South Phoenix Rules

22

I don’t remember much of the next five days. The cops interviewed me and I described the shooter: an Anglo woman, short and slight build, with pale skin and stringy, long dark hair. She wore no makeup and her features were hard and life-beaten. I went through the PPD electronic mug book and found no one who looked like her. A police artist put together a composite sketch that was a reasonable likeness. Had I ever seen her before? No.

Lindsey flew home. We were careful with each other, as if handling delicate and explosive cargos. I said more than once, “I did my best.” Every time I said it, I heard in my head a quotation attributed to Churchill: “Sometimes doing your best is not enough. You must do what is required.”

Lindsey brought me two books from the Politics and Prose bookstore and didn’t ask many questions. She didn’t cry. Neither of us slept much. We both drank a great deal. She drank straight vodka as opposed to her old standby, a Beefeater gin martini. I avoided the newspaper. The day she flew out I drove back home to find a notice from the bank: Justin Lee’s five-thousand-dollar check had bounced.

The telephone number on Justin Lee’s business card had been disconnected. When I called Peralta, he said he didn’t know the man aside from the day he came by specifically asking for me. I had let this snake into our garden. I noticed an unfinished pack of Gauloises left by Lindsey. I opened it, pulled out a cigarette and for the first time in my life lit one for myself. I smoked a second until I began to feel ill, and thought and thought.

In my old office, I had a white board on wheels. It was helpful in diagramming cases. Now I took a sheet of paper and tried to do the same thing.

I drew boxes and in them wrote “Sinaloa cartel” and “Gulf cartel” with a line linking them to the “Jesus Is Lord Pawn Shop.” Another line branched off from the Gulf cartel to hold “Los Zetas.” I set a separate “La Familia” box to the side, with no connecting line yet. Other boxes: “Jax,” “ATF,” “Barney,” “hit woman.” And at the top I drew a box and wrote “Judson Lee” until the pen nearly broke through the paper. I would have to find the connecting lines for all of them.

Peralta wanted to meet for breakfast, which was a problem. Our favorite, Susan’s Diner, was closed, another victim of the recession. Peralta didn’t want to go to the Good Egg at Park Central or Tom’s Tavern downtown, where he would have to see all the politicos and make small talk. The line at Matt’s Big Breakfast was too long. Linda’s on Osborn didn’t open that early. So we ended up at the Coco’s on Seventh Street, where the place was almost empty and nobody noticed us.

“I’m going down to Casa Grande on a case,” he said once we had placed our orders. “I want you to come with me.”

“No.”

He drank his coffee and we sat in silence until the food showed up.

“It’s an interesting case. It could use your skills.”

I had no skills.

He said, “You look like hell.”

I didn’t deny it. The omelet tasted vile, but that was no fault of the cook. I tried the Diet Coke, which tasted vile. Peralta reached into his suit-coat pocket and produced a leather wallet. He slid it over.

“Open it.”

From years of following his commands, I involuntarily opened the thin wallet, revealing credentials for a licensed private investigator in the state of Arizona, issued by the Department of Public Safety. My photo and signature were on the card.

“Where did this come from?” Another forkful of the foul eggs and cheese. “No, no, don’t tell me. It was in those papers I signed when I turned in my badge.” I started to say he’d also made a claim on my firstborn, but stopped myself in time.

I left the wallet open on the table. Peralta munched scrambled eggs and bacon contentedly. “That other desk at the office? It’s for you, Mapstone. I’ll even buy you a bookshelf.” He finished a piece of toast and let his coffee mug be refilled. “You have to let the police handle Robin’s murder.”

I stabbed at the omelet. The hash browns were no better. Everything tasted the same.

“The worst thing,” he said, “is a hotdog. You were never a hotdog, Mapstone. Don’t start now.”

“What does PPD have?”

“Nothing. But they have a top team on it.”

“Like you and Antonio?” I dropped the fork. “Nice job there. Los Zetas assassination team in jail. No problem, huh? Robin killed by an Anglo woman who looked like she stepped out of a trailer park. You guys deserve medals. I don’t even believe these Mexicans you’re holding killed Jax Delgado.”

“You know this takes time.”

“I don’t have any more time.”

“Come with me to Casa Grande. This is an interesting case.”

“May I ask a question?”

He nodded.

“Is that Five-Seven licensed or registered?”

“Yes.” He watched me evenly, which meant nothing with him. His dark eyes were angry, then alarmed.

I said, “That’s too bad.” I pulled it out and handed it back to him, no one noticing. I added the extra magazines of ammo to the tabletop, right by the ketchup and then I stood.

“Don’t.” That was all he said.

I started to leave. But I turned around and took the credentials, then walked out.

For the next two days I had lunches that I couldn’t afford at the Phoenician. The lush surroundings and spectacular view eluded me. I hated these people, the sharpies and phonies and wealthy vagrants that had ruined my city, that cared nothing for it except as a place to use up and throw away. The resort had been built by one of the archetypes: Charlie Keating. At least Harley Talbott had been home-grown trash.

No, I was there looking for the server who had called Lee such a charmer. If I was lucky, maybe I could charm her, even as I wondered if I was capable of a smile. She was off the first day, and I didn’t even know her name. But she was my only potential link to him.

The second day was better.

She was not only working, but I was seated in her section without asking. I had trimmed up my beard and was wearing my best suit with a burgundy Canali tie.

“It’s Mr. Lee’s friend,” she said, standing over me with a grin but no order book, this being a classy joint where the servers were expected to handle things from memory. “Where’s your colleague?” Meaning Robin. I just let my internal bleeding go and smiled at her.

“He certainly likes you.”

She raised her eyebrows and bobbed her head ironically.

I pushed a little deeper. “It looked like he’d been a regular for years.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “He’s only been coming here for a few months. But he just has that way about him.”

I agreed that he did and ordered lunch. That way about him: the harmless old guy, quick with a compliment and always wanting to know about her. As I waited for the food, I tried to figure out a shrewd way forward and kept coming up dry. Kept falling down into the places I was trying very hard to lay a thick concrete slab over just so I could move into the next sixty seconds of my life. I watched her graceful walk back toward the kitchen and wondered about her stake in this place. She was too old to be a high-school girl, and probably wasn’t in college, either. If she were trolling for rich men the better job would be working the counters at Nordstrom in Scottsdale. Maybe she was a professional server in this tourist economy. Maybe she was an ATF agent.

Judson Lee. Attorney at law. Except that a call to a friend at Snell & Wilmer that morning taught me a few things. This veteran lawyer at the city’s most prestigious firm had never heard of Lee. Nor was he listed in the Martindale-Hubbell directory going back more than twenty years. Just a charming old killer who had played me like a green rookie.

When it came time to pay the bill, I saw the server’s name-Lisa-and told her it was beautiful. She smiled at me, but I was a few decades shy of being able to come off as the harmless old guy and my flirting skills were rusty. Oh, I wished that I still had my badge, which made it easy to ask questions, especially of citizens who want to do the right thing.

“Well, you tell Mr. Lee I said hello when you see him,” she said. “I don’t see him anymore.”

“He’s a busy man, Lisa. I’m sure he’ll be in soon with another group of friends.”

“Oh, you were special,” she said. “He almost always dined alone.” She paused, decided my Canali tie made me trustworthy, and went on. “I get the sense he’s kind of lonely. Once he had a woman guest, but she seemed uncomfortable here, if you know what I mean.”

“I do. Was this her?” I opened up the composite police sketch and slid it over so she could get a good look.

“Yes.” Her voice was faint. “Am I in trouble?”

It was interesting to live in such an insecure-feeling America, where a man in a suit in possession of a piece of paper with official Phoenix Police logos on it had instant credibility. I asked her if she knew where I could find Judson Lee. Her eyes processed a response: Go get the manager? Say nothing? Risk losing my job if I don’t cooperate?

“I swear, I don’t know.” She bit her lip, eyes heavily lidded. “I will tell you that he told me a story once. Kind of creeped me out, you know? How he had visited a strip club the night before. ‘Gentleman’s club,’ he called it, but it was clear what he meant. Said he went there all the time. And he had to tell me the name, the Stuffed Beaver. Ick.”

I folded up the composite and put it away, thanked Lisa, and signed the receipt. I gave her a big tip.

The Stuffed Beaver. It was the same place on Indian School Road where Barney the gun dealer had lost his glass eye in the stripper’s stomach. At home, I drew a line from Judson Lee to the new box, the strip club, and another line that connected to Barney.

23

The Stuffed Beaver sat in a building facing north on Indian School Road a little before 24th Street. It had been built recently as a Washington Mutual office, a typical ugly freestanding structure, then shut down by the mortgage bust and remodeled as a strip club. The name was proclaimed with a blazing blue-and-red sign, accompanied by a smiling cartoon creature that took up the entire street-facing facade. I wondered how it got past the city code. In smaller letters: “18 to cum, 21 to swallow.” Wednesday was amateur’s night. This was not amateur’s night. The parking lot sat on the west side and extended behind the structure. Entry was through the back. That made surveillance problematic.

I couldn’t go inside and hang around-both Barney and Lee knew me. While the parking lot was spacious, a man sitting alone in a car for hours might attract the attention of club security. Fortunately for me, the biggest beneficiary of Phoenix’s bust was an outfit named “Available.” Its signs were everywhere, including on the vacated older building directly west of the club. Behind it were five covered parking places with a direct view of the parking lot. I backed into one and waited.

