South Phoenix Rules

13

The bedraggled, single-story building on Grand Avenue looked somewhere between sixty and eighty years old, with a single door and a square window on each side. All were covered by bars that might once have been painted. The square structure itself was bleached brown, done in cracking stucco to resemble adobe, and it sat atop the remains of an asphalt lot. It had once been the office to a motel in the golden age of driving, and this was the highway west out of town.

A battered sign on a pole near the street read, very faintly, Easy 8 Auto Court and beneath that, Air Conditioned-It’s Cool Inside!, but all the cottages were long gone. Now the office sat by itself, surrounded by barren lots on either side that held dirt and rocks the same color as the building. The only signs of newness were a twelve-foot-high security fence, a couple of halogen lights aimed from the roof, and Peralta’s silver Dodge Ram pickup parked in front. The Prelude bumped across the perimeter of the open gate. We got out, went inside, and found Peralta.

“I can’t believe this.” Those were my first words.

“What, Mapstone? You don’t believe in entrepreneurialism? It’s the American dream.”

He stood from behind an ancient metal desk, came around, and hugged Robin.

To me, he said, “What’s that growing on your face?”

A second desk sat at an angle across the room. Two institutional armchairs with green-cushioned seats that might have been new during the Eisenhower administration flanked both, and tall gray metal filing cabinets took up one wall. The floor was old linoleum, the color of coffee with three creams. The sheriff’s cigars had augmented the musty smell. Behind Peralta’s desk was a framed poster that proclaimed “Diversity.” It was meant to look exactly like one of those insipid motivational placards, but the image was of a dozen mean-looking assault rifles laid out neatly on white sand.

“Why are you not in some luxury suite in north Scottsdale?”

“Fake tits on a stick, not my style,” he grunted as he sat. To Robin, “Sorry about my language.”

She smiled at him.

“And you turned down how many high-powered offers to be corporate chief of security or a national consultant?”

“Thirteen,” he said. “But it’s a slow job market. I wanted to be on my own.”

“You must be crazy. You have a law degree, for god’s sake.”

He actually smiled. “Res ipsa loquitur.” The thing speaks for itself.

We sat in the chairs. He didn’t look much different. He wore a starched white shirt, red tie, and black slacks, with his usual firearms accessory.

“I’m a private investigator now, Mapstone. It’ll be fun. I don’t need to make much money. My ex has been very indulgent with her book royalties. But business comes anyway. I just got back from Douglas. Client wasn’t satisfied with how the police handled her brother’s murder. So I put some fresh eyes on it. Got out and saw a beautiful part of the state.”

I repeated, “I still can’t believe this. Why here?”

“I like it. The freight trains go by. I’m near my people. You know, I’m just a simple campesino.”

“Who went to Harvard,” Robin said.

He lowered his head and squinted at me. “Where’s your cannon?”

“I’m learning to love the Five-Seven.” The semi-automatic was tucked in my jeans, in the small of my back, concealed by my shirt. February, which was once the sweetest month in Phoenix, had come in hot, with today’s temperature near ninety. I wished that I had worn a short-sleeve shirt.

“Good.” He reached in a desk drawer and slid across a laminated card. “You won’t need this once the Legislature makes everything connected to guns legal, but here’s your concealed weapons permit.”

“But I didn’t…”

“Sure you did. I had you sign the paperwork for it the day you resigned.” I was irritated but reached over and took the card. He said, “So, give me an update?”

It didn’t seem as if there was much to tell. We had survived January, with no more scares, no more watchers sitting on the street at night. Sometimes I had seen a marked PPD unit drive down the street, but it could have been routine patrol. Vare had not even checked in with a phone call. When I called her to get an update, I was told to leave a message. It was, of course, never returned.

He put his elbows on the desk and folded his fingers in front of his face as I talked.

In a way, the lack of action had made the tension worse. But I had kept my anxieties to myself. Robin had become more comfortable, the trauma of opening the FedEx box receding. We held long discussions about the Great Depression-she knew much about the art and artists of the era-and comparisons with things now. She laughed more easily. She had a great laugh, uninhibited and delightfully distinctive. I could find her in a crowd just by her laugh. Although we relaxed some of the house rules-I was getting the mail and newspapers now-I tried not to let us get careless. I wouldn’t let her sunbathe outside and she complained that her tan was fading, but the result was quite attractive, at least to me.

…Oh, and I’m sleeping with my sister-in-law…Just that, although sometimes she caresses me in the night and I smooth back her soft hair and when I lie behind her, my front to her back, she knows how I feel about her, unfaithful bastard that I am…I’m not myself. Am I?

The only big news was the email I had received from ASU, blowing me off because of a new round of budget cuts. After all the in-person courting that I received after the election, I lost the job via an email. And it was just to be an adjunct professor, the minimum-wage counter help of academia.

“That must have pissed you off.” He leaned back and folded his hands behind his head. The only item of luxury in the entire office was where he sat, in a new executive office chair.

“History teaches humility and skepticism.”

“Right. Told you that you couldn’t go back to that P.C. shit. And that they wouldn’t have you. When Jennifer was at Stanford…” This was his oldest daughter. “…she said to me, ‘Why do I have to study something called HIS-story. What about HER-story?”

I could have pointed out that the word came from the Greek for inquiry and had nothing to do with pronouns, but he was right about the broader issue. I was mad as hell. Hurt, too. Me, the guy who couldn’t get tenure at San Diego State University, for God’s sake. Now I was rejected for a part-time teaching gig when I knew they were still taking on kids with half my credentials. I felt like even more of a failure, that I let down Lindsey, too. A couple of times I went off on Robin, although I immediately apologized. She accepted my outbursts with surprising equanimity, considering that I always imagined her to be someone who would cold-cock anybody who crossed her. But I had learned new things about her and we had grown closer. She would say, “You’re not yourself, David.”

Peralta spoke. “I hear you went to visit Amy Preston.” He dropped it light as a feather.

“That’s true.”

“Why were you out there at that gun shop?”

“He misses the cops,” Robin chimed in, gently punching my shoulder.

“I don’t doubt it,” Peralta said. “How’d you like Barney?”

“Barrel of laughs.”

“He’d kill you in a heartbeat. Did it occur to you that ATF might have an operation going?”

“Actually, no.” I felt the anger start to pulse in my temples. “If PPD wasn’t going to protect Robin, why wouldn’t I try to follow a lead and get ahead of the bad guys? Kate Vare takes this from a major case to the circular file and I’m just supposed to let it be?”

Peralta stared at me and grunted. Then, “Let’s go for a ride.”

He didn’t ask about Lindsey. But considering he was a good friend of the former Arizona governor who was Secretary of Homeland Security, he probably knew more about my wife than I did. I looked down, feeling my face burn.

The three of us fit easily into his pickup, which sat high off the road. He drove down 35th Avenue past warehouses and the entrances to half-century-old subdivisions of faded ranch houses. This was Maryvale, Phoenix’s first automobile suburb, laid down starting in the late 1950s. It was aging badly, like most of the city. This was a hunter-gatherer place, and when one location was used up the people with means simply moved farther out. They left behind thousands of tract ranch-style houses that could never be rehabbed as historic homes, could usually not even justify a home-improvement loan. Maryvale would never be gentrified.

In ten minutes, we pulled into a dilapidated shopping strip. But every store was occupied. One sign promised “celulares,” while another went with a thriving carniceria, a butcher store. One of the ubiquitous 99-cent stores held down the far end. Peralta parked directly in front of the yerberia.

For most of its history, Phoenix had not been a Hispanic city-that was Tucson, where roots went back to the Spanish conquest, even though an Irishman technically founded the Old Pueblo. Phoenix was the brash newcomer, established by Civil War veterans and assorted fortune seekers in the late 19th century. While it always had a Mexican-American population with its own proud history, the city maintained much of its Southern roots into the early 1960s. Then it started to change with enormous population growth from the Midwest. Tucson was culturally Hispanic and old. Phoenix was mostly Anglo and new.

That distinction started to change with the massive migrations from Mexico and Central America that began in the 1980s. Millions of new immigrants came through Phoenix and many stayed, working in restaurant kitchens, landscaping services, and building houses. If that wasn’t enough to destabilize the old Mexican-American population, the city razed many of the poor but historic old barrios to expand the airport. City Hall didn’t give a thought to bulldozing Santa Rita Hall, where Cesar Chavez began his hunger strike in 1972. All that was left there now was the Sagrado Corazón church, surrounded by a chain-link fence. The large Hispanic population moved into Maryvale as the Anglos bought new houses on the city fringes. As a result, Maryvale, the whitest of suburbs in the 1960s, was now almost entirely Latino. The same thing was happening all over the older parts of the city except in the Anglo historic districts. If you hadn’t been in Phoenix since 1980, you’d be amazed at the Spanish-language signage alone-including that marking the ubiquitous herbal healing stores called yerberias.

This one proclaimed its name in red letters across the plate glass, promising yerbas medicinales de todo del mundo y articulos religiosos. Herbal remedies from around the world and religious articles. We walked in to the sound of a long electronic beep, a sweet scent, and found a typical yerberia: long counters backed by floor-to-ceiling shelves of colorful devotional candles, and containers and bottles of all shapes and sizes. Incense was burning in a metal box at the feet of a statue of Jesus.

“This is amazing!” Robin said.

A woman about my age with long black hair and a white blouse ran to Peralta and gave him a hug. Magdalena was the owner, apparently, and introductions were made. She and Peralta conversed in rapid-fire Spanish, of which I could make out about every third word. I heard “pall of death,” but realized they were talking about the Phoenix economy. Which was true enough: a city that lived by real estate and low-wage jobs was now slowly dying. Her sons and nephews had worked in construction and now they couldn’t find any work. Her daughter had bought four rental houses during the boom and had now lost them all to the bank. She asked Peralta if he wanted a tarot reading and he declined.

“Then come on back,” she said. “They’re waiting.”

We followed her through a door into a small office with cinder-block walls painted baby blue. One man was seated behind a desk and another lounged on a sofa.

“El sheriff!” The man behind the desk came around and shook Peralta’s hand with both of his. He was middle-aged and thickset, with short hair, prominent eyebrows, and a faded Mexican eagle tattoo poking out beneath the sleeve of one arm. Again, a long exchange in Spanish, the vowels colored with warmth.

“An old friend?” Robin asked.

Peralta leaned his head toward us. “I put him in prison for ten years.”

“And it was the best thing that ever happened to me!” The stocky man shook our hands and said his name was Guillermo Gris. “But call me Bill.”

The man on the sofa slowly stood and put his hands on his hips. He was my height, six-two, and his broad shoulders tapered into a slender waist. He was darker than Bill, with an unlined face, and hair so black it had a shine. He wore a blue blazer over jeans and a light-blue shirt.

“Sheriff Peralta.”

Peralta said, “It’s good to see you again, Antonio.” There was less warmth here, unlike with Bill. They spoke to each other respectfully, in businesslike voices.

Bill unfolded two metal chairs and we all sat, me beside Antonio on the sofa. I could see the butt of a pistol under his blazer.

“This is the young lady?” he asked.

“Call me Robin.”

He reached over and took her offered handshake, and he didn’t look as if he was about to kiss her hand.

Peralta said, “I’d like for you both to tell what’s happened the past few weeks.”

