South Phoenix Rules

by Jon Talton

  I tentatively nodded. It seemed that I was in line to become an adjunct professor at ASU. The pay was crap and it lacked tenure track, but any money would help. I had other misgivings: about the tough university president, about the mega-department in which history resided, about my own inability to catch up with the latest politically correct fads. But the ASU people made it sound enticing: I could teach in a multi-disciplinary field: Phoenix history, criminal justice, courses I could put together. It would do until Lindsey and I decided our future. I loved teaching. I needed the distraction of work.

  “So what’s bugging you?”

  “Things.” I stared at the pavement. The all-too-familiar empty ache returned to my middle.

  “You look like crap this morning. You didn’t even shave. How’s your wife?”

  “She’s fine.”

  He cocked his head. “Maybe you’ll end up in Washington, Mapstone. Lindsey was one of my best. I’m glad she took the job. She could become a star at Homeland Security.”

  “She’s trying it out for six months.” I heard the anxiety in my voice.

  “Sure,” he said. “Is Robin telling the truth?”

  I told him, yes. At least I thought so.

  He put his bear-paw hand against my shoulder. It was not a friendly bear.

  “Look, this is serious shit she’s landed in. They know where she lives. They know where you live. Get it? Vare is right. You need to get out of the house. You guys can come up to my place, if you want. Plenty of room. I’m hardly ever home. But Robin may know more than she even realizes. She might have seen something, overheard something.”

  “What if she didn’t?”

  “Whoever tortured that man, whether he was El Verdugo or a professor, and then sent his fucking head to your house, thinks she did.” His voice rose ever so slightly, his anger evident to a close observer of all-things-Peralta. The bear paw came down. “And you’d better get your shit together and focus.”

  We walked back to his Crown Vic. Robin had tied her hair into a ponytail. He put her in the front seat. I got in back and tried to focus.

  I focused on Robin’s neck, which bore a similarity to my missed love. Lindsey and Robin both had long, elegant necks. Lindsey’s hair brushed against her neck and shoulders as she turned her head. It was art in sensual motion. Just thinking about it could make me feel better.

  Then I saw the chain sitting against Robin’s skin. I had never noticed it before. It was a simple ball chain, like the kind that hangs from a bare-bones lamp, one gray kernel snapped into the other.

  This chain had blood on it.

  6

  I kept my discovery to myself as Peralta drove us home. My temples throbbed.

  Something was different in his manner as we turned down Cypress Street. He stopped chatting about nothing with Robin. I watched the back of his head. It swiveled just enough. He was taking the street in, checking out the houses. Not even a lawn crew was there but he drove past my house, went around the block on Holly, past the little park we used to call Paperboys’ Island, and returned to Cypress. My hands grew cold. After stopping he came inside with us and casually asked Robin to run through the events of the previous night. As she did, they walked through the house. He was leading. His walk was looser and more attentive. As she talked, he was silent, just nodding. He reminded her of the offer for us to stay at his place and gave me a look that said, “back outside.”

  “You’re checking out the house,” I said once we were on the walk.

  “Can’t beat this weather, Mapstone.” It was seventy degrees, cloudless, dry, and he was lying to me.

  I pulled on his suit coat and he stopped, turning to face me.

  “How did you know about this?”

  His eyes widened with too much innocence. “You know the watch commander briefs me every morning on what went down the night before all over the county, especially the one-eighty-sevens.” The homicides. “The address sounded familiar.”

  “I bet.”

  He strode to the car and I followed him. We both scanned the streetscape. He was just able to do it more casually, mostly moving his eyes. He slid a key into the trunk and it popped open.

  “Here.”

  “I don’t need that. It looks too small anyway.”

  “It’s for Robin.”

  I hesitated, then took the Kevlar vest in one hand. “So I’m supposed to tell her about this El Verdugo? Let her know she’s in a lot worse danger than the trauma of opening that FedEx carton? That her boyfriend wasn’t a professor who studied at Harvard but was a killer for the Sinaloa cartel? Hell, no. You do it. And tell her she has to wear this damned thing. She might actually do what you say. She likes you.”

