Cool in Tucson (10 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Gunn
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural, #Crime, #General
By the time the shit was ready to go the sun had set, and thanks to Tucson’s dark sky policy, which kept street lights scarce to accommodate the astronomers up on Kitt Peak, much of the city was dark as the inside of a boot. It was a little unhandy for taxpayers trying to get home from a movie or the symphony, but a nice convenience for pushers.
They usually started in Mansfield Park, where the children of hard-up parents played on swings and softball diamonds in the daytime, and whores and pushers started work around sundown. If there was nobody there or too many dealers were there ahead of them, they’d try a corner up on Castro or go on to the motel strip out on Miracle Mile near the highway. Hector persuaded Ace to buy a little weed for the johns because some of them liked to loosen up with a toke first, save the hard stuff for later. Ace said Hell, weed’s for sale in every other house south of Twenty-Second Street, why fool with it? But Hector showed him he could get steady crack customers who’d come to him because he could be trusted to carry a little hemp along, and what did it hurt?
Ace would park in deep shadows nearby and protect his investment while Hector, his pockets full of slidy twists and change, sold the crack. Whenever he ran low he returned to the SUV for more, paying for it like a bar waitress dealing drinks as Ace counted out the packets. Ace kept his money in a plain white business-size envelope inside the Trader Joe’s bag, all the bills turned the same way neat as a bank teller, never made a mistake making change.
If the corner they chose didn’t produce in a few minutes he would hop back in the Ford and they’d move on; they didn’t fool around. Hector trolled; Ace idled along behind. At eleven o’clock or when the crack was gone, whichever came first, Hector walked back to the SUV and Ace moved once again to the passenger side. With Hector driving, Ace quietly speaking the next address each time he got back in the car, in a couple of hours they could deliver their snow orders to thirty to fifty regular customers scattered around the north and east side, some in very impressive houses.
Ace carried the money and the cocaine packets in the grocery sack, kept a Ruger nine mil tucked in the belted waistband of his walking shorts, under a loose shirt. He was a good-looking man, always neatly dressed in high-end sports clothes. Fussy about details; he kept a waterproof jacket in the bag in case of rain, carried along a bottle of Gatorade for if he got tired. To replace his electrolytes he said, whatever the fuck that meant. Hector thought it was a hoot to see this big badass drug dealer drinking Gatorade. But he had to admit, if you saw Ace get out of the big shiny car and walk toward the well-tended houses carrying his Trader Joe’s bag, you would think he was a friend coming to visit with a couple of bottles of wine.
Much as he hated Ace, Hector knew they made a good team and it had been damn smart of Ace to figure it out. Hector fit into the twenty-buck crack peddling scene along Grant and Oracle, and Ace looked at home in the sleek cul-de-sacs up north and east. That was where he moved the orders that really put money in the sack, Ace coming back with fistfuls of hundreds for the orders he had pre-sold by phone during the day. Tucson wasn’t the big city yet, offered nothing like the market up in Phoenix and Scottsdale, but then it didn’t have the competition you had up there either. By being consistent and reliable Ace had just about doubled his business since Hector had worked for him. Hector knew stuff like that, he paid attention because he intended to get ahead.
When they finished the run Ace would slide a CD into the player, set the volume on low, ease his seat back a couple of notches and relax while Hector drove back to the motor home park. He liked seventies music, Rolling Stones and Beatles, shit like that, all sounded alike to Hector. When they got to the single-wide Ace would hand him two hundred-dollar bills and get out and walk around to the driver’s side. Hector would get out without a word and walk through the drift of clanking beer cans underfoot to his own old Brat, and drive back to his mother’s house on Ohio Street.
He was no later getting home than many of his friends who had just been riding around picking fights and chasing pussy, and unlike them he kept quiet coming in and usually got to bed without waking anybody up. He slept late. His mama fed him breakfast when he got up, sighing over him as she had been doing since he was in seventh grade, already two years behind and a handful. She’d eased off on the sighing lately because she thought he was settling down. Which he was, in a way; he drank a few beers on his nights off, enjoyed a little Mexican Gold with his friends sometimes, but he kept his life quiet now, he didn’t want anything to mess up his plan.
So as he turned into his Aunt Lucia’s driveway and saw her plump figure under the acacia tree, hanging out a load of laundry in her purple printed housedress, he fixed the shit-eating grin on his face and got his head set to do the standard Hector snow job.
Couple more days of this shit,
he promised himself, feeling satisfaction spread in his chest,
I’ll be down in Mexico actin’ as bad as I really am.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Okay, I’ve got the warrant,” Sarah said when Jimmy walked back into his workspace. “Ready to go? I’ll call that apartment manager.”
“It’s lunchtime,” Jimmy said. “Aren’t you hungry?”
“No,” she said, but when Jimmy raised his hands in prayer mode, “OK, I could eat. Let’s find a drive-in on the way and call the manager from there.” She was in her doorway, clipping the paddle holster for her sidearm onto the belt of her slacks. She disliked carrying openly but it was too hot to wear a jacket. “You checked out? Where’s your weapon?”
“Oh, good gracious, you think I need a firearm?” Clowning to cover his embarrassment about forgetting it, he laid the back of one hand over his upturned forehead. “Great Scott, Holmes, you mean our lives will be in danger?”
