South Phoenix Rules

1

I drove home in the light rain, watching the moisture slowly dissolve the dust that had accumulated on the windshield, then be swept aside by the wipers. The trunk of Lindsey’s aging Honda Prelude was full of boxes, and the car rode low in the back. It was late December and cold for Phoenix, in the low fifties, the sky was overcast, and I wore my best suit. Up Third Avenue, the car slipped into the Willo district with its historic houses, big trees, and cooling lawns. Nearly every street had For Sale signs, a vain effort in the real-estate crash. “Willo Block Watch 9-1-1” signs had also recently proliferated in the yards, which irritated me, playing into the suburban stereotype of these neighborhoods. The really lurid crimes all happened out in the newer subdivisions.

I stopped behind a school bus letting out two children who walked east into the block of century-old bungalows on Holly Street. No children live on my block of Cypress Street. When I was their age, the neighborhood was full of kids, but it didn’t have a name then. It was just a neighborhood of old houses and we all walked or rode our bikes to Kenilworth School, half a mile away. Rich kids from Palmcroft, poor kids from south of Roosevelt and the rest of us-we all went to the public school. We did duck-and-cover drills and made lifelong friends. Now the children in the neighborhood go to private schools and Kenilworth is all Hispanic and poor.

Turning onto Cypress, I saw the FedEx truck pull away from our house, the 1924 Spanish colonial with the big picture window. The tamale women were working their way toward me. It was the last week of December but I was grateful they were still peddling the homemade Christmas treat. I parked the Honda in the carport, let the boxes in the back be, and waited on the front porch. As usual, the younger woman with the good English approached courteously; the older one, perhaps the chef, stood back. I greeted them both in Spanish and held out fifteen dollars for a plastic bag of tamales. Now I had dinner.

The low sun was cutting through the clouds, hitting the Viad Tower on Central, two blocks away, just right to make it glow. It was the most interesting skyscraper in Phoenix’s otherwise drab modern skyline. It was in foreclosure. On the doorstep was a square box addressed to Robin. I took the tamales in first, left them on the kitchen counter, and returned for the parcel. It was heavy. I hefted it up the staircase, past the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and placed it on the landing that led to the garage apartment. The apartment had its own entrance from the alley, admittedly on creaky old stairs. But Robin always came in the front door and used the open walkway that led from the landing, across the interior courtyard, to the south entrance of the two-room pad.

I didn’t want Robin living there, even if she was Lindsey’s sister. I didn’t trust Robin. But Lindsey insisted that she stay; they had been separated for many years before she showed up in Phoenix outside a murder scene one afternoon. Lindsey’s stubbornness about this only increased when Robin lost her job. She was a curator for a private art collection owned by one of the most prominent real-estate financiers in the city. The market collapse took down all his risky bets, and he put a nine-millimeter in his mouth. His art collection was seized. The empty shells of the projects he had funded were all over town.

Downstairs I went into our bedroom and slid off the heavy.357 in its holster, placing it in the drawer of the bedside table. Just two months ago I had been pricing gun safes. The drawer would do. I allowed myself a moment’s smile: all the years Peralta had teased me about my attachment to what he called “my cannon” in an era where all the deputies carried Glocks. But it was only a moment. I kept the suit on, stared at myself in the mirror too long. Then I went into the kitchen and made a martini. Beefeater gin from the freezer, a splash of Noilly Prat vermouth, olives, stirred-the way Lindsey likes it. I settled into grandfather’s leather chair in the office, tempted to read. On the top of my pile was David Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear about the Depression years. I left it there. I thought about turning on music. I didn’t. Instead I just stared into the house, stared out the picture window, and sipped the liquor. The window usually showed off our Christmas tree. This year we didn’t have one.

It was an hour and a second drink later when the front door lock clicked and Robin stepped in.

“Why are you sitting in the dark, Dave?”

I told her hello, told her that she had a package. I didn’t like it when she called me “Dave.” That was reserved for Lindsey. Robin knew this and sensed my irritation. She shrugged and smiled. She was wearing jeans and a light leather jacket with the shoulders wet from the rain. Her hair shone in the minimal light. She was blond and tan to Lindsey’s brunette and fair. Her hair was thick and unruly and it bounced against her shoulders as she walked. Lindsey’s hair, nearly black it was so dark, was fine and straight as a pin. They only looked like sisters when they smiled. They shared the same watchful, ironic eyes, blue for Lindsey, gray for Robin. Pretty legs ran in the family.

“Did you hear from Lindsey Faith?”

I let my answer hang in the dark room. “No. There’s tamales in the kitchen if you want some.”

“Don’t worry, Dave.” She rushed up the stairs, disappearing from my view. “Wow, it’s heavy,” she said. “Maybe it’s from Jax.” The upstairs door opened and closed, then I heard her energetic footfall crossing above.

Yes, Jax. Her boyfriend. Jax, I liked. He was Hispanic but pronounced his name with a hard “J.” I had never heard the name before, but we all have our lacunae-even washed-out history professors like me. Jax Delgado. He had aristocratic features, chiseled chin, and was well matched in the gym-rat physique for Robin. His eyes were full of life and fun-he was one of the few people I had met whose eyes fit that description of “twinkling.” He had a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard and now held tenure at NYU. Professor of American Studies, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, his card read. It was enough to rev up my academic insecurities, except that he wore the credentials well, like a working-class kid who had made his own way but not forgotten his roots. I had enjoyed our few conversations.

He was staying in Phoenix to study sustainability. “That’ll be a short paper,” I had said when he told me this. “We’re not sustainable.” His eyes had twinkled and he said, “We’ll definitely talk. You’re one of the few natives I’ve run into.”

I was looking forward to it. You had to rope in and keep the smart people in your life in Phoenix. And he seemed to calm and distract Robin, both of which were needed at this point of everybody’s lives.

Now I was toasty. I should have stopped at one martini. Three tamales on a paper plate made dinner, then I grabbed Kennedy’s book and went into the bedroom, closing the door. It was only a little past eight, but I felt exhausted, just like every day lately. Yet I knew I wouldn’t sleep. The bed hadn’t been made in days. I stretched out in it after carefully hanging up the suit. It wasn’t fitting quite right. I was losing weight. Maybe if Jax had sent Robin a gift he wouldn’t be joining her tonight.

For that, I’d be grateful.

That was the only rub about Jax and Robin. They were very loud when they made love. It had put an end to my winter ritual of sleeping with the windows and the screen doors to the inner courtyard open. Robin was a screamer. My first wife Patty had been one, too. We could never stay in a bed-and-breakfast. Men treasure this attribute, especially when it is genuine, and Robin sounded very genuine, and I didn’t want to hear. Some people you can’t imagine having sex-Peralta is one. Some you don’t want to imagine having it-Robin fit there. So tonight might be quiet.

I opened the book and began to read, cradling it in one hand, letting my other arm stretch across to Lindsey’s side of the bed. Herbert Hoover got a bad rap from the history mostly written by hagiographers of FDR. That was true enough. I could have written a book like this. The era was my focus in graduate school. But I didn’t write this one. Hoover the great engineer, the progressive, the pain-in-the-ass as Calvin Coolidge’s Commerce Secretary. He was elected president and the house fell in. Just like life. Then he was overwhelmed by events, by his own inability to think into the future, and then by his increasing isolation, intellectually and from the people…

…I felt so isolated sitting in the car at McDowell and Central, stopped at a red light. I needed to pick up Lindsey but I didn’t know where she was. Light rail was gone. Central was just a wide highway again, choked with traffic. I looked northwest into Willo and it was gone, clear-cut, covered by gravel. Even the coppery Viad Tower was gone. The only sign of habitation was a new, four-story condo complex that looked as if it had been built by scavengers from a junkyard. Somehow all this seemed totally normal but it still made me feel sad. All those historic houses just gone, including mine. I wished the light would change so I didn’t have to look at the emptiness.

Robin’s scream woke me.

It was not a sexy scream. It was sharp, primal, terror-ridden. High voltage shot up my spine. I yanked open the bedside table drawer, grabbed the Colt Python, and rushed out the door and into the dark living room. She screamed again, called for help. I ran up the stairs with both hands on the grips of the pistol, arms crooked, barrel in the air. When the door swung open I almost brought the barrel down and shot her.

She slammed the door and smashed her body into mine. She was shivering uncontrollably. As we stood on the interior landing, I held her tightly with my left arm, keeping the gun ready and staring at the door. I tried to push her away.

“No, no, don’t go back there. Please, no, don’t go…”

She said this as a cascade of hysteric words strung together, as I tried to disentangle myself from her and go to the garage apartment.

“No, don’t!”

I pushed her back on the landing and got as far as my hand on the doorknob.

“No! Please, David! Don’t go back there!”

She decisively locked the door, flew back into my arms crying, and I held her tightly until she calmed down.

Robin is slightly taller than Lindsey. We were both completely naked.

2

We were dressed and the revolver was back in the bedside table drawer by the time the first cops arrived, one a compact young Latino and the other an Anglo woman with her yellow hair in a bun. They regularly worked the beat in the neighborhood. I felt as if I’d been on ten thousand crime scenes, far more than the college classrooms I had taught in, a map of the twin forks my life has taken that I didn’t want to think about too much that winter. Too many crime scenes, and this one happened to be at my house, the house I was raised in. And I was just one of the “subjects,” as the police would say, at best a “complainant.”

They strode up the staircase two steps at a time with their Glocks drawn. More cops than you realized accidentally shot themselves with their Glocks. It lacks an external safety. The internal safeties, meant to keep the semi-automatic from discharging if it’s dropped, can be disengaged by a slight or accidental pull of the trigger. These two managed fine. They left the door open and crossed to the garage apartment, ordering me to remain in the living room. That was as it should be, but I wasn’t used to being on the other side of the yellow tape. For years now, my deputy’s badge had been the best backstage pass in town.

I already knew enough. Robin had responded to my initial questions before the first units got there, so I knew the basic information. Now she sat sullenly on the sofa next to me, having regained some of her toughness. But her eyes were still wide and she sniffled every few minutes. Robin was not a crier, much less a “hysterical female,” as the dispatchers might have termed her if I had allowed her to make the 911 call. She was wearing a pair of Lindsey’s sweat pants and one of Lindsey’s T-shirts. I didn’t like that. Now I had more questions for her, somewhere shy of a hundred, but I didn’t ask. My hands shook slightly and I felt gin and tamales at the back of my throat. I realized I was in a little shock, too.

My cell was still in my hand and I had scrolled to a familiar number. Robin shook her head.

“Don’t bother Lindsey Faith,” she said. “It’s midnight in D.C.”

I put the phone away.

The Anglo cop strode back through the living room, her black shoes squeaking on the hardwood floor, and then outside. In a few minutes she was wrapping the yard with crime-scene tape. To me, it was an overreaction, but the policing business had changed since I had been a young uniformed deputy. Through the picture window, I saw a few neighbors standing on the sidewalk. It’s not as if they had never seen law enforcement vehicles at our house, with both Lindsey and me working for the Sheriff’s Office. A couple of years ago, a new neighbor asked around if we were having marital fights, she had seen so many cop cars stop by. We had laughed at the time. But the three hundred block of Cypress hadn’t seen this. I counted the people I knew, lingered over some that I didn’t. Three couples, one woman alone. Unlike most of Phoenix, Willo was a real neighborhood with plenty of walkers and it was still fairly early, not even ten o’clock.

Then we were getting the initial interview for the incident report. The female officer wrote in a tight hand. Robin did most of the talking. But this was just preliminary: names, addresses, the basic scenario-before the homicide detectives showed up.

They weren’t long in arriving. My stomach gave a distinct kick when the first one walked through the door.

“Mapstone. God, I live for the day when I show up and you’re in handcuffs. It might happen tonight.”

“Happy New Year, Kate.” I said it with just enough snark that it hit her but didn’t damage any innocent bystanders.

Phoenix Police Detective Sgt. Kate Vare glared at us, hands on her hips. Underneath a PPD windbreaker, she was still compact, pinched, venomous. We had a history.

“Did you get kicked off the cold-case unit?” I smiled.

“No such luck, Mapstone. Budget cuts mean everybody’s having to do more. So I have the pleasure of coming to your pile of rocks in the ghetto tonight.” She ran a hand through her hair, which she had fried into a red color not found in nature. She was enjoying being taller than me for a change. “You just sit there.”

“I want to go have a look.”

“No way, sir,” she said. “You’re involved in this.” She smiled widely. I had never seen Kate Vare smile before. “Anyway, you’re not even a deputy any more.”

I let out a long breath.

“News travels fast around the cop shop,” she said, and mounted the stairs.

After she was gone, her partner, a big young guy who might have been nicknamed Moose by my parents’ generation, gave me a sympathetic look. His badge was hung around his neck-one of the new ones, made to imitate the LAPD shields. It had a number in the 9000s. It made me feel old: I remembered when PPD badges were numbered in the 4000s.

He cocked his head. “It’s okay.” I followed him up the stairs.

Outside the wind was waving the tree branches and the overcast sky had been turned into a washed-out pink by the reflected city lights. A few stray raindrops hit my forehead. The air was cool and clean, blowing down from the High Country. Fifteen feet away, the door to the garage apartment was open and all the lights were on. One of the abstract paintings Robin had hung on the wall faced me. It was a pink moon against a green sky. She had bought it at one of the galleries on Roosevelt Row.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, no fucking way!”

Vare charged out of the room, squared her small shoulders, and blocked us halfway. She jabbed a finger into my solar plexus. Technically, I had just been assaulted.

“This is a crime scene, you bastard. I told you to wait downstairs!”

“C’mon, Kate.” Moose spoke gently. “Professional courtesy.”

After a long pause, she closed the short distance between us. “If you touch anything, I swear to God…”

“I’ll be good,” I said. “I watch Cops on television all the time.”

“You’re not a deputy any longer, get it?”

Oh, I got it. I had turned in my badge to Peralta that morning, signed a sheaf of papers on his desk, given him my star and identification card, then spent the afternoon cleaning out my office in the old county courthouse, the room one floor below the old jail, the one that sat at the end of the corridor restored to its 1929 grandeur, with the nameplate that read David Mapstone, Sheriff’s Office Historian. I would miss that room. The boxes in the Prelude held some of my work. It reminded me of the car of boxes I drove from San Diego, six years before, when I lost my teaching job and returned to Phoenix. This time I also crammed in my old metal report clipboard, my battered black Maglite, and a side-handle police baton I hadn’t used in a couple of decades.

It was time to leave. I didn’t want to wait until the new sheriff was sworn in. “The new sheriff.” Just the words made my mouth sour up. But it was true. Peralta had been defeated in the Republican primary. I had always thought Mike Peralta would be Maricopa County Sheriff for as long as he wanted, and then become governor if he chose. But that’s why historians still have jobs. When you’re living events, it’s hard to get perspective. And the changes that had been creeping into Phoenix for years came crashing down on my friend. Changes I had noticed, but not fully appreciated. Peralta’s loss had only been one in an autumn of sorrows.

