Cool in Tucson (22 page)

The wife rolled down her window and said, “They’ll be fine, they’ll sleep all the way to Pinetop.”

“Good,” Estes said, “call me when you get there, remember.  What’s it going to be, three hours?”  He looked at his watch.

“Just about.  Don’t be late Sunday, they like to eat by one.”  A lot more blowing kisses while Hector, the paying customer, stood on the step about to melt.  He longed to  smash this guy in the doorframe with his own front door, stupid pansy playing Father Knows Fucking Best. 

Finally they were in the artsy-fartsy living room under the elaborate chandelier, Bernie’s watercolors all around them on the walls, framed in gold.  Probably had plenty of them because they never sold, right?  Because who’d buy his crappy
historical scenes of Old Tucson
?  They stood under the homemade art and argued some more.  

Hector was doing the arguing now because he wanted to see the goods before he paid the rest of the money.  Something about the way Bernie was behaving made Hector suspect he hadn’t done the job at all and was getting ready to work some new dodge as soon as he got his hands on the cash. 

“Absolutely not,” Bernie said.  “I did you a big favor doing this job without all the money up front, and you’re not even grateful.  You abuse my wife instead.”

“You’ve had my eight hundred dollars for three weeks, how about some gratitude for that?  And I’ve got nothing.  It’s just good business, Bernie.  You gotta show me the papers before you get the rest of the cash.”  He was getting anxious about the stolen car sitting out there in the street too, no question but what the Evil Mama would have reported it by now.  Suppose a cop came by and spotted the damn thing?  He couldn’t stand the thought of ending up in the slammer just for boosting that worthless piece of junk, all his careful plans in the toilet for nothing.  But he had to see the merchandise before he paid.  Damn, this man had a head like a rock.

Finally Bernie said, “Okay, you can look but don’t touch, then I want the rest of the money and I want you out of here, understand?”  He went into another room saying, “You just wait right there.” Acting like a goddamn parole officer, Hector wanted to break his face so bad.  But he came back with a plastic box, set it down and took out three cardboard sheets with clear plastic covers.   Laid them out on the table, and be a sumbitch if they weren’t right there, beautiful, the passport and visa and driver’s license, with Hector’s picture and Ace’s name, Adolph Alvin Perkins, to match the registration papers in the car.  Hector got a little light-headed for a minute, looking down at his new self.  He started to pick up the driver’s license but Bernie grabbed his arm.  “Money first,” he said.

“I was just—” Hector said.  He stopped then, because all of a sudden Bernie’s watery gray eyes were watching him across the short blue barrel of a Rossi .38. 

 “Aw, shit, Bernie,” Hector said, “now what’s this about?”

“Keep it simple, Hector,” Estes said, “Just put your money on the table.”  He let go of Hector’s wrist and backed up a step, the gun steady in his right hand.  Did Bernie have the balls to fire that thing?  In his wildest dreams, Hector had never imagined this wussy painter would have a gun.  But he was standing there like Cool Hand Bernie, didn’t look like he was bluffing.  Of course he had himself a cheap little ladies’ gun, but even so he could have, what, five bullets in that cylinder?  Only had to hit you with one.  Hector could almost feel himself sucking air through a hole in his chest.

Bernie had a different attitude now, too, not so preachy, just serious and cold.  He said, “Put your money down on the table so I can see it all, and then pick up your documents and get out of here.” 

Jesus, another minute he’d be saying what they had here was a failure to communicate
.
It would serve the little shit right if he got his ass whipped, pulling that thing on a customer.  Hector halfway planned how to do it, fake him out with a pleading move and then twist that gun out of his puny hands and pound his face to a pulp with it.   

But the new papers were right there on the table, clean and pretty with fresh ink, and they…damn, they made him feel like a pro.  He didn’t want to fight with Bernie, what the hell did he need that for?  He wanted to take his new identity and roll on down to Mexico, start his new life as a drug lord, save his fighting moves for the badasses down there.

So he set his Trader Joe’s bag on the table behind the sofa and reached in for the long white envelope.  Couldn’t seem to put his hand on it right away.  Felt around a couple of times and said, “Well, shit,” and spread the top open wide.  Pulled out the Gatorade and the windbreaker, the cell phone and three little slidy bindles of dope and the…no, not the Ruger.

The money wasn’t there
.  So it was better if Bernie didn’t see the Ruger till Hector decided what his next few moves were going to be.  He picked up the windbreaker and shook it, felt in all the pockets just to make sure, but he knew he hadn’t put the envelope in the pocket of Ace’s raincoat, why would he do that?  For a few seconds he had one of those wipe-outs like in the car when that little girl sat up.  Like looking into a fog bank, and this time it felt like the sun was never going to shine again. 

But Bernie Estes was standing right there looking more and more inclined to fire that motherfucking Rossi at him.  Hector went back to the last clear thought he had before he hit the fog bank.  Grabbed the handles of the grocery bag with his left hand, turned to Bernie Estes with his shoulders raised in a mock-hopeless shrug and said, “Stupid money musta fell out in the car, I’ll run out and get it.”  Grinned his shit-eating grin and reached into the bottom of the grocery bag with his right hand, got a firm grip on the Ruger and kept right on grinning while he shot Bernie Estes through the bag.  No time to aim but then his target was only two feet away.  The shot entered Bernie’s chest high, just below the neck, and knocked him over backwards as he was trying to return fire. 