  “She likes you, too. It makes you uncomfortable.”

  “Oh, bullshit! You know something. You know more than you’re telling me.”

  He ignored me. A large black bag was hefted halfway out of the trunk and I heard a heavy zipper. He held out a semi-automatic pistol.

  “Is that for her, too?”

  “This is for you.”

  Now my dread was complete. He was arming me up. I mumbled a quiet protest about the Colt Python. I was not a semi-auto man. That wasn’t really where my brain was: We were on our own. Kate Vare and PPD were not going out of their way to help Robin. And all I had in the house was my .357 magnum.

  I took the new pistol as if in a trance.

  It was unfamiliar: a black semi-automatic, sleek grip, futuristic frame that tapered into the barrel, no visible hammer, gray polymer controls including the safety on the side. It had a small cylinder attached to the accessory rail: a laser sight. This was the business, nasty looking. And that was before I saw the ammunition. The rounds looked like small rifle cartridges, with blue on their missile-sharp tips.

  “This is an FN Five-Seven, from Belgium. This can inspire you to study Belgium history.”

  “You don’t strike me as a Walloonophile.”

  “Fuck you, too.” He had no idea what I was talking about.

  The pistol was amazingly light, half the weight of the .357. I popped the magazine and racked the slide mechanism to make sure it was empty. I studied the small bullets.

  “The rounds are half the size of a nine, but they’re better,” he said. “This holds twenty rounds and one in the chamber. Here’s another two magazines.” I stuffed them in my pants pockets. Back his head and shoulders went into the trunk. He handed me a small slide-belt holster. Then a silver-plated .38 Chief’s Special.

  “Teach Robin about this one. It’s a good gun for a girl. That’s all I’ve got in the car that doesn’t belong to the county,” he went on.

  “I can’t believe you. I’m not a deputy now! Can’t you call the chief? Get Vare to give some protection?”

  He shrugged. “I can try. There are limits to friendship, especially when you’re a lame-duck Mexican.”

  I kept the guns, my hands full of weaponry as if visited by a violent Santa, but I didn’t like the semi-auto’s small bullets. Stopping power was everything. Peralta had taught me that. He obsessed about it. A .22 will eventually kill a suspect, but it won’t stop him if he’s determined to keep coming. The Python will knock a man down and kill him instantly.

  He said, “Those five-seven rounds will penetrate ballistic Kevlar vests. Don’t worry. Anyway, you might need both guns and more.”

  He slammed the trunk lid down and prepared to get in the car.

  “I can’t believe you’re cutting out.” That didn’t faze him. He sat heavily in the driver’s seat. I desperately talked ammo to keep him there. “If these rounds will penetrate a vest, what if the bad guys use one on Robin?”

  “Don’t let that happen.”

  I didn’t wait to watch him drive away. I went inside and stashed the gear in my bedroom. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I felt a momentary paralysis set in, starting in my feet and moving quickly to the brain. We lacked the money to move to a motel for any l
ength of time. I didn’t want to be stuck out at Peralta’s big house overlooking Dreamy Draw. I needed some time away from him, his moods, and demands. This house represented almost everything of financial value we had, and a value much greater to me. Just leave it? Let them fire bomb it? I would lose the last thing my family had passed on to me. I would lose grandfather’s desk, Lindsey’s gardens. I would lose the library.

  I closed the door. Lindsey answered on the fifth ring.

  “Am I calling at a bad time?”

  That stranger’s voice came back at me, the one that had emerged since September, the one that kept sticking a baseball bat into my stomach every time I heard it. I loved Lindsey’s voice, at one time thinking I knew every mood and desire firing it. Of course I was wrong. The personal calamity that overtook us was like an earthquake in a place with strong building codes, only the buildings didn’t stand. I had always thought such an event would cause us to cleave closer, but I was wrong.