My days were monsters, shooting me full of panic attacks that were only alleviated by trips to the shooting range. The nights saved me. The darkness covered me and made the city look less hideous, made me less aware of all that had been lost, the losses I carried around inside and ones that never occurred to the people who moved into a new “master planned community” on the fringes, only wanting the sunshine and cheap housing. Fewer were coming now. I had seen a story in the newspaper a few months ago that population growth might have even reversed. For seven decades, all Phoenix had to do was build houses and people came. Now the reliable old growth machine was flat busted. The “available” signs proliferated everywhere. The promising downtown condo towers were in foreclosure. The million-dollar faux Victorian condos on Central Avenue near my house were unfinished. Subdivisions rotted and were stripped of their building materials from Maricopa to Surprise.

For three nights I sat in my covered parking space, watching the men come and go. I had never understood the appeal: for me, sex was not a spectator sport. I saw the otherwise unremarkable young women walk through the parking lot wearing normal street clothes, carrying gym bags, heading to another night of work. Which one was named Destiny? I slowly worked my way through Lindsey’s blue pack of Gauloises Blondes, trying not to see Robin’s face hovering before my eyes. The club was open twenty-four hours, beyond my ability to cover. Considering the Jesus Is Lord Pawn Shop closed at six p.m., I decided to watch from six-thirty to eleven.

On the first night, I got a call back from Nick DeSimone, the Scottsdale chef. He told me things that didn’t surprise me. He had never heard of Judson Lee. He had no roots in Phoenix and both his grandfathers had died peacefully in Chicago. I thanked him, hung up, and for the thousandth time cursed my naiveté.

All that time Barney never appeared, but after ten on the third night a familiar cream Caddy zipped into the back lot and parked in a handicapped space. Judson Lee got out and strode inside. Following him, quick-stepping to keep up, was a tall Anglo man, young, muscled, military haircut. He had a hawk’s nose, as if begging for a pair of glasses, but there were no glasses. He was long-limbed and wide-hipped. The night was warm but he wore an oversized black windbreaker, just the kind of garment that might conceal a firearm.

I sat up straight in the car seat, a blend of rage and fear sending prickly signals through my legs. I unconsciously touched the butt of the Colt Python on my belt and ran my hand over the towel that covered the TEK 9, taken from the gang member who had been sitting on my street, resting on the passenger’s seat. Its thirty-two-round magazine was full of nine-millimeter ammunition. I cursed Judson Lee aloud, my voice a strange companion in the silence of the dark parking nook. Another ten minutes passed before a Dodge Ram truck glided into the lot and Barney got out.

After six hours that the clock said were forty-five minutes, the three men came out again. Judson Lee and Barney talked animatedly, the slightly built lawyer gesticulating, Barney nodding and nodding. They seemed like an unlikely pair. Then Lee walked to his Caddy, turned to say one more thing to Barney, and got in the car. The man who looked unmistakably like a bodyguard drove. I started the Prelude and slowly slipped down the driveway with the lights off. When the Cadillac turned east on Indian School, I followed, letting a car get between us, maintaining a quarter-mile distance.

This was the point where the old David, so valued by everyone in my life for good judgment, would have called the police. Called Peralta. But the idea never occurred to me. The prickliness was gone from my legs. I felt comfortably frosty.

They turned south on Thirty-second Street and accelerated to fifty. The speed limit was thirty-five, but nobody in Phoenix paid attention to such niceties, so I was able to keep up and still blend in with the moderate traffic. That’s what I told myself.

Much of this had been groves when I was little-Phoenicians drove out the two-lane roads and bought oranges and grapefruits from little stands-then it had been remade into middle-class, single-family ranch houses. Now it was going down, miles and miles. The well-off Anglos called it the “Sonoran Biltmore” and laughed. To me it was a haunted landscape.

The Caddy made the light at Osborn. Then it turned hard red. I cursed, made a quick right, a U-turn that barely missed an oncoming Chevy, then swung south again on 32nd and soon caught up, a safe quarter mile between me and Lee’s taillights.

They caught the Red Mountain Freeway and sped east, all the way across the Salt River, past downtown Tempe with its new, derelict forty-story condo tower and the In-N-Out Burger at Rural Road, then swung south onto the Price Freeway, running fast now that the four-hour rush hour was over. Of course, this, too, had once been wide-open agricultural land. Most of it was built up in the years I was away from Phoenix and I barely knew it now. Knowing it didn’t take genius: wide avenues every mile lined by the entrances to newer subdivisions of curvilinear streets and houses with tile roofs. Shopping strips anchored by a Fry’s or Safeway sat on the major corners, along with huge gas stations. There were far fewer payday loan stores. The tableaux passed with numbing regularity. Better-off white families, the better-funded schools; the Intel semiconductor plants that provided a dash of diversity in the region’s economy. Totally car-dependent. Except for the proliferation of brand-new Mormon and evangelical churches, this land was Maryvale half a century ago and didn’t know it. I wondered how many of the husbands of the East Valley had stopped at a strip club on the way home.

I was four cars behind them at the red light for Chandler Boulevard when the feeling first bobbed against me. I set it aside when the light changed. Couldn’t lose them now; wishing I could get close enough to make out the license tag. We whipped across the overpass and drove east again. Then the Caddy signaled left and entered a subdivision. I slowed down and waited, then followed them in with my lights off. The place was damnably well-lit, but I risked it, staying with the red tail-lights as they went straight, made a gentle curve, then a hard right turn onto another street. I approached the street at five miles per hour, nosing just enough beyond the edge of a house to see a large garage door opening in the middle of the block and the Cadillac disappear inside. The door came down.

It was a pleasant block, if suburbia was your thing. Yet it had all the charm of an empty cereal box. Newer houses were jammed together with postage-stamp lawns, wide driveways, three-car garages, and walled-in back yards. The entrances were small because the developer expected people to come and go through the garages. Those varied little more than the two or three styles of stucco tract houses, all painted to a palette ruthlessly enforced by the homeowners association. This was a place where people were supposed to blend in. If I had looked away for a second, I couldn’t have recalled which house they had entered. But I didn’t lose that second. I turned on the headlights and drove by at a normal speed, noting the address. Lights were on inside. No other vehicles were visible on the street.

But the feeling was still there: that cop’s sixth sense that I was proud to have acquired despite my itinerant law-enforcement career. It was the awareness of being followed.

24

It felt good to be back in the center city and I stopped at the taco truck on McDowell Road, in a dark parking lot a few blocks from the hospital. Even though it was nearly midnight, I had to wait in line to order two Mexican hot dogs. The music of Chalino Sanchez, or somebody who wanted to sound like him, was playing from portable speakers. The air was still and moody.

I sat in one of the lawn chairs opened on the pavement and for the first time in days actually tasted the food. A beer would have been nice, but I had to settle for a Diet Coke. They were fixed just right, cooked until the dog and bacon were one and covered in beans, tomatoes, and onions, to which I had added a few more goodies from the salsa bar. I ate the food and in my mind chewed over the meeting between Lee and Barney. Everyone was speaking Spanish but they took no notice of the Anglo in their midst. These were working people. They kept the local economy going and the whites from the Midwest hated them. I expected an immigrant sweep at any moment from the new sheriff.

Instead, a new Mercedes parked at my feet and a black cowboy climbed out.

He didn’t walk to the order window. With a scraping on the asphalt, he moved a cheap chair next to mine and sat down. I was in the middle of the second dog and just let him be. The Python was in easy reach, and if he were packing, it would be in an ankle holster, so I could beat him to the draw. I didn’t want any of that to happen. I just wanted to enjoy my hotdog.

“Nice evening.”

I agreed with him. The man was around my age, with a thick neck and big hands. He wore jeans, boots, Western-cut shirt, and a white Stetson. The real Old West had plenty of African-American cowboys. You just didn’t see them around 21st century Phoenix.

“Now I ran your tag through NCIC and the car came back clean.”

I just wanted to live with the hot dog for one more minute. After the last swallow, I sipped the Coke and leaned back, watching the traffic. So who the hell was he? ATF? Phoenix cop? Chandler P.D., maybe, if my instinct had been right and he had been behind me for a while. No. He wasn’t a local on the job. Otherwise, he’d have his badge on his belt and a firearm. Too flamboyant to be a fed. Could he be in Lee’s employ and yet have access to the NCIC to check wants and warrants outstanding? I doubted it.

“So I had to ask myself,” he said. “Who would be driving this old civilian vehicle and following my person of interest?”

“I’m a Maricopa County deputy sheriff.” The lie came fluently. “Who the hell are you?”

“Then let’s see a badge.”

I rolled up the messy foil wrapping and wiped my hands. “I’m too goddamned tired.”

He sighed. “Motherfucker. I get this close and the goddamned cops are trying to claim my prize.”

Bounty hunter. But who was he after?

“We cooperate with bounty hunters all the time.” Another lie. “Maybe we can work something out. Tell me why you’re after the old man?”

“Old man?” The cowboy shook his head. “I’m after that felonious ditch pig who’s with him most of the time.”

“The big guy. Former military?”

“Dishonorable discharge. What matters to me is that he skipped out on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar bond in Bakersfield. But I spent twenty years on the force there before I became a fugitive recovery agent.” And he obviously had buddies there still who would run my car as a favor to an ex-cop. He reached into his pants pocket and unfolded a piece of paper.

I looked at the wanted poster for Tom Holden, age thirty-two, and a face that went with Justin Lee’s bodyguard. He had made bail on charge of aggravated assault.

“Bad actor,” the cowboy said. “Considered armed and dangerous.”

“How is he with a sniper’s rifle?”

“Let me put it this way. He went to the Army sniper school at Fort Benning. I’m going to get something to eat.”

He walked over and ordered while I studied the sheet. Tom Holden, another box on my chart, connected to Lee. If he had been the one who killed the La Fam members…

The cowboy came back, quickly downed a Mexican hot dog, and tilted his hat back on his head. He folded his arms and stretched out his legs, boot tips pointing into the night sky.