Robin hesitated and so did I, not knowing either of these men, one of them armed. As often was the case, Peralta was working several steps ahead and not deigning to tell me what was going on. But I nodded to her, and she began with the rainy evening when she opened the parcel. I took over when it seemed appropriate and we alternated back and forth in the retelling. Neither Bill nor Antonio spoke. Antonio stared at the blue wall. Bill smoked a cigarette.

“What do you think?” Peralta directed this at Bill.

He stubbed out the cigarette, exhaled the last plume of smoke, and rubbed his mouth. “These two are alive because they want them to be alive. No other reason.”

I asked about the chase on the freeway, the gun barrel coming out of the window.

“They were just fucking with you, letting you know they can do you whenever they want,” Bill said.

So much for my heroics.

“Describe the men you saw at the gun shop.” Antonio’s voice was deep and rich, his English barely accented. I did the best I could, but we had been sitting across a parking lot and a street without binoculars. I couldn’t see faces. He gave small, precise nods and said nothing more.

“Sounds all fucked up, though,” Bill said. “If La Fam really killed El Verdugo, they probably did it for Los Zetas.” He looked at us. “Zetas, the enforcers for the Gulf cartel. Take down a Sinaloa cartel guy.”

“Maybe,” Peralta said. “But the alliances change all the time. Could have been MS 13; the Salvadorans are spreading fast. Could have been a hit ordered from prison by the new Mexican Mafia.”

“Not like back in the day,” Bill said. “We always had gangs in this town. Blacks in their ’hoods, and Latinos in theirs. Remember the Pachucos? We had gangs in Sono. Even the sheriff remembers that. He was Sono, too, before his dad made it and he moved out to Arcadia.” Bill was referring to La Sonorita. Like Golden Gate, Cuatro Milpas, El Campito, Harmon Park and Grant Park, it was one of old Phoenix’s barrios. Now they were almost all gone. La Sonorita, anchored by Grant Park, El Portal restaurant, and St. Anthony’s Catholic Church south of downtown, amazingly survived.

“By the time I came up,” he said, “we fought over geographic territory. It wasn’t no picnic, you know? The blacks had the Bloods and Crips. We did what we had to do.” His voice whooped, “Wedgewood Chicanos, forever!” Then his face turned wistful. “But there was a code, you know? A brotherhood. We were there to protect our own. Now, man, everybody’s fighting over everyplace. It’s all about drugs. The cartels are in it and it’s all fucked up. Glad I got out of the life. Glad the big man here got me out.”

Antonio looked bored.

Peralta sensed it. “The question is what we’re dealing with here? El Verdugo in little Phoenix, Arizona. Don’t like the look of that. This is not small-time.”

“He wasn’t El Verdugo!” Robin said, frustration wrinkling her brow.

“Tell me again how you knew this Jax?” Antonio asked. Robin went through it once more, how they had met at a gallery on Roosevelt Street. Antonio wanted to know which gallery. I could sense tension entering her voice and she started nervously playing with her hair, but she gave the same details I had now heard a dozen times. Was Antonio a cop, FBI, or a P.I. like Peralta? Maybe he was ATF, working for Amy Preston.

“What makes the most sense is that he was killed by the Gulf cartel or by Los Zetas,” Antonio said. “Maybe he was on a job here and they found him. Maybe he was trying to leave the life. Either way. Wouldn’t surprise me if they contracted it out to La Familia in the U.S. La Familia’s gone out on their own since 2006, but they used to have ties to the Gulf organization.”

“What about the gun shop?” Peralta asked.

“Zetas were a private army for the Gulf Cartel,” Antonio said. “Now the old alliance between the two is falling apart. They’re becoming rivals.” It was hard to keep things straight. My brain wandered off into analogies with the contending parties of Renaissance Florence, the Guelfi and the Ghibellini, or of the petty German states before the Napoleonic wars. Nothing really changes, except this was all about bloody crime and America’s insatiable hunger for drugs and cheap labor.

Antonio’s rich voice continued. “Los Zetas recruited from some of the best of the Mexican army. Airborne soldiers. Special forces. The pay is more than those soldiers can make in a lifetime with the government. Now they need weapons, lots of weapons.”

“This is the place to get ’em,” Bill said.

“It’s not enough,” Antonio said. “The existing supply is dominated by the Sinaloa cartel.”

“So the Gulf cartel or Los Zetas wants its own supply,” Peralta said. “Did Vega come out of the Mexican army?”

Antonio shook his head. “Nobody knows where he came from. But he’s been connected to at least thirty hits on high-value members of rival cartels. And always, the snake’s head is left imprinted on the victim’s forehead. Hell of a calling card.”

Bill said, “Alla entre blancos.” Let the white men settle it.

“No,” Antonio said. “This is destroying my country. It’s destroying your city.”

Robin said, “I can’t believe any of this.”

I spoke up. “So why are they letting us live?”

Bill looked at me and then at Peralta. He set his meaty hands flat on the desk blotter and shrugged.

After a silence, Antonio coughed. “Good question.”

Peralta said, “Give me a minute with these guys.”

We left, me reluctantly. Out in the shop, Robin browsed and settled on a thick, tall blue candle that promised “Peace and Protection.” She wanted a tarot reading but Peralta appeared and said there wasn’t time.

As we pulled away into the street, I wanted to know everything. But also I knew from experience that Peralta wouldn’t be pushed. He sat like a pickup-truck Buddha, saying nothing. I settled for a first question, asking about Antonio.

“He’s with the Mexican Ministerial Federal Police,” Peralta said. “That’s the elite national agency. If there’s an honest cop in Mexico, he’s it.”

We drove back to Peralta’s office in silence. The Maryvale ranch houses sat behind low walls and spiked fences that had been added by the new occupants. Bars, usually painted white, covered the windows. The elaborateness of the enclosures seemed an indicator of relative prosperity. This was one of the most dangerous parts of the city, but not because of most people who lived here. They worked hard and played by the rules, as the saying went. Except that they were mostly cut off from the economic and social mainstream, especially now. Who knew where it would end.

But like south Phoenix and the growing footprint of poor, ethnic neighborhoods, Maryvale was a hotspot of gang violence. I knew the basics: at least 35,000 gang members in the metropolitan area, almost all Hispanic and black. Thirty percent of the state’s inmates belonged to a street or prison gang. In many cases, the gang involvement went back two generations or more, and the generational nature of the problem was getting worse. My professorial brain wanted to linger on the many social, economic, and political reasons why. Maybe when all this was over, I’d apply for a grant to write about that. But the gun pressing against the small of my back reminded me that this daydream was a luxury I didn’t have. The gangs dealt in drugs, weapons, and human cargo. They stole identities and carried out armed robberies. And they fought each other. If a middle-class Anglo civilian like Robin was on their list…

She sat between us and turned to Peralta. “Mike, what is this about the bad guys letting us live? I don’t know what that means…”

He crossed the railroad tracks and swung onto Grand Avenue before he replied.

“It means,” he said, “that they may want to grab you alive. They haven’t been able to do that yet because they know that Mapstone here would go down blazing. He learned one or two things from me.”

She stared into her lap, rubbed her hands along the stone-washed denim of her jeans. “They want me alive because they want to do the same things to me that they did to Jax.”

14

That night we sat in Peralta’s pickup again, only this time we were in a parking lot on Central Avenue in south Phoenix. Outside it was pleasantly crisp, in the fifties. All three of us wore light leather jackets. They concealed Robin’s protective vest and our firearms. Her unruly hair was tucked in a bun. My cell showed a quarter past ten-a quarter past midnight in Washington. I tried the mental exercise: put it back in the compartment. But the compartment was shattered. The best I could do was look through the windshield and force myself into the moment. From the open spaces, we could look down at the lights of the city and the downtown skyline, which looked entirely different from this direction. Over our shoulders, the red lights of the television towers on the South Mountains blinked in a steady cadence.

I was heedlessly venting my anger over the new sheriff, who was using the department to make large-scale arrests of Hispanics in an effort to pick up illegal immigrants. Why the hell wasn’t he arresting the employers-or the Anglos who benefited from cheap yard work or maid service? Where was the arrest of the wire-transfer company executives for helping facilitate human smuggling? Or even bagging big-time coyotes? Where was the outrage at the destruction of the traditional Mexican economy by NAFTA and the lack of investment that would benefit ordinary people down there so they didn’t have to migrate north? As usual, the working poor suffered. Only the sheriff’s “sweeps” were played prominently in the newspapers, along with anti-immigrant letters on the editorial pages. As I went on, Robin elbowed me in the ribs. Peralta serenely ignored me.

“Does this take you back, Mapstone?” The streetlights set Peralta’s wide, flat forehead in silhouette. “Summer of ’77, when the big gang violence really started. Command and the politicians didn’t even want us to use the word ‘gang.’ Why, Phoenix couldn’t have a gang problem. That’s what the well-off Anglos wanted to think. Neighborhoods falling apart, but they didn’t see it.” He chuckled. “Mapstone and I rode together when he was a rookie deputy, Robin. We served warrants down here. I was his training officer.”

“And he was a real bastard to work with,” I said, staggered again by the passing of time.

“It saved your life,” he said.

That was true enough. “You didn’t think I’d make it.”

“Yes, I did. Robin, you should have seen Mapstone the first time he arrested this hooker we called Speedy Gonzales. He didn’t know Speedy was a transvestite.”

“Ha. Ha,” I said. “And I remember the night you almost single-handedly started a riot at the Marcos de Niza projects…”

“Two young studs still competing,” Robin said and laughed.

We were watching the Pete’s Fish ‘n Chips, which had been here as long as I could remember. The place had survived the building up of south Phoenix, which was once heavily agricultural and bounded by the Japanese flower gardens that ran on either side of Baseline Road. But south Phoenix was also the poor part of town on the other side of the tracks and the Salt River. That part still survived. Pete’s had outdoor seating on picnic tables next to the small building, lit by overhead fluorescent lights that cast a white glow out on the otherwise deserted streetscape. At the moment, half a dozen young Latino men sat there, holding court.

“I thought you said…”

“Be patient,” he said.

Sure enough, they paraded out to their cars and sped off going north. The picnic tables were entirely deserted for ten minutes.

Peralta shifted in his seat. “Here we go.”

A white SUV pulled in, its mandatory spinning hubcaps running. Four black guys stepped out and walked to the order window. They kept a loud hip-hop number playing out of the open windows. Lyrics about the wrong place at the wrong time.

“No colors?” I asked.

“There’s less of that now,” Peralta said. “They don’t want to give P.C. to law enforcement.” Probable cause.

We were no longer law enforcement, but in minutes we were out of the truck, waiting to cross the scanty traffic on Central. On Peralta’s orders, Robin waited in the locked cab.

“You ought to join me as a P.I.”

“No. Why would I want to spend every day with you out in that shack on Grand Avenue?”

“What else are you going to do? I sent you that lawyer, Judson Lee. His case seemed right up your alley. Robin could work with us, too. I’ve already got more cases than I can handle.”

“No. And why did you do that? You’re not my boss anymore. We’ll sell the house and move to Washington.”

“She’ll be back.”

“Says you, the master of successful marriage.”

“You lost one, too, Mapstone, so don’t be smug. Not that Sharon didn’t warn you about Patty.”

That was true enough. I felt the need to defend myself, but there wasn’t time. We started across the street and my gut constricted.

“Trust me,” he said. “I’m the ideal man to give you advice.”

“It’s never stopped you.”

Then we were on the curb, crossing the sidewalk.