“Don’t touch anything,” Vare lectured.

On reflection, I think the only reason she let me go in was the hope that she could find some reason to jam me. But she turned and I followed.

Robin had decorated the large space with paintings, contemporary furniture, and a bookcase overflowing with art books. But in my mind it was still grandmother’s musty sewing room. I crept behind the cops, who were gathered around a desk that sat against the east windows. The box from the front doorstep was on the desk with its flaps open. Vare and her partner had their latex gloves on and carefully examined what was inside. It was only one thing.

From the vault of cardboard, the once-handsome features of Jax Delgado faced us like the display in a macabre shadow box. Blood was smeared across his chin. His eyes were wide open.

3

We had no time to contemplate what had happened. More cops came, crime-lab technicians joined them, our statements were taken, the garage apartment was sealed off. It was four in the morning before we were alone again. I had a brief conversation with Lindsey, who was getting ready for work. She wanted to talk to Robin. When Robin handed the cell back to me, Lindsey said, “She’s staying in the guest bedroom. Please don’t argue with me about this. I’m tired.” So I didn’t. Her voice had sounded so unfamiliar.

The banging on the front door began at five minutes after seven. I had just come back from Starbucks with a latte for Robin and a mocha for myself. The caffeine did little for my headache and the toxic dump I felt in my stomach. Some would call it a hangover. Kate Vare stood on the front step with the rigidness of the indefatigable. She had changed into a black pants suit and had her nine in a holster on her hip.

“Come with me.”

Robin looked at me apprehensively. I shrugged. Outside it was sunny and pleasant, the air dry and cleansed by last night’s rain. I saw the blue-and-white Phoenix Police cruiser parked in the driveway.

“Leave those drinks,” Vare commanded.

“Fuck you, Kate.” I was exhausted and cross even before this petite gift of hell had shown up on my doorstep for the second time in less than twelve hours. “Arrest me if you don’t like it. Come on, Robin.”

Vare stomped ahead and opened a back door.

“The brass take away your ride?”

“Get in.”

I knew her game. Make us ride in the prisoner compartment. Make us nervous. Oh, and repay me for all the alleged slights over the years when my work on cold cases had somehow crossed the red line of her jurisdiction and her ego.

“Watch your head.” She put her hand on top of Robin’s head as she scrunched down and slid onto the seat, just like it happens with real prisoners.

“Watch your head, sir.” It didn’t work quite the same with me. I was too tall for her to guide me down, so she didn’t try.

“Thank you for your concern, officer.”

She ignored me and slammed the door. It lacked any visible locks, of course. We were essentially prisoners. The backs of patrol cars had changed since I was a young deputy, on my first sojourn into law enforcement before going back to graduate school. In those days, the older cars lacked any protection; suspects just sat in the back seat. The newer ones had rudimentary cage wire to protect the officers sitting in front. Now the prisoner compartment was much more elaborate, and confining, with Plexiglas ahead of us and heavy bars protecting the side windows, to keep suspects from kicking out the glass, wiggling out, and running away. I had seen it happen. Now I just sipped my mocha as Vare drove fast down Fifth Avenue to the Papago Freeway.

“Are you taking us straight to the tent jail?” I spoke through the Plexiglas. She wasn’t driving toward downtown.

“God, how I wish.” And that was all she said.

She drove west, took the 35th Avenue exit, and turned toward the South Mountains until she reached Lower Buckeye Road. A collection of ramshackle houses, tilt-up warehouses, and junkyards provided the scenery. The big county complex was off to one side. I avoided looking that way. The inside of the car smelled; it was better for my stomach not to attempt to pick out the origins of the odors. Robin made the mistake of touching the thick vinyl of the seat and withdrew her hand. Her face was tense, her mouth compressed into a thin line barely holding in emotions. Her coffee sat undrunk, her free hand balled up in a fist.

She had thought she was getting a gift from her lover and had waited to open it until after dinner. She hoped he would be joining her as a surprise. She undressed, lit a candle, and poured a glass of wine in anticipation. The X-Acto knife cut easily through the packing tape. Jax’s head had been covered with a layer of bubble wrap that had made identification impossible until she had pulled it off-and there he was. Robin had told me this story before the cops arrived and hadn’t deviated from it despite hours of Kate Vare’s badgering. I didn’t trust Robin for my own reasons, but she had nothing to do with this crime.

At 51st Avenue, a large field was still left on the southwest corner. I couldn’t identify the crop-maybe alfalfa?-but the view was a time machine into old Phoenix, the place where I had grown up. If you blocked out an ugly brown subdivision a couple of miles south, the vista was magnificent. Green field running toward the rough, treeless mountains in the distance under a vault of pure Western sky. It gave me a moment’s solace. I just watched the land and felt my chest fill with breath. Then Vare jerked the car to the right and we were inside a housing development.

One way in and out, surrounded by an outside wall, curvy streets, look-alike stucco houses with large driveways, big garages, and small front doors. No shade. It was unremarkable for what passed for a “neighborhood” in most of Phoenix, except that it looked mostly unoccupied, with a trail of For Sale signs along the street Vare drove. I saw two PPD units sitting in the asphalt gulf where the street curved north. It held three houses closely sandwiched into the bend. The door to one tan house was standing open, guarded by a uniform.

Vare turned in the seat. “Does your friend recognize this house, Mapstone?”

“She’s got a name and she can speak for herself. Unless you’re arresting us and then we’re not saying a damned thing…”

Robin interrupted. “I’ve never been here in my life.” She took a long draw on the latte and ran her other hand through her tousled hair, pulling it back over her shoulder, trying to tuck part of the strands under her ears. She watched me watch her as the car door opened.

Vare led us beneath the festive yellow tape and into the house. At the entryway, we all put on light blue crime-scene booties. I didn’t like the smell. But we followed her through the narrow entry hall and back into the sunny, high-ceilinged Arizona room. There was no furniture, no drapes. She pointed into the kitchen, where a body was slung over the top of the center island. It was the body of a man, completely naked. Blood had dripped down the counter tiles onto the new floor. It was mostly dry. Robin gave a small animal’s alarm call, covered her mouth, and ran back outside.

“Crime scene’s on the way. Don’t touch anything.” Vare laid her hand on the butt of her Glock.

“Don’t accidentally shoot yourself, Kate,” I said. I breathed through my mouth, which would help for a while, before I started to taste the rotting odor. Thank God it wasn’t in summer. The body hadn’t been here long-long enough for rigor to go away, twelve hours give-or-take as I recalled-but not long enough to putrefy and swell. I kept my distance, walking slowly in an orbit of six feet away. It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen bodies. I just didn’t want the tightly wound living body in the black pants suit to freak out and make me leave.

The dead body belonged to a male about my height with an athletic build. His thighs, calves, and hands were bloody from wounds. One hand was larger than the other. A large pool of blood congealed between his legs, which were slightly open. I stepped around a cordless drill. It had a small, bloody bit in its mouth. Close to the refrigerator, a stained handsaw lay on the fashionable Spanish tiles of the upgraded kitchen. The body was missing its head.

Even in Phoenix, there probably weren’t that many headless bodies at the moment.

“Jax.” I whispered it.

Vare shook her head. “Is that his name? Your girlfriend’s…”

“She’s…not!” Something in my voice actually made her take a step back.

“Well, she’s looking at some major trouble, Mapstone. She’s lying. I can tell it. You can, too-don’t deny it. I can’t tell if you’re lying because I never believe you anyway. You both had better start cooperating.”

I asked her how she had found the body. It didn’t look as if any of the neighboring houses were occupied, so this was no place for a block watch. A tip, she said.

“A tip? From where? What kind of tip?” I turned away from the corpse and faced her straight on, trying not to let my anger take over. It wasn’t easy.

“I can’t tell you that, sir,” she said, wagging a finger at me, emphasizing that last word, leaving no doubt that I was now just a civilian. She had a large gold wedding band on her hand with diamonds in it. Somebody once told me she had three children. I couldn’t imagine. She went on, “Let’s go through it again. Jax Delgado…”

So I went through it again: I’d known him for six weeks, since about the time he and Robin had started dating. She met him at a First Friday gallery exhibit. Lindsey and I liked him and invited them both for drinks and dinner. His grandfather was from Cuba and he’d grown up in Miami. I’d seen him maybe a dozen times, mostly fleeting.

“You’d better notify New York University,” I said. “He’s on the faculty. They’ll have next-of-kin information.”

Vare laughed, showing her prominent incisors. “Mapstone, if you’re telling the truth, you’re a fucking idiot.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time both those things were true.”

The new voice was deep, commanding, familiar. I turned my head to see Mike Peralta filling my vision. Behind him was Robin.

Vare rounded on him. “This is not your jurisdiction. You’re almost ou…” She stopped herself.

Peralta smiled slightly. “Everything is my jurisdiction, Kate. For a few more days, at least.”

4

The uniformed cops in the entry hall had already made room for the big man in the tan suit. His thick hair was combed straight back from a wide forehead and the years had turned it from black to charcoal. His face: carve it into a mountainside. You had to know how to watch his eyes and mouth to see what was really going on inside him. Now he walked into the room with his deliberate tread. His dark eyes ignored mine, taking in the scene even as his head barely moved. Robin stood beside him, her hand on his arm. Two of her could have fit inside him.

“Is this him?” Peralta spoke with uncommon gentleness. Robin nodded.

“What’s that, Miss Bryson? I need a positive identification.” Kate Vare took Robin by the arm and led her close to the body, waving an outstretched arm as if she were showing off a new car. “Was this the man you had been seeing?”

Robin wrapped her arms tightly across her sweatshirt, pushing up her breasts. Vare kept hold of her. “Yes.” Her eyes were wide and wet. “It’s Jax.”

“How do you know?”

“We were lovers.” Robin’s skin grew pale.

“Accomplices, maybe?” Vare held her close to the corpse.

Robin shook her head adamantly. “You don’t know anything.”

Vare released her grip. “Now I want these civilians outside.”

Peralta held up a hand. “Robin can sit in my car. Mapstone is still a deputy sheriff.”

Vare’s face dropped in dismay.

“I haven’t put through his papers yet.” He reached in his suit-coat pocket, produced my sheriff’s office identification card, then pinned it onto my shirt like a shabby medal. Peralta said, “I think we’ll both see what you’ve got.”

“Well, Mapstone’s history won’t do any good here,” Vare sulked. Peralta might have been the outgoing sheriff, but he was still close friends with the police chief, so she was stuck with us.

“La Fam?”

“Looks that way,” Vare answered.

Peralta grunted. I stood back, trying to keep up.

He produced a set of latex gloves and snapped them on, then stood over the kitchen island like a surgeon examining the work of a demented colleague.

“So did you track the package?” He already knew what had happened. It had only been twenty-four hours since I had last seen him, but somehow it seemed longer. I couldn’t tell whether I was glad to see him here or not. Considering Kate Vare was the lead investigator, I decided I was delighted.

Vare spoke reluctantly, pausing to give me the cop eye. “It was sent from the FedEx Office store on Central, uptown, you know, the old Kinko’s. Fake name and address of the sender. We’re going to interview the employee who saw the sender later this morning.”

Peralta nodded and went back to the corpse.

I heard one young uniform whisper to another: “Jax in the Box. May I take your order?” Another: “It gives a whole new meaning to giving head.”

Peralta’s voice overrode them. “They tortured him with the drill…” He pointed to the dark craters on his legs and the top of one hand, then he stepped lightly in a counter-clockwise circle, his eyes scanning, his head momentarily shielded by his back and broad shoulders. “Slit open his scrotum. That was probably late in the game.”

He turned back to the rest of us and pointed. “See his left hand? That’s from being dipped in boiling water repeatedly. Make sure crime scene gets that shot.”

Vare just had to stand there and take it. Her tight frame was almost humming with tension. I wondered if the black pants suit would burst into flames. I loved it. She said, “Yes, Sheriff.”

Emerson said there is no history, only biography. If that’s true, Mike Peralta encapsulated much of what was worth knowing about the best of law enforcement in Phoenix, not to mention more of my life than I cared to dwell on at that moment. I’d first met him when he was a trainer at the academy, then he had broken me in as my first partner.

We remained friends for the years I lived away from Phoenix, teaching in Ohio and San Diego. He never stopped saying that it was a mistake for me to be anything but a cop, and when I came home after my first marriage broke up he gave me a job. A pile of old cases-clean them up, he said. So I did, using the historian’s techniques married to my cop knowledge. It became a full-time job, working the crimes that ran from the 1960s all the way back to statehood. I didn’t fool myself: It had been good publicity for the sheriff to have an egghead on staff. I also solved some major cases. The old ID card hung familiarly from my pocket.

“La Fam,” I said. “I didn’t think they had a big presence here.”

I heard the naiveté in my voice even before I finished the sentence. La Familia was one of the most notorious gangs in Mexico and Southern California. Its signature execution was beheading. I cleared my throat. “But it wouldn’t be surprising to see them expanding with all the destabilization caused by the recession.”

Peralta’s eyes fixed on me. They said, shut up. I looked down at the blood spatter on the floor. Gangs were nothing new to Phoenix. Contrary to the local feel-good spin, Phoenix had been a Mafia hangout for decades. Some old cops told me that it had more mobsters per capita than New York City in the 1950s. It was close to the mob’s operations in Vegas, close to the border, easy to be anonymous. They hung out at places like the Blue Grotto, the Clown’s Den, Durant’s, Rocky’s Hideaway, and the Ivanhoe. Old Phoenix had been a paradise with snakes, indeed. It’s what kept my nostalgia for what had been lost from slipping into the lie of sentimentality. But I admitted to myself that I was way behind on the gangs of today, aside from knowing they were large, sophisticated, and deadly. That knowledge rarely penetrated my office in the old courthouse, where the crimes were as old as the architecture around me and where Peralta deliberately kept me segregated from the rest of the Sheriff’s Office.

“Did you know this subject, Sheriff?” Vare asked, tilting her sharp chin toward the corpse.

“I met him once. Seemed nice enough.” Peralta slid off the gloves and handed them to one of the young cops. There’d been a time, when the Arizona Dreams case was busted open, when I thought Peralta and Robin might actually become an item. It had never happened and I didn’t know why. That was fine with both Lindsey and me. It would have led to too many complications. And we still missed Peralta’s ex-wife Sharon. Mike as chief deputy and then sheriff, Sharon as a psychologist and best-selling author: They were a power couple without airs. It seemed impossible to imagine him with anyone else. Knowing him, I suspected he didn’t want anyone trying to get close now. The cops, that was what he was all about, and now even that was gone. Of course, he didn’t lack for job offers, all of them paying more than the post of Maricopa County Sheriff. I wondered for a few seconds where he might end up. It helped shave the edge off my emotions.

