When Pigs Fly

by Bob Sanchez

  “Has anyone tried to pawn a .38 today?”

  “Yours?”

  Mack nodded.

  “Clean as a whistle, just been oiled, nice grip? A guy came in here when I opened, asked what I’d give him for it. I’m thinking stolen goods, so I tell him flat-out no. His eyes bulge and his scalp goes red like it’s an old pressure cooker about to blow, but I show him Sadie and he calms right down.

  “Sadie?”

  “My double-barreled twelve gauge. I told him I haven’t shot a customer in the new millennium yet, and I offered to make him the first.” The proprietor showed a wide smile with crooked teeth. “He respectfully declined.”

  “Describe him for me.”

  “Ugly, like somebody pissed in the gene pool.”

  “Help me out here. Height? Weight? Hair color? Eye color? Scars? Bad teeth? Clothes? Nervous tics?”

  “You don’t want much. Do I look like four-one-one?”

  “I just want my property back.”

  “You thinking on killing him?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Too bad. We ain’t had a good killing around here in a while now. Last time was a guy running around on his wife. At her trial the gal testified she only meant to Bobbitt him, but then she got carried away and cut out his—”

  “Interesting. What’s the guy look like?”

  “After the wife and the coroner got done with him, probably not so good.”

  “Zeke, I’m asking about the guy who stole my .38.”

  “Wide-brimmed hat, wraparound shades, weighs a buck and a half, I’d say. Denim jeans, denim shirt. He was shaking like his dealer had stood him up.”

  A couple of minutes later, Mack thanked Zeke and walked across the street to the Sunrise Diner, where he occasionally stopped. It had a neon sign with a smiling yellow sun peeking over a long-armed saguaro topped with a cowboy hat. He slid into a booth with green vinyl seats and an orange Formica table still dirty from the last customer. A tired-looking waitress wiped a spot big enough for a clean cup.

  “What’s that thing, Mack?” she asked, nodding quizzically at the urn.

  “Ashes.”

  “You mean ‘ashes’ as in ‘ashes to ashes’?”

  He described Juanita and the guy with the pistol, but the waitress shook her head. “Might could’ve seen ‘em, but not today. Hey, you look like hell. Have some high-test.” She filled his cup, and he drank the coffee black. If it had brewed any longer, he would have asked for a knife and fork.

  “Good,” he said.

  “I mean, not that you usually look like Brad Pitt.”

  “Heaven forefend. Brendan Behan, perhaps.”

  “Sorry, I don’t know him, honey. Well, you’re normally a good-looking old dog even if you’re not silver-screen handsome.”

  “Thank you. I know you mean that only in the kindest of ways.”

  Mack ordered a jalapeño omelet with tortillas and refried beans, a steaming monstrosity with blood-red salsa that dripped off the plate. It burned going down, but Mack thought it would probably stay down, and he loved every searing bite. The sweat cleaned out his pores, and he forgot all about his headache. A meal like this would hold him ‘til sundown.

  His bill came to six dollars. He left a ten to cover the tip, because his brain still wasn’t up to doing fractions. Then he straightened up, put on his sunglasses, picked up the urn and tugged the visor of his cap in the direction of the waitress.

  The Snake In The Grass stood only two blocks to the east, the bar where he’d tied one on the previous night. “All of Arizona’s not pretty,” Mack told George Ashe. “You’re about to see its underbelly.”

  Inside, a man Mack figured for the owner leaned with his elbows on the bar while he smoked a cigarette and watched television. Chairs were upside-down on tables, and a hard-bitten woman who may have been Latina mopped the floor underneath them. The bar looked desolate through sober eyes in the daylight. “If that’s a piece of the rock you’re selling, then adios,” the man said. He wore shorts, sandals and a t-shirt. Above him, a ceiling fan toyed with the cigarette smoke and made it dance. “Christ, we got insurance peddlers up the ying-yang.”

  Mack drew up a bar stool next to the man. “Do I look like a salesman to you?”

  “Well…”

  “Insurance? Vacuum cleaners? Bibles? Time shares? Any kind of salesman at all?”

  “I take your point, you look more like somebody’s lost dog. But all kinds walk in here with a story, thinking they found a soft touch. I get fake nuns, homeless bums, scholarship drives, fifty-fifty raffles. You know what fifty-fifty means? It means they get half the pot and somebody else — never yours truly — gets the other half. All the time people come in to use my bathroom or my phone, now I say buy a drink first or pay me a buck. Oh yeah, and then there’s fundraising for every disease from croup to crabs. All that money, you’d think they’d have cured every sniffle in the world by now.”

