South Phoenix Rules (5 page)

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.”

“And yet this Johnny Kurita was in the service?”

“The Nisei soldiers were famous for their bravery.”

“Why would they fight for a country that had done that to them?”

I let that sit. “What was Johnny Kurita to Jax?”

“He never said. But he always wore the chain and dog tags. I'd ask him about it, but he'd just say it was a memento. Something passed on to him. But it was really like an amulet to him. He'd touch it almost obsessively. When he took it off and let me hold it, I knew I was getting somewhere.”

“He didn't explain it? No story behind it?”

“He said, ‘when I get to know you better.' But that didn't happen.” Her voice choked.

“And yet he said if anything happened to him, to give it to me…”

“Yes, that was about a week ago.”

“When, exactly.”

“Don't be such a bastard, David. That's not really you.” She screwed up her brow. “It was last Thursday night. We'd made love. I was touching his chest and playing with the dog tags. He put his hand on mine and said it. When I asked him about it, he just smiled and said, ‘it's no big deal. Just a thought.' I didn't know what he meant.”

“Was he worried? Had anyone made threats against him?”

She shook her head. “There were never any threats. He was kind of a loner, which I appreciate. So I never met his friends here, if he had any. And he was new to town. He did seem distracted that night. Not quite himself.”

“Maybe he had somebody to kill.”

“He wasn't a hit man!”

I asked her about where they went on dates. It was nothing out of the ordinary, although from the names of some of the restaurants they patronized it was clear he had money. Did he run into any old acquaintances? Anybody who might have seen her with him, and somehow chose her to send this horrific message? No. Did she ever feel as if they were being followed when they drove back here? No.

“Did he have drugs?”

“Of course not. I hate drugs.”

“Not even a little pot between friends? C'mon.” Even my first wife, Patty, had a fondness for the occasional toke—and the marijuana she procured was much more potent than the stuff I tried in college. It was another life; I shelved the thought away.

Robin glared at me. Of course that information meant nothing. The high-end people in the cartels usually don't use their products. They don't want to get careless.

I stopped talking, stood, and fetched a clear plastic bag from the drawer, then dropped the dog tags inside. She gave them to me, as he had asked. I knew what they meant in a historical sense. But that did nothing to solve the murder, or answer why the man's head was delivered to my sister-in-law. That act spoke for itself: just as Peralta had said, the killers had connected her to Jax, and not in a casual way, and they knew where she lived.

In the study, I removed a sheaf of file folders from the deep desk drawer, and then replaced them on top of the bag. Concealing evidence. Add it to my rap sheet.

The phone rang. I let it go to the answering machine and heard a woman's voice. She was a news producer for Channel Five, wanting to send a crew over to interview us. I was sure she wouldn't be the last to call. Kate Vare had probably personally talked to some media people, to put more of a squeeze on Robin—and on me.

I wished my friend Lori Pope still worked at the
Republic
. She was a real cops reporter, the kind that dug into cases and built sources inside law enforcement. I had been one of those sources. She would give information back, and I needed it now. But Lori had been laid off with many of the most experienced reporters and now the newspaper mostly rewrote the press releases from the police public information officers. Most of the paper was that way now. I continued to subscribe out of some misplaced belief in the written word and the free press.

Phoenix was increasingly a freak show. Ted Williams' head was frozen in Scottsdale, waiting for the day the slugger could be regenerated. Unfortunately some employees decided to use his noggin for batting practice. The richest man in town didn't support the arts, but he spent money to try cloning his dead dog. A disgraced former governor remade himself as a pastry chef. It was a city where a man left his wife by killing her and his children and then blowing up his suburban house, where a woman cut up her lover and left him in a dumpster. The “Torso Murderess.”

What a town. A top city official climbed on top of his Mercedes at high speed and went surfing on Camelback Road, until he and the car hit a wall. It was where retirees sold pot to support their gambling habits and Jenna Jameson, the porn star, was a local businesswoman. Up in Sedona, a self-help guru baked his clients to death in a sweat lodge. Now, a severed head delivered via FedEx. Just another day in paradise and we were part of the freak show. My hometown. The machine clicked off, its red light merrily blinking.

Robin stood before me, watching.

“We're not answering the phone or the door. We have some decisions to make.”

“Are we going to Peralta's?”

“Is that what you want to do?”

“No.” Her hands were fists. “I know you don't believe me, but I never meant to bring this onto you, especially not after what you've been through. I can't go to Lindsey Faith, I know that…”

“How?”