“I want to take him back,” he said. “The problem is getting him alone. He’s always with the old man. I can deal with that but it might get messy. A lot of the time he’s with this crew of white boys that comes and goes from that house. Tonight I thought you were one of them, following the old coot for protection.”

I nodded and asked him if he knew the old man’s identity. He shook his head. I showed him the sketch of the woman who shot Robin and he had never seen her. His eyes were on the ten percent or more of the forfeited bond that he could make if he nailed Holden.

“I can help you,” I said. “But you’ve got to book him into our jail.”

“No fucking way, man. I’m driving him back to California. No muss, no fuss, no extradition hearing.”

“Your subject might be wanted on a multiple homicide here.” I let that sink in before continuing. “The case is coming together. You don’t want to get in the way of that. You can work it out with your bondsman, make your money.”

He wiped his mouth, sucked at his teeth, and thought about it.

“All right.”

“There’s one other thing. When you get him in custody, I want you to have him make a call to the old man before he gets to jail.” I told him what Holden should say, word for word. “Can you persuade him to do that?”

He nodded. “I’m a persuasive kind of guy.”

He reached in his pocket and produced a silver business-card case, handed me a card. Demetrius Smith, fugitive recovery agent. I pulled one of my old MCSO cards out and gave it to him. “Call me on my cell when you’re ready to make a move.” I wasn’t really worried about him calling the landlines. With the way the county worked, it would be another three months before they were disconnected or reassigned.

I dreaded the house but there was finally no other place to go. The house that held so much of my past and had been our sanctuary amid all the troubles of the misbegotten city was now cursed. Why hadn’t I taken Robin to Peralta’s-maybe they could have tracked her there, too, but maybe not. Why didn’t I get in the car with Robin and just drive. Drive east and show up in D.C. and let Lindsey deal with us. Drive west and find whatever it was that had propelled people to go west for centuries and did still. My god, the bed was huge and cursed. All around me, dark house, slamming heartbeat, the sensations of the edge of death, but no release.

Then the gunshots started and the bedroom glass shattered. I swear I could feel the bullets zipping just above the top of my body, which seemed to want to levitate up until a round found me. I slid sideways and dropped painfully off onto the floor, then took the chance of reaching up to get the Python. How many shots? I lost count at ten. A framed poster from the Willo Home Tour shattered as the far wall absorbed the bullets. I knew the next move: come through the front door. It was a shame I was on the near-side of the mattress, closest to entry to the bedroom, and with nothing to shield me. Then the shooting stopped. In the silence, I heard something hit the windowsill and clatter away. It sounded like a full can of soda.

The explosion put me flat on the floor.

I stayed there, smelling the sulfurous chemicals. I was a little dizzy and couldn’t hear. The pistol stayed in my hand, my aim at the interior of the house. Then the ringing in my ears slowly receded and I heard the sirens.

25

Kate Vare had been to the hairdresser, who had given her tint an even more lurid red. It looked like the interior of an active volcano. Her temperament was similar.

“You’re holding back, Mapstone. I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years and I can tell. And you’re a lousy liar.”

“I’m the victim here.”

“Sure.”

We sat in an interrogation room of Phoenix Police Headquarters. The room smelled of urine and disinfectant. I had been taken there after the Fire Department had put out the small blaze in front of the bedroom window and a dozen police vehicles had sat along the street, lights reflecting off the houses. The responding uniforms and the initial detective team had been courteous. When Vare showed up, she ordered them to put me in handcuffs and take me out to a squad car. My rights were read to me.

“Do you want a lawyer?” Her lips suppressed a smile. Her leather portfolio was open but she hadn’t made any notes on the empty yellow legal pad.

“Maybe I can use yours.” Now uncuffed, I folded my arms.

“That goddamned blog.” She muttered, then she leaned into me. “Let’s go through it again. Your movements over the past twenty-four hours.” So I did, giving the same sanitized version that I had used for the past two hours.

“You’re holding back. You’re a lying sack of shit. Your house was shot-up with an automatic weapon and a hand-grenade almost made it through the window. That’s a gang hit. It makes me wonder what you’ve been doing to provoke it.”

“Like the ‘gang hit’ that killed Robin? How’d that theory work out for you? I never heard of La Familia using an Anglo hit woman.”

In this case, however, I wondered if she must be right. After all, I had survived the assassination of four top La Fam guys. We hadn’t even been shot at. Word gets around. Now somebody was coming for me. I wished that I had the Five-Seven.

“Are you depressed, David?” Her eyes aimed toward the wall and I swear she started to tear up. “Lost your job. Your wife has left you. Your sister-in-law has been killed. Must be a lot to bear…”

I’d seen the view from the other side of the table enough times that I didn’t give her so much as a blink of the eye. My facial muscles remained relaxed.

“Maybe you should get help,” Vare said. “I hear Pristiq is effective.”

It was amazing to live in our therapeutic and pharmaceutical society. How many great works of art seeking to transcend the tragic nature of life, how many majestic, melancholy personalities would have been lost to civilization if cave men had invented antidepressants and self-help books.

“Are you depressed, Kate?”

“You depress me.” Her eyes met mine and her tone was harder. “You’re a wuss. Weak. You always thought you could use that Ph.D to be some kind of United Nations observer of police work instead of getting your hands dirty. You got the publicity when cases were solved but I never bought it. You never fooled me.”

Why did she hate me with such virulence? It was something I would have to answer another day. I said, “Then you know I’m telling the truth now.”

She picked up her pen and made notes for at least five minutes, covering the writing from my view with her other hand. She was probably making a grocery list; that’s what I would have done. Just slow things down and make the suspect uncomfortable. Then she closed the portfolio.

“So you and Ms. Bryson were close? You were hysterical at the scene, I heard.”

I just watched her.

“Maybe you had feelings for her? Wife’s left you. Why, I don’t know. Not that I’m asking. Her sister’s right there. Wow. What were you capable of, depressed…weak? She struck me the same way. Oh, well, acts have consequences. There’s this territory called adult that not everybody can enter. Where you can throw away your vows. Lie to the police.”

I fought to keep my facial muscles neutral. “What are you doing to find out who killed Robin? She’s dead because of you.”

“Don’t you dare,” she said. “This is all your fault. Your stubbornness. Your stupidity.”

That was fair enough. I said nothing.

“I read her autopsy.”

All of my insides wanted to be outside. My temples throbbed concealing it. Vare watched me closely. The room vibrated silence for at least five minutes before she went on.

“You’ve got a concealed carry permit and a P.I license. I swear to god, Mapstone, if you’re hotdogging this case, I’ll do everything I can to see that you do time. Peralta can’t help you. Nobody can. You’re on your own.”

That was true enough, too. But I was pissed. “You’re either incompetent or you’re holding back, Kate. It’s one or the other. Which one is it?”

Her eyes betrayed surprise.

“I guess incompetent.” Two beats later. “That, plus they’re keeping you out of the loop because you’ll be facing a grand jury. Ain’t case management a bitch?”

She slapped her portfolio closed.

“God, I wish I had enough to hold you.” She stormed to the door and turned back. “It won’t take me long to get it.” Then, to someone outside, “Cut the son-of-a-bitch loose.”

A sympathetic uniform gave me a ride home, where I found that a neighbor had cut a piece of plywood and placed it over the bedroom window. Aside from the eighty-year-old glass lost and the bullet holes in the bedroom wall, the main casualty of the overnight mayhem had been a mature myrtle planted years ago by Lindsey, now dead by hand grenade. The area below the window was black and some of the stucco had been blown off.

My cell rang. It was Demetrius Smith.

“How fast can you be here? I think we can get him.”

I could get there in fifteen minutes, the freeways running lighter thanks to the recession. I met him in the parking lot of a shopping center near the grandly named Chandler Crossing Estates, which was just more suburban schlock no matter the moniker. I found the Mercedes and climbed inside.

“They’re in there, grocery shopping.”

“They must have good taste and lots of money.” It was an A.J.’s, the upscale food store in town. Its parent company, the last locally owned grocer in Arizona, was in bankruptcy reorganization.

I noticed he appreciated firepower: a.44 magnum Colt Anaconda with a six-inch barrel sat underneath his sport coat. It was the big brother of my Python.

“He’s only got one of these kids with him. So we ought to be able to take him. But don’t take anything for granted, Mapstone. He’s dangerous. Hell, these young ones today are dangerous.”

And here they came, thankfully macho, grocery bags in both hands, paper not plastic. They walked toward a Kia, purple with black-tinted windows. We got out and made as if we were walking toward the store. We were one parking row away and they didn’t even notice as we passed them, then we quickly cut over and came up behind them.

“Freeze.” I said it in a conversational voice, my hand on the butt of the Python but the weapon in the holster. Tom Holden turned his head, betraying high, wind-burned cheekbones and cold, light-blue eyes. He tossed a sack at me but that was the oldest move in the world, one you learn as a young deputy serving warrants. I sidestepped it, moved quickly to his side and put a foot behind his leg before I pushed him backwards. He fell hard to the pavement and expensive victuals fell all around him.

Smith stood over him with the long-barreled.44 magnum. It’s a very unpleasant view for someone on the receiving end. Holden didn’t move.

“Hello, Tom.” His voice carried an amiable lilt. “Susie’s Bail Bonds sends her greetings.” He swiveled the barrel toward the teenager, whose face was pasty with fear between two grocery sacks. “Kid, if you even move, I’ll blow your guts all over this parking lot.”

I heard a murmur behind me. A pair of elderly women was watching us. I pulled the wallet and flashed my P.I credentials. “Maricopa County sheriff’s deputy. Stand back, please.” They complied. To Smith, in a lower voice, “get moving.”

“I know my job.” He already had Holden on his stomach handcuffed. Smith removed a semi-automatic from the thug’s waistband, then painfully lifted him off the ground by his bound hands and marched him toward the Benz.

“Remember our deal.”

