by Jon Talton
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 d
ry, 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 forwar
d 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. ”
