South Phoenix Rules

by Jon Talton

  Peralta went on, “I’m a warrior, too. Maybe different sides, but a warrior. My Aztec blood is as pure as yours.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Warrior-to-warrior, your boys sent her a severed head. That’s disrespectful. She’s a civilian. She’s not a part of our war.”

  “What the fuck?” Genuine surprise melted his gang face. “We didn’t…”

  I said, “You didn’t send her a severed head? Why did you have one of your homeboys watching my house?” I even gave him the address.

  He blinked hard and shook his head. “I don’t even know you.”

  Peralta honed in. “Am I talking to Mero Mero or not?”

  The gang face returned, full of something to prove.

  “I hope so,” Peralta said.

  “I speak with authority,” the man said with great formality. “I don’t know either of these gabachos. Warrior-to-warrior, La Familia has nothing…”

  His next word was lost in the bright red fog that suddenly came out of his head. The gold cross around his neck shimmered brightly.

  Then we heard the explosion.

  I didn’t think or hesitate. I just tackled Robin, drove her to the pavement, and lay on top of her, even before Peralta yelled, “Down!”

  From the surface of the parking lot, I watched Mero Mero’s crew enjoy a last moment of confusion, not knowing whether to rush to their fallen leader, open fire on us, or heed Peralta’s commands. They did none of these, and each one succumbed to head shots. One, two, three…gone. That fast. Each shot involved a deep, artillery-like concussion and echo.

  I stayed on top of Robin and she didn’t move. My heart was about to jerk free of my chest and run across the parking lot. The headlights from the vehicles now seemed like an especially bad idea. Peralta’s truck seemed a football field away.

  “That’s a .50-cal sniper rifle,” Peralta said, crouched and searching with the barrel of his sidearm. “He’s got a flash suppressor. Maybe he’s on the roof.”

  Then the shots stopped.

  Peralta didn’t wait long. “Back to the truck,” he ordered, in the voice of the Army Ranger that he once was. I ran with my hands on Robin, shielding her. My back felt gigantic and vulnerable. We reached the truck in seconds, propelled by gallons of adrenaline, and climbed inside.

  After making sure Robin was no more than bruised from me pushing her down, I pulled out my cell.

  “What are you doing?” Peralta took it from my hand.

  “Calling 911. What else should we do?”

  We had always been the law. Our obligation, once the civilian was secure, was to pursue the shooter. Peralta just looked at me as if it was a stupid question.

  “We get the fuck out of here.”

  He dropped the truck into gear and roared out, turned west, and picked up the 101 beltway that would take us back to the center city.

  16

  “They had a chance to kill all of us and they didn’t.” I spoke into the dark, cigar-perfumed cab of Peralta’s truck. The speedometer needle rested on a lawful sixty-five and we pirouetted through an interchange and went east again on the wide freeway.

  “We were exposed all that time. How many minutes? The shooter could have taken all of us out. He could have shot Robin. Why were we spared?”

  “I need you to be quiet now, Mapstone.”

  And that was all Peralta said. His face was set except for the subtle tension in his jaw. I put my arm around Robin to ease her trembling, then I fully embraced her the rest of the way into the city. Peralta glanced at us, then focused ahead, and kept his own counsel. The sound of the rifle still sounded in my head.

  We came off the Papago Freeway at Seventh Avenue, just before it entered the tunnel under the deck park. The light was green and I got only a quick glance at my old grade school, built in the1920s with grand columns and palm trees out front, the alma mater of Barry Goldwater. And me. How did I get into this life, where I was competent at several things but brilliant at none? How many bad choices had I made since I was a student there, terrified by the duck-and-cover-drills, learning to fight against the school bullies, and impatiently watching the clock. At that age you don’t realize how quickly the clock runs out. Robin gently pulled away and sat up.

  “What happened back there?” she asked, her voice wavering.

  “I don’t know,” Peralta said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To find Antonio.”

  This made my passive-aggressive side, never one of my prime movers, shift into aggressive-aggressive. “No, fuck no. You pull over and give us some answers, or we’re out of this.”