“Quite possibly, Watson.” She watched him find his recorder, clip his Glock on his belt, find his little notebook in a pile of papers.
If I ever do get Delaney’s job I’m going to teach a class called Housekeeping for Hogs, and make all these bozos sit through it.
Nobody in homicide was neat enough to
suit her
.
“I asked for backup when we go in,” she told him. “Chase said he’d try to have somebody meet us up there but they’re very busy right now.”
“Ain’t that a shocker? They’re Tucson police, for Chrissake, of course they’re busy.” He was pulling on a jacket.
“You’ll be hot,” Sarah said.
“You’re right.” He took it off. “Hell with it, let the gun hang out.”
Without any discussion, they took Sarah’s car. Sarah always drove when she was the primary investigator on a case. It was one of several small moves an older woman on the force had steered her toward when she first earned the rating. “Street patrol, you’re on your own a lot,” she said, “but in here you’re working with mostly men and you have to hold up your end.”
“How do you keep your car so neat?” Ibarra said, getting in. “Mine’s got files and junk all over it.”
“It’s just the way I am,” Sarah said. “I can be in a room all day, and walk out and you’d never know I was there.”
“And you think that’s good?” They stared at each other for a couple of seconds before they burst out laughing.
The Lumina was almost cool by the time they got to the drive-in. Jimmy Ibarra ordered a double bacon cheeseburger, curly fries and the biggest sloshing tubful of coke and ice they sold. Sarah watched him anxiously as he brought it all aboard, making small chuckling sounds, and began spreading salt with a lavish hand. “What’s junk about it?” he often asked defensively about his favorite menu. “Fast food tastes great to me.”
Sarah got a fish sandwich, hold the mayo and tomatoes. It tasted like fried cardboard, but it didn’t drip.
The apartment manager was waiting nervously outside the door of the three-story building off Granada. “Stan Clark,” he said, shaking hands. He rolled his eyes downward toward their weapons. “Are you expecting a fight?”
“You tell us, “Sarah said. “What kind of a tenant was Adolph Perkins?”
“The kind you hope and pray for,” Clark said. “Paid his rent on time, never made noise, kept his place clean.”
“How long’s he been a tenant?”
“Since the first of April.”
“He live here alone?”
“Yes. Never had any company I saw. You saying somebody killed him? I can’t
believe
it.” The neighbors were always astounded when there was violence. “Such a nice quiet person,” they said. Sarah sometimes longed to point out that nobody lives near a guy who keeps making them think, “I bet that sucker’s a mass murderer.”
“Honestly,” Stan Clark said, rolling his eyes up, “Tucson’s just getting awful, isn’t it?”
“True,” Ibarra said. He had often told Sarah how lucky he felt to live in this beautiful valley, how much he loved the way the desert smelled after rain and the way the light slanted across the mountains on winter afternoons. “The reason the contractors can’t build houses fast enough,” he told Clark now, “is that we’ve ruined this place.”
“Ha ha, never thought of it that way.” Clark was looking at him anxiously, probably wondering why a detective, of all people, would be defensive about the crime rate in Tucson.
A squad car slid in beside the curb and a tall young officer got out and said, “Hey, Sarah.”
“Hey, Fritz. This is probably nothing. We’re just checking out a victim’s apartment.” To Clark she said, “Here’s the search warrant. You want to open it or—?”
“No, you can do it,” Clark said quickly, holding out the key. “Top of the stairs on your left there.” He dithered behind the three of them as they went up the stairs. Jimmy and Fritz drew their weapons as Sarah knocked on the door and called, “Police!” She waited twenty seconds, knocked and called again, waited again, opened the door.
They all peered in at an immaculate empty hall. After a few seconds of silence the two men with guns sidled through the door with their backs to the wall, took two minutes to determine that all the rooms were empty, and came back out.
“Okay, you can be on your way, Fritz,” Sarah said. “Thanks.”
“Sure you don’t want me to stick around? I could check under the beds.”
“Tough shift, huh? How much time you got left?”
He shrugged. “Two hours. Another ten or twenty calls. Then I gotta take my three-year-old for his shots. Now
that’s
gonna be frightening.” He holstered his weapon and drove away.
“Let’s see what we’ve got here. Don’t touch anything,” Sarah said sharply, as Clark started toward the drapes with his hand out.
“All
right
.” He jerked his arm back, offended. “I have to be here, though.”
“Fine. Good idea, watch everything we do. Did Perkins have a cleaning service?”
“It’s not included with the rent but everybody in this building uses Spick and Span, they got a group rate. I’ll give you their card before you go.”
“Fine. Utilities included?”
“No. All metered.”
“Good, a paper trail on everything,” she told Ibarra, and to Clark, “We’ll give you a list of the items we remove.”
“Let’s start in the bathroom,” Ibarra said. As they walked down the hall together he asked her, “Does this place look like it was lived in by a drug dealer?”
“Hardly looks like it was lived in at all.”
The bedroom was sparsely furnished. There was a good light by one side of the bed, though, and two books stacked under the light: a thriller and a non-fiction about Iraq, both from the Pima County Library. The pusher read books? Maybe a habit picked up in prison. In the closet, shoes were lined up in a precise row along one wall, pants and shirts and a couple of jackets ranged above. It looked like an ad for closets.