“Well, well, well, the motherfucking former sheriff and his history bitch.” This came from a slender man. Beneath his hoodie, he looked somewhere south of thirty, with skin the color of almonds. I had never met him, but people still knew me from television and newspaper appearances that Peralta would orchestrate when we broke an old case.

“Peralta, you the only motherfucker in the La-Ti-No community that’s got a nigger pass. Does your gabacho here have a nigger pass?”

The three other men, all large and heavily tattooed, watched us silently with the dead, sociopath eyes that had become all too common. My sensibilities stung from hearing the slur, even though it was common on the street.

“He’s got a nigger pass from way back.” Peralta actually drawled this. “The question is whether it’s worth anything down here anymore.”

“Here’s my black ass,” the man said, “there’s your Mexican lips. Act accordingly. Bloods have owned this corner since my granddad was banging.”

“Whatever you say. Now go shut off that diarrhea coming out of your speakers or I’ll put a bullet in your high-end sound system.”

The men around the lighter-skinned guy started getting twitchy, but he ordered one of them to turn off the music.

“We need to talk,” Peralta said, swinging a leg over the picnic table and pilfering one of the leader’s fries. “Don’t mind if I do. Mapstone, this here’s Andrew “Cut Me Some” Slack, the middle part being his gangster name.”

“Hey, fuck you, Peralta. My street name’s ‘Scandalous.’ You know that.”

“Sure.” Peralta chuckled and ate another of Scandalous’ French fries. “I gave him his real nickname because when we first arrested him, he kept saying ‘please, cut me some slack.’ Anyway, what kind of black name is Andrew?”

Slack ate part of a fish filet and smiled. “Same old racist bastard, yo. But not enough of one to get re-elected. The times they are a-changing.”

I kept standing, ready to give Peralta backup if things went bad, but he seemed perfectly comfortable. Every few minutes, I looked back toward Robin. The truck sat unmolested.

Peralta leaned forward on his elbows. “So since we’re talking about nicknames and all, what about El Verdugo?”

The backup crew stopped eating and eyed us carefully. Slack chewed intensely and slurped from a giant soft drink.

“Ain’t no such,” he said. “El Verdugo’s an urban legend. And if he ain’t, he’s down in ole Me-he-ko…” His voice didn’t have the same bravado.

“Oh, no,” Peralta said. “He’s up here. I almost wondered if he was coming after your ass, but then I guess he figured Andrew Slack was the name of some plastic surgeon in Scottsdale…”

“What the fuck you saying?” Slack’s voice rose. “El Verdugo? Here? In Phoenix?”

“No, at Disneyland, genius.”

Slack was silent. He desperately wanted to look around him, see who might be lurking, but he wouldn’t let himself. El Verdugo had a reputation.

He pushed away the tray of food and Peralta helped himself to more fries. “Nobody’s been killed down here we don’t know who did the killing,” Slack said.

When he went sullen, Peralta prompted. “But…”

“Look man, we used to own this area.”

“Competition sucks,” Peralta said. “The creative destruction of the underground economy.”

Peralta, the anti-intellectual, channeling the ghost of Joseph Schumpeter. Now that was new.

“All these fucking ‘Cans coming across the border. Bring their gangs with ’em. Keep having babies. What the fuck part of illegal alien don’t they understand? The pie’s only so big. Only so many white motherfuckers with money to buy drugs. ’Specially now. Bloods are American fucking citizens.”

“What about guns?”

Slack hesitated slightly. “You’re not even a fucking cop. Why am I talking to you?”

Peralta picked his teeth. “Because you’re afraid of El Verdugo. To him you’re just another mayate.”

“Fuck no!” He rose halfway up, puffed out his chest, showed the silver-plated pistol in his waistband, and sat back, all conventions satisfied.

He went on in a conversational voice.

“Word on the street is La Familia is moving in from Southern California. They’re taking over some of the foreclosed places out on the west side, using them as safe houses and moving guns for the Gulf Cartel.”

“Now why would the cartel want a bunch of bangers when they can just buy from Anglos with clean records making a trip south now and then?” Peralta almost echoed Amy Preston’s words.

“It’s volume, my man,” Stack said. “Word is, La Fam has a smuggling route where they can get truckloads of guns across into Mexico.”

“Don’t fuck with me,” Peralta said. “Smuggling route, my ass.”

Slack was undeterred. “Word is, they go across the Indian rez. They’ve got some Border Patrol on the payroll. Some say they’re working directly with the Mexican cops.”

“What’s your piece of the action?” Peralta asked.

“Wish I had some, el sheriff.” He spat toward the sidewalk. “For us, it’s all about maintain. We just fighting to keep the business we got.”

“Just a hard-working businessman, huh?”

He nodded. “Exact.”

Peralta stood. “Thanks. You stay safe now.” He nodded to me and we walked back across Central.

Behind us came, “Hey, what are you going to do for me, Peralta? What about El Verdugo? Cut me some slack!”

“See,” Peralta said. “He can’t help himself.”

“What’s a mayate?”

“Now, Mapstone, I wouldn’t want to make you go all politically correct on me.”

Back home, Robin lit the Peace and Prosperity candle and sat with me in the study. After the day of visits to the most scenic parts of the city, I still didn’t know where Peralta was going. It felt as if we were up against an army of ghosts and impossible odds.

“Was I just a fool?” Robin asked, her face in her hands. “I always thought, the way I grew up, I had a pretty good bastard detector. But not with Jax. Pedro Alejandro Vega. El Verdugo. What a moron…”

I reached over and touched her shoulder.

She stood, stepped in front of me, and bent down. I felt her long fingers against the sides of my face and then her lips on mine. I kissed her back with minimal stabs of guilt, grasping her waist to pull her closer. Her hair spilled around me and our tongues found each other. It wasn’t the best kiss I’d ever had, but it was close, damned close, and if only for a moment it vanquished all the fear and grief and hurt. When I said I didn’t trust Robin, it was about this. I didn’t trust myself.

“Take me out in the back yard and let’s look at the stars,” she said.

Our back yard was indeed a good place for stargazing, despite being in the heart of the city. Fourteen-percent humidity would do that. I told her it was too dangerous.

She sighed and sat back on her haunches in front of me. “David, are we ever going to have sex?” She held both my hands. “I don’t know about you, but I really need sex.”

“Robin, I love Lindsey. I made a vow.”

“Love is complicated,” she said. “Anyway, she released you from it.”

I looked away.

“I know what she said to you in Washington. I know it word for word.”

I met her gray eyes. “How can you know that? Lindsey and I were alone, walking on the mall.”

“Because she told me.”

15

Contingency is the great trickster of history. Abraham Lincoln might have given in to the South and let the warring sister go in peace, but he refused. In the desperate months between the election and inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt, when the country faced depression and potentially revolution, a gunman fired at the president-elect. He missed. Housing prices were supposed to go on rising indefinitely, justifying all manner of risk and financial mischief, especially in Phoenix. Only they didn’t. And after a long, long dry spell, last May-the causes were the prosaic ones that settle into marriages, even when love and affection persist, and I was as much to blame as she… After that long drought, Lindsey and I had made frenzied love with the air conditioning washing over our bodies. She didn’t take time to put in her diaphragm but she thought it would be safe.

When she told me she was pregnant, I withheld my reaction.

“Are you struck dumb?” she asked. “You’re the talker in the family, the passionate man whose opinions get him in trouble.”

That was true enough, especially in this situation. Yes, the news was so comprehensively staggering that I was struck dumb. But I also knew that Lindsey didn’t want children, probably especially not since she had turned forty that year.

But as her dazzling blue eyes grew wet, I just said it. “I’m so happy!” And we embraced tightly, for a long time, laughing until we cried, hugging like silly kids at an eighth-grade dance, our pelvises eight inches apart as if any pressure would somehow damage the life that was growing inside my wife’s womb.

“I am too,” she said, sobbing and kissing me all over my face. “I didn’t know, Dave. I didn’t know if I could handle it, a child…” Her voice skipped between weeping. “But, God, I want this child. I want this child with you. You, my true love. My true north.”

Now it was my turn to cry, from deep down inside chambers of my emotions and history that I didn’t even know existed.

“I want to quit and stay home, be a real mom,” Lindsey said. “Will you think less of me? Think I’m Donna Reed?”

“I had a thing for Donna Reed.”

“Bap, bap, bap.” She shadowboxed my face.

Of course, it was all right. Lindsey had always loved the house and the garden more than her job at the Sheriff’s Office, talented as she was. The house was paid off. We had some savings. I would still be employed by Peralta. We would make it work.

I wanted to make martinis to celebrate, but of course that was out, at least for Lindsey. As she joked and danced around me in the kitchen, I made one for me, and put shaken cold water in a glass for her.

It was the beginning of the three happiest months of my life.

Peralta called the next night. He said to be ready to go out at ten.

“Go where.”

“To meet La Familia. Did you think I was just taking you on a free tour of gangland yesterday? Arrangements had to be made.”

I let the phone sit silently by my ear, bad feelings coursing through me despite the merry blue Peace and Prosperity candle sitting on the desk.

He said, “Make sure Robin wears her vest. And bring your friend, Mister Five-Seven. Bring the Colt Python, too.”

“Maybe we can let Robin stay at your house,” I said.

“No. She has to come. That’s part of the deal.”

“What deal?” I demanded.

But he had already hung up.

The norteño music came blaring out of the open door of the Los Arcos Night Club. Guitar, accordion, bass, and drums, accompanying a tenor’s fervent croon. Inside, however, the musicians were only on a sound system and business was slow. Two men in pressed jeans, neat cowboy shirts, and immaculate Stetsons sat at the bar and watched the two Anglos come in accompanying the former sheriff. Their expressions weren’t hostile; more of curiosity. At the end of the bar, Bill was smoking and drinking a Budweiser.

“That’s illegal.” Peralta indicated the cigarette, now banned in a bar or restaurant.

“So arrest me.” Bill gave a wide smile. A bartender came over and I ordered two Negra Modelos for Robin and me. Peralta wanted a Bud.

“Who is that?” Robin pointed to a ten-inch-tall porcelain statue behind the bar. It depicted a man with emphatic thick eyebrows and a black mustache, dressed in a white shirt and black scarf. A small devotional candle was burning beside it.

“Jesus Malverde,” Bill said. “He was the angel of the poor.”

“The narco saint of Sinaloa,” Peralta said.

“Don’t be disrespectful.” Bill looked at the statue and crossed himself. “He was like Robin Hood, only more. I seek his intercession.” He looked morose. “Magdalena says he’s from the devil, she won’t have his statue in the shop.”

My Robin, no hood, tried to change the subject. “Tell me about this music.”

“It’s Chalino. Chalino Sanchez. He was the greatest corrido singer. Balladeer.”

“He was a play outlaw,” Peralta said. “Real ones ambushed and killed him in Sinaloa.”

“So cynical,” Bill said. “You can’t understand this world without understanding the narcocorridos.”

“Is that what he’s singing about now?” Robin asked. “About the traffickers?”

“No. This is a love song. But it’s lost love and bitterness. He sings that he keeps the bitterness to himself. It’s the corridos pesados that are about the heavy things, drug smuggling and murder, exploitation and the poor fighting back any way they can. But it’s life, right? These are very moral songs, when you think about it.”

Peralta swigged the last of his beer. “Let’s get the details, Bill. I’m not here for the local color.”

They bent their heads close together and spoke quickly in Spanish, too fast and too low for me to understand.