Peralta stepped back and thrust his hands into his pockets, pushing back his wide-cut suit coat enough so that I could see the.45 in his shoulder rig. He faced Vare. “So why would Professor Delgado here have ended up with La Fam? Unless he wasn’t who he claimed to be…”

“That’s the whole deal!” Vare’s voice trembled in agitation. I felt my chest grow tight. “He’s a fraud. There’s no Jax Delgado on the NYU faculty, contrary to what Mapstone and the girl keep telling me.” She glared at me. “Oh, you’re surprised?”

“How…?” It was all I could manage.

“He’s not on the faculty. Nobody by that name. Nobody matching his description. We emailed a photo. No, Mapstone, we didn’t wait. We woke people up. This is a major case. Somebody beheaded by La Familia in Phoenix, or a La Fam copycat-whatever-and the head shipped to a woman who lives in a historic district? If the media get hold of this it won’t be just another forgotten asshole-on-asshole homicide in Scaryvale.”

“What about this cat’s ID?”

“No wallet, nothing on the body. No clothes left.” She leaned toward him. “Sheriff, I hate to tell you, but the girl is lying and I wonder about Mapstone here.”

“We all do, Kate. But I’m going to give them a ride home now. You got your positive ID. You know where to find Mapstone and Robin.”

“What’s that under the drill?” I said.

I had been desperately searching for gravity as they were talking and my eyes had wandered. Something the color of dull silver was sitting beneath handle of the power drill.

Vare just stood there, as if anything I said was illegitimate, but Peralta took out a cheap plastic pen and slightly lifted the tool from the floor. I was expecting to see a bolt and learn some new, unwanted information about torture, but no. Underneath was a ring. Vare knelt-her knees cracked-and lifted it in her gloved hand. Peralta gently let the drill down exactly where it had sat.

“Shit.” She said it quietly. Then she held it up for the sheriff to see.

He bent towards her, squinting. “It might be a copycat,” he said. “A wanna-be.”

“Maybe,” she said, unconvinced. “It looks like platinum. Not cheap.”

I moved over to them, bent down on my haunches. It was a man’s signet ring with a sharp engraving protruding from it.

It was an image of a rattlesnake’s head.

I said, “Kate, it’s you.”

“Asshole,” she said quietly.

“El Verdugo.” Peralta spoke with gravity and fluency. My Spanish was rusty but I knew the word. “The executioner.” Nobody said anything for at least a minute.

I held out my hands, waiting.

Vare sounded like my fourth-grade teacher lecturing the bad kids in the front row. “Pedro Alejandro Vega. Big-time hit man for the Sinaloa cartel. When he kills, he leaves the ring’s implant on the victim’s forehead. Like an artist signing a painting.”

“I’ve never seen Jax wear that ring.”

“That doesn’t mean shit,” Vare said. “There’s no photo of Vega. He’s never been arrested. He’s almost like a folklore legend in the narcocorridos.” She rolled her r’s, something I could never master, using the word for the songs that romanticized the exploits of the drug world. “Your Jax could easily be Pedro Vega. And then, I’ve got a whole list of new questions for you and this Robin Bryson.”

“Whatever.” Anger burned my throat. I processed, trying to see the world as it was, not as I wanted it to be. The foulness of the air was now in my taste buds.

“If La Fam killed El Verdugo…” Vare was talking to herself, tucking her head down, saying words that would confuse any Iowans who just moved to town but were obviously of great interest to the PPD. She dropped the ring into a plastic evidence envelope, muttered profanities. “What the hell was he doing in Phoenix, posing as a college professor?”

“That’s not my problem, Kate,” I said. “Sounds like a gang-unit deal, and you can go back to trying to close screwed-up cases from the eighties.”

5

I stalked out into the sunlight where Robin was leaning against the hood of Peralta’s black Crown Victoria, her sunglasses on, staring down a street of bank-owned houses that was empty except for the police cars. A crime-scene van was pulling up. The two plainclothes deputies in Peralta’s security detail sat in another Crown Vic. They waved. I nodded. I felt like a chump. It was okay. It was a good feeling, in fact, like the clean air I was sucking in to get the smell of dead body to leave my head.

Sure, I’d had a couple of good cocktail conversations with Jax Delgado about Churchill as a wartime leader and our current endless wars, and about the civilizations of Mesoamerica. But anybody can read a book. Anybody can play a role. He could be a cartel killer from Sinaloa. I’d been played, made a chump. I laughed inside and shook my head. Considering the weights around my heart the past few months, being played was almost a holiday.

But this amusement was a product of one hour’s sleep in the past forty-eight hours. It was a feeling, a wish. It wasn’t a thought. My eyes found Robin, surprised by how uncharacteristically fragile she appeared. Then Vare caught up with me.

“I’ll be in touch, smartass,” she said. “In the meantime, you’d better be wondering why the severed head of El Verdugo was sent to your house. And you’d better get Ms. Bryson and check into a motel. Let me know where you go.”

I am not generally a stupid person, but of course what she said was as obvious as a mountain falling on me. But my emotions had been living moment-to-moment lately. Combine it with the turmoil of the past four months, a bad hangover, and the suffocating feeling of being in the death house and you get a stupid person. All the weights stacked back up inside me.

“You will protect her,” I said.

Vare shook her head. “I could lock her up as a material witness. I might still do it.”

I told her that wasn’t what I meant.

“Do you understand budget cuts, Mapstone?”

“Don’t make this personal, about you and me, Kate. They know where she lives. They know she was seeing him. So they were sending her a message, like ‘you’re next’-and you’re telling me you won’t protect her?”

She moved close in, poked me in the chest with her finger. “That’s exactly what I’m saying, you worthless-piece-of-shit excuse for anything. Right now she’s a suspect. If she wants my help, she’d better start telling the truth. Otherwise, she’s your problem, fuck-face.” Spittle came out of her angry mouth, shining in the sunlight. “You’re a deputy sheriff.” She snapped my ID card with her nail. “I feel better about her safety already.”

She spun around and stomped back into the house, nearly colliding with the supertanker of Peralta.

Now two unmarked PPD Chevies came speeding down the new pavement of the street. Two pairs of detectives got out: slim, young, male, shorthaired. They walked over to Peralta and shook his hand, telling them they were sorry he had lost the election. He nodded and clapped them on their arms.

“I’ll be fine,” he said. They slid under the crime-scene tape and walked to the house.

“They probably voted against you,” I said.

“Nah. If the new sheriff really does what he promised and uses the department to play Border Patrol, it’s going to complicate things for every agency. People in the immigrant neighborhoods will go back to fearing the police. We worked years to overcome that. Worse, more paperwork.”

His normally immobile face managed a wink.

“You’re pretty fucking tranquil about all this!” My hands ached from the fists they had been unconsciously molded into for who-knows-how-long. “Here, take this goddamned thing.” I handed him my identification card. Robin gave me what might have been a look of concern or sympathy. I ignored her.

I felt Peralta’s large arm steer me aside and move me down the sidewalk.

“You have an anger-management problem, Mapstone.”

Peralta was the most cant-free person I had ever known. The world turned upside down again and it only made me madder.

“You sound like Sharon now!” I was baiting him. I didn’t care.

His voice was calm.

“Mapstone, you have been the moodiest son of a bitch the past few months. It was just an election. The voters have spoken, the bastards.” His eyebrows subtly philosophized with each other. The corners of his mouth raised a few millimeters. “I came up with that. Pretty good, huh?”

“You didn’t come up with it. Mo Udall said it.”

“Whatever. I’m the one who lost the election, not you. People fall for this ‘be scared of the Mexicans’ crap, even though they want cheap housecleaning and lawn care and never wonder why their homes are inexpensive.” He sighed. “Anyway, you’ll do fine. You’re going to be a professor again, right?”

I tentatively nodded. It seemed that I was in line to become an adjunct professor at ASU. The pay was crap and it lacked tenure track, but any money would help. I had other misgivings: about the tough university president, about the mega-department in which history resided, about my own inability to catch up with the latest politically correct fads. But the ASU people made it sound enticing: I could teach in a multi-disciplinary field: Phoenix history, criminal justice, courses I could put together. It would do until Lindsey and I decided our future. I loved teaching. I needed the distraction of work.

“So what’s bugging you?”

“Things.” I stared at the pavement. The all-too-familiar empty ache returned to my middle.

“You look like crap this morning. You didn’t even shave. How’s your wife?”

“She’s fine.”

He cocked his head. “Maybe you’ll end up in Washington, Mapstone. Lindsey was one of my best. I’m glad she took the job. She could become a star at Homeland Security.”

“She’s trying it out for six months.” I heard the anxiety in my voice.

“Sure,” he said. “Is Robin telling the truth?”

I told him, yes. At least I thought so.

He put his bear-paw hand against my shoulder. It was not a friendly bear.

“Look, this is serious shit she’s landed in. They know where she lives. They know where you live. Get it? Vare is right. You need to get out of the house. You guys can come up to my place, if you want. Plenty of room. I’m hardly ever home. But Robin may know more than she even realizes. She might have seen something, overheard something.”

“What if she didn’t?”

“Whoever tortured that man, whether he was El Verdugo or a professor, and then sent his fucking head to your house, thinks she did.” His voice rose ever so slightly, his anger evident to a close observer of all-things-Peralta. The bear paw came down. “And you’d better get your shit together and focus.”

We walked back to his Crown Vic. Robin had tied her hair into a ponytail. He put her in the front seat. I got in back and tried to focus.

I focused on Robin’s neck, which bore a similarity to my missed love. Lindsey and Robin both had long, elegant necks. Lindsey’s hair brushed against her neck and shoulders as she turned her head. It was art in sensual motion. Just thinking about it could make me feel better.

Then I saw the chain sitting against Robin’s skin. I had never noticed it before. It was a simple ball chain, like the kind that hangs from a bare-bones lamp, one gray kernel snapped into the other.

This chain had blood on it.

6

I kept my discovery to myself as Peralta drove us home. My temples throbbed.

Something was different in his manner as we turned down Cypress Street. He stopped chatting about nothing with Robin. I watched the back of his head. It swiveled just enough. He was taking the street in, checking out the houses. Not even a lawn crew was there but he drove past my house, went around the block on Holly, past the little park we used to call Paperboys’ Island, and returned to Cypress. My hands grew cold. After stopping he came inside with us and casually asked Robin to run through the events of the previous night. As she did, they walked through the house. He was leading. His walk was looser and more attentive. As she talked, he was silent, just nodding. He reminded her of the offer for us to stay at his place and gave me a look that said, “back outside.”

“You’re checking out the house,” I said once we were on the walk.

“Can’t beat this weather, Mapstone.” It was seventy degrees, cloudless, dry, and he was lying to me.

I pulled on his suit coat and he stopped, turning to face me.

“How did you know about this?”

His eyes widened with too much innocence. “You know the watch commander briefs me every morning on what went down the night before all over the county, especially the one-eighty-sevens.” The homicides. “The address sounded familiar.”

“I bet.”

He strode to the car and I followed him. We both scanned the streetscape. He was just able to do it more casually, mostly moving his eyes. He slid a key into the trunk and it popped open.

“Here.”

“I don’t need that. It looks too small anyway.”

“It’s for Robin.”

I hesitated, then took the Kevlar vest in one hand. “So I’m supposed to tell her about this El Verdugo? Let her know she’s in a lot worse danger than the trauma of opening that FedEx carton? That her boyfriend wasn’t a professor who studied at Harvard but was a killer for the Sinaloa cartel? Hell, no. You do it. And tell her she has to wear this damned thing. She might actually do what you say. She likes you.”

“She likes you, too. It makes you uncomfortable.”

“Oh, bullshit! You know something. You know more than you’re telling me.”

He ignored me. A large black bag was hefted halfway out of the trunk and I heard a heavy zipper. He held out a semi-automatic pistol.

“Is that for her, too?”

“This is for you.”

Now my dread was complete. He was arming me up. I mumbled a quiet protest about the Colt Python. I was not a semi-auto man. That wasn’t really where my brain was: We were on our own. Kate Vare and PPD were not going out of their way to help Robin. And all I had in the house was my.357 magnum.

I took the new pistol as if in a trance.

It was unfamiliar: a black semi-automatic, sleek grip, futuristic frame that tapered into the barrel, no visible hammer, gray polymer controls including the safety on the side. It had a small cylinder attached to the accessory rail: a laser sight. This was the business, nasty looking. And that was before I saw the ammunition. The rounds looked like small rifle cartridges, with blue on their missile-sharp tips.

“This is an FN Five-Seven, from Belgium. This can inspire you to study Belgium history.”

“You don’t strike me as a Walloonophile.”

“Fuck you, too.” He had no idea what I was talking about.

The pistol was amazingly light, half the weight of the.357. I popped the magazine and racked the slide mechanism to make sure it was empty. I studied the small bullets.

“The rounds are half the size of a nine, but they’re better,” he said. “This holds twenty rounds and one in the chamber. Here’s another two magazines.” I stuffed them in my pants pockets. Back his head and shoulders went into the trunk. He handed me a small slide-belt holster. Then a silver-plated.38 Chief’s Special.

“Teach Robin about this one. It’s a good gun for a girl. That’s all I’ve got in the car that doesn’t belong to the county,” he went on.

“I can’t believe you. I’m not a deputy now! Can’t you call the chief? Get Vare to give some protection?”

He shrugged. “I can try. There are limits to friendship, especially when you’re a lame-duck Mexican.”

I kept the guns, my hands full of weaponry as if visited by a violent Santa, but I didn’t like the semi-auto’s small bullets. Stopping power was everything. Peralta had taught me that. He obsessed about it. A.22 will eventually kill a suspect, but it won’t stop him if he’s determined to keep coming. The Python will knock a man down and kill him instantly.

He said, “Those five-seven rounds will penetrate ballistic Kevlar vests. Don’t worry. Anyway, you might need both guns and more.”

He slammed the trunk lid down and prepared to get in the car.

“I can’t believe you’re cutting out.” That didn’t faze him. He sat heavily in the driver’s seat. I desperately talked ammo to keep him there. “If these rounds will penetrate a vest, what if the bad guys use one on Robin?”

“Don’t let that happen.”

I didn’t wait to watch him drive away. I went inside and stashed the gear in my bedroom. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I felt a momentary paralysis set in, starting in my feet and moving quickly to the brain. We lacked the money to move to a motel for any length of time. I didn’t want to be stuck out at Peralta’s big house overlooking Dreamy Draw. I needed some time away from him, his moods, and demands. This house represented almost everything of financial value we had, and a value much greater to me. Just leave it? Let them fire bomb it? I would lose the last thing my family had passed on to me. I would lose grandfather’s desk, Lindsey’s gardens. I would lose the library.

I closed the door. Lindsey answered on the fifth ring.

“Am I calling at a bad time?”

