South Phoenix Rules

by Jon Talton

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

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

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

  “An old friend?” Robin asked.

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

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

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

  “Sheriff Peralta.”

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

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

  “This is the young lady?” he asked.

  “Call me Robin.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  So much for my heroics.

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

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

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

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

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

  Antonio looked bored.

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

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

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

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

  “What about the gun shop?” Peralta asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ***

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

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

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

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

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

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

  14

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

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

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

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

  “It saved your life,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

  “I thought you said…”

  “Be patient,” he said.

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

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

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

  “No colors?” I asked.

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

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

  “You ought to join me as a P.I.”

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

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

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

  “She’ll be back.”

  “Says you, the master of successful marriage.”

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

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

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

  “It’s never stopped you.”

  Then we were on the curb, crossing the sidewalk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “No, at Disneyland, genius.”