The wide, dark avenues took us farther west. Wide, dark avenues ran through my soul. The pickup’s cab felt stifling even though the heat was off and the vent was running on low. Peralta said Bill had arranged for us to meet with the Phoenix boss of La Familia. The catch: we had to bring Robin. I didn’t like it.

“Do you want to live in fear for the rest of your life?” he asked.

Robin spoke quickly. “No.”

“Wait a damn minute,” I said, but Peralta sped on, making every green light. “Robin, I don’t think you should do this.”

She said, “I have to.”

We were just about out of Maryvale when Peralta spun the wheel and we entered the large parking lot of a shuttered big-box store. Phoenix had maybe one million square feet of empty big boxes, crushed by the recession or left behind when a retailer moved to a newer mega-store out in newer suburbia. This looked as if it had once been a Home Depot. The building was dark. The streetlights were off. The parking lot was empty. He shifted into park on the far edge of the lot and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Robin put her hand in mine.

The clock read 11:11 when two pairs of headlights came in from the west. The vehicles parked directly opposite us across the block of empty asphalt. Peralta clicked his high beams twice. In a second, one of the vehicles shot back two flashes.

“We’re going to walk to the middle of the lot,” Peralta said. “So are they.”

“Why?” My back was suddenly aching.

“Because. They’ll know we don’t have PD backup. And we’ll know they don’t have a shooter hidden in the back seat of one of those cars.”

“This doesn’t guarantee any of that,” I said. “They could drive up and kill us. This is crazy.”

“Maybe,” Peralta said. “It’s the rules of engagement they demanded, or no meeting. We meet on open ground so everybody can see what’s around them.”

Peralta swiveled to face Robin. “You don’t have to go through with this.”

I said, “I don’t want her to do it. This is too dangerous.”

She sighed heavily and squeezed my hand. “Let’s do it.”

Four figures were already walking into the lot. The car headlights remained on. Peralta left the truck idling, our lights on, too. They barely cut through the gloom of the vast space. I opened the door and swung myself out, eager to find firm ground. I unzipped my jacket.

We walked at an easy pace toward the silhouettes. I made Robin walk behind me, and I moved in step with Peralta, a pitiful skirmish line. Robin had a different analogy.

“It’s like the old West,” she said softly.

“If anything goes wrong, you run back and drive away,” I said over my shoulder. “I mean it.”

I forced down the dread inside and felt the calm that extreme situations always gave me. I didn’t understand it. Panic attacks when I was in the quiet shelter of scholarship. Clarity and focus in an emergency. “Frosty,” as Peralta, the Vietnam vet, said approvingly. It seemed to go against something I had heard years ago, attributed to Confucius: about three methods to gaining wisdom. “The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is imitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.” Maybe it’s why I didn’t feel wise. I didn’t even know if Confucius had actually said it.

Peralta slow-walked so the four men arrived at the center of the lot first. He was plotting one of those tactical solutions, maybe several.

“Well, well, well, the former sheriff of Maricopa County.”

The speaker was a man of medium height, wearing a zippered cotton warm-up top with horizontal stripes and a stylized L on the breast pocket. He had large, dark eyes, a stubble goatee, and mustache setting off a wide mouth. Beneath a red ball cap, he looked as if he could go from zero to thug in under six seconds. On his chest was a gold cross with Christ crucified upon it, gleaming in the strange light. Except for the cross, everything was in the half-shadow of the contending headlights. His buddies reminded me of the Hispanic bangers I had watched that hot day last summer, as we waited for the gasoline to flow. They were lean and muscled, wore jeans and sleeveless white shirts to show off their tattoos. The three silent ones carried compact automatic weapons and they were aiming them at us.

“And who are you?” Peralta’s voice was familiar and comforting.

“Mero Mero.”

“Good. I wouldn’t want to deal with el pequeño.” A little one.

“We’ll have your guns,” Mero Mero said.

“That doesn’t seem sporting.” Peralta’s tone was unchanged but he subtly shifted his posture.

“Too bad. Rules is rules.”

We all stood and watched each other for what seemed like several eras. I didn’t know everything about Peralta’s moods and moves, but here I was certain.

“Okay,” Peralta said, affecting his peculiar insouciance. “No problem.”

Now I was afraid.

Peralta pulled out his Sig Sauer P220 Combat semi-automatic, chambered for.45 caliber. He held it by the barrel, an offering.

“Go ahead, Mapstone. Take out your guns.”

I looked at him.

“Do it,” he ordered.

One of the bangers laughed. “This bolillo’s so scared he has two.” He tilted down his gun and spat heavily on the ground. And they all laughed. Part of my mind wondered where he had picked up the old Chicano slang for white boy, not meant in a favorable sense.

The frivolity provided the nanoseconds for Peralta to drop the.45 back into shooting position and have it aimed at Mero Mero’s head. The bullet only had to travel two feet.

By that time I had the Python in my left hand and the Five-Seven in my right. I had trained for years on left-handed shooting. Peralta demanded it, in case a deputy was shot or injured in the hand he favored. I clicked off the safety of the Five-Seven, aimed at two of the other men. The spitter looked at me with wide eyes.

I said, “Si levantas esa arma, te mato.” If you raise that weapon, I’ll kill you. Or that’s what I hoped I said: the gun stayed down.

“I guess this is what they call a Mexican standoff,” Peralta said. “But it’s not really, because I can kill all of you before my partner here even has to exercise his trigger fingers.”

Seconds turned into minutes. Spitter didn’t raise his gun. Every now and then the whoosh of an oblivious motorist cut into the silence.

Mero Mero said, “It’s cool. Es chida.” And his minions relaxed their arms.

I breathed sweet, dusty air.

Peralta lowered the.45, kept it out, and I did the same with my two life-preservers.

“Is this the girl?” Mero Mero said.

Peralta nodded.

“Let me look at you, chica.”

Robin stepped from behind me and the top dog evaluated her with a lascivious smile.

“I don’t know you, chica. I might like to.”

“Quit fucking around,” Peralta said.

“Let me tell you something, ex-lawman. I only come out here because my uncle owes a favor to Guillermo. I don’t owe you shit.” He pulled off his cap and scratched his short hair. “But, what the fuck, I don’t know this girl. Don’t know anything about her. Don’t have anything against her. Should I?”

“No,” Peralta said. He holstered his weapon. I knew it was a gesture, and I kept mine ready to rock although down at my sides. He said, “I know you’re not a gangster like the mayates,” he said. “You’re a warrior.” One of the men ran his hand across an elaborate tattoo on his upper arm. I could make out a feathered helmet and a profile.

Peralta went on, “I’m a warrior, too. Maybe different sides, but a warrior. My Aztec blood is as pure as yours.”

“What are you saying?”

“Warrior-to-warrior, your boys sent her a severed head. That’s disrespectful. She’s a civilian. She’s not a part of our war.”

“What the fuck?” Genuine surprise melted his gang face. “We didn’t…”

I said, “You didn’t send her a severed head? Why did you have one of your homeboys watching my house?” I even gave him the address.

He blinked hard and shook his head. “I don’t even know you.”

Peralta honed in. “Am I talking to Mero Mero or not?”

The gang face returned, full of something to prove.

“I hope so,” Peralta said.

“I speak with authority,” the man said with great formality. “I don’t know either of these gabachos. Warrior-to-warrior, La Familia has nothing…”

His next word was lost in the bright red fog that suddenly came out of his head. The gold cross around his neck shimmered brightly.

Then we heard the explosion.

I didn’t think or hesitate. I just tackled Robin, drove her to the pavement, and lay on top of her, even before Peralta yelled, “Down!”

From the surface of the parking lot, I watched Mero Mero’s crew enjoy a last moment of confusion, not knowing whether to rush to their fallen leader, open fire on us, or heed Peralta’s commands. They did none of these, and each one succumbed to head shots. One, two, three…gone. That fast. Each shot involved a deep, artillery-like concussion and echo.

I stayed on top of Robin and she didn’t move. My heart was about to jerk free of my chest and run across the parking lot. The headlights from the vehicles now seemed like an especially bad idea. Peralta’s truck seemed a football field away.

“That’s a.50-cal sniper rifle,” Peralta said, crouched and searching with the barrel of his sidearm. “He’s got a flash suppressor. Maybe he’s on the roof.”

Then the shots stopped.

Peralta didn’t wait long. “Back to the truck,” he ordered, in the voice of the Army Ranger that he once was. I ran with my hands on Robin, shielding her. My back felt gigantic and vulnerable. We reached the truck in seconds, propelled by gallons of adrenaline, and climbed inside.

After making sure Robin was no more than bruised from me pushing her down, I pulled out my cell.

“What are you doing?” Peralta took it from my hand.

“Calling 911. What else should we do?”

We had always been the law. Our obligation, once the civilian was secure, was to pursue the shooter. Peralta just looked at me as if it was a stupid question.

“We get the fuck out of here.”

He dropped the truck into gear and roared out, turned west, and picked up the 101 beltway that would take us back to the center city.

16

“They had a chance to kill all of us and they didn’t.” I spoke into the dark, cigar-perfumed cab of Peralta’s truck. The speedometer needle rested on a lawful sixty-five and we pirouetted through an interchange and went east again on the wide freeway.

“We were exposed all that time. How many minutes? The shooter could have taken all of us out. He could have shot Robin. Why were we spared?”

“I need you to be quiet now, Mapstone.”

And that was all Peralta said. His face was set except for the subtle tension in his jaw. I put my arm around Robin to ease her trembling, then I fully embraced her the rest of the way into the city. Peralta glanced at us, then focused ahead, and kept his own counsel. The sound of the rifle still sounded in my head.

We came off the Papago Freeway at Seventh Avenue, just before it entered the tunnel under the deck park. The light was green and I got only a quick glance at my old grade school, built in the1920s with grand columns and palm trees out front, the alma mater of Barry Goldwater. And me. How did I get into this life, where I was competent at several things but brilliant at none? How many bad choices had I made since I was a student there, terrified by the duck-and-cover-drills, learning to fight against the school bullies, and impatiently watching the clock. At that age you don’t realize how quickly the clock runs out. Robin gently pulled away and sat up.

“What happened back there?” she asked, her voice wavering.

“I don’t know,” Peralta said.

“Where are we going?”

“To find Antonio.”

This made my passive-aggressive side, never one of my prime movers, shift into aggressive-aggressive. “No, fuck no. You pull over and give us some answers, or we’re out of this.”

To my astonishment, he complied.

He reached into the glove box and removed a portable police radio, switching channels until he found the one he wanted. Civilians couldn’t get this at Radio Shack, since so many police bands were encrypted now to prevent criminals from monitoring calls-and many routine ones were transmitted to cruiser laptops, anyway. It didn’t surprise me that Peralta had one. The radio was busy with units responding to the shooting on the west side. On the sidewalk, a man shambled north with his belongings in two large, black plastic bags.

Peralta pulled a seven-inch cigar out of his jacket pocket, clipped it, and struck a match to light the end in a circle, ensuring it would burn evenly. The electric motor of the window whirred and he puffed out into the cool, dry air.

“Bill’s been clean for years,” he said. “But from time-to-time, he’s been a valuable go-between for me. He has friends and relatives in the life. Because he did his time and never gave up his friends, he has respect. I’ve worked to never put him at risk, never make him seem like he’s a snoflon, a snitch. So that meant I had to give something up sometimes to get something better. Understand?”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to understand. Peralta’s wings spread far beyond my little cold-case boutique. I said, “So that was the deal tonight? Meet with La Fam and make a deal to save Robin?”