That stranger’s voice came back at me, the one that had emerged since September, the one that kept sticking a baseball bat into my stomach every time I heard it. I loved Lindsey’s voice, at one time thinking I knew every mood and desire firing it. Of course I was wrong. The personal calamity that overtook us was like an earthquake in a place with strong building codes, only the buildings didn’t stand. I had always thought such an event would cause us to cleave closer, but I was wrong.

Things, indeed, fell apart, the magical golden light of fall providing no balm. My love became unreachable. The holidays were especially grim, that day between Thanksgiving and Christmas when Lindsey lay on her stomach on the bed, her right leg bent up, twitching like a metronome, and she told me she had taken a job with Homeland Security. It was an announcement, not an invitation to discussion. She would move to Washington, D.C.-alone. She couldn’t be in the house. She needed time away from me. This was how much our personal disaster had shifted the axis on what I once thought was the most stable terra firma.

I tried talking about us but she cut me off.

“You always want to talk things out, Dave. Some things can’t be fixed by talking.”

Still. I brought her up to date and told her Robin needed to come to Washington, to stay with her. To hell with Kate Vare if she didn’t like it.

“No,” the stranger’s voice said. “David…” A deep exhaustion shaded her intonations. “I can’t deal with this right now. I just can’t.”

“I need your help, Lindsey.”

“You’re badgering me!”

“I’m not trying to…”

“Then you have to handle this. I need you to protect Robin. Do what you need to do. But she can’t come here. It’s impossible.”

I wanted to ask why, but she was gone even before I could tell her I loved her.

In such a mood, I walked into the kitchen and found Robin standing by the window. She was staring out at the orange trees in the increasingly unkempt back yard, drinking orange juice. Any bad guy outside could shoot her that second.

“David, I’m sorry…” She set the glass down. “For all this.”

I walked close to her, wavered inside for a moment, then put my hand on the arc of her cheek. She had regained her color. The skin-on-skin momentarily rattled and confused me. She leaned against my hand and smiled. Small, attractive crinkles appeared at the edges of her eyes.

I regained my mental footing and let my fingers slide down to the simple metal chain on her neck, then slip under it and pull it out onto the sweatshirt. Metal slapped on metal. She jumped back three steps.

“Sorry.” She smiled. “Tickled.” Her face blushed the red of the apprehended. She slid the chain back under the sweatshirt, freed her hair, and fluffed it out. I had my reasons for not trusting Robin. But I had never imagined she could be involved in a murder. Until now.

“How much did you know about Jax?” I spoke the name as if it still meant something.

“Things you know when you’ve been seeing a man for a couple months.” She finished the orange juice and put the glass in the dishwasher.

“The cops don’t think his name is Jax. They think his name is Pedro Alejandro Vega.” I watched her eyes and mouth; they registered confusion. I went on and told her what I knew, he was a hit man, involved in one of the most dangerous drug cartels in the world.

She shook her head as I talked. After an hour with Peralta, it was always surprising to be with someone with an expressive face. Robin’s eyes were wide and teary. She wiped her too-long nose. Her jaw worked in agitation. Little ripples of emotion shook her cheeks. She was two years younger than Lindsey, yet looked instantly older.

I stepped closer. “He told you this, didn’t he?”

She stepped back again. “Of course not! Are you crazy?”

“You suspected…”

“No! He’s a professor! He couldn’t hurt a fly. I was afraid he was too nice a guy to hold my interest, for God’s sake.”

“And you had no suspicions? None?”

“None.” Her hair shook vigorously.

I let her keep her distance as I spoke again. “Why is there blood on that chain?”

Robin’s hand went unconsciously to her breastbone. She opened her mouth but nothing came out.

“I saw it on the back of your neck in the car. It has blood spatter on it.”

“David, you don’t understand.” She started out past me but I stopped her. Her face went through stages, settling on surprised fury. “You son of a bitch!” She threw a punch, a good one. I caught it just in time. Grabbing her roughly by the arm, I pushed her into the breakfast nook.

“We’re going to talk.” I reached across and pulled the chain out again. It held two dog tags. They were bare metal, without the rubber cushions that soldiers had started using in Vietnam to keep the tags from making noise. That would make them from World War II or Korea. The metal had aged into a dark gray, although the raised information stamped into the tag was still silvery. The dog tags themselves looked clean. Indeed, the entire part of the chain I could see now was spotless. The bloodstains were only on the back, as if they had been missed during a quick cleaning.

She saw my appraisal and again covered the tags with her hand. Her face turned redder and a vein stood out in her forehead. “Why am I being questioned?” Her voice echoed around the wood of the old breakfast nook. “Jax has been killed! I lost my lover! You’re just being an asshole cop, just like the rest. It’s what you’ve become, David! Why are your losses this big deal and mine is nothing?”

“This isn’t about me.”

Her eyes were molten. “Yes, it is. It’s been all about you, about you and Lindsey Faith! My grief is shit to you. You think I’m guilty of something.”

I forced my breathing to slow down. Quietly, I asked her how the chain got bloody. Maybe it was totally innocent. She had been wearing it, this chain I had never seen on her before, yesterday when she opened the box. And maybe, just maybe, it had fallen into the blood. I didn’t believe it.

“Jax gave it to me.”

“He gave it to you, or you took it?”

She tried to get up. I pushed her back again. I looked at my sister-in-law anew. I couldn’t tell what the hell I saw except…capacity. To lie, to conceal evidence, what else? My mouth felt as if it was stuffed with gauze. “You took this out of the FedEx box, washed it, and kept it from the police…”

After a long silence, she nodded. “I guess I did.”

Now my stomach had a hole straight through it. “Was that before or after you screamed last night?”

Her eyes grew wide and wet again. “Everything happened fast, all right? But it was right there. And it mattered. So I did it. Now you can arrest me and all your fucking problems will be over, David, except they won’t.”

“Our problems are just beginning.” I said it quietly. She had taken evidence, tampered with it. A crime. Unless I called Kate Vare that moment, I was a part of it.

The house was silent for a long time. Finally, Robin took off the chain and rested it gently on the table.

“This was the most important thing in the world to him. He told me that if anything ever happened, he wanted me to have it.” She touched it tenderly, then slid it toward me. “He wanted me to show it to you. He said you’d know what it meant.”

7

She slid the dog tags at me like Kryptonite. It made me think of the Superman comics I collected as a kid. I had filled a cardboard citrus box full of them, and today they’d really be worth money, but somewhere along the way I dumped them. I was having too many such magical thinking moments lately. Exhaustion, fear, and anger competed for my emotional center. I ran the Arizona Revised Statutes through my head, counting all the laws I was on the verge of violating. I stopped at seven.

Then I looked over at Robin again. She had shown up unexpectedly a year before, Lindsey’s half-sister, a woman she barely knew as an adult. And yet she had become important to Lindsey. Vital, especially the past few months. Now my one undamaged connection to Lindsey was ensuring this woman’s protection. I picked up the tags and examined them.

The information stamped into the two-inch-long, aged metal was basic: a name, serial number followed by some other numerals, another name and an address, all on five lines. There was a small notch in the end of each tag. I had wanted to study military history, but the discipline was frowned upon when I was in graduate school. My advisor had urged me to consider gender studies. But I was enough of an amateur scholar to know this data was from World War II. The numbers “43-45” indicated the years of immunization shots. The soldier’s blood type was O. He was a Protestant. The name and address were whom to notify in case of emergency. They went to Poston, Arizona. And the soldier’s name was Johnny Kurita. It was as far from the Sinaloa cartel, or a Hispanic academic from New York, as you could get.

“Nisei,” I said.

“The second generation,” Robin said. “The children of Japanese immigrants to America.”

I nodded, pleasantly surprised. Outside of her art knowledge, Robin had always seemed street smart rather than book smart, certainly not well versed in my dying discipline. I said, “The Poston address makes sense, too. Lots of Nisei were forcibly interned in World War II. Poston was a camp.” I hated to use the words, but they were accurate. “An American concentration camp.”

“And yet this Johnny Kurita was in the service?”

“The Nisei soldiers were famous for their bravery.”

“Why would they fight for a country that had done that to them?”

I let that sit. “What was Johnny Kurita to Jax?”

“He never said. But he always wore the chain and dog tags. I’d ask him about it, but he’d just say it was a memento. Something passed on to him. But it was really like an amulet to him. He’d touch it almost obsessively. When he took it off and let me hold it, I knew I was getting somewhere.”

“He didn’t explain it? No story behind it?”

“He said, ‘when I get to know you better.’ But that didn’t happen.” Her voice choked.

“And yet he said if anything happened to him, to give it to me…”

“Yes, that was about a week ago.”

“When, exactly.”

“Don’t be such a bastard, David. That’s not really you.” She screwed up her brow. “It was last Thursday night. We’d made love. I was touching his chest and playing with the dog tags. He put his hand on mine and said it. When I asked him about it, he just smiled and said, ‘it’s no big deal. Just a thought.’ I didn’t know what he meant.”

“Was he worried? Had anyone made threats against him?”

She shook her head. “There were never any threats. He was kind of a loner, which I appreciate. So I never met his friends here, if he had any. And he was new to town. He did seem distracted that night. Not quite himself.”

“Maybe he had somebody to kill.”

“He wasn’t a hit man!”

I asked her about where they went on dates. It was nothing out of the ordinary, although from the names of some of the restaurants they patronized it was clear he had money. Did he run into any old acquaintances? Anybody who might have seen her with him, and somehow chose her to send this horrific message? No. Did she ever feel as if they were being followed when they drove back here? No.

“Did he have drugs?”

“Of course not. I hate drugs.”

“Not even a little pot between friends? C’mon.” Even my first wife, Patty, had a fondness for the occasional toke-and the marijuana she procured was much more potent than the stuff I tried in college. It was another life; I shelved the thought away.

Robin glared at me. Of course that information meant nothing. The high-end people in the cartels usually don’t use their products. They don’t want to get careless.

I stopped talking, stood, and fetched a clear plastic bag from the drawer, then dropped the dog tags inside. She gave them to me, as he had asked. I knew what they meant in a historical sense. But that did nothing to solve the murder, or answer why the man’s head was delivered to my sister-in-law. That act spoke for itself: just as Peralta had said, the killers had connected her to Jax, and not in a casual way, and they knew where she lived.

In the study, I removed a sheaf of file folders from the deep desk drawer, and then replaced them on top of the bag. Concealing evidence. Add it to my rap sheet.

The phone rang. I let it go to the answering machine and heard a woman’s voice. She was a news producer for Channel Five, wanting to send a crew over to interview us. I was sure she wouldn’t be the last to call. Kate Vare had probably personally talked to some media people, to put more of a squeeze on Robin-and on me.

I wished my friend Lori Pope still worked at the Republic. She was a real cops reporter, the kind that dug into cases and built sources inside law enforcement. I had been one of those sources. She would give information back, and I needed it now. But Lori had been laid off with many of the most experienced reporters and now the newspaper mostly rewrote the press releases from the police public information officers. Most of the paper was that way now. I continued to subscribe out of some misplaced belief in the written word and the free press.

Phoenix was increasingly a freak show. Ted Williams’ head was frozen in Scottsdale, waiting for the day the slugger could be regenerated. Unfortunately some employees decided to use his noggin for batting practice. The richest man in town didn’t support the arts, but he spent money to try cloning his dead dog. A disgraced former governor remade himself as a pastry chef. It was a city where a man left his wife by killing her and his children and then blowing up his suburban house, where a woman cut up her lover and left him in a dumpster. The “Torso Murderess.”

What a town. A top city official climbed on top of his Mercedes at high speed and went surfing on Camelback Road, until he and the car hit a wall. It was where retirees sold pot to support their gambling habits and Jenna Jameson, the porn star, was a local businesswoman. Up in Sedona, a self-help guru baked his clients to death in a sweat lodge. Now, a severed head delivered via FedEx. Just another day in paradise and we were part of the freak show. My hometown. The machine clicked off, its red light merrily blinking.

Robin stood before me, watching.

“We’re not answering the phone or the door. We have some decisions to make.”

“Are we going to Peralta’s?”

“Is that what you want to do?”

“No.” Her hands were fists. “I know you don’t believe me, but I never meant to bring this onto you, especially not after what you’ve been through. I can’t go to Lindsey Faith, I know that…”

“How?”

“I just know her, David. So maybe I should just go. I have some friends in San Francisco.”

I stopped her, mindful of Lindsey’s charge. “Please. Stay.”

“Can we make a stand here, at the house?”

I thought about it. Maybe we could. Much would depend on what happened next.

“We can try. We have some work to do.”

We went back to the garage and lugged out a six-by-four-foot plate of one-eighth-inch thick sheet steel. It had been back there as long as I could remember and it was a miracle it wasn’t hiding a black widow nest. The deadly spiders, as well as scorpions, had made a big comeback in the years since DDT had been outlawed. The steel plate was just dusty and edged with rust. I wiped it down and we slowly moved it into the house, working up a sweat trying not to gouge the hardwood floors. I directed Robin to help me situate it inside the guest-room closet. Houses built in the 1920s lacked the giant closets of today. This one was maybe five feet deep. But it was wide enough that I could lean the steel plate up against the outer wall. The plate stuck out past the doorjamb maybe two feet, with enough room to slide around it and close the door.

“What’s that all about?”

“It’s your safe space,” I said. “If something goes down, get in that closet, and hide behind the steel plate. Take your cell. You’ll have enough time to call the police. The plate should protect you if they start shooting through the closet door.” At least I hoped it would.

She listened with her tough-girl face on, but her eyes were anxious. “And if they open the door?”

I walked her into my bedroom and showed her the.38 Chief’s Special. “Do you know how to shoot?”

She opened the cylinder, saw its five chambers were empty, clicked it back into place, and pointed the compact revolver toward the wall, dry-firing it several times. “Yes.”

Full of surprises, my sister-in-law.

“When Kate Vare comes back, she’s going to go at you harder than ever. You can’t tell her about taking the dog tags. Ever. Understand?”

She said she did, and asked if I had.38 ammunition.

8

The next week passed dreamlike, uneventful. I was evermore conscious of how the days slipped by, time brutal. Robin and I agreed to some house rules. We wouldn’t go out. Move the Prelude into the garage, with its entry on the alley. Let the mail and newspapers pile up. Turn on the lights only in the interior rooms, such as the study and the kitchen, where I tacked up a blanket over the windows that looked into the yard.

We went through the tamales and almost all the cans of soup and frozen Lean Cuisines. I cooked breakfast until we were out of eggs. With the blankets on the windows, the room seemed like a scene out of a World War II blackout. There was nothing to be done about the big picture window in the living room, so we avoided it and kept the lights off. I called out an alarm service and made an appointment to install a system that we couldn’t afford.