He gave a little wave.

I was using the car keys that had spilled out of Holden’s hand to check the trunk. I found what I had hoped for. “I’ll give this young man a ride home.” I ordered the teenager to walk to the Prelude carrying the grocery bags. It didn’t look as if he was armed but you never knew.

Once he was in the passenger seat, I used an old pair of cuffs that Lindsey kept in the glove box to shackle his hands behind him, locked the door, walked around to my side, and drove. The entire operation had taken maybe three minutes.

“Where are we going?”

I ignored him and got out of the parking lot fast, then crossed the freeway into Phoenix jurisdiction, just in case the old ladies weren’t so trusting of counterfeit authority. If Chandler P.D. rolled in, my move across the city limits would complicate things. The downside: I was in the Ahwatukee district, or All-White-Tukee as the cops and firefighters called it, the world’s biggest cul-de-sac with only three ways in and out, all from the east.

“Am I under arrest?”

I didn’t answer. He was tall and skinny with a dusting of acne on his nose, the barest stubble on his chin, and curly brown hair. Just an all-American boy.

“I’m only sixteen.”

I found another shuttered Washington Mutual branch and swung behind it. There was nothing but empty parking lot and a side view of the South Mountains over red-tile-roofs. Turning to him, I took his wallet and gave him a more complete pat-down.

“Hey, don’t do that. I’m straight, so don’t think I’m gonna suck your cock or anything.”

Dr. Johnson said, “Nothing so focuses a man’s mind as the knowledge that he is to hang at dawn.” Lacking a rope, I had to use the tools at my disposal. My hand went gently behind his head and slammed it violently into the dashboard, which had been hardened by years of exposure to the Arizona sun. He was handcuffed and his abdominal muscles didn’t even put up token resistance to the sudden forward movement.

“Ahhhhhhhhheeeeee!”

Blood came out of his nose but he otherwise looked fine except for a vague, terrible comprehension in his eyes.

Still, he put up a brave front. “Do you know who my dad is? You’re out of a job, asshole.”

“I don’t give a fuck.” I bounced his face into the dashboard again, harder this time, provoking another wail. Now he was bawling.

“Son,” I began, momentarily taken back by the word. I had never used it before in my life to refer to someone. “We’re going to have a conversation, and you have a choice. Either answer me honestly or I’ll beat the shit out of you, literally. You people wanted a tough new sheriff. Now you’ve got him. If you get blood on my car, I’ll shoot you and plant a gun on your dead ass. See what daddy thinks about his little junior then.”

He sniffed hard and painfully.

“What’s the old man’s name?”

“Fuck you!” It was said more from surprise than bravado. “I’ll get killed.”

I reached for his head again to continue to build rapport with the suspect.

“Okay, okay. Sal Moretti. His name’s Sal Moretti.”

Something fired inside my brain. “Sal ‘the Bug’ Moretti?”

“That’s right, motherfucker.” He was still weepy. “Now you’re gonna get yours.”

“That dashboard really likes your face.” I banged him into it again with slightly less force, but with all his pain centers running on high I might as well have thrown him off an overpass.

“Please! Arrrrrrrwwwwwwwwwwwwwwggggggg…”

“What the fuck is Sal the Bug doing in Chandler?”

“Witness relocation. But he got bored playing golf. He’s a real-time gangster.”

“What a little honor student,” I said. “Now ace the test. What…is…he…doing…here?”

His wet eyes were now full of fear at having his perfect nose irrevocably vandalized. “Black tar heroin, dog. He’s got a hell of a connection. We sell it around to the high schools. What the fuck? There’s ten of us. He picked us all by hand. All our parents have money and they’re bored shitless with their lives. They don’t give a fuck what we do. Anyway, we’re all straight-A students, go to church, that shit. Cops ain’t gonna bother us.” He sniffed his bloody nose, making a disgusting sound. “You haven’t even read me my rights. I’m a juvenile. My dad’s gonna sue the county for a hundred million dollars…”

I moved my hand and he shut up. “I can drive an hour and there’s a hell of a lot of desert where they’ll never find your body. And if they do, they’ll just think you’re another illegal who died coming norte. The animals out there eat everything but your bones. You’ll be just another wetback buried in an unmarked county grave.” My voice wasn’t hard; more of a reverie, which sounded scarier, even to me.

He was crying hard by this time. “What do you want?”

“Why did you follow us that night, outside the Sonic on McDowell?”

“Mr. Moretti wanted us to cruise by your house at night, just check on things. We saw you leave. So we waited near the Sonic. Tom wanted to do you both. Not, me, dog, I was scared, honest to god, I didn’t want to be involved in a killing. But two of the older guys had guns, too.”

“What stopped you?”

“Mr. Moretti. Tom called him and he said to chill.”

“Where does the black tar come from?”

“Tom said the Sinaloa cartel.”

“Oh, bullshit. Washed-up Chicago gangster and some teenagers who can’t get dates running heroin for the Sinaloa cartel…”

“Real shit, dude! The demand is unbelievable. I’m making so fucking much money and that’s just me. All I have to do is make some deliveries every week. Why should the fucking spics make all the money? Mr. Moretti’s a legend and a real American.”

I could have told him that Italians had once been held in the contempt now shown Hispanic immigrants, but what was the point? I asked him what Moretti supplied to the cartel in return?

“Money, lots of money.” He puffed up his chest. “And guns. I’ve never seen so goddamned many guns.”

“Where does he get them?”

“They don’t tell me. Really, I swear to god.”

I pulled out the image of the hit woman and held it in front of his rapidly swelling face.

“Who is this?”

“Sabrina.”

He said it too easily to be dissembling. I wanted her last name.

“I think it’s Cobb. Talk about a skank.”

“What’s her connection to Moretti?”

He said he didn’t know.

“Then how do you know her?”

“I took a package to her, okay?”

“Heroin?”

“She’d a rather had that,” said this straight-A product of what passed for the well-funded suburban schools. “But it wasn’t.” He tried to smile but it hurt too much. “I checked it, ’cause my ass would have been on the line, you know? It was ten thousand dollars. Hundreds and twenties. I made her count it, too, so she couldn’t say I’d stolen anything.”

I reached into the back and pulled out my old metal clipboard, which I’d carried as a uniformed deputy and had to dig out again when Peralta put everybody on standby for uniform duty because of budget cuts. Pulling his driver’s license out of his wallet, I started writing up an incident report. It was mostly for show. The kid’s name was Jonathan Zachary Grady. I wrote down his name, date of birth, address. He kept sniffling and suppressing his bawling.

“You’re in a shitload of trouble, Jonathan.”

“They call me Zack.”

“I don’t give a fuck. Are you following me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The old man is under surveillance as of an hour ago. I’m going to temporarily let you go because you cooperated. Do you skateboard?”

“What?”

His head crashed into the unyielding sun-baked polymer surface once again, hard this time. Blood spattered like July Fourth fireworks. He screamed.

“Yes, yes, goddamn, yes, I skateboard. Please don’t hurt me!”

“Then it’s too bad you fell off your skateboard,” I said. “Don’t go back to the old man’s house. You’ll go to jail and you’ll be tried as an adult, then you’ll go to prison. I’ll make sure the prison gangs know you were a snitch, and by the time they finish passing your virgin asshole around…”

Out of his rapidly swollen face, he looked at me with growing terror.

“Don’t go back to Moretti’s house. Don’t contact him. All his phones are tapped. Don’t say anything to your buddies. We’re watching them, too. This is a big case for the feds and they don’t give a shit who your parents are.”

He tried to nod vigorously but it hurt too much. He kept saying “yes” until I told him to shut up.

I ordered him to lean forward and unlocked the handcuffs. They had left no cuts or bruises on his wrists. He put a wad of McDonald’s paper napkins I gave him up to his nose.

“Now get the fuck out and walk. And thank you for your cooperation.”

26

I used surface streets to return home. The stop-and-go gave me time to assess new information. Sal “the Bug” Moretti-Judson Lee-in Chandler, comfortably relocated thanks to our tax dollars, and now running new criminal enterprises. Selling black-tar heroin to affluent high-school kids. Somehow involved with the Jesus Is Lord Pawn Shop, selling guns to the cartels. This was what had showed up on our doorstep, peddling himself as an attorney with a bogus story.

Why? What was his role in the beheading of Jax Delgado? The answer ate at my insides all along the length of Baseline Road, as I passed the cheap, fake Tuscan-Spanish architecture of apartments and subdivisions, profaning the land that once held the Japanese gardens whose images so enchanted Robin. He wanted to get close to Robin. Maybe he had wanted to see how effective our defenses were. Maybe…I didn’t know.

I had let this happen.

Beyond that, it was all little things. Holden wanted to kill us that night, but Moretti had held him back? Why? Had Tom Holden been the long-rifle shooter who had taken down La Fam as we watched stupefied? What was the Bug’s angle in that killing? I cursed so long, loud, and profanely that I fogged the inside of my sunglasses.

The drive gave me time to assess new information about me. The packets of wet wipes Lindsey kept in the glove box did an adequate job of cleaning the blood off the inside of the car and my hands. But I had seen my own capacity back there with Jonathan Zachary Grady, middle-class teen drug dealer. I had enjoyed it, this darkness that had been growing in me suddenly let out into the sunlight. I kept wiping my hands long after the little cloths were dry, kept wiping them until my skin was raw.

On Central, I turned north, crossed the canal, passed Sue’s Fashions, and took in the brown cloud hovering over the skyline. In the historic districts, everything was blooming and lovely. This was the garden city of my youth, the green oasis, what was left of it anyway. It was lost on me. I was almost home when the cell rang. It was Peralta. This time I picked up.

“How’s Casa Grande?”

“Why aren’t you answering your phone?”

“I’ve needed quiet time.”