He took another puff and nodded.

“What did you have to give in return?”

“All sorts of things.”

I let that alone. But I asked how he even knew if these now-dead bangers could speak for La Fam.

“Mero Mero? His real name is Carlos Mendoza. He’s one of the top dogs of La Fam in the United States. Check out his sheet. The gold medals start with homicide and go from there. This is not just another street gang in Phoenix.”

“And he said he spoke with authority,” Robin said, hope in her voice. “He didn’t know me. He said he didn’t have anything against me.”

“That’s what he said.” Peralta studied the bright orange tip of the cigar. Cars zipped by benignly on Seventh Avenue.

Now Mero Mero and his crew were dead, taken out as accurately as bad guys in the sights of Marine scout snipers in Iraq. I asked what that meant.

“Maybe the theory has been wrong.”

“Are you ever going to clue us in on this theory?” I tried to keep my anger down, without much success. “I love theories.”

He said nothing, so I just let loose all the stress of the evening. “You’ve known more about this than you’ve been telling me since the start. You just show up at the house where El Verdugo was tortured and beheaded. You load me up on ordnance at home, stuff you just happen to have in the trunk. Then Kate Vare drops a case that just happens to lead to a gun shop being watched by ATF. And here’s my good friend the sheriff, taking me to meet his old gang buddy and some Mexican cop. Now a top La Fam guy is taken out and we get to walk away. What the hell is going on?”

“You need to calm down.” He gently tapped an inch of ash off into the air. “I’m on retainer to the state Attorney General. That happened after I left office so we could continue an operation that’s been going on for a year.”

“The gun-runners.”

“Exactly. The A.G. doesn’t have much confidence in the new sheriff. I have the institutional knowledge. So there I was.”

“You made Kate Vare back off?”

“It didn’t take much,” he said. “You ever read the Bad Phoenix Cops blog? The guy that writes it has great sources inside the department. There’s lots of turmoil in command and the homicide bureau right now. And it turns out Vare is being investigated by PSB…” The Professional Standards Bureau, what was once called Internal Affairs. “Botched case management on the Baseline killer. Alleged. The families are suing the city. Maybe it’s political-it’s a very screwed-up department. But she began leaving you alone right when PSB came down on her. Not a coincidence, if you ask me. Vare had a hard-on for you, but Robin’s an investigative dead end. The new detective team would go after this from the El Verdugo and gang angle. At some point, the A.G. told them about our interest. So it doesn’t surprise me they’ve left you alone.”

“And what exactly is your interest?”

“We know there’s been a big uptick in weapons crossing the border from Arizona gun dealers. There are a few, like the Jesus Is Lord Pawn Shop, that sell in volume.”

“The Blood leader said La Fam has a new route to move guns for the Gulf cartel.”

“That confirms other intel we’ve had,” he said. “The feds and the Mexican authorities took down the top Gulf boss a year ago, extradited him to Houston, and he’s been cooperating. So plenty of the Gulf cartel’s reliable U.S. gun suppliers in Texas have been prosecuted. They’re under real pressure now from the Mexican army, so they really need a new supply chain.”

“They sound like multinational corporations,” Robin said, “only with guns.”

“In lots of ways they are,” Peralta said. “The cartels have billions of dollars at their disposal. ‘Cartel’ isn’t even an accurate word anymore. These are highly organized entities. They can employ top-notch accountants to help launder the money. They compete for market share to sell drugs and tax the coyotes that bring the illegals across the border to work in legitimate industries. They work with gangs in this country. Consider those the subcontractors. Sometimes they cooperate with each other, because bloodshed is bad for business. Sometimes they don’t.”

“So what was the theory?” I prodded.

He waved his flaming cigar wand. “That the Sinaloa cartel found out that the Gulf cartel was poaching in a supply chain it considers its own, namely the perfectly legal industry of Arizona gun sales.”

“And they sent in a trouble-shooter, El Verdugo…”

He nodded. “To do a strategic hit on a high-value target, maybe a major gun dealer. Send the message: Don’t do business with the Gulf boys.” He nursed the stogie. The tobacco was such high-quality it must have been Cuban. “Mind you, I was skeptical when you found the snake’s-head ring. Nobody really knows who El Verdugo is, much less that he’d be up here. Antonio is convinced, the guy Robin was seeing was Vega.”

“But La Fam, doing the Gulf cartel’s dirty work, got him first.”

“That was the theory.”

I asked why Robin’s involvement hadn’t derailed the theory.

He shook his head. “She’s an attractive woman, clean record, middle-class, artsy. She might have been useful to El Verdugo’s cover. Hell, Mapstone, you might have been useful to his cover. He was in Phoenix pretending to be a professor and fooling both of you. It let him fit right in.”

“So it was tonight. Somebody took out La Fam, who was supposed to have taken out El Verdugo. Only maybe they didn’t even do that, or send the head to Robin. And you don’t know who fired those shots tonight.”

He took the cigar out of his mouth, started to say something, and just nodded.

“Maybe Robin is in the clear.” He spoke slowly. “You haven’t had any other trouble since you took down the guy in the pickup. Tonight La Fam said they didn’t even know her. And whoever was doing the shooting could have killed us all and didn’t.”

“Unless they want to snatch her alive.”

“Why not do it tonight, then?” he said. “We were totally exposed. This shooter was good enough to take both me and Mapstone out and leave you alive, Robin. He didn’t.”

I sighed. “Why don’t I feel better? Somebody delivered that package to her for a reason.”

He tossed away the cigar. “Maybe it was a demonstration. Nothing more than that.”

I asked what he meant.

“To show their power. They can find El Verdugo in this very respectable cover he’s taken on. They can kill him. And deliver his head to his girlfriend in a very public demonstration of their power. And don’t forget you live there, too. A deputy sheriff, and one who was in the media with his old cases. They showed, ‘We can do this.’ And maybe it was nothing more than that.”

“I never picked you for the cockeyed optimist.”

“That may not be our biggest problem. Whoever killed those four La Fam guys wasn’t some banger. You see where this is heading? It’s only been a matter of time. Maybe this is it.”

Robin said, “The war going on down in Mexico is here now.”

The truck rumbled to life. “That’s why I want to talk to Antonio.”

I asked about us.

“Go home. Have a drink for me. Have two.”

17

Peralta had already driven away when I saw the FedEx package leaning neatly against the front door. It was letter-sized. Too small to contain a head; eyeballs or ears, maybe. Anthrax or a small explosive, definitely. I asked Robin if she was expecting anything-neither was I. On the long walk up to the door, I thought about calling the police. I scanned the dark sidewalks, seeing nothing, not even a car parked on the street. But I was so damned tired, had seen so much death that night, that I just picked it up and unlocked the door.

Once the alarm was disarmed, I took the envelope into the study and zipped it open, keeping the opening away from my face. Inside were some Xerox copies of old newspaper clippings and a five-thousand-dollar check drawn on the account of Judson Lee, Attorney at Law. It wasn’t signed. He had included a note: “My offer still stands.”

“He wants you pretty bad,” Robin said.

“But I don’t want him.”

“It might do you some good. Get outside yourself for a while. I know you can use the money.”

“Peralta wants to rope me into being a P.I.”

“A private dick, huh?” Her eyes gleamed merrily. She undid her bun and shook out her hair across her shoulders. It gleamed with colors ranging from light brown to gold. “I’ll help you. I’m a good researcher-a curator has to have those skills. This would be a healthy break from trying to keep track of all these cartels and gangs. It can be the return of the History Shamus.”

That had been Lindsey’s nickname for me, but I didn’t mind that Robin used it. It actually felt good. My eye wandered to the photo on the desk. It showed me, Lindsey and Robin last summer in Flagstaff. The weather was gentle in the high country and our smiles genuine and joyous. Robin was the only other person who knew that Lindsey was pregnant, and this drew them even closer together. We decided we would wait until Lindsey passed the three-month mark to tell anyone else.

Our new reality was only beginning to settle in. Much of our conversations revolved around the kind of parents we wouldn’t be. We wouldn’t call our child a kid, which is a goat. We wouldn’t take a newborn into the Sheriff’s Office and parade it around like some consumer product bought at Walmart. Our child would be raised in a real neighborhood with front porches and neighbors who knew each other, in a house with books, music, and ideas, a doting aunt who would teach her about art, and most of all, a house of love. She would go to a public school, just as we had done. I called the baby a she, and Lindsey was convinced it would be a son. We laughed over it and agreed to let God surprise us.

Robin picked up the photo, studied it, and replaced it on the desk. She sat on the blotter and looked down at me.

“When we were growing up, there was such…chaos.” Robin searched for that last word. “Linda had Lindsey Faith when she was sixteen. So you can imagine the sexual competition between the two, when Lindsey was sixteen and luminous, and Linda was an attractive woman in her early thirties.” She smiled. “I paid good money to therapists to learn all this shit. Lindsey Faith was the peacemaker, my protector. She kept the family together through it all.”

“Why do you call her Lindsey Faith?”

“Because it’s a beautiful name.”

“What’s your middle name?”

“Someday I’ll tell you.”

“You were the teenage rebel,” I said.

“How’d you guess? We moved every couple of years. There was always a new boyfriend and most of them were creeps who wanted to sleep with Lindsey or me. Seriously. This was what we grew up in. Our mom wasn’t a bad person. She was just very creative and very overwhelmed by life. She wanted to be an artist and she ended up working as a cocktail waitress.”

“Lindsey said she had schizophrenia. That’s why she had always said she didn’t want children. And it was all right with me.”

Robin tilted her head, closed her eyes, summoning a past both sisters would rather forget. “My bet is Linda was bipolar and it was aggravated by drugs and anger and heartbreak in her life, but what do I know?”

“And Lindsey lived her life to not become her mother.”

“Yes. And I think it was a struggle for her. Mother and daughter were very alike when I think back on it. I was the foundling. She fought to be normal and stable. She had her devils, always hearing Linda’s voice in her head, that she wasn’t good enough, that she was a screw-up. I used to joke with her and say, ‘Turn off your Linda Unit’-that critical voice she heard in her head. She never did. She just kept those devils chained up.”

“Don’t we all?”

“I suppose. Every family has its skeletons. Ours was a skeleton festival.” She said it without humor. “I don’t know how we survived.”

I said, “Lindsey blames me for what happened.”

She rubbed her hands gently on her jeans. “That’s not true, David. You blame yourself. She blames herself. She wanted so much to give you a child, so your DNA could carry on in the world.”

“And hers.”

After a long silence, Robin said, “I remember after we first met, we went out one night. I think I put the moves on you. Tall, smart men always get me going.”

“Sexual competition again?”

“Oh, I’m a free spirit, David. I make no apologies. But I do remember telling you that Lindsey had a baby when she was in high school.”

I did remember, all of it.

“You just thought I was messing with you. But it’s the truth. She got pregnant. The father was one of the high-school hoods, but she had a crush on him, and was so naive. And she got pregnant. Now I think it was a cry for help, as they say. Anyway, Linda wouldn’t let her keep the baby. She put it up for adoption. Lindsey Faith never got over that. So in her mind, she’s lost two babies.”

I fought the tightness in my throat.

“It’s been an awful night,” Robin said. “I’ve never seen anyone killed before. I was so afraid for you. Let’s go to bed.”

I looked at the photo again.