“I just know her, David. So maybe I should just go. I have some friends in San Francisco.”

I stopped her, mindful of Lindsey's charge. “Please. Stay.”

“Can we make a stand here, at the house?”

I thought about it. Maybe we could. Much would depend on what happened next.

“We can try. We have some work to do.”

We went back to the garage and lugged out a six-by-four-foot plate of one-eighth-inch thick sheet steel. It had been back there as long as I could remember and it was a miracle it wasn't hiding a black widow nest. The deadly spiders, as well as scorpions, had made a big comeback in the years since DDT had been outlawed. The steel plate was just dusty and edged with rust. I wiped it down and we slowly moved it into the house, working up a sweat trying not to gouge the hardwood floors. I directed Robin to help me situate it inside the guest-room closet. Houses built in the 1920s lacked the giant closets of today. This one was maybe five feet deep. But it was wide enough that I could lean the steel plate up against the outer wall. The plate stuck out past the doorjamb maybe two feet, with enough room to slide around it and close the door.

“What's that all about?”

“It's your safe space,” I said. “If something goes down, get in that closet, and hide behind the steel plate. Take your cell. You'll have enough time to call the police. The plate should protect you if they start shooting through the closet door.” At least I hoped it would.

She listened with her tough-girl face on, but her eyes were anxious. “And if they open the door?”

I walked her into my bedroom and showed her the .38 Chief's Special. “Do you know how to shoot?”

She opened the cylinder, saw its five chambers were empty, clicked it back into place, and pointed the compact revolver toward the wall, dry-firing it several times. “Yes.”

Full of surprises, my sister-in-law.

“When Kate Vare comes back, she's going to go at you harder than ever. You can't tell her about taking the dog tags. Ever. Understand?”

She said she did, and asked if I had .38 ammunition.

8

The next week passed dreamlike, uneventful. I was evermore conscious of how the days slipped by, time brutal. Robin and I agreed to some house rules. We wouldn't go out. Move the Prelude into the garage, with its entry on the alley. Let the mail and newspapers pile up. Turn on the lights only in the interior rooms, such as the study and the kitchen, where I tacked up a blanket over the windows that looked into the yard.

We went through the tamales and almost all the cans of soup and frozen Lean Cuisines. I cooked breakfast until we were out of eggs. With the blankets on the windows, the room seemed like a scene out of a World War II blackout. There was nothing to be done about the big picture window in the living room, so we avoided it and kept the lights off. I called out an alarm service and made an appointment to install a system that we couldn't afford.

Fortunately I had bought three large bottles of Beefeater before we became shut-ins. Robin, a wine drinker, began downing martinis. I had to start rationing olives. We drank the house's only bottle of champagne on New Year's Eve and I tried not to get nervous when I heard the fireworks. Robin would get in foul moods because she couldn't go running but was otherwise decent company. She was not an omnivore reader, and unfortunately we had only two real art books: The Phoenix Art Museum catalog—the museum director and his wife lived around the corner—and an Edward Hopper album. So Robin drank each book dry, then watched television, searched for jobs on the Internet, and listened to her iPod while I tried to read. My history books had always been a refuge—my history porn, as Lindsey called it. They were less so now. My mind wandered.

The street seemed unchanged from before the ghastly FedEx delivery. The usual neighborhood walkers went by at their usual times. Two houses down, the winter lawn was coming in nicely. Cypress was dark and normal-looking at night. No drive-by shooting through the window. No Molotov cocktail into the carport. It almost made me think the worst was over. That we could do this and survive.

At night, I made sure the guns were in easy reach. Sleep evaded me and I lay in the big bed, sure I was going to die within the next seconds. Almost all of my adult life these panic attacks had hit me when I was alone and things were quiet. They had kept me from writing more, from playing well with others when I was on a faculty, probably helped take away my chances for tenure. Sharon Peralta had diagnosed me. Knowing what they were barely made it better. My heart thumped hard and fast against my chest. My breathing was constricted. I was terrified about the next minute and every second within it. They only came in the quiet times. I hoped for a call from Lindsey in the middle of the night, when we might talk soul-to-soul as in the old days, but it didn't come.