“You’re a really crappy liar. I heard about the gunfire at your house. You need to get out of there. Come see me and gun-up.”

“No.”

The line was silent for several seconds. “Do you still have the wallet you took off the banger watching your house?”

I hesitated.

“Because he’s a DEA agent,” Peralta said.

It was eighty-five outside but I felt chill.

He continued, “Don’t start on me. I just found out myself. So don’t fuck this up. Bring me the wallet and the TEK-9.”

“I don’t have a…”

“Crappy liar, Mapstone. I need the gun back before Amy Preston sends me to Guantánamo or you murder somebody with it.”

“Fine. Fuck you. What was a DEA agent doing watching our house before I ever got in the middle of their investigation?”

He had already hung up. That answer, of course, was obvious: their man, Jax Delgado, had been killed and his head sent to the Spanish revival house on Cypress Street.

The next call came two hours later.

“Mapstone, it’s Demetrius. Thanks for your help back there. You have good moves. I hope you got the misguided lad home safely.”

“Where are you?”

“Sorry, my man, but I just crossed the state line. Ditch pig will be safely in jail in Bakersfield when you need him, and I’ll be thirty-thousand-dollars closer to paying my daughter’s tuition at UCLA.”

I just let the microwaves carry silence until he said my name again.

“Did you make him do the phone call?”

“He did it just the way you wanted. Sorry about the rest, but California called.”

I put up a fuss, made it a good one. But I was satisfied. Demetrius Smith had not let me down.

Now I sat in the living room and looked around the house. “Just get me to the night.” I said it over and over, as if it would stop the tachycardia that was overwhelming me. The only thing that helped for a few moments was to lie in bed, where the sheets still had Robin’s scent.

The address the high-school kid gave me went to an old, single-story row of apartments on 15th Avenue north of Missouri. This part of the city had developed slowly, the cursed subdivisions creeping in on the acreages and farms. Some properties still had horse privileges in the zoning code. But I was not going to horse country. The apartment was in the middle, behind a fading white door that had no peephole in it. There was no back exit and the lights were on. It was full dark.

I walked through the smell of citrus blossoms that only fed my blood lust and gave the hollow-sounding door three knocks.

“Who is it?” A female voice.

“FedEx.”

The door cracked and I pushed through, raising the barrel of the Python to her face.

“Oh, shit!”

She turned to run and I grabbed her by her hair, smashed her into the wall, and dragged her inside, kicking the door shut behind me.

“Who else is in the apartment?”

“Nobody”

I told her we’d double check. With her hair pulled painfully and the big Colt against her back, I made her do a walk-through, to the bedroom, the bathroom, the closet. Then I pushed her back into the living room and threw her to the floor.

It was the same woman: thin, pallid face, long dark hair, wearing dark shorts and a teal top. In the light, she looked about five feet tall. She stared up at me with terror. In the light, her face was prematurely crisscrossed with lines and her skin carried the unhealthy pallor of an addict. I sat in a chair and kept the gun on her.

“Why?”

“Oh, mister, please, I’m begging…”

“I’m going to ask again.” My voice was quiet, unfamiliar. “Why?”

“He said he’d pay me, okay? My old man’s in jail and I was trying to get him out.”

“How did you find him?”

“He found me, I swear to god.”

“Who found you?”

“Mister Lee!”

So he had played the same game. She didn’t know who he was or where he lived. She might have been the woman who had lunched with him at the Phoenician, who, recounted the server Lisa, felt out of place.

“My old man had done some work for him before. When Mister Lee called here I was desperate to raise that bail money. There was nothing I could do and I asked for his help. He said I had to do this.”

“Why?”

“He said you’d shot and killed his son, that both of you were drug dealers, and he wanted justice.”

“Why didn’t you shoot me?”

She stared at the wall. “The gun jammed.”

“Where is it?”

“Under the sofa cushion. He said he’d pick it up. But that kid who brought the money wouldn’t take it.”

I told her to get the gun, hold it by the barrel, and put it on the coffee table. She pulled up a black.22 semi-auto with a silencer attached to the barrel and set it next to a stack of “Real Simple” magazines. I ordered her to lie back down on the floor.

“Did you bail out your husband?”

She shook her head.

“Where’s the goddamned money!”

Her eyes grew wide. She pointed to a black satchel sitting against the giant flat-screen television set.

“You didn’t smoke it?”

“No, no! I’ve been thinking about leaving, starting over. Donnie beat me anyway, so I thought, maybe this was my shot. Let him stay in jail.” She held bony hands against her face. “I know I did a bad thing. I know I did wrong. All I ever did before was turn a few tricks. I was in jail for that but nothing else. I swear to god, mister. I wasn’t raised…”

She suddenly stopped talking when I held up my hand.

“Do you have a dishrag?”

I had to repeat myself.

She nodded and pointed to the kitchen. It was wet and draped over the 1960s-era faucet. I picked it up and tossed it to her.

“Put it in your mouth.”

She hesitated until I cocked the Python. The move is not necessary in a double-action revolver, but the sound gets attention. “Please, Mister…” I aimed. She started to eat the dirty rag, tears running down her cheeks. She lay on the floor, raised on her elbows, staring at the madman over her. I replayed that night in the back yard, Robin hit and falling. I felt shrapnel rubbing up against my heart.

I holstered the Python and pulled out the latex gloves from my pocket. I slid one on each hand and then examined the.22. The magazine still had ammunition. I worked the action to make sure it wouldn’t jam and slapped the ammo back into the gun.

“I know you’ve studied your Northern Ireland history,” I said. “The Irish Republican Army used to do something called ‘a six pack.’ A bullet in each ankle, knee, and elbow. You’ll probably live, if you can stand the pain, and you don’t bleed out. I don’t care.”

Here I was lying, because I intended to put the last bullet between her eyes. Muffled words. Steady streams of water coming down her face.

“You killed an innocent woman. You didn’t kill me. Two strikes and you’re out.” I hefted the cheap, poisonous manufacture in my gloved hand.

My cell rang. I made the mistake of looking at the caller I.D.: Lindsey.

Inside the Lincoln Memorial, where he sits in his chair watching what has become of the republic he did what was required to preserve, words are carved into the walls. Among them,

In this temple

As in the hearts of the people

For whom he saved the union

The memory of Abraham Lincoln

Is enshrined forever

The inscription never fails to move me. But as Lindsey and I stood there that night, barely noticing the light crowd around us, I began to weep full-out.

We had walked the length of the mall. I had been once again trying to coax a talk about the natural disaster that had befallen us. Lindsey, once again, had been silent. None of this was new, nor was my inability to leave it alone. Inside, I tried to imagine the events of grievance, misunderstanding, and disregard that, beyond losing the baby, were pulling her away from me. It was a fool’s errand, of course, worse than asking for trouble. I didn’t understand why we had to mourn separately, or why we couldn’t talk any more. Once again, I suggested that we try counseling, together or separately.

At this she had turned to me and nearly snarled, “I don’t even know who I am!” before stalking ahead.

It had become clear that the distance separating us was one that couldn’t be crossed with an airplane ride. How we had gone so far off course, little by little, was probably beyond either of us that night.

And I cried there before the engraved words, not knowing how to save my union. She wasn’t wearing gloves and put the hand without the wedding rings on my arm.

“Dave, I don’t know how to tell you…” Her voice was nearly a whisper. “The last thing I want to do is add to your sorrows or be cruel to you…”

“Just say it, Lindsey.” My gut tightened.

She said, “I’m not sure I want to be married to you.”

Now I let her call go to voice mail. The woman was imploring me with wide eyes, a shaking head, and making small, animal-like sounds through the dishrag.

My left hand pulled back the action and chambered a round. I would start with her kneecap, supposedly the most painful wound. Her right kneecap that was two feet away. I slipped my finger inside the trigger guard, lined up the sights, and took a breath, started to let it out slowly. This moment had been imagined in my sleepless nights and days a hundred times, T.S. Eliot hammering in my brain, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”

But that moment I heard Lindsey. And I heard Robin. Voices as clear and insistent as if they were sitting next to me. They would not let me be.

I put the gun on the table and walked out into the cool night.

On the sidewalk, I called PPD and told them I had just seen the woman who had murdered Robin walk into an apartment. The first units showed up in three minutes. I could clearly identify her and would have great credibility on the witness stand as a decorated former deputy sheriff. The murder weapon and money were there as evidence. I would take my chances with the justice system I had spent so many years serving. This time.

27

The next night I drove toward the blinking red lights of mountaintop communications towers again. Something kept drawing me back to south Phoenix and I didn’t know what it was.

When I was a boy, our weekend drives to the Japanese gardens were down Seventh Avenue. Often we stopped at Union Station along the way so I could watch the passenger trains, or see the freight cars switched across the many tracks-seventeen as I recall-that crossed the street at grade level. Now Seventh Avenue soared across the tracks on a concrete overpass, but it didn’t matter because Union Station was closed, the passenger trains were gone, the thriving industries that once lined the tracks were empty lots or decaying buildings, and most of the tracks were long gone.

Back then, we drove through the poor side “south of the tracks.” No bridge carried cars on Seventh Avenue over the Salt in those days-we simply followed the pavement across the dry, wandering riverbed. One of the many quarries was near the road and it contained a pit nearly always filled with water. I imagined it as a fathomless depth, and for a child from a place with dry rivers, even passing close to this tiny inland sea filled me with terror. The city gradually fell away, replaced by pastures, fields, groves, and irrigation ditches, presided over by the South Mountains and the Sierra Estrella. I hiked both of them as a boy and from their summits, the green fields, this civilizing enterprise, which went back centuries to the Hohokam, only barely kept the desert wilderness in check. The wild West and the frontier seemed very near.