“I can’t call her to say we’re okay, can I?”

“No,” Robin said.

“Because she won’t talk to me, or because she’s not even at her apartment?” She’s not wearing her wedding band.

Robin gave me a look, her eyes sleepy and her mouth in something like a half-smile. Then she looked away. “David, you’ve given me a great gift. You’ve brought out a gentle side I never knew I had. You’ve watched out for me. With all that happened tonight, I felt safe and taken care of. When you covered me with your body, you were willing to die in order to save me.” She reached down and mussed my hair. “It’s so much more than that. You’ve let me into you. I would never betray that trust.”

Now it was my turn to look away. I felt so sad and strange. And so suddenly aware of how dependent I had become on protecting Robin, on being the knight in, well, tarnished armor, and, yes, I had let her in. Dr. Sharon wouldn’t approve.

Robin hadn’t given me a straight answer about Lindsey. But, of course, she had.

18

I started on the case the next day. Case? No, a research project. I was not a deputy any longer, not a private investigator. I was just a guy at loose ends.

We had a long lunch with Judson Lee at the Phoenician, poolside at the Oasis Bar & Grill. The dismal economy seemed far away, but like nearby Scottsdale, the resort had a dull falseness to it. Miami depended on tourists, too. But it was sexy, edgy, and authentic. Phoenix just had a lot of people, and in the places where most people lived, no soul. Nobody would ever do “CSI Phoenix” for television.

The server, an attractive brunette in her twenties, seemed to know him well and he flirted relentlessly with her. The posh surroundings were a shock when compared with our recent sojourns. The clientele were all white, all rich. Add in all the people in Maricopa County who were white, poor, and desperately looking for someone, anyone, to blame for their straits-a substantial demographic-and this was the constituency of the new sheriff. I tried to set the thought aside.

Lee asked what I knew about Harley Talbott. I asked him how many hours he had. But after his smile faded I went through the basics. The multi-millionaire had died in 1990. He bridged the eras between old and new Phoenix, coming out of a pioneer Arizona family, building the city’s largest liquor distributorship, owning land, cattle, and a cotton-seed company. The rumors about Talbott’s connections to organized crime went back decades. His liquor business-and alleged bookmaking operation-was said to have had its start in Talbott’s friendship with the remnants of the Al Capone mob. He owned senators, congressmen, and judges, thanks to his political contributions.

“How much of this is true?” Lee wanted to know. “I’m from Chicago, so I can tell you about Al Capone. Phoenix, there’s history I don’t know.”

“I suspect a lot of it was true,” I said. “This was a wide-open town back in the old days. As the city grew, the line between the establishment and the mob was very porous. There are old rumors about Del Webb, the man who built Sun City. The same is even true with Barry Goldwater. It was a mobbed up town, and everybody touched it one way or the other. But you’ll still find Talbott defenders even today.”

“I don’t want his defenders,” Lee said. “As you can understand, my loyalty is to my client, and I help solve problems.”

“And Mr. DeSimone’s problem is the prison stretch his grandfather did back in the 1940s?”

“Yes. As you saw from the newspaper clippings, a liquor store was firebombed. It was a store that wouldn’t play by Harley Talbott’s rules. Paolo DeSimone was arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned. It’s true Paolo worked as a driver for Talbott. But he always maintained his innocence. My client wants to know if that’s true. If it is, we have the resources to try to clear his name.”

“If he did it for Talbott, it doesn’t make sense that Talbott couldn’t get him off,” I said. “He pretty much owned the cops and the courts.”

Robin asked what became of Paolo.

“That’s the tragedy. He got out of prison and lived just three more years. Cancer. He died broken, almost penniless, his family destitute. Harley Talbott lived to be ninety-two.”

“How awful.” When Robin said it, Lee reached out his old leather hand and tapped her comfortingly.

My heart was not in this. That morning’s Republic had the west-side killings inside the Valley & State section. “Four men found shot in parking lot.” The editors just couldn’t bring themselves to bump the latest health news or feel-good story about 100 jobs at a solar-panel factory off page one. They probably all lived in Ahwatukee or Chandler and had no idea of what was really happening in the city. If a white person had been killed in Scottsdale, it would have been Page One news. Why did I care about this case? But watching Lee’s friendly, imploring face, I agreed to take it on. I warned him that I might not be able to find any new evidence, with virtually every player in the case dead by now, and the condition of records uncertain. I also said the facts would speak for themselves.

“It might be that Paolo was guilty. Families have secrets, and Nick might find out things he really doesn’t want to know.”

“If that’s the case, so be it.” He said it without pause and went back to telling the server what pretty eyes she had. She rubbed his tanned, bald head and he smiled and flicked out his tongue like a contented lizard.

“Mr. Lee is such a charmer,” she said.

My cell rang as we were getting the car from the resort’s valet. It was Peralta. Come to his office. It wasn’t a request.

So I drove out of the surreal green expanse of the Phoenician: designed, manicured, beloved, flowers and bright green grass under perfect palm trees. Then through the comfortable old wealth of the lush Arcadia district, past Biltmore Fashion Park, now hideously “modernized,” west on Camelback Road as the real estate became seedier and seedier, land not beloved, places not built to be cared about. Poor people waited in large clusters at bus stops for the city’s evermore diminished transit. The sun beat on them with an intensity that belied the eighty degrees on the thermometer. In thirty minutes, we turned on the broad diagonal of Grand Avenue and then bumped into what passed for Peralta’s parking lot.

“It would be really cool if he restored the neon,” Robin said, indicating the Easy 8 Auto Court sign. I studied its odd shape and realized it had once shown a cowboy throwing a rope.

“I’ll let you tell him that.”

I held the door for Robin and walked in talking, telling Peralta that I was taking on the work for Judson Lee, even though it was probably a waste of time. Then I noticed Antonio, the Mexican cop, sitting on the other desk, slowly swinging his leg, smoking a thin cigar. He had on the same jeans and blue blazer. Expensive lizard-skin boots had been added to the ensemble. I shut up.

“It’s been a productive morning,” Peralta said after we were seated. “A joint agency task force raided a house in a gated community in Mesa this morning.”

I waited, suddenly pulled out of corrupt 1940s Phoenix. But I couldn’t resist. “How many Mormons did you nab?”

“We arrested three men. All Mexican nationals. All heavily armed.”

“Did they…Last night?” Robin let it hang.

“It’s a good probability. One is a former Mexican Army airborne sniper. Now he’s working for the Sinaloa cartel. This was an assassination squad.”

“Did you find a rifle?”

“Not yet,” Peralta said. “We will.”

“So they were avenging La Fam’s hit on El Verdugo?” I said.

Neither man spoke.

I could see Robin’s expression cloud over. She had taken comfort in Mero Mero saying he had nothing against her, didn’t know her.

She said, “He wasn’t El Verdugo.” I gave her points for loyalty.

The room smelled of mildew, no easy thing in Phoenix. It was a smell that mingled with cigar smoke and congregated in my senses as nobody spoke for several minutes. Peralta and Antonio exchanged glances.

Then Antonio said, “That’s true.”

“What?” Robin sat up straight.

“He wasn’t El Verdugo.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Because I killed El Verdugo in Juarez a year ago.”

“Oh, my God.” She cupped her face in her hands. “Then, who…”

“Let’s get something straight.” Peralta’s tone was harsh. “What we’re about to tell you is off the record. You can never tell anyone.” He stared at me.

I struggled to keep my anger in check-all the lies they had casually told us, when Robin’s life was at risk. I slowly nodded.

“El Verdugo was alone when I caught up with him,” Antonio said. “He drew, I was faster. Adios, chingaso. We buried him in Juarez in an unmarked grave, kept the information from the other cops. His buddies never knew, either. So we hijacked his identity.”

Antonio gently set the cigar in a large glass ashtray. “We made it seem like he’d disappeared and gone rogue. Every now and again, I’d get to a killing first-an easy thing in my country-and use that snake’s-head ring on the victim. Just to keep the stories and rumors coming. Sinaloa went crazy. Their man was killing them. But the Gulf boys had no comfort. El Verdugo was killing them, too. And killing Los Zetas.”

“But not really,” Robin said. “You were just faking it.”

“Precisely.” Antonio said. “But it was useful. Sow chaos. This was a very closely held secret, especially among my colleagues, but even with my friends the Americans, who have shown they have a weakness for cartel bribes, too.”

“Three months ago,” Peralta said, “we picked up intel that a subject in Phoenix was shopping for a hit man. He met with an undercover officer, but wouldn’t bite. He wanted the best. He wanted El Verdugo. Asked for him by name.”

“Who was this party?” I asked.

Peralta pursed his lips. “Barney. At the Jesus Is Lord Pawn Shop.”

I softly said, “Guns, knives, ammunition.”

Antonio said, “ATF inserted a deep undercover agent to pose as El Verdugo. He was one of their best. I gave him the snake’s head ring. You knew him by his real name, Jax Delgado.”

I heard Robin’s throat catch. My stomach burned. “You’ve known this all along? Damn you to hell, Mike.”

“The A.G. wouldn’t let me tell you.” Peralta folded his arms. “And ATF sure as hell wouldn’t. Amy Preston went nuts after you showed up at her house asking about the gun shop.”

“Why are you telling us now?”

“It just seems right,” Peralta said. “With this arrest, I think we’re going to be able to close the case. These guys somehow picked up Delgado’s trail and killed him. Maybe it was because they thought he was the real Verdugo and this was payback time. Maybe they sniffed out his cover.” He noticed my expression. “When they were torturing him, maybe he talked about Robin. Or maybe they followed him and knew where she lived.”

“The autopsy on Delgado said he’d been tased,” Antonio said. “That may have been how they initially took him down. These guys had a Taser. We’re going to show their photos to the staff at the FedEx shop where his head was shipped from.” His tone made it sound like so much freight. “See if anybody can pick them out.”

I said, “What about last night?”

“Because La Fam is working with the Gulf cartel to move arms,” Antonio said, “the Sinaloans also took out Mero Mero and his crew. They probably followed you last night. This hit squad was up here on serious business. My guess is Barney would have been the next patient on the torture table, for doing business with the Gulf cartel and La Fam. Maybe he’d get off easy. Lose a finger or an ear and have to keep supplying Sinaloa.”

“Slow down,” I said. “Jax made contact with Barney?”

Peralta nodded. “No Arizona jury is going to convict a licensed gun dealer for selling firearms, no matter how many people they kill in Mexico. With Jax, we had Barney on hiring a hit man. We thought we could get more. Evidence that he was selling firearms in bulk to the Gulf cartel. We could shut him down forever.”

Robin clasped her arms tightly around her chest. “Does this mean we’re safe?”

Both men said “yes” simultaneously.

“They ought to just legalize drugs,” Robin whispered. “All this death, and for what?”

Antonio said, “This isn’t about drugs anymore. This is about power.”

I was drowning in the bucket of information they had just dumped on us. “If he was on the job, why would he tell us his real name?”

Peralta shrugged. “Maybe he met somebody he cared about.”

Robin abruptly stood and strode out across the ancient linoleum.

I had many questions, but followed her out. She fell into my arms by the car and sobbed hard, her tears soaking through my shirt while a freight train trundled past, steel slamming upon steel.