  Things, indeed, fell apart, the magical golden light of fall providing no balm. My love became unreachable. The holidays were especially grim, that day between Thanksgiving and Christmas when Lindsey lay on her stomach on the bed, her right leg bent up, twitching like a metronome, and she told me she had taken a job with Homeland Security. It was an announcement, not an invitation to discussion. She would move to Washington, D.C.—alone. She couldn’t be in the house. She needed time away from me. This was how much our personal disaster had shifted the axis on what I once thought was the most stable terra firma.

  I tried talking about us but she cut me off.

  “You always want to talk things out, Dave. Some things can’t be fixed by talking.”

  Still. I brought her up to date and told her Robin needed to come to Washington, to stay with her. To hell with Kate Vare if she didn’t like it.

  “No,” the stranger’s voice said. “David…” A deep exhaustion shaded her intonations. “I can’t deal with this right now. I just can’t.”

  “I need your help, Lindsey.”

  “You’re badgering me!”

  “I’m not trying to…”

  “Then you have to handle this. I need you to protect Robin. Do what you need to do. But she can’t come here. It’s impossible.”

  I wanted to ask why, but she was gone even before I could tell her I loved her.

  In such a mood, I walked into the kitchen and found Robin standing by the window. She was staring out at the orange trees in the increasingly unkempt back yard, drinking orange juice. Any bad guy outside could shoot her that second.

  “David, I’m sorry…” She set the glass down. “For all this.”

  I walked close to her, wavered inside for a moment, then put my hand on the arc of her cheek. She had regained her color. The skin-on-skin momentarily rattled and confused me. She leaned against my hand and smiled. Small, attractive crinkles appeared at the edges of her eyes.

  I regained my mental footing and let my fingers slide down to the simple metal chain on her neck, then slip under it and pull it out onto the sweatshirt. Metal slapped on metal. She jumped back three steps.

  “Sorry.” She smiled. “Tickled.” Her face blushed the red of the apprehended. She slid the chain back under the sweatshirt, freed her hair, and fluffed it out. I had my reasons for not trusting Robin. But I had never imagined she could be involved in a murder. Until now.

  “How much did you know about Jax?” I spoke the name as if it still meant something.

  “Things you know when you’ve been seeing a man for a couple months.” She finished the orange juice and put the glass in the dishwasher.

  “The cops don’t think his name is Jax. They think his name is Pedro Alejandro Vega.” I watched her eyes and mouth; they registered confusion. I went on and told her what I knew, he was a hit man, involved in one of the most dangerous drug cartels in the world.

  She shook her head as I talked. After an hour with Peralta, it was always surprising to be with someone with an expressive face. Robin’s eyes were wide and teary. She wiped her too-long nose. Her jaw worked in agitation. Little ripples of emotion shook her cheeks. She was two years younger than Lindsey, yet looked instantly older.

  I stepped closer. “He told you this, didn’t he?”

  She stepped back again. “Of course not! Are you crazy?”

  “You suspected…”

  “No! He’s a professor! He couldn’t hurt a fly. I was afraid he was too nice a guy to hold my interest, for God’s sake.”

  “And you had no suspicions? None?”

  “None.” Her hair shook vigorously.

  I let her keep her distance as I spoke again. “Why is there blood on that chain?”

  Robin’s hand went unconsciously to her breastbone. She opened her mouth but nothing came out.

  “I saw it on the back of your neck in the car. It has blood spatter on it.”

  “David, you don’t understand.” She started out past me but I stopped her. Her face went through stages, settling on surprised fury. “You son of a bitch!” She threw a punch, a good one. I caught it just in time. Grabbing her roughly by the arm, I pushed her into the breakfast nook.

  “We’re going to talk.” I reached across and pulled the chain out again. It held two dog tags. They were bare metal, without the rubber cushions that soldiers had started using in Vietnam to keep the tags from making noise. That would make them from World War II or Korea. The metal had aged into a dark gray, although the raised information stamped into the tag was still silvery. The dog tags themselves looked clean. Indeed, the entire part of the chain I could see now was spotless. The bloodstains were only on the back, as if they had been missed during a quick cleaning.