  On the television, a handsome couple nuzzled in an ad for erectile dysfunction. They couldn’t have been much over forty. “Now they’re selling hard-on pills,” the owner said. “To me that’s cheating, just like steroids in football. I mean if you can’t do it with her naturally, then get out of my way.” He lit a new cigarette from the stub of his old one. “What do you got in the fancy can?”

  “This and that,” Mack said. “I met a woman here last night, and I want to see her again.”

  The man’s eyebrows arched, and he slowly turned to face Mack. He bent his wrist and made a pumping motion with his fist. “You got some nooky and now you’re in love, is that it?”

  “About five-four, blonde, great body, pouty lips, likes Tequila Sunrise.”

  “Tattooed tits?”

  “She wore a pink vinyl miniskirt and fishnet stockings.”

  “Christ, I hope you wore a condom. Did you wear a condom?”

  “She told me her name is Juanita. Where can I find her?”

  “That’s her name, Juanita Lopez. She’ll be here again tonight if the past is—whatever that saying is.”

  “If the past is prologue. I can’t wait that long. Where can I find her now?”

  “Hoo boy, you’ve got it bad. You got twenty bucks?”

  “Twenty bucks for what?”

  “Information costs money, amigo.”

  “I’ll make you a deal. Answer me and I won’t report your illegal help.” Of course, Mack was swinging a roundhouse right with his eyes closed. That stooped-over woman probably had a green card, made well over minimum wage and had stock options and a health plan. The owner of The Snake In The Grass would surely do no less.

  “Let me borrow your pen, asshole.” The owner scribbled an address on a cocktail napkin.

  “You’re too kind.” Mack tucked the napkin in his shirt pocket and headed for his car.

  The address was six blocks away, in a homeless shelter named Casa de Esperanza. Mack knew the place; he locked his car and left George Ashe in the passenger seat. Rosa Blackbird ran the shelter and was a Tohono O’odham woman with a face like a dried-up lake bed. Behind her, a man sat on a chair and read the newspaper’s classifieds. On one wall a clothes dryer rattled on uneven feet, its spinning contents visible in a circular window. The air smelled of refried beans and laundry detergent.

  “We don’t turn many people away,” she said. “But Juanita Lopez, we had to throw her out last month. We don’t want no drugs or booze in here, and we’re sure as God not running a puta party.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “What my husband calls a whorehouse.”

  “Oh. How long did she stay?”

  “Less than a night. At first I thought there might be a glimmer of good in her, but I can’t say it was no blinding light. Trying to whoop it up with the Reverend Blackbird iced it for us. He called the cops and they made her leave. Last I heard she was shacked up with some fellow on South Berman.”

  “She told me she came from Nogales, on the Mexican side. “

  “Cou
ld be. Where people come from don’t matter much to me anyhow. She told me she come from Phoenix, but I also heard her tell folks Juarez and L.A., and that was all between dinner and dishwashing. So counting what you heard, she’s got at least three lies going. Bet she has a sack full.”

  “The guy she’s with, you have his name?”

  “My opinion, you’re asking for trouble. Best you stay away from that man.”

  “She got into my wallet last night, then disappeared.”

  “Got into more than your wallet is my guess. You might want to have yourself checked down at the free clinic.”

  “I appreciate your concern. So what’s the guy’s name?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Yes, I do. I’ll be careful, Rosa. I was a cop. Besides, I have no beef with the guy.”

  “Not yet you don’t. Check the corner of McCue and South Berman and ask where you can find Zippy. If he has a last name I’ve never heard it, and if he has a good side I’ve never seen it. He’s a skinny maniac with a shaved head and a pair of earrings and a big tangle of tattoos.”

  Mack thanked Rosa and drove east down McCue, passing a wire fence tangled with creosote bushes, prickly pear cactuses and the burned-out wreck of a car. The intersection with South Berman lay dead ahead, and Mack pulled into a small, sandy parking lot. There was a bar next door, the building a two-story wooden affair.

  “Wait here,” Mack said to George.

  No rush, pal. Got all the time in the world.

  Mack went in. A ceiling fan swirled the hot air as he leaned against the bar and smiled at the bartender. “At least it’s a dry heat, huh?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Zippy, if you know him. He’s a boyhood pal. Said I should look him up, I came around the Tucson area.”

  “This ain’t Tucson, it’s Pincushion.”

  “Right, I’m in the ‘burbs. But it’s the area.”

  The bartender walked away and served a customer at the other end of the bar, then started toweling beer glasses and lining them along the base of a mirror. “Sorry. Can’t help you.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. Salesman. Well, trust me, I’m not selling vacuum cleaners, financial security, or time shares in Tahiti. I’m just a guy checking up on a bud.”