19

The clippings from the old Phoenix Gazette told of how McNamara’s Liquors on Van Buren Street burned in the early hours of September 20th, 1940. The fire marshal said it was arson. Within two weeks, police had arrested Paolo DeSimone for what was now being called a “fire bombing.” The newspaper displayed a booking photo of a slender, hatchet-faced man with a pencil moustache. It listed him as an “itinerant laborer” and gave his age as twenty-eight. He had signed a confession, and unlike today, the case rapidly moved to trial within a month. DeSimone didn’t take the stand. The jury convicted him of arson and he was sentenced to ten years at the State Prison in Florence. That was the end of the news, and if the reporting was halfway accurate, things didn’t look good for Paolo.

But we would try.

My large office in the old County Courthouse had been full of police and court records from the 1910s through the 1940s. The county hadn’t been much interested in them, and over the years with Peralta I had amassed a wonderful library of old Phoenix crime. It was my anti-Google and had done right by me in dozens of old cases. Except for the boxes I had brought home in Lindsey’s car that December day, I had left most of it behind. And a quick check of the files I had showed little of utility. The Phoenix Police logbook showed a notation, written in efficient script, that the east-side squad car had been dispatched to a fire at McNamara’s Liquors at 2:21 a.m. on September 20th. It was still a fairly new innovation to have two or three radio-equipped cars out in the city late at night. The population of Phoenix was 65,414. The area within the city limits was maybe twelve miles.

The new cases were online, the old ones stored away in paper files. In theory, at least. I made a call and a friend from the county got me into the deep storage of the Superior Court clerk. Arizona v. DeSimone was not there. It felt strange being down at the county office buildings, seeing the line of prisoner buses parked and the corrections officers smoking outside the Madison Street Jail, except the sign had a stranger’s name on it as sheriff. I had no desire to have lunch, as I so often once did, at Sing Hi. I didn’t want to run into old colleagues from the S.O. or the county attorney’s office and have to make explanation, much less get angry over the treatment of Peralta.

It was a relief to be sent over to the State Archives, near the capitol. The building was new but the state’s financial troubles had cut the hours to nearly nothing and the crackpots in the Legislature were trying to take its space. Criminal transcripts might eventually make their way here, both for historical value and because the defendant had a right to appeal. In reality, the records were often a mess. This would especially be true for the DeSimone case. It lacked the notoriety of, say, Winnie Ruth Judd. Fortunately, we came at the right time; the archives were open. Within forty-five minutes a helpful archivist found the files we were seeking. Not much was left: maybe an inch of paperwork. We paid for copies to take with us.

Robin seemed happier after the catharsis of learning Jax’s true identity. She had been right about him. We would probably never learn more. Robin suggested that I give the dog tags to Amy Preston, the ATF supervisor; perhaps she could pass them onto Jax’s family. I had forgotten about them, and the idea alarmed me. This was, after all, evidence in a homicide investigation that we both had knowingly concealed. Better to let it be. She hadn’t argued.

But we talked a great deal those days, about ourselves, about history and art. She was a good companion. Our lives were complicated and yet simple. It felt as if we had been friends on a deep level for many years. Her presence eased the sting of not getting the ASU job, the gaping absence of Lindsey, and I didn’t worry too much about the future. Robin downloaded Chalino Sanchez songs from iTunes and we listened to them. I went running with her, starting to get into the best shape I had been in for several years. We made several visits to the art museum and I felt centered enough to read Kennedy’s book on the Depression and World War II. Light rail took us down to Portland’s for cocktails made by Michelle, the owner. The outside world didn’t hold its former menace.

We read the newspaper together. In addition to the news of the dreadful economy, the Legislature slashing everything from health care for children of the working poor to closing state parks, and the silly features written to make readers feel better, it contained several stories about the “cartel hit squad” arrested and facing charges. It didn’t mention’s the hit squad’s alleged murder of ATF agent Jax Delgado, of course. The reporter and editors also seemed oblivious to the larger implications of the arrests. So did the millions living here. Tea Partiers protested outside the Capitol against taxes, immigrants, and the government. They were too ignorant to know Arizona wouldn’t even exist as a habitable place without aggressive government action. Every day a new real-estate project slipped into foreclosure.

Robin and I pulled our small, contented world closer around us. I told her more stories about old Phoenix and learned about some of her adventures. I took her to the old cemetery just west of the Black Canyon Freeway, and, under the canopy of its old trees, we left flowers on the graves of my grandparents and the parents I never knew. We took the rough brush from the car-meant to wipe off snow-and used it to scrub the dust from the headstones. We sat in the grass, and she leaned her head on my shoulder. Lindsey called every four or five days and talked to each of us. She talked to Robin far longer. Our talks were unbearably light considering the deep-soul talks that had been our sustenance for years. What was she listening to? Carrie Newcomer, Heather Nova, and Dar Williams. What was she reading? Marcus Aurelius and Camus.

When Robin and I emerged from our research at the State Archives that day, it had been raining and a very faint rainbow was visible behind the downtown towers.

Lindsey loved rainbows. She seemed to bring them out. I had seen more Arizona rainbows since I had met her than I had seen in my entire life. She would call me to the window to watch them, where we lingered while she painted the scene with her words, her arm around my waist. The summer of her pregnancy, the monsoon season was poised to be the new strange normal. When I had been a boy, the summer rainstorms had come into the city regularly from mid-July through early September. The lightning and thunder were spectacular. The rain constituted the majority of the precious seven inches a year that made the Sonoran Desert lush and unique in all the world.

When I moved back, I found a metropolitan area that had become a 2,500-square-mile concrete block. The summers were becoming hotter and longer, and the monsoons strange and unpredictable. In this strange new normal-all that most of this city of newcomers knew-the big thunderheads stayed beyond the mountains, as if they were gods surveying the mess that man had made of their timeless Salt River Valley. And when the storms rolled in, they were often violent. One storm two years before had been so savage that it knocked the telephone poles on Third Avenue straight down and ripped off some roofs. The meteorologists talked about microbursts and the collision of the weather front with superheated concrete, especially in places like Sky Harbor airport. I thought about how those storm gods might be releasing their kindled anger.

But while last summer had been hot and scary with the broken gasoline line, the monsoons had been as before. In addition to the obligatory dust storms and dramatic nighttime lightning shows, several times a week we had gotten real rain. And real rainbows.

One afternoon I had come home early and found Lindsey and Robin together in the upstairs apartment. Lindsey stood at the window as the clouds moved away and the room lightened.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “It’s a double rainbow.”

It was: twins soaring all the way through the boiling sky toward Camelback Mountain.

“It’s a good sign,” Robin said.

An hour later, Lindsey started bleeding.

What is the dark matter that controls our fates, that brings catastrophes upon us suddenly? We are fools to even consider it. And what of the losses that we can never fully purge, never grieve away? Never make right. Never atone for. Never even hold a funeral or let our friends know what has collapsed us. Our child was gone without ever having breathed this fated atmosphere, without even a name.

My wife was only saved from bleeding to death by a procedure that meant she could never have children of her own. It was just another moment on a planet of tragedies, but it was our tragedy, our world knocked off its axis, taking with it all the tomorrows we had so vainly believed in. Later, when she was awake, Lindsey had demanded to know what had happened to her child. That was how she phrased it, “my child.” The doctor was not delicate: the fetus had been disposed of in the hospital incinerator. That was the way it was. Lindsey had nodded once and stared ahead dry-eyed.

I looked back on those three months with Lindsey as golden. But the complexion of the time was more complicated than that, as any historian would tell you, more shaded, nuanced. Someday when I could bear it, I might see it with greater clarity. We had grown closer together than ever, and yet mysteriously also drawn apart, as if making room for someone. Lindsey became very dependent on Robin, and now it was clear that having lost her job and facing the worst recession since the Depression, Robin embraced being needed. They denied that they were going shopping for baby things. “I don’t want to jinx it,” Lindsey said. The poetic watchfulness in her that had first so attracted me became something more. She worried. She was acutely aware of changes in her body, even as the doctor reassured her. A few days before the miscarriage, she had said, “Something doesn’t feel right,” and the doc reassured her again.

But she would never be set at ease. These were the first days when I had seen her grow suddenly angry with me over seemingly like small things. But, in her mind, nothing was small. Although the breach was quickly healed, this was a new side of my love. And me? I probably did a hundred things wrong. Maybe the worst, that day when she first saw the blood in her panties, was to say, like a towering ass, “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

Now I was lost in the past as the rainbow faded over the Chase Tower. Robin lightly touched my shoulder. “Just be with me in this moment, David.”

I nodded and we started to walk to the car.

She said, “It’s all we really have.”

20

We carried the copied case files home and laid them out on the big desk in the study. I was tempted to give Robin the trial transcript, but didn’t want her to get bored. She was excited by this historical sleuthing. So I divided the work, taking the transcript myself and giving her a small stack of police and arson reports.

It was tempting to look back on 1940 as a more innocent time, and that’s probably true. Wars always change nations, coarsen them; Woodrow Wilson had known that on the eve of World War I. And the Arizona and America of 1940 had yet to go into World War II, much less the Cold War, and our current imperial adventures. Advanced communications consisted of dial telephones – the police radio system was only eight years old. Social networking was done at barber and beauty shops, the railroad depot, and the American Legion hall. But human nature persists in all its darkness, and even the little town of Phoenix had its share of violent crime back then. It also had a disproportionate amount of corruption.

The city commissioners themselves were said to control some of the local rackets. The Mafia was beginning to discover Phoenix, a town where cops and judges could be bought, where the banks could be used to launder money. On the outside, it was just a sunny farm town, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of citrus groves and fields. My grandfather’s dental practice was downtown. But Phoenix was also segregated, this place that had been settled by plenty of ex-Confederates. The relatively large black population, which came west with the cotton crop, went to separate schools. The Mexican-Americans were set off in their barrios. The main places everyone mingled were in the produce warehouses along the railroad tracks and in the red-light district on the east side. That was also the scene of Phoenix’s worst race riot, when soldiers went on a rampage during World War II. The official death count was three, but probably was much higher. It was history the chamber of commerce didn’t want you to know.

“Are you bored?”

“Yes.” I was honest.

“It’s fun to watch your face,” she said. “See your mind wander.”

“I just don’t know how much we’re going to be able to help Nick DeSimone clear his grandfather. I wonder why he even cares that much. I probably have several horse thieves and worse in my woodpile.”

“You’re just afraid of getting pulled into Peralta’s orbit. Becoming a private dick.” She said the two words with lewd glee. And it was true enough: I could see Peralta using this project as the “point of entry” drug to get me in his new game.

“What would be so bad about that?”

“I’m just tired of it.”

“He’s very entertaining,” she said. “I remember the first time he said he wanted to tell me his philosophy. That’s exactly what he said, ‘my philosophy.’ I was ready for something heavy and wise.”

I quoted Peralta from rote: “ ‘If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.’ Don’t get me wrong, Peralta probably saved my life when I came back to Phoenix. I really enjoyed the job. But I’m ready for something new.”

“What?”

I just put my lips together and shook my head.

“There’s no more market for history professors than there is for private art curators.” Her face assumed a half-smile. “It wouldn’t be bad. I’d work with you. We could make him fix that old neon sign.”

“You’re a dreamer,” I said. “You could find work outside Phoenix.”

“Do you want that?”

“No.” I said it too fast.

“If you’re done with the job, why did you bring home all those boxes of case files?”

“Maybe I’d write a book.”

She gave me a disbelieving smile. “You were going to work those old cases. Admit it. I admire you for it.”

“A few of them. I thought, in my spare time.”