Bernie’s shot went into the chandelier, made a helluva racket, shattered glass that flew everywhere like bright knives.  Hector felt pain on his cheek and knew one of the pieces had cut him.  He pulled the gun out of the bag, aimed carefully and fired two more shots into Estes’ squirming body. 

When Estes lay still at his feet he put the Gatorade and jacket, the phone and the dope back in the bottom of the bag.  He laid his new documents carefully on top, and slid the Ruger down alongside everything with the handle up so if he needed it he could get it fast.  His hands were shaking a little but he thought he was okay, just had to look cool from here to the car, no big deal.    

He walked out of Estes’ house carrying the Trader Joe’s bag in his left hand, pulling keys out of his pocket.  A couple of neighbors came out of their houses and looked around, asking each other, “You hear something?”  Hector walked straight to his car, got in and drove east on Princeton Road the way Ace had taught him, slow as a hearse, easy over the speed bumps.  He turned left on Prudence, turned left again on Broadway and caught the light just right. 

Cool Hand Hector, right? Damn right. Let’s see ol’ Rudy top that one.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Rudy Ortiz never took a vacation.  But sometimes he liked to relax a little after work and for that he usually went to the dog races.  Tucson Greyhound Park was on South Third near the highway, an oval dirt track backed by indoor bleachers in an old cast cement building.  Its lumpy asphalt parking lot had room for a thousand cars, but usually there were only a hundred or so nondescript older models clustered near the door.  Admission was a dollar and a quarter, the program cost a dollar and a half, and there was rarely much of a wait at the betting windows.  The clientele ran to janitors, waitresses and cowboys, truck drivers and bartenders, with a sprinkling of sunburned tourists.  People often brought children in strollers.  Rudy served on the Park board because he thought the dog track, like the tire store, was perfect just as it was, and he hoped to protect it from any improvement.

Sometimes on Sunday when the track opened early, Rudy’s wife joined him and they had dinner on the second floor near the windows, watching the dogs run.  Camille liked to bet the Quiniela and they spent a lot of time picking the dogs. 

During the week he went alone in the evening and sat in the noisy bar downstairs. Besides the dog track out front, on the ground floor he could watch two or three other races from around the country, simulcast on big TV screens.  You could bet on horses as well as dogs, and people who had money on a horse at Santa Anita or Pimlico often stood in front of the sets and urged their chosen horses on.   

There was no table service on the ground floor.  People brought their own drinks from the bar on the back wall and carried baskets of food in from a window in the lobby.  All that fetching of food and drink, added to the traffic back and forth to the betting windows and the yelling in front of the TV screens, made the place feel as crowded and busy as a train station.  The lack of service meant nobody hassled you.  You could sit at a table as long as you liked, alone or with somebody, drinking or not.  It was a good place to meet people and do a little business, so public and noisy that in effect it was private.

Tilly found him there at ten-thirty Wednesday night.  He pulled a chair away from the table next to Rudy’s and sat sideways on it, close enough to talk but not to eat or drink.  Tilly didn’t come to be sociable, he would tell what he had to tell, get his orders and leave. 

“Okay, like I told you this morning Ace is dead,” Rudy told him.  “And now I got a few more details.  The
boca
got back to me after lunch.  That John Doe in the paper, that was Ace.  Some runner found him in the park yesterday morning.”

“Mmm,” Tilly could read at about third-grade level, but most of what was in the newspaper puzzled him, like news from a distant planet, so he rarely bothered to look at it.  He was not surprised, though, to hear that Ace was dead.  He had never figured Ace for a no-show.  Man made plenty of money working for Rudy, and he was the only one of Rudy’s dealers that Tilly knew he couldn’t scare.  Guy like that didn’t just run off.

But he had never seemed like a likely victim, either.  “What makes ‘em think it was murder?”

“He was stabbed.”

“Ace?  Hard to believe.  You see a picture?”      

“No.  But my mouth saw the autopsy and his prison records.  He says they match.  They made him offa his prints.”

“Huh.  They know who killed him?”

“Not yet.  They know he was dealing and they’re going through his laptop.”

“You worried about that?”

“Nah.  They ain’t gonna find much there.”

“You sure?”

“Uh-huh.  Ace kept a coded customer list but he blew off all his orders as fast as he filled them.  He told me once the reason he left Stroud and came to work for me was he thought Stroud wrote down too much.”

Tilly asked, impressed, “How’d you get Stroud to let him go?”

            “I didn’t.  Ace did.  When he made up his mind to come over to me he told Stroud he kept a list of all his customers and dealers, in a safety deposit box.  Said he left instructions with a family member to mail it to the Chief of Police if…” Rudy squinted, remembering, “ ‘in the event of my death,’ I think that’s how he said it.”

            “You know how to find the box?”         

“Ace never done it.  I told him, I can’t have something like that hanging around, suppose you get popped?  And he said, don’t worry, I got no family and I never write anything on paper.”

“Did he tell you who’d be on the list if there was one?” 

“No.  But if I thought hard enough I could probably sit right here and come up with most of the names myself.  I pretty much know all the players.  Hell, so do you by now, right?”

“I guess.  Tucson’s not L.A.”

“It ain’t even Phoenix.  That’s what’s good about it.”  Rudy watched a big gray gelding win by three lengths at Woodlands.  When he turned back to Tilly he looked grave.  “Right now I’m more interested in who capped Ace and why.  If it was just some personal thing, well… he won’t be easy to replace but that’s all it amounts to, the bother.  But if somebody’s coming after my dealers that’s different.”  He stared into his beer and then reluctantly put his biggest worry into words.  “Or if there’s something in that apartment that leads them to me.”