  To my astonishment, he complied.

  He reached into the glove box and removed a portable police radio, switching channels until he found the one he wanted. Civilians couldn’t get this at Radio Shack, since so many police bands were encrypted now to prevent criminals from monitoring calls—and many routine ones were transmitted to cruiser laptops, anyway. It didn’t surprise me that Peralta had one. The radio was busy with units responding to the shooting on the west side. On the sidewalk, a man shambled north with his belongings in two large, black plastic bags.

  Peralta pulled a seven-inch cigar out of his jacket pocket, clipped it, and struck a match to light the end in a circle, ensuring it would burn evenly. The electric motor of the window whirred and he puffed out into the cool, dry air.

  “Bill’s been clean for years,” he said. “But from time-to-time, he’s been a valuable go-between for me. He has friends and relatives in the life. Because he did his time and never gave up his friends, he has respect. I’ve worked to never put him at risk, never make him seem like he’s a snoflon, a snitch. So that meant I had to give something up sometimes to get something better. Understand?”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to understand. Peralta’s wings spread far beyond my little cold-case boutique. I said, “So that was the deal tonight? Meet with La Fam and make a deal to save Robin?”

  He took another puff and nodded.

  “What did you have to give in return?”

  “All sorts of things.”

  I let that alone. But I asked how he even knew if these now-dead bangers could speak for La Fam.

  “Mero Mero? His real name is Carlos Mendoza. He’s one of the top dogs of La Fam in the United States. Check out his sheet. The gold medals start with homicide and go from there. This is not just another street gang in Phoenix.”

  “And he said he spoke with authority,” Robin said, hope in her voice. “He didn’t know me. He said he didn’t have anything against me.”

  “That’s what he said.” Peralta studied the bright orange tip of the cigar. Cars zipped by benignly on Seventh Avenue.

  Now Mero Mero and his crew were dead, taken out as accurately as bad guys in the sights of Marine scout snipers in Iraq. I asked what that meant.

  “Maybe the theory has been wrong.”

  “Are you ever going to clue us in on this theory?” I tried to keep my anger down, without much success. “I love theories.”

  He said nothing, so I just let loose all the stress of the evening. “You’ve known more about this than you’ve been telling me since the start. You just show up at the house where El Verdugo was tortured and beheaded. You load me up on ordnance at home, stuff you just happen to have in the trunk. Then Kate Vare drops a case that just happens to lead to a gun shop being watched by ATF. And here’s my good friend the sheriff, taking me to meet his old gang buddy and some Mexican cop. Now a top La Fam guy is taken out and we get to walk away. What the hell is going on?”

  “You need to calm down.” He gently tapped an inch of ash off into the air. “I’m on retainer to the state Attorney General. That happened after I left office so we could continue an operation that’s been going on for a year.”

  “The gun-runners.”

  “Exactly. The A.G. doesn’t have much confidence in the new sheriff. I have the institutional
knowledge. So there I was.”

  “You made Kate Vare back off?”

  “It didn’t take much,” he said. “You ever read the Bad Phoenix Cops blog? The guy that writes it has great sources inside the department. There’s lots of turmoil in command and the homicide bureau right now. And it turns out Vare is being investigated by PSB…” The Professional Standards Bureau, what was once called Internal Affairs. “Botched case management on the Baseline killer. Alleged. The families are suing the city. Maybe it’s political—it’s a very screwed-up department. But she began leaving you alone right when PSB came down on her. Not a coincidence, if you ask me. Vare had a hard-on for you, but Robin’s an investigative dead end. The new detective team would go after this from the El Verdugo and gang angle. At some point, the A.G. told them about our interest. So it doesn’t surprise me they’ve left you alone.”

  “And what exactly is your interest?”

  “We know there’s been a big uptick in weapons crossing the border from Arizona gun dealers. There are a few, like the Jesus Is Lord Pawn Shop, that sell in volume.”

  “The Blood leader said La Fam has a new route to move guns for the Gulf cartel.”