Almost all this was gone as I drove south now. Seventh was a wide arterial with curbs and sidewalks. It crossed the river on a span with no character or beauty, matching the built environment of the entire route. If the tree restoration along the river was moving this far, I couldn’t see it. The quarries had moved farther west and the river had been confined to an unnatural dredged passage to prevent flooding. I saw one old farmhouse and a rickety barn that transported me back to being ten years old. But it didn’t last. When I hit Baseline Road, I turned east on just another look-alike, six-lane Phoenix highway, known locally as a “street.” The agriculture, and of course, the flower fields with their fantastic spectrum of colors, were long gone.

If you followed the road in the opposite direction, it led to a spot that marked the Gila and Salt River “baseline” for the surveys of the territory and the state. It was one of the most important manifestations of the white man’s conquest of the land. In many ways, it was the beginning of everything you saw now. Hardly anyone knew about it. The only way you might get their attention would be to say that the baseline is near Phoenix International Raceway, but you wouldn’t keep their attention long. This wasn’t their hometown. They had come here to escape history.

But history would not be evaded long. Perhaps that’s why I kept coming down here. South Phoenix had always been the poor side of town. The barrios and shantytowns near Buckeye Road and Seventh Avenue were slums so atrocious that they were identified as some of the nation’s worst during the Depression, this when Phoenix was smaller than a hundred other cities. Much of the area lacked even running water or a sewage system. This was where Father Emmett McLoughlin toiled for decades to help the poor, and the Henson housing project was built in 1941 as a beacon of hope-not the crime-infested danger zone I later knew as a young deputy.

Now an ugly new apartment complex had replaced even that, a good intention I was sure, but the trees and shade that had once made Henson livable had been torn out, swapped for gravel and off-the-shelf suburban architecture. The old black community had diminished and although the Hispanic population had soared, the barrios had been disrupted and in many cases destroyed.

The Anglos who ran Phoenix historically thrived on ignoring the south side-prospered through its cheap labor, kept comfortable in their soft apartheid. It was a place to put the landfill, the toxic disposal outfits, and all manner of not-in-my-backyard enterprises. It was a place whose history was to be overlooked and marginalized. Now I wondered how much had changed, despite the newer subdivisions along Baseline, the tilt-up warehouses that were raised on spec, or the city signs that proclaimed this “South Mountain Village.”

The well-off had decamped for north Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, and the fringes, leaving millions of working poor all over the city that once haughtily neglected these neighborhoods. Every place outside of the newer areas was partly south Phoenix now. But this place, south of the tracks and, especially, south of the river, was also special, anointed by its unique history, and it had soul and edge, however many cheap, new houses sat behind walls along Baseline, no matter how horrid the fast-food boxes that squatted at Central and Baseline.

I turned north, the city lights briefly before me, before I crossed the canal, passed the Catholic church, and started the long, slow glide back to the valley’s center. The gaudy lights at the Rancho Grande supermarket were misleading. No place had been hit harder by the combination of the recession and the anti-Hispanic fervor of the Anglos than South Phoenix. The Ed Pastor Transit Center was nearly deserted, with only one bus idling in the bays. A man filled large jugs from a water machine while his children yelled from the open windows of the car. Did the water machines mean the families didn’t have operable plumbing? For whatever reason, they proliferated here.

It was this reverie that prevented me from noticing the vehicles that swarmed me.

They executed the maneuver as expertly as cops handling a felony stop. We were just south of the Central Avenue bridge. I was boxed in by a tricked-out Honda in front, a white car behind, and, what finally got my attention, a jacked-up, extended cab pickup truck. Before I could fully react, the truck swung over and bumped the Prelude into a warehouse parking lot. Then the car ahead suddenly stopped, forcing me to brake hard. I had the insane thought: Was this where the old Riverside Ballroom stood? I had a choice between using the cell to dial 911 or pulling out the Python. I chose the latter. But by then, six men were on the far side of the car, M-4 assault rifles with scopes and laser sights leveled at the windshield and door. All wore black protective vests.

Oh, I wished I had the Five-Seven. I wished I had backup. I wished Robin’s laughter still graced the world and that my wife loved me and that our child would have lived a long and full life and remembered us well. Instead I had six rounds in the Python and two Speedloaders. Eighteen rounds in all, but no time to reload. The Prelude was not, to put it mildly, armored. More men appeared around me, but they evidenced no gang hauteur. Instead all moved with a military-like competence. If this wasn’t the ATF, I had only one hope. It had little chance of success, but it was all I had.

South Phoenix Rules.

I was not afraid as they tore open the driver’s door and dragged me out, taking the Python, pinioning my arms at my sides, and roughly backing me up against the side of the car. My spine bent painfully backwards. The men all spoke Spanish. They were not the ATF.

“Let him go.”

This command came in accented English, his voice sandpapery. My arms were released.

A dark-skinned man walked close. He was my height with bad skin and dressed all in black, including a Kevlar vest. Now I really missed the Five-Seven. He spat in my face.

“You gunned down my people and you just thought it would be okay?”

“I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

“Why did you do it?”

“I didn’t do it. Didn’t you read the newspaper?” Of course, he didn’t.

“Screw this. Take him.” My brief and conditional freedom was rescinded, replaced by strong hands gripping my arms.

“You were lucky last night. We should have just come in the house and finished it. But this will be better. I’m going to feed you to my dogs. They like human flesh. They have a taste for it now. But first, I want you to have a little traveling companion. Let’s say it’ll help keep you quiet.”

He produced something dark and round, and another man latched onto my head.

“Open his mouth! Pull on his jaw!”

The next few seconds passed in a long, painful, frantic dream-state, ending with a man’s scream, something like a wet Chicken McNugget in my mouth, and half-proprietorship in a hand grenade.

A man was still screaming, as well he should. I had just bitten off one of his fingers at the second knuckle. Now I spat the bloody remnant on the pavement and stared at the jefe. The idea had been to put the grenade in my mouth. He held it up to my face as I struggled. Unfortunately, the man’s timing was bad and I have good teeth. The sudden turnabout had caused four-finger’s friends to loosen their grip, and I latched onto the grenade.

The jefe held it too, trying to wrestle it from me, tendons standing out in his neck and forearms. The crew could easily have overpowered me, but everyone hesitated. They could see that I had control of the top and the pin. That provided enough time to bend forward and pull the pin with my teeth.

Then I spat it away. The metal hitting the pavement was unnaturally loud.

The leader tried to back away but I wouldn’t let him. I held his hands wrapped in mine. His men were unsure what to do. The man who now had four fingers on one hand was reduced to moans as he ripped off his shirt to staunch the bleeding. All were confused by the new reality that had entered their lives: South Phoenix Rules-when you’re outnumbered and backup can’t arrive in time, when you have more assholes than bullets, all you can do is become the crazy Anglo.

I spat bloody saliva back at him. “Let’s all die today.”

His eyes widened and he tried again to disengage. It didn’t work. I had one hand firmly around his grip on the grenade and my other hand as the only thing holding down the safety handle. If my left hand was pried away, it was nearly impossible that anyone could move fast enough to keep the handle from springing, setting off the fuse, and leading to a short-countdown to explosion. What was it? Five seconds? Was it worth the risk? All had come to realize that el gabacho loco held their destiny, literally, in his hand.

I went on in Spanglish: “Ya no se puede hacer nada. Estamos jodidos.”

They all knew there was nothing they could do. We were screwed.

“Who the fuck are you? La Familia? No, too disciplined. Los Zetas? Mexican police? I don’t even give a shit.” I lightly fluttered my grip atop the safety handle and everyone tensed. Four Fingers stopped whimpering.

“You…” The leader stammered as his men regained themselves and aimed their M-4s at me. A new sheet of sandpaper colored his words. “You’re not going to just walk away…”

“Then we’re all gonna meet God in five seconds, and even if you shoot me, I guarantee you’ll go with me when this piña blows.” I watched his luminous brown eyes as they failed to blink. My arms ached but I fought to conceal it. “Or, we can talk, entre machos, warrior to warrior. ”

“What can you possibly give me?” he demanded, his hand still firmly in my grip. We were both sweating heavily but his hands were starting to shake.

“I can give you what you want.”

28

Back at the house, I tried to take stock. After brushing my teeth like a maniac, I put the Bill Evans Trio on the sound system, made a martini, and settled at the desk to think. I thought about Lindsey, wondered about the man or men she might be seeing. Might be in bed with right now. What was he like? Lindsey was so conservative, almost a prude in some ways. Now I guessed she had rubber to burn. My lodestar lost, perhaps irrevocably. Common male jealousy twined with my vivid imagination wrestled with grief over control of my emotions and lost. The level of the liquid in the martini glass went down. I was too broad shouldered to carry off the narrow neckties popular when Bill Evans was at his peak. I still didn’t understand why Robin mattered so much to Sal Moretti that he would put a hit on her.

For the first time, I looked at Robin’s legal pad as more than a painful relic. I pulled it over and started reading the notes she had made on that long afternoon she spent alone, after she had given me a kiss at the light rail station near the central library. Soon, I was making my own notes on a separate pad.

Peralta answered on the second ring.

“Have you murdered anyone?”

“No.”

“And you just happened to see the hit woman walking down the street several miles from your house.”

“I was just a concerned citizen.” When he didn’t answer, I went on. “You still have the contacts to get a fast-track check on military records…”

He reluctantly said yes.

I read him the information from the aged dog tags that I held in my hand.

Then I called a friend back east. She was an expert in the history of the Mafia. It was late her time, but she was indulgent. Something in my voice, perhaps. When I ended the call, all I could do was lay my head on the desk.

The next morning, I was at the ASU Hayden Library early. The Arizona Historical Foundation archives were a starting point at least, and by ten, a preservationist named Susan had set me up at a table where I was surrounded by the comforting mass of gray Hollinger boxes.

