hand.

“I want you to give this to Ernestina,” Father Leo said quietly, leaning close to Big Boy. “You understand, don’t you?” He waited, dangling the chain in midair between them.

Then he sat back as Big Boy took the silver chain from his hand and dropped it in his pocket.

“Confession on Saturday, don’t forget,” Father Leo said.