Fortunately I had bought three large bottles of Beefeater before we became shut-ins. Robin, a wine drinker, began downing martinis. I had to start rationing olives. We drank the house’s only bottle of champagne on New Year’s Eve and I tried not to get nervous when I heard the fireworks. Robin would get in foul moods because she couldn’t go running but was otherwise decent company. She was not an omnivore reader, and unfortunately we had only two real art books: The Phoenix Art Museum catalog-the museum director and his wife lived around the corner-and an Edward Hopper album. So Robin drank each book dry, then watched television, searched for jobs on the Internet, and listened to her iPod while I tried to read. My history books had always been a refuge-my history porn, as Lindsey called it. They were less so now. My mind wandered.

The street seemed unchanged from before the ghastly FedEx delivery. The usual neighborhood walkers went by at their usual times. Two houses down, the winter lawn was coming in nicely. Cypress was dark and normal-looking at night. No drive-by shooting through the window. No Molotov cocktail into the carport. It almost made me think the worst was over. That we could do this and survive.

At night, I made sure the guns were in easy reach. Sleep evaded me and I lay in the big bed, sure I was going to die within the next seconds. Almost all of my adult life these panic attacks had hit me when I was alone and things were quiet. They had kept me from writing more, from playing well with others when I was on a faculty, probably helped take away my chances for tenure. Sharon Peralta had diagnosed me. Knowing what they were barely made it better. My heart thumped hard and fast against my chest. My breathing was constricted. I was terrified about the next minute and every second within it. They only came in the quiet times. I hoped for a call from Lindsey in the middle of the night, when we might talk soul-to-soul as in the old days, but it didn’t come.

We talked every couple of days on a regular schedule. She couldn’t talk about her work. She didn’t ask about the house or her gardens. She wanted to know how Robin was doing. On the most recent call, I asked her again to let Robin come to D.C. Then I demanded it and we had a bad fight. It was like all our fights of late, intense and open-ended. She refused. “You’re to blame,” she said at one point, as if it were an all-embracing statement. Maybe I was. I stayed up all night rewinding and playing our words in my head. The pilfered evidence sat in the bottom of my desk drawer, a worthless riddle and my own culpability in concealing evidence.

Finally, I started taking a chance and slipping out the back at night, making a slow walk around the block, watching for the unusual. More than once, I saw a coyote running along Third or Fifth Avenues. They had come into the city as sprawl destroyed their habitats. From the street the house looked unoccupied. One night around three I saw a Chevy parked mid-block with two men in it. It had rained again and I could smell the special scent of the wet desert soil. My body stiffened and I reached for the comfort of the Colt Python’s custom grips. I didn’t know if they saw me, but I got close enough to pick out the license plate. It had the first three letters that an insider knew belonged to Phoenix Police undercover units. So Vare was keeping the house under surveillance, at least some of the time. It didn’t give me much comfort. Otherwise, Vare stayed away.

The media moved on, to a gang rape out in the suburbs that occurred after a high-school dance, to the shooting of a police officer in the white suburb of Gilbert, reminding readers and viewers that “things like this don’t happen here.” The implication was that they did happen in the city, where the brown-skinned people lived, where severed heads were delivered right to your doorstep.

Peralta left office without talking to the media. The new sheriff immediately announced he would begin sweeps to arrest illegal immigrants. Peralta had focused on the smugglers that abandoned the immigrants to die in the desert, or held them hostage-sometimes a hundred in a house-until relatives paid to set them free. He had worked with the state attorney general to go after the electronic fund transfer services such as Western Union. The bad guys used them to move ransom money.

Violent crime in the areas policed by the county was at twenty-year lows and the jails were well run. He had put Bobby Hamid in prison. Mike Peralta had been the best sheriff in the county’s history, better than “Cal” Boies-Peralta never used his deputies to sway an election-better even than Carl Hayden, who went on to be one of the longest-serving senators in American history. He stood for, as I heard him say in one campaign speech, “tough law enforcement and simple justice.” In the end, the only thing that seemed to matter was his opponent’s pledges to “stop illegal immigration.” “What part of illegal don’t you understand?!,” one of his campaign signs read. I wondered who did the landscaping at the new sheriff’s house in Fountain Hills. Now he’d probably use inmates.

By the end of the week my beard was coming in nicely. I hadn’t worn one since I had joined the Sheriff’s Office. I awaited word from the university, wondering what it would be like to teach again, what students were like now. I had seen some of the classrooms. They had high-tech lecterns with a microphone and a computer dock for PowerPoint presentations and all sorts of new media. I didn’t need that. Just give me some willing minds. I wondered if I would have to take Robin to class with me. I wondered if I would be endangering the students as long as this case remained open. Some times I lay awake and pondered whether Jax could really be the killer they said he was. Most of the time I fought to keep my mind off the events of last year, especially the late summer when the dreadful heat lingered. Sometimes the bedroom seemed so large that I would shrink to nothing and float away.

If Jax was really involved with the Sinaloa cartel, and Robin was being targeted, there really wasn’t a damned thing we could do. That would have been my reaction if I were just watching our lives from the outside. The cartels controlled entire states in Mexico. Even the Mexican army couldn’t stand against them. Thousands had been murdered down there. A classroom of kids had been massacred in Juarez recently, wrong place wrong time, but that showed their reach. It was only a matter of time before they reached across the border in a big way.

A battering ram through the old front door followed by an all-out assault. A bomb in the car. Not a damned thing you could do. I knew all this. And I didn’t really care if they killed me. That was the truth. For the first time in my life, I didn’t give a damn. I was at peace with it, in fact. But I had someone to look after. That was a knot in my stomach. At least this reality made the panic attacks go away. And I was determined we would survive.

After a week, the cabin fever was high enough that I took a chance. We snuck out at ten p.m. in the Prelude and went to the Sonic on McDowell just east of Seventh Street. I couldn’t chance a sit-down restaurant, but this seemed as safe as we could make it: well lit, on a major artery with an escape route. I made Robin wear the protective vest under her hoodie. She ate a foot-long cheese Coney and I had a Supersonic cheeseburger and a diet cherry Coke.

Two spaces away sat a Toyota holding a plump woman with long red hair and a little girl with brown hair. The little girl was leaning on mom’s shoulder as she ordered. She yelled and started crying. For much of my life, screaming children were like a dental drill in my brain. I mellowed in recent years. It was a strange evolution. The little girl was out too late. She was tired and cranky. I could sympathize. Her hair was wavy, unlike her mother’s straight hair, and her face was angelic even in its tantrum. Now when I saw such scenes I just said a silent prayer that the child would be treated well and have a happy life.

“David.”

I turned back to face Robin and my half-finished burger.

She said, “Roll up the window. I’m cold.”

So we listened to the muted Sonic sound system play old hit songs, and we laughed and made light conversation in the fashion of people who had been through recent trials. My sympathy for her loss grew. My eyes continued to sweep the parking lot and the street, but our only other company was a group of six high school girls in mini-dresses, sitting on the benches and talking to one another. They were slender and mostly Hispanic, with two Anglo girls. I wondered about their stories.

We turned west on McDowell and the dash clock read ten forty-two.

The bump from behind was sudden. The car had come out of nowhere, and at first I thought it might be a fender-bender. It was a low-slung import with glowing purple paint. Traffic was light so I wondered, just for a few seconds, how the driver could have rear-ended us. Maybe he was drunk. Then I saw four doors open and men pile out. I could see guns in their hands.

My foot slammed into the floor, and after a brief seizure where we just sat there waiting to be killed, the old Honda leaped ahead. I ran the red light at Seventh. The oncoming pickup never stopped and I could see the Ford F-150 grille coming into the side window. I got more power out of the engine just in time and as we passed Safeway the speedometer needle was resting on eighty.

“What happened back there?”

“They had guns. Climb in the back seat and lie as low as you can.”

Her long legs slid against me as she moved between the seats. She disappeared from the rearview mirror. Unfortunately, the purple car was right on my tail. I swung south on Third Street and accelerated again, then ran the red light at the ramp to the Papago Freeway. The car bumped down hard and I wished I had unloaded the boxes from the trunk. I kept the pedal on the floor and we sped down the ramp to the wide, depressed highway, the tachometer in the red. I had the Python on my hip and wished I had brought the Five Seven. There was no tactical solution if I chose to take them on. They had automatic weapons in that car. I had six rounds and two Speedloaders of ammunition.

The purple car ran up behind and came over into the next lane. It was a Kia. The black-tinted back window came down and a gun barrel came out. I slammed on the brakes, fighting the Prelude as it shuddered, and pulled to the right. My speed dropped in half to forty, and I heard the tires scream behind me. The Kia shot ahead momentarily. It lacked a license tag. That came from a forward glance I made while trying to watch the five lanes of freeway I was trying to thread. The back of a semi came within inches of the front bumper, then I slid into a slot between two more trucks, changed lanes again, and hit the Sixteenth Street exit. A cascade of horns followed my moves. I thought I heard a collision behind me. Where the hell was a cop when you needed one?

“David?”

“Stay down.”

I swung south on Sixteenth and blew past Roosevelt doing seventy, swerving between cars. Unfortunately, the rear view gave me no peace.

“Fuck.”

I don’t know how he crossed that many lanes of freeway after overshooting me by ten car-lengths, but the purple car was a block behind, the streetlights making it glow. The driver was expert. And determined. I unholstered the Python and set it on the seat.

Shooting the driver might slow them down.

Then I hit on a better plan.

Phoenix’s traffic lights are generally set so that if you do the speed limit, you’ll hit green. So I doubled the speed limit and went effortlessly through Van Buren, Washington, and Jefferson, then crossed the railroad yards on the narrow overpass. Our pursuers easily matched me and bumped us twice. But I kept changing lanes. He wasn’t going to get alongside, or get ahead and pull a PIT maneuver: Tactical ramming.

All I needed was one more intersection and in a few seconds Buckeye Road flashed past. Susie’s Mexican food was closed and dark. Another half mile and I turned right into the central city precinct of PPD. It was close to shift change and cruisers were coming and going. Scores of marked units were parked and off-duty cops were walking to their civilian cars. The Kia continued on south, not changing speed.

They knew they’d get another shot.

It took a long time before my heart rate dropped down or before I would allow Robin to get in the front seat. It took even longer before we ventured out, behind a police SUV heading north.

“Aren’t we going inside? Report this?”

I said no. I had no license tag or decent description of the suspects, and I didn’t want to spend the rest of the night in Kate Vare’s clutches. I followed the PPD unit all the way to Roosevelt. It was one a.m. and no purple car was behind us. At Roosevelt, I turned left and slipped through the dense old Garfield district, then past the darkened art galleries on the other side of Seventh Street, bumped over the light-rail tracks by Trinity Cathedral, and headed home. I circled the house twice with the car lights off. Our PPD minders were off tonight. The street seemed empty. Then I took the chance of turning down the alley, where we could be hemmed in and ambushed. I kept the lights off. But the only commotion was the barking dog two doors down.

Later, after some time spent on the computer, I lay in bed in a T-Shirt and sweatpants. The Python under my pillow, the Five Seven on the nightstand, and I went through the events of the evening and tried to formulate a plan. How had they picked us up at the Sonic? I didn’t see any tail when we had first pulled out of the garage into the alley, then onto the street. Nobody had been watching us; my late-night walks around Cypress told me that. I had missed something, screwed up…what? I lost it in a deep sleep. When I woke up, Lindsey was next to me. But it wasn’t Lindsey. It was Robin, curled against me, facing away, with her hair in my face. It was soft and fresh smelling. I wasn’t startled and thought about running her out, but I could hear her quietly crying, feel her chest shaking and heaving. I put my arm around her and pulled her closer, felt her warmth radiate against me, and we were both quiet. In the morning I was alone on the mattress and sure I had imagined the whole thing.

9

Kate Vare stood on the doorstep a little after nine. She held a coffee travel mug with the city of Phoenix logo wrapped around it. She said she was there to take the evidence seal off the garage apartment. We could use it again. I led her up the stairs and she pulled the label off the door.

“So this means what?”

“To me, it’s misdemeanor homicide,” she said. “Asshole-on-asshole crime. Now we have one less asshole in the world. I’ve got plenty of cases where real people have been hurt or killed.”

She was enjoying this way too much.

“And what about Robin? She’s a real person.”

“If she’s telling the truth, we don’t have any further questions.”

“A beheaded Sinaloa cartel hit man and no further questions?” I stared past her, taking in the view at treetops from the walkway. The air was yellow brown. “What happened to your big media event? Your major case?”

“Things change, Mapstone.” She cocked her head and looked up at me. “Do you see any media? I don’t see any media. Meanwhile, we’ve got a new round of layoffs coming.”

“I’m sure Wal-Mart will hire you.”

“Oh, I’ll be around,” she said, sipping her coffee.

So I told her about the chase the night before with the Kia. She shrugged.

“Did you file a report?”

I shook my head.

“Maybe it was a robbery attempt.” One eyebrow went up. “Maybe you imagined it all. You look fine now. So if you’re worried, file a report. Meanwhile, if Ms. Bryson remembers anything she wants to tell us, call me.”

Vare turned like a figurine on a music box and stalked away. I swear she was smiling.

“She’s told you the truth.” Mostly. “Do your damned job, Kate!” I spoke to her back, which disappeared into the house.

I spent the day writing a grant proposal, to fund a history I wanted to write of Phoenix. If I was going to make my re-entry into academia, I needed to publish again. And the histories of the city were lacking. Brad Luckingham’s book left out so damned much and VanderMeer’s wasn’t even in print any longer. I fretted about my future. Every job was being chased by six unemployed persons, and the competition was much greater among people with advanced degrees in the humanities. The situation was even worse in Phoenix, by far the largest city with only one real university. I hated to be at the mercy of ASU. Although I had gone there as an undergrad, I had long since moved on. But I really needed this job. And they had come after me, several high-ranking folks urging me to apply for the job after Peralta lost the election. By the end of the day, my eyes hurt from so much computer time. Robin did yoga in the guest room and stared out at the interior courtyard, saying little.

In the afternoon, she wanted to know about the family photos on the bedroom dresser. There were my grandparents in black-and-white, around the time they married: 1912, when Arizona became a state. They looked pleasantly unsmiling at the camera, he in his narrow tie and coat, she with raven black hair and wearing a high-necked blouse. The mother and father I never knew were in several photos, my father a surprise baby born to grandmother when she was in her thirties, when they didn’t think they could have children. One picture showed him in the war, in his fighter pilot’s jacket and a P-51 Mustang behind him. “Dashing,” Robin commented. All these people looked impossibly young. Another photo: my parents and me as a baby, taken a few weeks before they flew off to Denver and never arrived. I told her stories that didn’t cut too deep.

“You’re lucky to know your past,” she said. “I don’t know anything about my dad. I only knew Linda’s mother a little, we were on the road so much.” Linda being her and Lindsey’s mother, always referred to by her first name.

She sighed and looked at the pictures. “When I was sixteen, one of Linda’s alcoholic boyfriends burned down our garage. All the family photos were lost. You should have seen Lindsey Faith. She was the beauty. I was the ugly duckling.”

“I doubt that,” I said. “I wish I would have asked more when my grandparents were still alive. Grandmother knew the entire family history.”