  She saw my appraisal and again covered the tags with her hand. Her face turned redder and a vein stood out in her forehead. “Why am I being questioned?” Her voice echoed around the wood of the old breakfast nook. “Jax has been killed! I lost my lover! You’re just being an asshole cop, just like the rest. It’s what you’ve become, David! Why are your losses this big deal and mine is nothing?”

  “This isn’t about me.”

  Her eyes were molten. “Yes, it is. It’s been all about you, about you and Lindsey Faith! My grief is shit to you. You think I’m guilty of something.”

  I forced my breathing to slow down. Quietly, I asked her how the chain got bloody. Maybe it was totally innocent. She had been wearing it, this chain I had never seen on her before, yesterday when she opened the box. And maybe, just maybe, it had fallen into the blood. I didn’t believe it.

  “Jax gave it to me.”

  “He gave it to you, or you took it?”

  She tried to get up. I pushed her back again. I looked at my sister-in-law anew. I couldn’t tell what the hell I saw except…capacity. To lie, to conceal evidence, what else? My mouth felt as if it was stuffed with gauze. “You took this out of the FedEx box, washed it, and kept it from the police…”

  After a long silence, she nodded. “I guess I did.”

  Now my stomach had a hole straight through it. “Was that before or after you screamed last night?”

  Her eyes grew wide and wet again. “Everything happened fast, all right? But it was right there. And it mattered. So I did it. Now you can arrest me and all your fucking problems will be over, David, except they won’t.”

  “Our problems are just beginning.” I said it quietly. She had taken evidence, tampered with it. A crime. Unless I called Kate Vare that moment, I was a part of it.

  The house was silent for a long time. Finally, Robin took off the chain and rested it gently on the table.

  “This was the most important thing in the world to him. He told me that if anything ever happened, he wanted me to have it.” She touched it tenderly, then slid it toward me. “He wanted me to show it to you. He said you’d know what it meant.”

  7

  She slid the dog tags at me like Kryptonite. It made me think of the Superman comics I collected as
a kid. I had filled a cardboard citrus box full of them, and today they’d really be worth money, but somewhere along the way I dumped them. I was having too many such magical thinking moments lately. Exhaustion, fear, and anger competed for my emotional center. I ran the Arizona Revised Statutes through my head, counting all the laws I was on the verge of violating. I stopped at seven.

  Then I looked over at Robin again. She had shown up unexpectedly a year before, Lindsey’s half-sister, a woman she barely knew as an adult. And yet she had become important to Lindsey. Vital, especially the past few months. Now my one undamaged connection to Lindsey was ensuring this woman’s protection. I picked up the tags and examined them.

  The information stamped into the two-inch-long, aged metal was basic: a name, serial number followed by some other numerals, another name and an address, all on five lines. There was a small notch in the end of each tag. I had wanted to study military history, but the discipline was frowned upon when I was in graduate school. My advisor had urged me to consider gender studies. But I was enough of an amateur scholar to know this data was from World War II. The numbers “43-45” indicated the years of immunization shots. The soldier’s blood type was O. He was a Protestant. The name and address were whom to notify in case of emergency. They went to Poston, Arizona. And the soldier’s name was Johnny Kurita. It was as far from the Sinaloa cartel, or a Hispanic academic from New York, as you could get.

  “Nisei,” I said.

  “The second generation,” Robin said. “The children of Japanese immigrants to America.”

  I nodded, pleasantly surprised. Outside of her art knowledge, Robin had always seemed street smart rather than book smart, certainly not well versed in my dying discipline. I said, “The Poston address makes sense, too. Lots of Nisei were forcibly interned in World War II. Poston was a camp.” I hated to use the words, but they were accurate. “An American concentration camp.”