We talked every couple of days on a regular schedule. She couldn't talk about her work. She didn't ask about the house or her gardens. She wanted to know how Robin was doing. On the most recent call, I asked her again to let Robin come to D.C. Then I demanded it and we had a bad fight. It was like all our fights of late, intense and open-ended. She refused. “You're to blame,” she said at one point, as if it were an all-embracing statement. Maybe I was. I stayed up all night rewinding and playing our words in my head. The pilfered evidence sat in the bottom of my desk drawer, a worthless riddle and my own culpability in concealing evidence.

Finally, I started taking a chance and slipping out the back at night, making a slow walk around the block, watching for the unusual. More than once, I saw a coyote running along Third or Fifth Avenues. They had come into the city as sprawl destroyed their habitats. From the street the house looked unoccupied. One night around three I saw a Chevy parked mid-block with two men in it. It had rained again and I could smell the special scent of the wet desert soil. My body stiffened and I reached for the comfort of the Colt Python's custom grips. I didn't know if they saw me, but I got close enough to pick out the license plate. It had the first three letters that an insider knew belonged to Phoenix Police undercover units. So Vare was keeping the house under surveillance, at least some of the time. It didn't give me much comfort. Otherwise, Vare stayed away.

The media moved on, to a gang rape out in the suburbs that occurred after a high-school dance, to the shooting of a police officer in the white suburb of Gilbert, reminding readers and viewers that “things like this don't happen here.” The implication was that they did happen in the city, where the brown-skinned people lived, where severed heads were delivered right to your doorstep.

Peralta left office without talking to the media. The new sheriff immediately announced he would begin sweeps to arrest illegal immigrants. Peralta had focused on the smugglers that abandoned the immigrants to die in the desert, or held them hostage—sometimes a hundred in a house—until relatives paid to set them free. He had worked with the state attorney general to go after the electronic fund transfer services such as Western Union. The bad guys used them to move ransom money.

Violent crime in the areas policed by the county was at twenty-year lows and the jails were well run. He had put Bobby Hamid in prison. Mike Peralta had been the best sheriff in the county's history, better than “Cal” Boies—Peralta never used his deputies to sway an election—better even than Carl Hayden, who went on to be one of the longest-serving senators in American history. He stood for, as I heard him say in one campaign speech, “tough law enforcement and simple justice.” In the end, the only thing that seemed to matter was his opponent's pledges to “stop illegal immigration.” “What part of illegal don't you understand?!,” one of his campaign signs read. I wondered who did the landscaping at the new sheriff's house in Fountain Hills. Now he'd probably use inmates.

By the end of the week my beard was coming in nicely. I hadn't worn one since I had joined the Sheriff's Office. I awaited word from the university, wondering what it would be like to teach again, what students were like now. I had seen some of the classrooms. They had high-tech lecterns with a microphone and a computer dock for PowerPoint presentations and all sorts of new media. I didn't need that. Just give me some willing minds. I wondered if I would have to take Robin to class with me. I wondered if I would be endangering the students as long as this case remained open. Some times I lay awake and pondered whether Jax could really be the killer they said he was. Most of the time I fought to keep my mind off the events of last year, especially the late summer when the dreadful heat lingered. Sometimes the bedroom seemed so large that I would shrink to nothing and float away.

If Jax was really involved with the Sinaloa cartel, and Robin was being targeted, there really wasn't a damned thing we could do. That would have been my reaction if I were just watching our lives from the outside. The cartels controlled entire states in Mexico. Even the Mexican army couldn't stand against them. Thousands had been murdered down there. A classroom of kids had been massacred in Juarez recently, wrong place wrong time, but that showed their reach. It was only a matter of time before they reached across the border in a big way.

A battering ram through the old front door followed by an all-out assault. A bomb in the car. Not a damned thing you could do. I knew all this. And I didn't really care if they killed me. That was the truth. For the first time in my life, I didn't give a damn. I was at peace with it, in fact. But I had someone to look after. That was a knot in my stomach. At least this reality made the panic attacks go away. And I was determined we would survive.

After a week, the cabin fever was high enough that I took a chance. We snuck out at ten p.m. in the Prelude and went to the Sonic on McDowell just east of Seventh Street. I couldn't chance a sit-down restaurant, but this seemed as safe as we could make it: well lit, on a major artery with an escape route. I made Robin wear the protective vest under her hoodie. She ate a foot-long cheese Coney and I had a Supersonic cheeseburger and a diet cherry Coke.