“So no brothers or sisters,” she said. “What about other family?”

“My grandmother had a sister. She had a beautiful acreage on Seventh Avenue, when it had irrigation ditches on either side and big trees. But she died in 1976.”

“God, you really are alone.”

I sprang up and dug into the closet. “Take a look at this.” I showed her a scrapbook that Grandmother had kept, page after page of old postcards from Phoenix in the 1930s and 1940s. One showed a narrow Central Avenue lushly bordered by palm trees and manicured grass. Other postcards were from places they had visited, plus miniatures of the labels that went on the citrus crates that were shipped out when this was a farm town. “Arizona Beauty.” “Big Town Grapefruit.” “Desert Call.” “Westward Ho.” “Kathy Anne Melons.” All were colorfully, lusciously illustrated in the style of the day.

I told her about the rich agricultural valley this had once been, even when I was young. We grew oranges, grapefruits, lettuce, cabbage, summer squash, tomatoes, beets, strawberries, cucumbers, watermelons and more. Just add water to the alluvial soil of the Salt River Valley and almost anything could flourish, especially with the ingenuity of our farmers and the water from our mighty dams and canals. Phoenix had one of the nation’s largest stockyards and major packinghouses. We shipped our produce all over the nation in long trainloads. It had almost all been lost to tract houses and shopping strips. Without a ten-thousand-mile supply chain, this city would starve. I was grateful my grandparents hadn’t lived to see it.

“What’s this?”

She pointed to a post card showing long red, pink, and white rows of flowers, framed by palm trees and the South Mountains. I told her about the Japanese flower gardens that once ran for miles along both sides of Baseline Road. The way the north side of the flower fields swept down toward the city, interrupted by citrus groves and ranches in what was then a largely rural south Phoenix. How my grandparents took me down there most Saturdays, were we would buy cut flowers for the house from one of the simple tin, open-faced buildings facing what was then a two-lane highway.

“It’s so beautiful,” she said. “And they plowed it all under to build houses and apartments. I can’t believe it.”

Neither could I.

The pictures and the postcards entranced Robin. I left her and she spent two hours with the scrapbook.

As the evening advanced to ten, I told her I was going for a walk and to stay in her room. I set the newly installed alarm and didn’t want her to come out and trip the motion detectors. She said to be careful. It was midnight in Washington and Lindsey hadn’t called. She had never gone three days without calling.

I dressed in black and had the Python on my hip. I took the alley west to Fifth Avenue to avoid rousing the dog. The night was chill and the air tasted dusty. It was so quiet I could hear a train whistle from the yards over at Nineteenth Avenue, nearly two miles away. Instead of walking around the block as I had done before, I walked to Vernon, two blocks north, then moved fast back to the east, popping out of the pedestrian entrance in the wall that closed off the street near Central. The bell and whoosh of a light-rail train went by. I cut back down to Cypress and came in from First Avenue, moving toward the house from the block to the east. I had made a wide circle around our house, the better to see the perimeter.

The pickup truck sat against the north curb, near the far corner. It was a compact job, dark paint, and it was occupied. As I got closer, I could see an arm dropping out of the driver’s side with a glowing cigarette. Closer, near the house where the state appeals court judge lived-he and his wife had a musical group on the side-I made out the tag and memorized it. It was not law enforcement. Whoever was in the truck had a perfect view down Cypress to our house, and could see if we drove out the alley onto Third Avenue. It was also parked in front of the two corner houses that were for sale and unoccupied-a great spot if you didn’t want to attract attention. This was how they had picked us up last night.

I counted on two advantages: my quiet old Nike’s, and the hope that he would be staring ahead. I had other hopes: that he might be bored and careless. But you can’t live on hope. I pulled the big Colt and walked with the barrel pointed down.

As I got to the left rear of the truck he dropped the butt on the street, where it joined a dozen of its colleagues. Almost immediately, a match flared in the cab, illuminating only one occupant, then it went dark and the hand flicked it out the window.

“Smoking’ll kill you.”

He still had the cigarette in his mouth and his arm outside the cab when I got to his side. I stood just behind him so he couldn’t really see me, just like they teach about handling a traffic stop. The difference was that I had the Python’s barrel pointed at his head. He turned and bumped into it with his cheek.

“And so will I. Put your right hand on the dash.”

My finger was on the trigger guard, but he didn’t know that. I didn’t want to accidentally blow his head off. I was taking a chance, though. If his left arm had been inside, he had the opportunity to open the door suddenly and knock me to the ground. I could almost see the thought bubble above his head.

“Keep your left arm where it is.”

He looked Hispanic and about my age, with a large head and black hair combed straight back. He was wearing jeans and a checked short-sleeved shirt, with tats on his lower arm. He slowly tossed the smoke out the window and laid his hands on the dashboard.

“Where’s your weapon?”

I nudged him again with the barrel and he said, “Right on the seat beside me. I’ll be happy to show you if you’re willing to fight like a man.”

“Hand it out. Use your weak hand.”

He started to move his left and I cracked his temple with the barrel.

“You’re a lefty, asshole. I saw you light the cigarette.”

“Chingaso.”

“With your mother, asshole. She liked it a lot. Hand out the gun very slowly. Keep your left hand where it is.”

The gun came up and I took it. A black TEK 9, one of the old gang-banger weapons of choice, no doubt converted to full-automatic fire. I moved back two steps, clicked on the safety, and tossed it on the asphalt behind me. The street was empty and the lights were off in most of the houses. No cars even came by on Third Avenue.

I pulled on the door handle.

“Out and on the pavement, very slowly.”

He obliged grudgingly, dropping to his knees, then lowering himself face down with his arms straight out. He knew the routine from much experience. Everyone should have a career, and here was a career criminal. A chain dangled down from his neck holding a silver cross. I did a quick pat-down, finding nothing but a wallet. I stuck it in my pants.

“You robbing me?”

“Sure. What are you doing here?”

“Smoking.”

“Why are you watching the street?”

Suddenly the streetlights went sideways and I was on my back, barely avoiding the hard pavement with the back of my head. His bulk was immediately on top of me. I fought to breathe as he grabbed with both hands for the revolver. Stupid, stupid rookie mistake, standing too close, not watching-he had reached for my ankle and pulled me down. He was strong. Years doing weights in prison will do that. And I only held control of the Python in one hand. I had just enough strength to toss it out of his reach.

He tried to scramble for it and that’s when I brought my knee into his balls. I felt a satisfying fleshy connection and he made an “oomph” sound. It gave me enough time to flip him over and slam the heel of my hand into his nose. I heard cartilage snap and a glob of blood spurted in his upper lip. I sprang up and got hold of the Python again, turning around in time to see him crawling for the TEK 9.

“Don’t!” I was panting and bouncing on the balls of my feet, adrenaline sending me ten feet in the air. He looked back and studied me.

“You had to think about it,” he huffed, pain pinching his face. “That’s the thing about guys like you. You hesitate. You think.”

I was in a two-handed shooting stance now, his upper torso lined up in the Python’s precision sites, three feet away. I said, “Don’t make me think too long.”

He put his head on the street and brought his legs up, giving in to the agony down in his crotch.

“Motherfucker.”

I took the opportunity to kick him in the side.

“Fuuuck! I’m filing against you, homes, police brutality.”

So he knew who I was. This was no small-time burglar or car thief prowling the neighborhood.

“Guess what, genius. I’m not a cop anymore. I’m just another concerned citizen.” His head rose and he watched me closely. His pupils seemed to dilate despite the streetlights.

“I’m asking you again: Why are you watching the street?”

His bit his lip to fight the pain. “You know the drill, homes. I got nothing to say.”

“You sound like somebody using dialogue out of an eighties gang movie.” I forced myself to ratchet down the barely controlled hysteria inside me. I had almost lost my gun. “You’re not coming back here. And I want you to send a message to your keepers, asshole. The woman who lives down the block didn’t have anything to do with anything.”

“Says you.”

“That’s right. And you’re going to have to take my word for it. She doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t have anything. She hasn’t crossed anybody. No venganza.” Revenge. “Your friends didn’t even kill the right guy. They killed an innocent civilian and the cops aren’t going to just drop it.”

“Not what I hear,” he muttered.

Now how did he know that? I poked his sore side again with my shoe and he winced.

“You kicked me in my balls, man!”

“You’re lucky I didn’t just shoot your ass.”

“Next time, homes. Next time. I won’t hesitate.”

Now I was running cold, just like training had taught me. I kept him in the gun sight. “There’s not going to be a next time you like, homes. You people aren’t going to be the only ones watching. I’m going to be watching. You won’t know when or where. I’m going to be watching this street, and if I have to blow away some felons, nobody’s going to bother me about it.”

“If you have the valor to pull the trigger.”

“You don’t want to find out. Better for everybody that we just drop it.”

“They won’t drop it, chingaso. They never do.”

“If they don’t, Estás chingado, hombre.” You’re fucked, man.

My legs were going stiff, but I went on with it. “Now, you be a good messenger boy and get the hell out of here.” He raised himself with difficulty and fell back into the driver’s seat. I said, “If I see your hand come out of that window, I’ll kill you. If the truck turns around and comes at me, same deal. Drive away. Don’t come back.”

He looked at me with sad eyes.

“My wallet…”

“Adios, asshole. I might need to know your name so I make sure it gets on the street that you talk to cops.”

He thought about it. He thought about it again. Then he sighed, closed the door, and started the truck. It drove slowly down to the corner and turned north.

I picked up the TEK 9. He also left his matches. The matchbook was yellow and said Jesus Is Lord Pawn Shop, with an address on Bell Road. I put them in my pocket and slowly walked home, my butt and lower back aching, my nerves drained. When I crossed Third, I could make out a pair of taillights several blocks past the traffic circle at Encanto Boulevard, moving slowly away.

Inside the house I sank gingerly into one of the leather chairs in the darkened living room, sweat against my chest, and my hands shaking so badly I had to put them under my arms. Nausea flooded my middle. I looked at the bookshelves in an urgent attempt to hold onto something steady: the shelves with grandfather’s books and mine, lifetimes of reading and reflection. It was a few minutes before I could will my legs into the bedroom, where I stowed the TEK 9, replaced the Python on the nightstand, and got into my sweatpants for bed. I missed sleeping in the nude. I missed a lot of things about my old life. I sure as hell didn’t know the person who had just done that take-down on the street. Was I willing to shoot the banger? Yes, I was.

An hour later I was still lying flat on my back staring up at the ceiling. Robin’s door opened quietly and I watched her pad across the landing that separated the two bedrooms. She wore boxer shorts and a T-shirt. Her nipples were obvious even in the semi-darkness. I let her climb into the bed and lie down next to me, resting her head on my shoulder. Neither of us said a word. She put her hand on my bare chest and I fought any feeling. I did not know myself or what I was capable of. It was nearly three a.m. in Washington. I turned away from her and this time I was the one crying while she held me close, her front to my back. I tried very much not to notice the contour of her body against mine, head-to-toe, or to remember how it felt that night on the landing when we were both naked holding onto each other, or how it had felt the other time, when she first came into our lives. My wedding band weighed on my left hand, the room grew cooler and after a long time it dissolved into sleep.

10

The man who stood before me at the Jesus Is Lord Pawn Shop was a middle-aged Anglo with short, gray hair and skin the color and texture of a scrubbed potato. The Arizona sun will do that. His face was unremarkable except for the fact that he lacked one eye. He didn’t wear a patch, frosted glasses, or any kind of prosthetic. Instead, his eyelid hung half-open like a stuck garage door, inviting you to stare into the cavity beyond. His good eye was yellow. He was at least a hundred pounds overweight, which was accented by the tight T-shirt encasing his folds of flab. The front of the shirt proclaimed in yellow capital letters, PEACE THROUGH SUPERIOR FIREPOWER. The butt of a revolver stuck out of his shoulder holster.

“Colt Python?” I asked.

“One of my faves, bro.”

One can always find common ground.

He stood behind a display counter that ran what looked like a third the length of a football field. It contained every firearm goodie I could think of and quite a few I had never even seen. The old days of a reliable few brands and types of revolvers and some nine-millimeters were long gone. The pistols under the glass were varied and bad-ass looking, plenty of semi-automatics, and a couple that looked like pistol-sized shotguns.

Behind him was a wall of shotguns and assault rifles, as well as another low counter stocked with ammunition. When Barack Obama was elected president, there was such a run on Phoenix gun shops that even the cops had a hard time finding ammo. They obviously didn’t look here. Around me was the equivalent of a big-box gun store, with tables and shelves full of holsters, magazines, Speedloaders, scopes-every accessory a shooter could want. Combat knives were abundant in another display case. Overhead signs marked each merchandise area. It was the largest gun store I had ever seen, exuding the vibe of a porn shop crossed with a hardware store.

The sound system was playing tunes from the seventies. “Brandy” was on at that moment, and I cursed to myself-now I’d have it in my head for a week or more.

The spaces on the wall that didn’t contain firearms held a large American flag hung horizontally and a six-foot-long stained wood plaque reciting the Second Amendment. Bumper stickers also abounded: Illegal aliens SUCK, Stop the Invasion, Every Juan Please Go Home, and Illegal Alien Hunting Permit among them.

“I see you have good taste, too.” He eyed the Python on my hip. “May I?”

Never give up your gun, Peralta taught. The night before I had almost carelessly lost it. Now I unholstered it, opened the cylinder, and dropped the shells into my palm. Then I handed it across the counter to him.

He snapped the cylinder back in, pointed it at me. “Bang!” He laughed with a strangely high-pitched voice, like a boy soprano, and his belly tectonically undulated the folds of his T-shirt. His bad eyelid fluttered then froze again grotesquely in place.

“You’re not the jumpy kind, huh?”

“You just caught me on a slow day.” I watched him evenly. He examined my gun.

“Nice action. You’ve taken care of it. Want to sell it?”

I told him no, which was a shame, he said, considering they weren’t made any more and he’d give me top dollar.

“Shoot it much?”

“Every now and then. Helps me relax.”

“You bet your ass.” He handed the gun back to me. “I’m Barney.”

“David.”

We shook hands. He was one of those guys who wanted to hurt you with a handshake. I returned the grip back at the same intensity. He appraised me freshly with his good eye and the handshake ended.

“So what can I do you for?”

“Never been in. Looks like a great store. I had a friend pass on one of your matchbooks and I thought I’d check it out.”

“I got a hundred boxes full of ’em. Help yourself.” He tapped on the open cardboard container of matchbooks by the cash register.

“But you’re not a pawn shop?”

“Used to be. But the chains drove me out of it. Everybody’s pawning shit, the economy’s so bad now, but an independent outfit has a really hard time making it. Anyway, I get better margins on guns. Now, if you’re a revolver man, I’ve got everything your firepower-seeking heart would desire. If you want more, got a special going on Sig Sauer P238 Equinox. Sweetest little concealable you’d ever want.”