“That’s the David Mapstone I know and love.” She stopped and we looked at each other, not sure what to say next. Finally, she said, “For now, why don’t we try to fight for Paolo? It doesn’t sound like anybody did it when he was alive. This Harley Talbott sounds like a total creep, a big man with power. I know you want to be the objective historian, so I’ll be the little cartoon creature on your shoulder, whispering in your ear, ‘fight for Paolo.’ It’s a matter of simple justice.”

“Fair enough.”

I went back to the transcript.

“This is a funny name.” Robin ran her fingers down one Xeroxed page. “Detective Navarre. Sounds like something out of a Bogart movie.”

I slapped down the sheaf of papers. “You have got to be shitting me.”

Frenchy Navarre. Sometimes it was spelled “Frenchie.” I told Robin what I knew. He wore two guns and was one of the most brutal and dangerous cops the Phoenix force ever produced. If there had been a Bad Phoenix Cops blog in the forties, Frenchy would have generated a post a day. The worst Frenchy story was from 1944, when he was off-duty and given a ticket by another officer, one of the few African-Americans on the force, a man named David “Star” Johnson. Frenchy went into one of his rages, shot and killed Johnson right on Second and Jefferson streets. A jury acquitted him and he went back to work. Johnson’s partner caught him at headquarters one day and shot him to death in revenge. The legend was that Frenchy went down shooting and the bullet holes remained in the stationhouse-then located in the old Courthouse-for years afterwards.

Now here was Frenchy Navarre as a detective on the DeSimone case.

Robin handed me the paper. It was a typed confession signed by Paolo DeSimone, given to Detective Navarre. Paolo said he was drunk and mad because Big Sam McNamara wouldn’t sell him liquor. Later that night he came back with a can of gasoline and set fire to trash at the back of the building. I could imagine Frenchy beating the confession out of him. But that would be letting my prejudices get the better of me.

“The arson investigator’s report.” Robin held up two pages. “It says a firebomb was thrown through the front window of the store. That jibes with the newspaper accounts.”

I looked it over and handed it back to her. The transcript was incomplete but raised questions, too. There was no public defender then. It appeared that DeSimone received legal counsel from a local lawyer either paid by the county or doing pro-bono work. He introduced several motions that were denied by the judge. One was to throw out the confession as coerced.

“You’re onto something, History Shamus.”

“Here’s Navarre on the stand. He’s asked why he arrested Paolo. Says he was given a tip by another man who had been in the drunk tank where Paolo spent the night on September 29th. Name of Eugene Costa. He told Frenchy that Paolo told him he burned down McNamara’s.”

I flipped through, trying to find if Costa had testified and what he had told Paolo’s lawyer on cross-examination. The pages were missing.

“The joys of historic research: more questions than answers. All the cops and lawyers are long dead. I can try some of my retired police buddies, but they were too young. I don’t see the hand of Harley Talbott in any of this. If he owned the judge and jury, we can’t prove it.”

“Don’t give up.” Robin went back to her half of the record.

We kept at it for three days. The police records betrayed a slipshod investigation. McNamara himself said he believed Talbott had ordered his store burned because he wouldn’t pay the extra “taxes” demanded for Talbott’s liquor. The cops never interviewed Talbott. The tip from Eugene Costa and the “confession” by Paolo kept them on a single, simple theory: one drunk Italian burned down the liquor store.

At the Arizona Room of the central library, we went through old city directories and phone books. Eugene Costa was listed from 1939 through 1948 and then he disappeared. Phoenix was a city of transients. I called around to the law firms to see if they had any information on the man who had defended Paolo-it was a long shot and came back empty. The fire department’s arson records from 1940 were long gone. I couldn’t find any manuscripts or diaries about Harley Talbott during this period. He had probably donated a fair amount to the library.

“So give me something else to do.” Robin gathered up the legal pad on which she had been making notes. The Arizona Room hours had been cut back again and we were being told it was time to leave.

I admired her passion and persistence, saw something of myself in her. So I let her go down to the county offices to research land transactions from the period involving any of the principals we were tracking: Paolo, Talbott, Costa, Frenchy, the judges and lawyers involved. I would go home to Cypress where I would start to write a very incomplete report for Judson Lee. I would feel bad about taking his money. She kissed me goodbye beneath the shade screens of the light-rail station. She took the train south and I waited for the one heading north. I realized it would be the first time she was out of my sight since that last week in December.

21

We worked together on the computer to finish the final report. We couldn’t exonerate Paolo DeSimone. We could give a history of the case, from the initial firebombing to Paolo receiving a ten-year sentence and then being paroled after five years. The report also had background on Paolo working for Talbott as a driver and the power that the big man wielded in the city, as well as some of the allegations that dogged him past the grave. Most critically, we listed the investigative errors and inconsistencies, including Paolo wanting to take back his confession-given under duress to one of the most famously nasty cops in Phoenix history. Robin had added an appendix that painstakingly listed properties that Talbott owned in 1940, and some land bought by the otherwise mysterious Eugene Costa a few years later.

Judson Lee read quickly through the report, lingering on a few pages, and pronounced himself pleased. I told him not to bother with the money-I didn’t believe we had earned it. In my old job, I had actually cleared cases. Peralta wouldn’t have been satisfied with this. I handed the unsigned check back and said this was on the house.

“You don’t give yourself enough credit, Dr. Mapstone,” he said. “You know this city.”

I thought about our recent travels into gangland. “I’m not sure anyone knows this city.”

He scrawled his signature on the check with his small, sun-browned hand and passed it back. “Utter, ultimate, truth may be beyond the finest historian. This should be more than enough for my client to make a start to clear his grandfather’s name.”

I took the check. He shook my hand. Did his old-world kiss of Robin’s hand and she laughed. I continued to apologize as he left, wishing we had found more, giving Robin credit for the good stuff. He waved it off, moving with surprising spryness.

“Anyway.” He turned to face us on the front step. “Napoleon said, history was nothing but a fable agreed upon.” Then he drove away in a new cream-colored Cadillac.

“It’s five grand and nothing to sneeze at.” Robin was reading the look on my face. “Let’s go out and celebrate tonight.” The smile took over her face. “I’ll wear a skirt even.”

I relented and felt my shoulders relax.

“You get to choose the place.”

“Good. First, give me the keys to the Prelude.”

I handed them over and asked her where she was going. It was an innocent enough question.

“Girl stuff.” She walked out of the study laughing that wonderful, house-filling laugh.

A little after midnight Robin wanted to go outside and see the stars. We pulled on clothes and walked into the backyard, where the oleanders and citrus trees provided dark, sheltering masses around us. We sat in the old chairs by the chiminea that Grandfather had built so long ago. She lolled her head, sending her hair cascading down the chair back.

The vault of sky overhead had been degraded when they built the big freeway ten blocks south and by the pollution of four million people, but it was still clear and dark enough to make out the Big Dipper and dozens of companions. There was no moon and the scent of orange blossoms lingered for probably its last week this year.

“There’s Polaris,” she said. “Regulus…Arcturus.”

I told her about my Boy Scout merit badge in astronomy, how I had forgotten nearly everything. How one year we came out at night and watched one of the Gemini capsules soar over us. This was before she was born.

“You must have been an adorable little boy.”

“I felt like a freak.” I smiled about it now. “Always had my head in a book. They made fun of me about my last name. I didn’t have a mom and dad like the other children. My little friends always told me how ugly I was.”

“I’ve seen the photos, David. You were a beautiful little boy.” She laughed, the slight breeze carrying her big, happy sound. “Handsome, I should say. Adorable. I love those pictures of you.”

She asked if I had played in this yard and I told her stories. We fought in the alley: oranges and dirt clods if the conflict was among friends, rocks if things got serious.

“Your own little street gang,” she said.

We played in the yard. One year we spent the spring assembling discarded wood and building a boat that we intended to sail to India. I was nine and have no idea how the destination was chosen. But the map told us we could sail down the Salt River to the Gila, then into the Colorado and out into the sea at the Gulf of California. I was a child map nerd. The only catch was that the rivers here were dry, so we would have to wait for a flood. My grandparents were indulgent with our enterprise, even if the boat never touched water. Robin laughed and held my hand.

“So no play dates, no bus to school, no mini-van…”

“Nope,” I said. “It seems like another country.”

“It sounds like an idyll, even if your friends were mean to you.”

“I learned to fight in seventh grade,” I said. “So I owe ’em.”

“I learned to fight, too,” she said. “But not that way. I always envied the kids who could walk to school, live on a street with sidewalks, go to the same school for more than two years straight.”

I squeezed her hand. “You turned out good.”

We stayed out there for at least an hour, sometimes talking, often enjoying a communion of silence. The dull whoosh of the freeway and the occasional bell of a light-rail train were the only intrusions. The stars and planets seemed comfortingly fixed, whatever the reality of our orbiting world and expanding universe. A couple of airplanes circled toward Sky Harbor, but not one police chopper or siren disturbed our little universe.

“I’ve always loved the stars,” she said. “Looking at infinity. Wondering why we’re here, what’s our purpose and destiny…”

Only for a few seconds did I imagine the child that might have survived to play in this yard just as I once did. I said, “We’ll go to the desert sometime, get away from the city lights. It’s incredible.”

She pulled herself up and reached for me.

“Come on.”

I stood and she stepped close, putting her arms around my waist. I tousled her hair and embraced her.

“You,” she said with mock accusation in her voice. Then, “You have so surprised me. I didn’t even like you at first, that day on the home tour when I came back into Lindsey’s life. And you’re thinking, who the hell is this? You didn’t like me, either. Right?”

I tipped my head. “True enough.”

That big smile remade her features. I had never seen her smile so. “Remember when I told you that it would be trouble if I got under your spell?” Her eyes were bright and merry. “Well, Dr. David Mapstone…”

She stopped herself, swallowed hard. My heart was very full at that moment and I said nothing.

“Come here.” She pulled me close, nuzzled against me. “I want to tell you something.”

“Your middle name?”

“Better than that.”

I felt her warm breath, heard her whispers. Just a few words. I held her so tight, one arm around her waist, the other grasping her shoulders and back, feeling her body totally a part of mine.

Finally she whispered, “Are those happy tears?”

I held her away from me just enough to look at her and nod. I spoke her name and started to pull her close again. The next sounds were barely audible, more of an odd annoyance.

Thup…thup…

She bobbed sideways in my arms. Turning, I looked straight at a woman standing five feet away, no more. She held a pistol with a long silencer.

“Robin!”

She went heavy in my arms and I laid her gently on the grass. Her hair fell out around her face, which was already unnaturally pale. She stared at me, her eyes wide with shock. Her mouth was working words and nothing was coming out. Her left arm was bloody. More blood was coming out of her left side.

“Stay awake!” I yelled, barely conscious that the woman with the gun was gone. I screamed for help, kept calling her name, and held my hands behind her head, as if they could keep her from the ground. “Stay with me, Robin.” I cried for help again.

She locked her eyes on me. I bent closer to see if she was breathing.

“David…” It was a hoarse whisper. Her eyelids fluttered and closed.

The dispatch logs would show that the police and fire response times were within three minutes of the first neighbor’s calls.

The first cops that came through the gate later told Peralta that they found me over Robin trying to resuscitate her, holding her, crying, and screaming. I don’t remember the last part.

They told him that I was screaming, over and over, “Kill me!…Why didn’t you kill me?!…” until they forcibly pulled me away from her body.