  The bartender shook his head. “Second floor around the back. He’s not home, though, not for another hour.”

  “He get himself a nice girl yet? His mother’s been after him, get a nice girl.”

  The bartender gave him a fish-eyed look. “You must be looking for a different Zippy. This one’s a lot younger than you, his mother’s croaked, and he’s had the same broad for a year.”

  “Oh, oh, oh. He told me, he told me. Anita somebody.”

  “Juanita.”

  Mack snapped his fingers. “That’s the one.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Cleveland.” That was a random lie. Mack had never been to Cleveland.

  “I thought so. You got the accent. I didn’t know Zippy had human friends.”

  “Thanks, I’ll come back and say hi in a couple of hours.”

  “Wait, you got a name?”

  “Neville Staunton.”

  The bartender gave him a blank look.

  “Neville, after Neville Chamberlain, the World War II hero. Staunton, after the chess pieces.”

  “You’re a lying sack of iguana shit. If that was your name, Zippy would’ve killed you out of pure spite.”

  Mack grinned and put on his sunglasses. “That’s the Zippy I know, full of fun.” He went out into the bright sunshine, walked around the block and came back to the building from South Berman Street. He walked up the stairs and knocked on the door. No one answered. The door was locked, but he let himself in through an open window.

  There wasn’t much to the place—a bedroom, a kitchenette and a bathroom. The place smelled like sweaty sex. On a flickering TV screen, a woman hawked bargain zirconium jewelry: “But wait! There’s more!” A half-filled coffee cup felt cold. A pizza box lay on the floor with only a half-eaten slice remaining. The pair of rumpled pillows had long black hair that could have been Juanita’s. A box of Froot Loops lay on the bed, its rainbow of nutrition scattered everywhere. Clothes lay on the mattress, on the floor. On a side table lay an ash tray and a roach—three, really, one held by a clip and two crawling over it. Interesting, Mack thought, that the bugs were ignoring the pizza. Some white powder had spilled on a side table; Mack touched it with his fingertip and touched his finger to the tip of his tongue. Coke, that’s where his money was headed. He checked a drawer and found—wouldn’t you know it?—a card from the Pincushion Public Library, just like the one he was missing. He gritted his teeth and slipped the card into his pocket. It was heartening to think they’d savor a good book after a hard day of felonies, but maybe they used the card to pick the occasional lock. In the corner, a dead mouse lay in state amidst its own droppings and a crumpled cheeseburger wrapper.

  Mack checked out the bathroom, which needed a serious dose of Lysol. He wished he didn’t have to touch anything in there. The shower stall had cobwebs, the toilet hadn’t seen a brush since Arizona became a state, and a dull brown rodent skittered behind a broken baseboard. Mack opened the medicine cabinet with his fingertip, thinking he’d have to wash it later. He found a baggie full of white powder and several pharmacy bottles of pills, one of them labeled OxyContin. Then he turned on the faucet and washed the stuff down the drain.

  “Whatchoo doin’ in my place?” Mack looked around and saw Juanita Lopez standing in the doorway, feet spread apart, hands on her hips. She wore a skirt that didn’t hide much, and a t-shirt with a silk-screen photo of herself. She had pouty, bee-stung lips, and her breasts stood out as though gravity were science fiction.

  “Squaring things. I don’t like my money going to drugs.”

  “You throw my coke away? You bastard!” Juanita swung at him, and he grabbed her wrist. She pulled close to him. Her breath reeked of tobacco. “You’re gonna have to pay for this,” she said, “or Zippy will go apeshit.”

  Mack’s nose wrinkled at a sour armpit smell that suddenly overpowered the other stinks. He released his grip, thinking other men might snap her arm. “The hell with Zippy. He can take a flying—”

  Mack’s head snapped back as an unseen hand grabbed his hair and twisted hard. “I’ll turn around, if that’s what you want,” Mack said, and he turned slowly.

  Rosa Blackbird had been right about Zippy’s earrings and shaved head, but she’d skimped on the details. He had a bony face and a tattoo of a zipper that opened from front to back across the top of his cranium, with the blue outline of the frontal lobe he must have wished he had inside. The guy had scar tissue where his eyebrows belonged. Zippy poked the barrel of a .38 Special under Mack’s chin and pulled back the hammer.

  “Take a flying what, Staunton?”

  He pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 8

  Back East

  Ace and Frosty had a whistle-clean apartment due to Ace’s conscientious feather dustings, which wasn’t to say there wasn’t stuff sitting around, like the flat-screen TV they’d pinched for some jerk who canceled his order and paid too much for the same thing on eBay instead.