South Phoenix Rules

by Jon Talton

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

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

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

  “Look man, we used to own this area.”

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

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

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

  “What about guns?”

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

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

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

  He went on in a conversational voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Just a hard-working businessman, huh?”

  He nodded. “Exact.”

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

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

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

  “What’s a mayate?”

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

  ***

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

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

  I reached over and touched her shoulder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I looked away.

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

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

  “Because she told me.”

  15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I had a thing for Donna Reed.”

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

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

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

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

  ***

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

  “Go where.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “What deal?” I demanded.

  But he had already hung up.

  ***

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

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

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

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

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

  “The narco saint of Sinaloa,” Peralta said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ***

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

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

  Robin spoke quickly. “No.”

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

  She said, “I have to.”

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

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

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

  “Why?” My back was suddenly aching.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Mero Mero.”

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

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

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

  “Too bad. Rules is rules.”

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

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

  Now I was afraid.

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

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

  I looked at him.

  “Do it,” he ordered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I breathed sweet, dusty air.

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

  “Is this the girl?” Mero Mero said.

  Peralta nodded.

  “Let me look at you, chica.”

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

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

  “Quit fucking around,” Peralta said.

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

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