The Japanese internment of World War II was one of the sorrier chapters in American history, when more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese living in the country were forcibly moved from the West Coast into concentration camps. The reasoning had been fear of a Japanese invasion or sabotage of war industries, even though there was never an instance of sedition or espionage. But it had been arbitrary: Hardly any Japanese living in Hawaii, which had actually been attacked, were interned.

No matter: the anti-Japanese feelings that had long simmered, especially in California, were unleashed by Pearl Harbor. Franklin Roosevelt signed executive order 9066 in 1942. Many were brought to camps constructed in Arizona, including one at Poston, in the western desert. Most lost everything and after the war had to start over. Today, conservatives were defending this move by the otherwise hated FDR as a useful precedent for profiling Muslims living in America. Everything comes around.

At my crowded table, like a credible historian, I moved through primary source material, the recollections and documentation of people who had actually been there. The Frances and Mary Montgomery Collection-they had been teachers at the Gila relocation camp south of Phoenix. The Wade Head Collection-he had been the director of the Colorado River War Relocation Center at Poston. I set aside the memoranda about camp construction and organization. Letters about individuals and families took more of my time.

It was a rich archive. I wanted to spend a month there and listen to the hours of oral histories. There was no time. And I couldn’t find much on the relocation in Phoenix itself. It was probably there. Everything is somewhere, if you look long enough-ask the archeologists who found ancient Jericho. But the records concerning Arizona related to the camps themselves. The same was true of the secondary source materials, such as the scholarly articles and a couple of Ph.D. dissertations.

I was ashamed to know so little. I remember Grandmother telling me about the German prisoners of war being marched into town to work. About the Japanese, she and grandfather said little. I did remember one thing: the line that separated the families to be relocated from those who could stay ran along U.S. Highway 60-Van Buren Street and Grand Avenue. Those living south of the boundary, including the Japanese farmers along Baseline Road, were sent to the camps.

I found a couple of good academic articles, but they were mostly confined to Japanese immigrants to Phoenix and Maricopa County prior to World War II. First-generation, or Issei, families began arriving early in the 20th century. The first American-born child came around 1906. The state’s Alien Land Law of 1921 prohibited property ownership by “Orientals,” but it was overturned in 1935. The Japanese were innovative farmers and encountered prejudice and envy, but they also built good relationships with many Caucasian farmers and business owners. Kajuio Kishiyama was among the first farmers near the South Mountains, first leasing land and then buying it. Members of the Nakagawa family were also early growers. Both had been interned during the war. After the war, they came back and started over.

With these flimsy threads, I tried to narrow my search.

Peralta called at one. He had the information that I needed.

Back home, I pulled out phone books, opened up Google on the Mac, and started making calls. It was tedious work but at least it kept the panic attacks away. On the thirty-seventh try, I reached a man who took my name and number, and said he would talk to his cousin. In an hour, a young woman called. After some persuading, she said she would be willing to talk with me. She lived near Los Angeles and agreed to meet me the next day.

I made another call, to a cell phone I was sure couldn’t be traced, not that I even wanted to try.

“I need another forty-eight hours.”

“I knew you’d fuck me over.” The sandpaper voice. “I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

“It didn’t work out that way.”

“Maybe you’re afraid to get your hands dirty, history teacher.”

“You know better than that.”

“Why should I even trust you? You’re a former cop?”

“Because you want more than me.”

He didn’t speak for a long time. Then, “I’ll give you twenty-four. That’s all. Then we’re coming for you, this time for keeps. We’ll start by cutting off your finger.”

“Whatever.”

I flew into Burbank and rented a car, driving an hour through the dismal traffic to a comfortable house with a view of the San Gabriel Mountains. It was not a very smoggy day. Phoenicians always talk about not wanting to become “another L.A.” It’s the smugness of yokels. Phoenix had become another L.A. in all the bad ways, including the gangs. It lacked almost all the good things, from the extensive rail transit to the cool vibe to the world-class universities and talent. Oh, and there was the ocean-and mountains, when you could see them, as magnificent as the San Gabriels.

The young woman I had spoken to on the phone only had a youthful voice. She was close to my age, but attractive with shoulder-length hair, large eyes, and a fine figure in an expensive suit. It turned out that she worked in the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office and was not prepared for any bullshit from David Mapstone, of late the historian for the Maricopa County Sheriff.

“I checked you out,” she said, standing in the doorway.

“Did I pass?”

My flirting skills still needed work. She said, “Let me see them.”

I handed her the plastic bag with the dog tags. She took them out, held them in the sunlight, and ran a finger over the metal.

“Oh, my God.”

She introduced herself as Christine Tanaka Holmes, stepped aside, and let me come in.

She led me back into a large family room lighted by an arcadia door that led out onto a sumptuous garden. But much of the interior space was taken up with the tools of old age: a walker, a four-footed cane, a wheelchair with a thick, black cushion as the seat. And in a print armchair sat a small, very elderly woman with hair the color of lead pulled back into a bun. She assessed me with bright eyes.

The deputy D.A. bent down on her haunches.

“GiGi, this is David Mapstone from Phoenix. This is my great-grandmother, Sarah Kurita. GiGi, he brought Johnny’s dog tags home.”

I pulled up another chair and sat before her as she held the objects. Tears dimmed the bright eyes. She took both of my hands. “My big brother, Johnny.”

She instructed the younger woman. “Bring them.”

We sat in silence, her diminutive, bony hands clutching mine, until Christine returned. She opened a wooden box and began to hand out objects.

“This was Johnny in 1943. He sent it to us in Poston, from his training.”

The photo showed a cocky smile on a young soldier. “He trained in Mississippi, if you can believe that,” Christine said.

“He was his own man, Johnny,” the old woman said. “He was a rebel, had to do it his way. Didn’t want to follow the old ways. Wanted to marry who he wanted. He was such an American boy, even though they called him a Jap. But he was a good brother and a great soldier. He didn’t want to stay in Poston. He and his friends enlisted as soon as they could. It wasn’t easy. Lots of resentment about what the government did to us. But Johnny was going to show them.”

More photos: Johnny with other soldiers; aboard a troop ship; another man. “This was his friend Shigeo,” the old woman said. “He was killed on the beachhead at Salerno.” She touched each of the photographs as if they were religious icons. “Johnny wrote us every other day.” She pointed to stacks of letters inside the box, neatly tied with silk bands. “Johnny fought all the way up Italy and into France, with the rest of the 442nd.” Her face clouded. “Then he came back home…”

Christine said quickly, “The 442nd Regimental Combat Team was made up exclusively of Nisei who chose to fight for their country. It was the most highly decorated unit in the Army’s history-twenty-one Medal of Honor winners. Meanwhile, their relatives were forced to live in the relocation camps.” She allowed her first smile. “But you know that.”

Next came shadow boxes with medals and ribbons. One was a Silver Star. It was the third highest decoration for bravery and this one looked as if it had just come from the War Department. In a laminated cover was a citation for Johnny Kurita, for gallantry in action against the enemy at the battle of Biffontaine.

All this was living history, right before me. I let it wash me along, carry away my impatience, and then distract me from my heartbreaks and losses. Against all this, mine seemed small.

Two hours went by at warp-speed before I finally asked my questions. Her hearing was keen, so I could speak in a normal voice. Her memory was vivid and precise. The answers she gave knocked me sideways. The same was true for Christine.

“GiGi, I’ve never heard this before.”

“What was the point? We knew we couldn’t get justice in Phoenix. The other Japanese on Baseline tried to help us, but they were just getting re-established. Most of the whites didn’t care. Oh, we grew so many things. The South Mountains shielded us from the frosts. The whites just said we were taking the best land. What was the point in carrying around such bitterness.” She nodded to Christine. “None of you young ones knew. Except…well, he read Johnny’s letters, so I eventually told him.”

It was only then that GiGi wanted to know, so politely, how I had found Johnny’s dog tags.

29

After the mandatory hassles at Sky Harbor, I was back in the Prelude by six that evening. The sunset was ordinary. As I took the exit out the east side of the airport, Peralta reached me.

“Where have you been?”

“Scholarship.”

He silently weighed my answer. “We’re taking down the Jesus Is Lord Pawn Shop. Want a front-row seat? You can sit in the command van with me and the A.G. Those guys you saw loading guns into the SUV? They work for Antonio. We’ve got probable cause. We’ve got the buy on tape, the fake paperwork. We’ve got enough now to shut down the new supply route. All the muckety-mucks from Washington signed off at last. So we’re finally going in. It’ll be fun to watch Barney frog-marched off to prison.”

I told him no thanks.

“Why not?” It was a demand, not a question.

“I’m just trying to put all this out of my mind.”

“Good luck,” he said.

On the freeway south, I made another call. I had an obligation to repay and the clock was running against me.

The walnut with eyebrows opened the door himself. He stood, slight inside his loud golf shirt, blinking at me.

“May I help you?”

I just pushed my way past him. “Where are your punks?”

He stepped outside, did a careful check of the street. The only vehicle in sight was Lindsey’s Honda Prelude. He turned back.

“I don’t even know you. Why have you forced your way into my house?”

It was a good act and he kept it up in his old-man voice, even after he had produced the Beretta and begun a careful search of me, not just for a weapon but also for a wire. When he was satisfied, he used the gun barrel to prod me into the Arizona Room.

“Now, Dr. Mapstone, you have become an intruder on my property, so I can shoot you at will and be perfectly within Arizona law.”

“But you’re curious why I’m here.”

“You do surprise me. Sit.” He hospitably waved the pistol toward a leather sofa. The room was large, decorated at some expense but still vulgar: cowboy paintings, a bejeweled saddle on a stand, a grandfather clock encased in faux adobe, and gigantic leather furniture.