“They’re nice.” I knew: Lindsey had one. “I’m just kind of browsing for home defense.”

“I got you,” he said, poking his eye-socket with a stubby finger. “Like to say to folks, ‘I got my eye on you!’ ” This brought more child-like laughter. “I don’t always look like this. Usually have in my glass eye. But last night I went down to this club, see. That one down on Indian School? The Stuffed Beaver, with all the neon out front? Was buying this stripper drinks-Jager shots-and she’s never seen a glass eye before. Get it? Seen a glass eye?” I was in the presence of comedic genius. “Anyway, I pop it out and show it to her and she fools around with it and puts it in her mouth and next thing you know, shit, she swallows it! Fuck, that eye cost real money!”

Up until now, he had been speaking in a flat, Midwestern accent. Suddenly, a little Southern came in. “I was fixing to get real mad, started yelling at her, and she turns green and runs to the bathroom. I run after her. Well, kinda wobbled-I was three sheets. I go right into the ladies room behind her, and she runs into one a the stalls, bends over and, hell… Throws up! My glass eye right there in the toilet with all that barf from drinking all day and not eating, guess ’cause she has to keep her figure.”

“Not good,” I ventured.

“Damned straight. She also heaved up her dentures. Girl can’t be more than twenty-five. Pretty little thing. Named Destiny. And she’s got false teeth.” He sighed. “What can you do? So here I am without my eye.”

At least he didn’t call himself “Deadeye.”

I repeated, “Home defense.”

“Got it.” Now he was from Iowa or Nebraska again. “Here’s this little Kel Tec number back here.” He pointed to one of his guns on the wall. It looked like something from a science fiction movie. “Gas piston. Ten rounds, but I can give you a deal on a thirty-round mag. Sweet. Just remember, if you do ’em in the yard, drag the body inside your door. Self-defense. Now, ’course if you’re a traditionalist, which it looks like you are, I recommend a Remington 870, twelve-gauge, with a pistol grip…”

While he went on, I nodded, and checked the place out more. It was retail space that had gone through many incarnations. The drop ceiling looked as if it hadn’t been replaced since LBJ was president, and it had dark yellow water stains in some spots. At the back of the long room was an alcove and scarred double doors. Still, a new surveillance camera was mounted in one corner, inside a saucer-like cowling that allowed it to swivel to different angles. I watched it as it turned. Also at the back was a mirror, probably one-way glass. He was the only worker visible in the store but I sensed he wasn’t alone. I was the only customer, which seemed odd, even if it was the middle of a workday and Phoenix was in its worst recession in history.

“Let me think about it,” I said, told him he owned a great store.

“I’m proud of it.” He rubbed at his missing eye. “Been out here twenty years and seen what they did to this place. Tax and spend. Open borders. A goddamned invasion. Islamo-fascists coming, too. No wonder people are scared and need to buy guns for home defense. At least we got rid of that spic sheriff.”

Something primal inside cocked my muscles to reach across the counter, pull his head down into the glass display case by his ears, and add to his facial deformity. I could have done it before he ever got his fat hand to his gun. I did a quick relaxation exercise Sharon Peralta had taught me. I took a deep, grateful breath. The past was gone and the future was unknowable, even if I couldn’t face it. All I had to do was be in that moment. My lungs filled with air.

“You okay, mister?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just thinking about how much money I’d like to come spend here.”

He smiled wide, showing a set of teeth right out of Hollywood. “Don’t let the old lady know. She’ll want you to buy furniture or some such shit. But if she’s a shooter, bring her by! Got an underground range!”

I thanked him and walked out the door, the laser sensor sounding a loud tone back in the store. From the speakers, Warren Zeavon was kicking in “Lawyers, Guns and Money.”

Robin was sitting in the car when I got back. Her hands were covering the Chief’s Special that sat between her legs. Today she had refused the protective vest and I hadn’t argued.

“Any trouble?”

“Just sitting out in this suburban hell. Maybe that’s unfair. Somebody built this, sweated over it, maybe was proud of it. I sat here wondering if anyone could paint this as a landscape…capture the desolation. How small it all is under the sky. I wish I had the talent to paint. I don’t, so I studied the ones who did.”

“You’re not through yet,” I said.

She smiled slightly. “What now?”

“Let’s sit awhile and watch.”

“I’ve never been on a stakeout. But why are we doing this?”

“Following a clue.”

“Why not let the lady cop who hates you do it?”

I shrugged.

“Because she doesn’t give a damn. She thinks you’re hiding something, and she wants to squeeze you.” That’s why we sat here. A connection between Jax/Verdugo and the gun store might be tenuous. It might be important. I had contacts beyond Kate Vare. I couldn’t protect Robin alone. Maybe I was a fool to think I could protect her at all. They won’t drop it, the scumbag had said last night. They never do.

Robin said, “Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

I said it with a certainty that I rationally had confidence in. It wasn’t because of the nights we had spent side-by-side. I told myself that. The silence lasted long enough for the mood to change.

“You miss the cops, David. You do. Don’t deny it.”

She smiled wide, making her face beautiful, and starting to resemble her sister. I set that thought aside and pulled across the street into the lot of another decaying set of storefronts, then parked beside some clothing-donation containers. To the south, Shaw Butte and the North Mountains were befogged in the dirty air of three million cars. When I was in high school, Bell Road had been a two-lane highway through a mix of flat desert and used-car lots. The city planners had vowed it would be the northern boundary of Phoenix for decades to come. Now it was six lanes wide and the city limits were many miles farther north. The growth machine had come and gone, a freeway paralleled it a quarter mile north, and Bell had been left seedy for much of its route from Sun City across Phoenix until it became more prosperous-looking near the Scottsdale city limits. Every place changes. I wondered why my city had to change mostly for the worse.

As cars sped by doing sixty, I told Robin about how empty it once was up here. My buddies and I launched model rockets in the empty desert a few miles to the east. “I wish I could have seen it back then,” she said. I heard Lindsey, in her former voice, saying, “Tell me a story, History Shamus,” and my heart gnawed at my breastbone.

My eyes stayed on the ugly building across the street. The gun store anchored an aging, low-slung shopping strip with a discount smoke shop as the only other tenant. Its sign was gigantic: JESUS IS LORD PAWN SHOP in five-foot black letters against a bright yellow backdrop. Beneath those: GUNS, KNIVES, AMMUNITION. The meek shall inherit the earth but not Bell Road.

We sat for an hour with the windows open, a gentle breeze blowing between us, the winter sun in our eyes. Half a dozen customers came and went, always solitary, middle-aged white men in pickup trucks or SUVs. I engaged in profiling and was not disappointed. For a place whose matchbook was found on a Hispanic banger, this was not exactly an oasis of diversity. One man carried a rifle into the store and came out empty-handed. The others carried out white plastic bags weighed down with guns or ammunition.

Finally, I spoke into the cool air. “We can’t keep doing this.”

“I know. I want lunch.”

“You know what I mean. We’re headed for trouble.”

“It feels good” She brushed back her hair and smiled at me. “I like it. You do, too. You haven’t done anything you have to feel guilty about or confess to Lindsey Faith.”

I stared into the pawnshop. It had windows tinted aluminum and bars across them. Small planes flew overhead, coming into Deer Valley Airport.

“Nothing’s going to happen unless you want it to.” Her voice was even and damnably soothing. “And if it does happen and afterwards it bothers you, that’s your hang-up. I decided a long time ago that I don’t like to be alone, and I don’t have to be, so I won’t be. I sure as hell am not going to feel guilty.”

“Robin, you’re my sister-in-law.” I looked at her again, the sun turning her hair to a rich gold color.

“David, we have slept together. Literally. Didn’t they do that on the frontier all the time…”

“Not that way.”

“Whatever. If you have an erection that persists more than four hours, as they say in the ads.” Her smirk was brief. “Things happen between people. Chemistry, passion. Lindsey Faith is my half-sister and the truth is, your marriage is falling apart.” She put her hand firmly on mine. “Now don’t get pissed off. It’s just the truth. You’ve both been through a lot. When was the last time you made love to her? When was the last time she really wanted to make love to you?”

I wasn’t angry with Robin. I did fight to keep my throat from closing off.

“There’s a lot about my sister that you don’t understand,” she said.

It ate me up, but I had to admit she was right.

Another pickup pulled in and another white guy got out, walking with a wide stride into the store. “Anyway,” she went on, “You don’t have to worry. I’m not going to fall in love with you.” Her hand left mine. “Which doesn’t mean I don’t like you. I do. I love the feeling of your body against mine. I just don’t intend to get under your spell. That would be trouble.” In a different tone, she said, “Check this out.”

The long black Chevy Suburban bumped loudly from the street into the lot and drove straight to the front of the gun shop. It didn’t use a parking space but pulled up just ahead of the door. Two muscular Hispanic men got out. They weren’t bangers. Both wore suits without ties. The driver did a subtle scan of the surroundings and then they both went inside. They moved with a limber, professional gait. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they were cops.

Another half hour passed, enough time for the other customer to leave. Soon after, the driver came out and opened the back of the Suburban-it had double doors. Then my new pal Barney wheeled out a cart stacked with long, thin boxes. The three men hefted them into the SUV. The operation took ten minutes at the most, but it was enough for three loads on Barney’s cart. The three men shook hands and the Hispanics sped away. Unless they were buying ammunition for local law enforcement, they were definitely not cops. At least not friendly ones.

11

I took another chance that evening following cocktails. After getting Robin in the guest room and setting the alarm, I walked around the corner to a bungalow on Encanto Boulevard. It belonged to a neighbor who we had over for dinner parties, when we used to have them, and saw at Central Church on Palm Lane, before Lindsey had decided that if God really did exist she hated him. The door opened after the first knock and Amy Preston invited me inside.

She was fair-haired and attractive, in a girl-next-door way, wearing her mid-thirties well. As usual, she was dressed in a conservative pants suit. If asked where she worked, she would say, “the Department of Justice.” But she really worked for what I kidded her was the “fun agency”: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The joke had been spoiled somewhat when the feds added “explosives” to the title.

I met her when she first moved into the neighborhood and had stopped by to ask if a homeless person was camping behind our house. The answer was no-the camper had temporarily bedded down behind the overgrown back yard of a nearby house, owned by an elderly couple whose kids I had gone to school with. But that was how we met. It took a long time to realize that her businesslike restraint was not just because she was the supervisor of an elite federal law-enforcement unit, but also because she was shy.

“David. My God, are you all right?”

I told her I was and took a seat on one of the mission-style chairs in her perfect Pottery Barn living room.

“I guess not completely, since you’re packing.”

I had the Python under my windbreaker. I said, “An armed society is a polite society.”

“Yeah, yeah. I read about what happened. Did you know this…person? The story only said it was an unidentified male.”

“It was Robin’s boyfriend. You never met him.” I turned down her offer of wine. “He claimed to teach at NYU and was in town writing about sustainability. It’s the latest fad in academia.” I paused. “Unfortunately, it all seems to have been a scam.” I continued: Now the cops had an entirely different assumption, all based on the man’s ring that I had found in the death house. I described the design.

“El Verdugo.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “He’s been on the radar for several years.” She added, “If he’s real. Some analysts think he’s an amalgamation of different hired killers, but the myth is more powerful to the cartel.”

“The bogeyman.”

Her eyes were still. “Something like that.”

Amy was circumspect, even though we both worked in law enforcement. At one time, I would have been inclined to think: typical fed. Now I was more willing to accept that she had secrets she had to keep. We didn’t talk shop and I had never asked her for a professional favor.

“Are you still staying at home?” she said. “I’m surprised. Robin might be a target-I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. PPD’s providing protection, I assume.”

“I don’t count on it. The lead investigator is Kate Vare.”

“Ah, Ms. Professional Jealousy. Surely she wouldn’t let that get in the way.”

“I wish I could say that.”

The talk stoked my anxiety about Robin. But she knew the drill: if the alarm went off, she would immediately get in the safe space behind the steel plate, with the Chief’s Special, and dial 911. “Tell the dispatcher,” I had drilled her, “it’s a break-in that is in progress. They respond to those words, ‘in progress.’ ”

Amy sipped from the glass of white wine on the table beside her chair. The calm normality I felt in her house was so at odds with the intensity of our lives on Cypress that it broke my stride, diverted me from my mission. Then I heard Bruce Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love” album softly playing in the background. Just the kind of thing I had banned from my life lately. The Boss sang “Cautious Man” and the weights on my heart swelled. “Weights” was probably the wrong word. They were compartments in which I had placed recent disasters and sorrows – stuffed them full and heavy and tried every waking moment to keep the lids on. It was a learned skill and I was still learning. Fortunately she filled the silence.

“How do you like working for the new sheriff?”

“I’m not going to stay.”

I lied. I bent the truth. For the moment, there was no reason for Amy to think I didn’t still carry a badge. It was a useful fiction and I could use it for a few more days without getting caught; paperwork traveled slowly down on Jefferson Street. I had used my name and badge number that afternoon to run my scumbag through the NCIC. His wallet had two stolen credit cards and fifteen dollars cash, but his California driver’s license was true. And he was a member of La Familia-on parole after doing time for assault and weapons possession, the latest in a long and violent sheet.

“Here’s a gift for lighting your backyard grill.” I reached into my windbreaker pocket and tossed Amy the yellow book of matches. She studied it all of five seconds.

“Where did you get this, David?”

“Off a banger who was watching the house the other night. He’s La Fam. Then I took a little field trip, too. Quite an operation at Jesus Is Lord. Good ole Barney.”

“You know you shouldn’t be doing this.” Her voice assumed a taut, supervisory tone. “If you see a suspicious vehicle, call PPD. This isn’t a county case and you’re personally involved anyway. I can’t believe you did that.”

But I did, so I just smiled at her, and let the silence collect between us.

“How’s Lindsey taking all this?”

“She’s concerned. She’s in D.C.”

“Already? Well, she’ll go far. Fighting cyber attacks is the growing field and she’s got the skills.”

I didn’t go for the distraction. I just watched her and kept my mouth shut.

“Look,” she said, “you know Phoenix is the center for people smuggling into the United States. The coyotes bring them across the desert and once they’re here, they spread out all over the country. Even corporations hire the smugglers to get them to the poultry and hog operations in North Carolina or the packing plants in Nebraska. We’re number one in kidnappings and almost all of that is tied into the people smuggling. Now the probability is high that we’ve become ground zero in the drug trafficking organizations’ ongoing expansion in this country. So if La Familia has shown up, it doesn’t surprise me.”

“And they say we don’t have a diverse economy.”

She didn’t smile. “Local law enforcement is not ready for what’s coming, David. That war down in Juarez and Tijuana-it could come here. The people behind their gated communities think this won’t touch them. They’re wrong.”

“But I thought tax cuts would solve everything,” I said.

“The thing is, we don’t just import and distribute, with all the bodies along the way. We’re probably the biggest hub for firearms smuggling back the other way.”

