South Phoenix Rules

by Jon Talton

  11

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

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

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

  “David. My God, are you all right?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “The bogeyman.”

  Her eyes were still. “Something like that.”

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

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

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

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

  “I wish I could say that.”

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

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

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

  “I’m not going to stay.”

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

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

  “Where did you get this, David?”

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

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

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

  “How’s Lindsey taking all this?”

  “She’s concerned. She’s in D.C.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “The drug war in Mexico.”

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

  I asked her if it was that easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Exactly.”

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

  But I knew that I already had.

  12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Howdy.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “No!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Can we go inside?”

  “No.”

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

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

  I told him to come in the house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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