  “That confirms other intel we’ve had,” he said. “The feds and the Mexican authorities took down the top Gulf boss a year ago, extradited him to Houston, and he’s been cooperating. So plenty of the Gulf cartel’s reliable U.S. gun suppliers in Texas have been prosecuted. They’re under real pressure now from the Mexican army, so they really need a new supply chain.”

  “They sound like multinational corporations,” Robin said, “only with guns.”

  “In lots of ways they are,” Peralta said. “The cartels have billions of dollars at their disposal. ‘Cartel’ isn’t even an accurate word anymore. These are highly organized entities. They can employ top-notch accountants to help launder the money. They compete for market share to sell drugs and tax the coyotes that bring the illegals across the border to work in legitimate industries. They work with gangs in this country. Consider those the subcontractors. Sometimes they cooperate with each other, because bloodshed is bad for business. Sometimes they don’t.”

  “So what was the theory?” I prodded.

  He waved his flaming cigar wand. “That the Sinaloa cartel found out that the Gulf cartel was poaching in a supply chain it considers its own, namely the perfectly legal industry of Arizona gun sales.”

  “And they sent in a trouble-shooter, El Verdugo…”

  He nodded. “To do a strategic hit on a high-value target, maybe a major gun dealer. Send the message: Don’t do business with the Gulf boys.” He nursed the stogie. The tobacco was such high-quality it must have been Cuban. “Mind you, I was skeptical when you found the snake’s-head ring. Nobody really knows who El Verdugo is, much less that he’d be up here. Antonio is convinced, the guy Robin was seeing was Vega.”

  “But La Fam, doing the Gulf cartel’s dirty work, got him first.”

  “That was the theory.”

  I asked why Robin’s involvement hadn’t derailed the theory.

  He shook his head. “She’s an attractive woman, clean record, middle-class, artsy. She might have been useful to El Verdugo’s cover. Hell, Mapstone, you might have been useful to his cover. He was in Phoenix pretending to be a professor and fooling both of you. It let him fit right in.”

  “So it was tonight. Somebody took out La Fam, who was supposed to have taken out El Verdugo. Only maybe they didn’t even do that, or send the head to Robin. And you don’t know who fired those shots tonight.”

  He took the cigar out of his mouth, started to say something, and just nodded.

  “Maybe Robin is in the clear.” He spoke slowly. “You haven’t had any other trouble since you took down the guy in the pickup. Tonight La Fam said they didn’t even know her. And whoever was doing the shooting could have killed us all and didn’t.”

  “Unless they want to snatch her alive.”

  “Why not do it tonight, then?” he said. “We were totally exposed. This shooter was good enough to take both me and Mapstone out and leave you alive, Robin. He didn’t.”

  I sighed. “Why don’t I feel better? Somebody delivered that package to her for a reason.”

  He tossed away the cigar. “Maybe it was a demonstration. Nothing more than that.”

  I asked what he meant.

  “To show their power. They can find El Verdugo in this very respectable cover he’s taken on. They can kill him. And deliver his head to his girlfriend in a very public demonstration of their power. And don’t forget you live there, too. A deputy sheriff, and one who was in the media with his old cases. They showed, ‘We can do this.’ And maybe it was nothing more than that.”

  “I never picked you for the cockeyed optimist.”

  “That may not be our biggest problem. Whoever killed those four La Fam guys wasn’t some banger. You see where this is heading? It’s only been a matter of time. Maybe this is it.”

  Robin said, “The war going on down in Mexico is here now.”

  The truck rumbled to life. “That’s why I want to talk to Antonio.”

  I asked about us.

  “Go home. Have a drink for me. Have two.”

  17

  Peralta had already driven away when I saw the FedEx package leaning neatly against the front door. It was letter-sized. Too small to contain a head; eyeballs or ears, maybe. Anthrax or a small explosive, definitely. I asked Robin if she was expecting anything—neither was I. On the long walk up to the door, I thought about calling the police. I scanned the dark sidewalks, seeing nothing, not even a car parked on the street. But I was so damned tired, had seen so much death that night, that I just picked it up and unlocked the door.