“The drug war in Mexico.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Calderon’s offensive has set off a bloodbath down there. The cartels get their guns from here.” The Mexican president had promised an offensive against the narcos, and the border had been convulsed with violence. I wondered when we would have a failed state on our southern flank. And the firepower for the bad guys was courtesy of the good old U.S. of A.

I asked her if it was that easy.

She nodded emphatically. “The gun laws are so lax. There are six thousand licensed gun dealers in the border states and we have two hundred agents to police them. Try to get an Arizona jury to convict these gun dealers. Not going to happen.”

I listened as she explained the enterprise: American citizens can take the guns across the border-they won’t be searched going in. The smugglers hire Americans with clean records, have them buy three or four assault rifles, and take them south. Sometimes they buy at gun shows where there’s no requirement to notify the authorities. Other times they use licensed dealers. She said, “Most of the time it moves below the radar. Hundreds of individuals going south with guns. Drugs and money moving north to pay for them. It’s very hard to detect.”

The Jesus Is Lord Pawn shop didn’t seem hard to detect. I described the store.

“I’m aware of it.” And that was all she said.

So I detailed what else I saw: the black Suburban, the well-dressed Hispanics, and the large quantity of boxes they loaded. “They were a tad out of place there, to say the least.” Springsteen sang “One Step Up.” I fought against my guilt and gloom like a man trying to stay standing in a brutal windstorm. Emotional honesty and mordant guitars were not what I needed at that moment. And then it occurred to me. “Mexican cops, right?”

Amy Preston sipped her white wine and shook her head. “You know I can’t comment…”

I finished the sentence for her: “on an ongoing investigation.”

“Exactly.”

I said, “My problem is personal. The people who are watching Robin, the ones who chased us with guns, they’re ongoing, too. So everybody needs to understand there’s an innocent civilian here and I’ll do what I have to do to protect her.” My machismo didn’t carry me far. I watched her face and ran it all through my head. So after a pause, I added, “I just don’t want to get in somebody’s way.”

But I knew that I already had.

12

Maybe we should have canceled the trip to Washington. Maybe we should have gone and stayed. I’ll never know.

We went and came back, a long weekend. It gave me a chance to wear the good, navy wool topcoat and gray fedora that I had bought years ago in Denver, and of course to see Lindsey. It was cold and the sky was the color of granite for those five days, a nice change for a native Phoenician. As our jetliner took off for home, snow began to fall. By the time we touched down at Sky Harbor twelve inches were on the ground back in D.C.

Before I left, I had asked a retired cop in the neighborhood to keep an eye on the house. He didn’t ask questions. A former Marine with a gruff exterior and a great sense of humor, he was now an artist living off his cop’s pension. He liked to walk around the neighborhood and keep an eye on things, talk to people. I dubbed him “the Mayor of Willo.” As we drove home, I hoped his walks had been uneventful.

On the flight I tried to make sense of things. Some things. Robin’s boyfriend had been murdered in the signature style of one of the most notorious gangs anywhere. His identity was a fraud and if the ring was his, it meant he might be a hit man for the Sinaloa Cartel. So far the criminal calculus worked fine. The hit man had gotten crosswise with his employer, who outsourced his assassination to La Fam. The thug watching our house that night had La Familia connections, too. So far, so good.

But why Robin? They sent her an emphatic message via FedEx. Then they tried to ambush us outside the Sonic. What had she seen or heard? We had talked about it so much that I was convinced she really didn’t know. And Kate Vare’s behavior was strange, too-the case going from priority to back-burner in days. Then there was Deadeye and his gun shop, with Mexican cops, the feds, and my La Fam watcher all drawn to the store up on Bell Road. Maybe the feds had backed Vare off-but if so, why hadn’t they tried to contact and interview Robin?

I could make more sense of this jumble than anything that had happened in Washington, where Lindsey was not wearing her wedding rings.

Now we were back under the big sky in time for a spectacular sunset and seventy degrees. People paid the big bucks at resorts for this. We lived here. Of course they were gone by the time summer hell arrived, and most of them weren’t targets of a drug cartel. The car flowed into the maze of ramps where Interstate 10, Loop 202, and State Route 51 all came together, then we turned due west as the incandescent pink that rippled across the sky merged into the intense copper glow directly ahead of us.

Robin said, “It’s going to be okay, David.” And that was the only sound besides the rush of the freeway.

The person was sitting in one of the rocking chairs in front of the big picture window. I could only see the dark silhouette and make out the motion of the chair. I didn’t turn on Cypress but instead drove north on Third, my body taut.

I thought about calling the cops. A suspicious person. Let the uniforms handle it. But where would that get us? At best, he’d be a scumbag with warrants out on him, and another scumbag would replace him tomorrow. At worse, he’d show them I.D., get a warning, and go away without me ever knowing who he was.

“If he wanted to kill us, I’m not sure he’d just be rocking on the front patio,” Robin said.

“Unless he’s a hit man with real sang froid.”

I turned and crossed Windsor Street to Fifth Avenue and turned south again. I parked a little past Encanto and gave Robin instructions. The Python was already on my belt-I had retrieved it from the trunk first thing when we got to the car at the airport. Now I walked slowly toward home, keeping close to the fronts of the houses on the north side of Cypress Street. The sun was gone, replaced by the long, deep-blue twilight that was peculiar to the desert. I hoped it would provide enough cover for me. The sounds and glow of televisions intruded on my senses as I wondered if a neighbor would call the cops on me. But by then I was two houses away. I pulled the Python and carried it straight down, concealed by my leg.

“Howdy.”

The silhouette in the chair started. “You…” That was all he got out.

“I want to see your hands.” I dropped into a combat shooting stance. My finger was on the trigger and I knew exactly how much pressure the Colt gunsmiths had required to make the hammer and firing pin do their jobs. “Now.”

The form didn’t hesitate. Two hands shot up straight like in an old Western. It was a small, older man.

“Just take my wallet. I’ll get it out for you!” A quavering voice.

“Keep those hands up,” I said. “Are you armed?”

“No!”

The house looked fine and the guy didn’t seem to have any backup. I moved in closer.

The man in the rocking chair could have been anywhere between sixty and eighty. He was completely bald and clean-shaven. His face looked like a walnut with eyebrows. The walnut was dressed in a loud golf shirt and khaki slacks. His shoes looked expensive. I put my finger on the trigger guard, cocked my arm to raise the gun away, and gave him a quick pat-down. His bones felt brittle. Now I placed him closer to eighty.

“I said you can have the wallet.” This time his voice was testy.

“I don’t want your wallet. Who the hell are you and why are you sitting in my rocking chair?”

Without taking my eyes off him, I gave a signal to Robin, who had been following me at a distance.

He said, “You’re Dr. David Mapstone? I have a business proposition for you.”

I let him lower his hands. I holstered the Python and sat in the other chair.

He went on, “You have a funny way of greeting people.”

“What’s your name and why are you here?” I was not in a hospitable mood.

“Can we go inside?”

“No.”

Robin pulled in the car and started bringing luggage into the house. I heard the alarm’s warning beep until she disarmed it.

“May I?” He held up a small hand. I nodded. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a business-card case. He handed me the white card. It said: Judson Lee, Attorney at Law.

I told him to come in the house.

“I haven’t really practiced law for twenty years. I have a few clients, friends mostly, that I do favors for.”

Now he was in the study, in the low armchair, while I sat at the desk. My mind was still back in Washington, where history was everywhere. I hadn’t been to the city in years and Robin had never been there. The three of us had walked from the White House to Capitol Hill, around the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress, and the Capitol itself as I told stories. The Capitol dome wasn’t even complete when the Civil War broke out and wounded union soldiers were hospitalized inside. The building held a crypt for George Washington, even though he was buried at Mount Vernon. Sam Rayburn’s “Bourbon-and-branch water” sessions were held in his basement hideaway, where young LBJ ingratiated himself to the lonely House speaker.

Lindsey seemed distracted, the woman who had once been so moved when I talked history. She walked alongside us, but she didn’t really seem to be with us. The National Portrait Gallery entranced Robin; we spent an afternoon there while Lindsey was working. She said little about her new job. Maybe she told Robin more when they had sister time. We ate in restaurants we couldn’t afford. The bad economy seemed far away and to a casual observer I was fortunate to be in the company of two attractive women. Lindsey was luminous. Robin, I saw with new eyes. “I’m glad you two are getting along,” Lindsey said. I had assigned a guilty cryptic message, of course. But I kept myself tamped down. Mostly.

“Now I have a client who needs your help.” The little man paused. “Your special combination of skills, the historian and the deputy.”

“I’m not with the Sheriff’s Office any longer.”

“I know this, Dr. Mapstone. That’s why it’s a business proposition.” He looked at me as if he expected to be offered a refreshment. I sat back and said nothing.

“I’m sure you’ve heard the name Harley Talbott?”

Of course I had. He was one of the most controversial of Arizonans. Some said he was a great philanthropist. He had his name on a building at the University of Arizona. Others claimed he was a gangster who had been behind the murder of an Arizona Republic reporter in the 1970s. Nobody argued that he initially made his money as the biggest liquor dealer in Phoenix.

Lindsey had rented an apartment in the District. She furnished it from Ikea, getting an allowance from the government. Robin slept on the sofa while Lindsey and I shared her new bed. It felt strange, of course. Late at night, I tried to tunnel into Lindsey with compliments-she had cut her hair again, into something called an angled bob; I liked her hair longer but I told her how looked lovely she looked, which was the truth. Her blue eyes were still so stunning against the darkness of her hair. She had new glasses. I told her people in Phoenix thought she was such a star in the new cyber war. Little neighborhood gossip was another light topic, such as whose house had been on the market for two years now, or how the new sheriff was training deputies to be immigration enforcers. My tunneling attempts failed. She said matter-of-factly, “You have a beard.”

She wanted to know how Robin was doing. Inside, I wanted to rage “what the hell about us?” I didn’t. The crisis back home kept me oddly in control during this visit. I gave her the details of the case but she didn’t react much. I felt as if we were back home over the past year, when her silences had grown to terrify me. The closest we came to a fight was when Lindsey once again refused to let Robin stay with her in D.C. The job was too all-consuming right now. She didn’t have time to entertain Robin, much less look out for her.

We didn’t make love. I lay down in bed nude, like I always used to sleep with her. She slept in her panties, a new innovation. We made out a little but then she patted me on the arm and pulled away, gently but obviously. It was like a switch flipped off. This had been happening for a long time. It made what took place last year more remarkable. Every marriage has its ups and downs. Every marriage has moments when you think you’ve awakened with a total stranger, when you have moments when you really dislike this person you know that you love. Our story was nothing special. That’s what I told myself. But Lindsey’s waning interest in sex didn’t mean she wasn’t interested. I wasn’t that self-absorbed. It meant she wasn’t interested in sex with me. I lay awake as she slept. On her side of the bed, I noticed a blue pack of Gauloises Blondes. She was smoking again, but not around me. I wondered who else she might share a cigarette with?

In the study now, Robin joined us. Judson Lee stood and introduced himself, holding her hand in a courtly way. “What a beautiful name, Robin,” he said. I thought he was going to kiss her hand.

He sat back down and resumed. “This isn’t about Harley Talbott, directly. My client is Nick DeSimone, the restaurant owner. He’s a great guy. Have you been to his place?” His hands gesticulated in his small lap.

“When I can afford Scottsdale prices.”

“Ah.” One of the black slashes of eyebrows arched. In the light, his face bore the signs of Scottsdale or Paradise Valley privilege-or rather lack of signs: in spite of its sun-leathered color, it was barely wrinkled. “Well, Mr. DeSimone’s grandfather Paolo worked for Harley Talbott when he was young. He was an impressionable kid. Harley was a big personality. Paolo went to prison for Harley Talbott.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m out of the cold-case business.”

“This was a miscarriage of justice,” he said. “Paolo was no angel at times, that’s true. But he had cleaned himself up, started a family. Then this incident happened and he was made to take the fall. His family deserves to have his name cleared.”

I told him I could recommend some good private investigators.

“But you’re a historian, no? What I’m proposing, Dr. Mapstone, and what my client is willing to pay for, is what you might call family history.”

“A family history that clears his grandfather?”

“I can’t think of a better person to do it. You solved the murder of the FBI agent, after how many decades? And the Yarnell kidnapping. I know your reputation.”

Out of the lawyer’s vision, Robin smiled and winked at me.

I told him I appreciated it, but no. I would have my hands full teaching at ASU. I hoped so: I kept waiting to get the final sign-on. Things moved so slowly in academia. Or maybe we would sell the house and move to Washington-I had offered that to Lindsey and she had said no. That was another example where she calmly made a hard pronouncement and ended the conversation, another reason to lie awake. Was she really trying out this job for a few months, as we had discussed? Now the round brown face in front of me kept talking.

“He’d be willing to pay five thousand dollars.”

“I can’t. But thanks for stopping by. I’m sorry I gave you a scare. We’ve had some trouble in the neighborhood lately.”

“Ah.” He stood and shook my hand. “I totally understand. I don’t even know anyone who would live down here.”

I kept my neighborhood pride tamped down. I didn’t tell him you couldn’t pay me enough to live in his gated property or mountainside mansion.

He said, “I hope you’ll keep my card in case you change your mind. If what I hear about you is correct, this story might really intrigue you.”

I walked him to the door, eager to get him out-eager, desperate really, to make drinks.

For the first time in weeks, I put on jazz. Bill Evans, Stan Getz, McCoy Tyner. Coltrane, of course. I drank two martinis and Robin had one. I was drinking too much. It was the least of my problems. Robin opened our last cans of chili, used up the box of crackers, and made me eat something.

When the music stopped, Robin said, “This isn’t your fault.” There was no question what this was. “There’s nothing you could have done differently.”

“I wonder about that every day,” I said.

“I know you do.” It wasn’t a reproach. Just a gentle commiseration. “There’s nothing anybody could have done. Nobody is to blame.”

“That may not be what Lindsey thinks.”

She didn’t respond.

Her face brightened. “If you’ll go running with me tomorrow, I’ll take you to a bookstore.”

“Will you wear the vest?”

“Hell, no.” She tried unsuccessfully to pull her hair behind her ears. It fell back, gently framing her smile.

“You are a pain in the ass.” I said it fondly.

We sat a long while in the dark living room, until she asked, “Do you want your space tonight?”

I closed my eyes, remembering the previous night, after Lindsey and I had strolled together along the Mall, the monuments grandly lit, the cold sharp. It felt important to try again to make a connection, to find my way back to her. It was a bad idea. I talked and she met me with silence. Until we came back to the Washington Monument, and then she spoke for all of ten seconds.

Lindsey’s words were still burning inside me like white phosphorous. The compartments had shattered and now I was carrying the shrapnel. But my body was giving in to alcohol and east-coast time.

I looked at Robin and shook my head. “Come be with me.”