I dropped into the sofa and he gingerly sat across from me, his hips barely on the seat, as if he needed to be ready to spring up at any moment.

We seemed alone, but I asked again about his teenage henchmen.

“Back home for dinner with their families. I wouldn’t want them falling in with the wrong crowd.”

“And what a mentor they’ve found. Salvatore “Sal the Bug” Moretti.”

He cocked his head in mirth.

“If we had the time, I’d love to know how you found me.”

Part of my brain sized up that angle: He didn’t know that I had followed him from the Stuffed Beaver. The honor student I interrogated with the dashboard: I told him Moretti’s house was under surveillance and his phones were tapped; if he went back or warned Sal, he’d be arrested. Tom Holden had made the call I wanted-with the persuasion of Demetrius Smith-that a California bounty hunter was after him and he needed to lay low and not risk bringing the cops to Moretti’s house. Too many days had passed, so Sal had assumed that his identity and location were secure. But he didn’t strike me as someone who would be introspective in the face of the crisis now sitting on his leather sofa. As he said, if we had the time…

So I just said four words, the lethal information I had gained from my friend the organized crime historian.

“Eugene Costa, your grandfather.”

One black eyebrow went up.

“He wasn’t just a gofer for Harley Talbott,” I said. “He was a middle-man between Talbott and the Chicago mob. The DeSimone case was bullshit, of course. But the articles mentioned Eugene Costa. Just a bit player. A nobody, unless you knew what you were looking for. Unfortunately…” My throat started to close and I slowed myself down. “Unfortunately, Robin happened to run Eugene Costa through some old property records and put that information as a footnote to the report we gave you.”

“You’re a genius.” He aimed the gun at my chest.

“She didn’t know anything. Neither did I.”

“They always say that.” His voice sounded thirty years younger and I could imagine the many executions he had carried out. In fact, I knew about ten of them. He must have negotiated a sweet deal with the feds to avoid the needle. If I were thirty days younger, I might have been afraid, might have been anxiously worried about time-just like that little boy at Kenilworth School, watching the clock. None of that was in my mind now. I settled in the sofa and spread my arms over the back, feeling the cool leather on my hands.

“You’re an idiot,” I said. “You rat out your old pals, get witness protection to resettle you here, and pretty soon you’re selling black tar heroin to high-school kids. You can take the goombah out of the rackets but you can’t take the rackets out of the goombah.”

“I opted out of witness protection a year ago,” he said. “They check in every now and again, but you know how it is, war on terror, budget cuts and all.”

“You might have gotten away with it if you hadn’t paid ten thousand dollars to that woman to kill Robin and me.”

“It would have been twenty thousand if she’d done the job right. I should have had Tom do it.”

“Like he did the job right on Jax Delgado.”

He moved his finger off the trigger, curious.

“It was meant to look like La Familia’s work,” I said. “But because you’d seen Jax with Robin, you figured she was a risk, too. So you had Holden send her his head. That way, when she ended up dead, the cops would think it was another killing by Mexican gangs. Nobody would ever suspect you. So far so good? But you learned her brother-in-law was a deputy sheriff. You backed off. You’re a careful guy. You wanted to know what Robin had learned from Jax: so you did the Judson Lee thing, gave us a cold case, quoted Napoleon on history. You provided us with just enough information that our findings would tell whether we knew the secret about Jax and you.”

He moved the Beretta to his lap, watching me intently. I remained sprawled on the sofa.

“Robin didn’t know anything.” I spoke slowly, letting each word hit him. “She was just a thorough researcher. It got her killed.” A voice in my head: David, you got her killed. I said, “You killed her and it made me curious why.”

“I don’t like curious guys.”

“That’s why you killed Jax, too. Too bad he was a federal agent.”

Moretti opened his mouth but nothing happened except a string of saliva separated between his lips.

“Oh, you didn’t know that, Sal? You thought he was El Verdugo and he’d go to work for you? Be some insurance against the cartels?”

“What the hell are you talking about? You’re a crazy man!” He stood and backed away, keeping the gun on me. At a 1950s-style bar cart, he poured himself Scotch, neat. He didn’t offer me anything. Slipping the gun in his pocket, he consumed two fingers of the booze in one gulp.

“Jax Delgado was ATF,” I said. “He discovered that you were off the witness protection reservation. But it wasn’t the heroin he was after. It was the Jesus Is Lord Pawn Shop, which you secretly own through your friend Barney.”

The two black eyebrows slithered up his forehead. “Smart guy. How do you know this?”

“Just destiny.”

He slapped the glass down hard and paced the large room. It was amazing how isolated the space felt, but it was designed to be that way, so people could come in their garages, watch television and play video games, and never notice what might be going on outside their front doors.

“Nobody can prove it!” His voice echoed into the high ceiling.

“I thought you old-school guys didn’t kill cops, code of honor, and all that shit.”

“It’s no shit! It’s real. This Mexican passed himself off as a contract killer. The best! I don’t kill cops. Don’t you realize I could have killed you and the girl anytime? I could have had you killed in that parking lot with those spics, but I didn’t. I am a man of honor.”

“Forgive me, Salvatore.” I said it with the old-world flair of Judson Lee, and then laughed slow and low. I thought he’d shoot me right then, so I continued quickly.

“Johnny Kurita,” I said. Moretti’s tan dialed down by half. He slowly returned to his seat, gripping the gun. “Jax wasn’t just here to take down your gun pipeline. He wanted you on personal business. It was the kind of personal business his bosses didn’t know about: the murder of Kurita by your grandfather, Eugene Costa.”

Now the pigments reversed: a stroke-red blush broke its way through the stony brown skin.

“Personal business? Now you’re talking nonsense. What was I to him, huh?”

“You helped your grandfather in the killing.”

That was just a wild pitch, an improvisation that suddenly came to me-I didn’t have any evidence-but it found its way across the plate and he went for it.

He nodded very slowly and stared past me. “You do live up to your reputation, Mapstone.” He idly stroked the pistol in his lap, trying to figure me out. The young Sal the Bug would have killed me by now. The man before me knew he was in trouble, knew there were now too many loose ends. He stood again, agitated, and for a moment I thought he would pull out his own box of mementos. Then he sat again and said what was logical: “How the hell do you know?”

“I talked to Johnny Kurita’s little sister today.”

He watched me in silence for long minutes. The grandfather clock chimed.

“They were both hotheads.” Moretti was reliving the long-ago moment. “Grandfather and that Jap kid. They argued, then they fought each other right out there in the flower fields. I wasn’t going to let that Jap disrespect my grandfather.”

The black brows, the only trace of hair on his head, narrowed. “He came back from the war, this Kurita, and thought he was a real American, that the world owed him something. He wanted that land back. It wasn’t his anymore! Japs couldn’t even own land down there on Baseline for years, you know. Then they started coming in like locusts. When the government took the Kuritas’ property during the war, we got it fair and square. Hell, we’d have even leased it back to them.”

“You stole it. And Harley Talbott made it all look legal down at the courthouse.”

His mouth crooked down. “So what? Talbott owed my grandfather. Talbott owed the Moretti side of the family back in Chicago. The Costa side, the heirs all became totally legit, and sold that land for millions in the nineties. Funny, we buried the Jap right behind the flower shed that night. Now he’s under a parking lot by the swimming pool.”

I didn’t speak until he stopped laughing.

“What is history but a fable agreed upon, right?”

He was silent. The pistol drooped slightly in his hand.

Then, “None of this had to happen. I was minding my own business when this Jax, this man who you say was an agent, shows up at my home and starts asking questions about my grandfather Costa. He was a Mexican, for Christ’s sake. Supposed to be a hit man, supposed to only go through Barney. How the hell did he even know where I live? How did he know what happened in 1947? He wasn’t even born yet. The flower fields are a goddamned bunch of apartments now.”

“Maybe he didn’t even care about the land.”

“What the hell would he care about?”

“Simple justice.” I waited two beats. “Because Johnny Kurita was his great-grandfather.”

A palsy ran down the left side of Moretti’s face.

“Before he enlisted in the Army, Johnny met a pretty Mexican-American girl who was working at the Poston relocation camp. When he came home, he married her, and they had a baby boy. That little boy’s grandson was Jax Delgado.”

“And you’ve come here unarmed to tell me this? You have a death wish because I killed your sister-in-law?”

“Yes. What about you?”

“What the hell do you mean, ‘What about me?’”

“Don Salvatoré, you’ve been double-dealing so long you don’t even know right from left,” I said. “Selling guns to Sinaloa, selling guns to the Gulf cartel, too. Having your buddy Tom assassinate four top La Familia men. Why? Because you were afraid of what they might tell us? Because you want to set one side against the other like back in Chicago? You think you’ll profit from it. Well, you’re not in Chicago anymore, asshole. You’re playing way out of your league.”

He raised the Beretta.

The front door crashed open.

Sal looked up, confused by the laser scopes dancing on his chest. He quickly put the gun on the table and smiled.

“This man tried to kill me, officers. Thank God you got here…”

The men I first encountered on Central Avenue moved with the same sinister efficiency. Sal was pulled up and handcuffed before he even comprehended what was happening. Then he saw the roll of duct tape. His panicked eyes met mine for a long ten seconds.

“Wait.” I took the duct tape myself.

“Zack,” I said. “The kid who delivered the money to Sabrina. Did he know what she was going to do to earn it?”

He squirmed in the grip of the men, staring hatefully at me. “You goddamned right he did. I gave him the chance to do the job himself, prove himself a man, but he was a little coward.”

I wrapped the duct tape around his bony head myself, covering his mouth even as he tried to keep speaking. I shoved his pistol in my belt. Then the men hustled him out to a waiting SUV, its motor quietly running. Within two minutes, we were all gone from the pleasant street where everyone was deep inside the Arizona Rooms watching television and where bad things never happen.