  Once the alarm was disarmed, I took the envelope into the study and zipped it open, keeping the opening away from my face. Inside were some Xerox copies of old newspaper clippings and a five-thousand-dollar check drawn on the account of Judson Lee, Attorney at Law. It wasn’t signed. He had included a note: “My offer still stands.”

  “He wants you pretty bad,” Robin said.

  “But I don’t want him.”

  “It might do you some good. Get outside yourself for a while. I know you can use the money.”

  “Peralta wants to rope me into being a P.I.”

  “A private dick, huh?” Her eyes gleamed merrily. She undid her bun and shook out her hair across her shoulders. It gleamed with colors ranging from light brown to gold. “I’ll help you. I’m a good researcher—a curator has to have those skills. This would be a healthy break from trying to keep track of all these cartels and gangs. It can be the return of the History Shamus.”

  That had been Lindsey’s nickname for me, but I didn’t mind that Robin used it. It actually felt good. My eye wandered to the photo on the desk. It showed me, Lindsey and Robin last summer in Flagstaff. The weather was gentle in the high country and our smiles genuine and joyous. Robin was the only other person who knew that Lindsey was pregnant, and this drew them even closer together. We decided we would wait until Lindsey passed the three-month mark to tell anyone else.

  Our new reality was only beginning to settle in. Much of our conversations revolved around the kind of parents we wouldn’t be. We wouldn’t call our child a kid, which is a goat. We wouldn’t take a newborn into the Sheriff’s Office and parade it around like some consumer product bought at Walmart. Our child would be raised in a real neighborhood with front porches and neighbors who knew each other, in a house with books, music, and ideas, a doting aunt who would teach her about art, and most of all, a house of love. She would go to a public school, just as we had done. I called the baby a she, and Lindsey was convinced it would be a son. We laughed over it and agreed to let God surprise us.

  Robin picked up the photo, studied it, and replaced it on the desk. She sat on the blotter and looked down at me.

  “When we were growing up, there was such…chaos.” Robin searched for that
last word. “Linda had Lindsey Faith when she was sixteen. So you can imagine the sexual competition between the two, when Lindsey was sixteen and luminous, and Linda was an attractive woman in her early thirties.” She smiled. “I paid good money to therapists to learn all this shit. Lindsey Faith was the peacemaker, my protector. She kept the family together through it all.”

  “Why do you call her Lindsey Faith?”

  “Because it’s a beautiful name.”

  “What’s your middle name?”

  “Someday I’ll tell you.”

  “You were the teenage rebel,” I said.

  “How’d you guess? We moved every couple of years. There was always a new boyfriend and most of them were creeps who wanted to sleep with Lindsey or me. Seriously. This was what we grew up in. Our mom wasn’t a bad person. She was just very creative and very overwhelmed by life. She wanted to be an artist and she ended up working as a cocktail waitress.”

  “Lindsey said she had schizophrenia. That’s why she had always said she didn’t want children. And it was all right with me.”

  Robin tilted her head, closed her eyes, summoning a past both sisters would rather forget. “My bet is Linda was bipolar and it was aggravated by drugs and anger and heartbreak in her life, but what do I know?”

  “And Lindsey lived her life to not become her mother.”

  “Yes. And I think it was a struggle for her. Mother and daughter were very alike when I think back on it. I was the foundling. She fought to be normal and stable. She had her devils, always hearing Linda’s voice in her head, that she wasn’t good enough, that she was a screw-up. I used to joke with her and say, ‘Turn off your Linda Unit’—that critical voice she heard in her head. She never did. She just kept those devils chained up.”

  “Don’t we all?”

  “I suppose. Every family has its skeletons. Ours was a skeleton festival.” She said it without humor. “I don’t know how we survived.”

  I said, “Lindsey blames me for what happened.”

  She rubbed her hands gently on her jeans. “That’s not true, David. You blame yourself. She blames herself. She wanted so much to give you a child, so your DNA could carry on in the world.”