Two spaces away sat a Toyota holding a plump woman with long red hair and a little girl with brown hair. The little girl was leaning on mom's shoulder as she ordered. She yelled and started crying. For much of my life, screaming children were like a dental drill in my brain. I mellowed in recent years. It was a strange evolution. The little girl was out too late. She was tired and cranky. I could sympathize. Her hair was wavy, unlike her mother's straight hair, and her face was angelic even in its tantrum. Now when I saw such scenes I just said a silent prayer that the child would be treated well and have a happy life.

“David.”

I turned back to face Robin and my half-finished burger.

She said, “Roll up the window. I'm cold.”

So we listened to the muted Sonic sound system play old hit songs, and we laughed and made light conversation in the fashion of people who had been through recent trials. My sympathy for her loss grew. My eyes continued to sweep the parking lot and the street, but our only other company was a group of six high school girls in mini-dresses, sitting on the benches and talking to one another. They were slender and mostly Hispanic, with two Anglo girls. I wondered about their stories.

We turned west on McDowell and the dash clock read ten forty-two.

The bump from behind was sudden. The car had come out of nowhere, and at first I thought it might be a fender-bender. It was a low-slung import with glowing purple paint. Traffic was light so I wondered, just for a few seconds, how the driver could have rear-ended us. Maybe he was drunk. Then I saw four doors open and men pile out. I could see guns in their hands.

My foot slammed into the floor, and after a brief seizure where we just sat there waiting to be killed, the old Honda leaped ahead. I ran the red light at Seventh. The oncoming pickup never stopped and I could see the Ford F-150 grille coming into the side window. I got more power out of the engine just in time and as we passed Safeway the speedometer needle was resting on eighty.

“What happened back there?”

“They had guns. Climb in the back seat and lie as low as you can.”

Her long legs slid against me as she moved between the seats. She disappeared from the rearview mirror. Unfortunately, the purple car was right on my tail. I swung south on Third Street and accelerated again, then ran the red light at the ramp to the Papago Freeway. The car bumped down hard and I wished I had unloaded the boxes from the trunk. I kept the pedal on the floor and we sped down the ramp to the wide, depressed highway, the tachometer in the red. I had the Python on my hip and wished I had brought the Five Seven. There was no tactical solution if I chose to take them on. They had automatic weapons in that car. I had six rounds and two Speedloaders of ammunition.

The purple car ran up behind and came over into the next lane. It was a Kia. The black-tinted back window came down and a gun barrel came out. I slammed on the brakes, fighting the Prelude as it shuddered, and pulled to the right. My speed dropped in half to forty, and I heard the tires scream behind me. The Kia shot ahead momentarily. It lacked a license tag. That came from a forward glance I made while trying to watch the five lanes of freeway I was trying to thread. The back of a semi came within inches of the front bumper, then I slid into a slot between two more trucks, changed lanes again, and hit the Sixteenth Street exit. A cascade of horns followed my moves. I thought I heard a collision behind me. Where the hell was a cop when you needed one?

“David?”

“Stay down.”

I swung south on Sixteenth and blew past Roosevelt doing seventy, swerving between cars. Unfortunately, the rear view gave me no peace.

“Fuck.”

I don't know how he crossed that many lanes of freeway after overshooting me by ten car-lengths, but the purple car was a block behind, the streetlights making it glow. The driver was expert. And determined. I unholstered the Python and set it on the seat.

Shooting the driver might slow them down.

Then I hit on a better plan.

Phoenix's traffic lights are generally set so that if you do the speed limit, you'll hit green. So I doubled the speed limit and went effortlessly through Van Buren, Washington, and Jefferson, then crossed the railroad yards on the narrow overpass. Our pursuers easily matched me and bumped us twice. But I kept changing lanes. He wasn't going to get alongside, or get ahead and pull a PIT maneuver: Tactical ramming.

All I needed was one more intersection and in a few seconds Buckeye Road flashed past. Susie's Mexican food was closed and dark. Another half mile and I turned right into the central city precinct of PPD. It was close to shift change and cruisers were coming and going. Scores of marked units were parked and off-duty cops were walking to their civilian cars. The Kia continued on south, not changing speed.

They knew they'd get another shot.

It took a long time before my heart rate dropped down or before I would allow Robin to get in the front seat. It took even longer before we ventured out, behind a police SUV heading north.

“Aren't we going inside? Report this?”

I said no. I had no license tag or decent description of the suspects, and I didn't want to spend the rest of the night in Kate Vare's clutches. I followed the PPD unit all the way to Roosevelt. It was one a.m. and no purple car was behind us. At Roosevelt, I turned left and slipped through the dense old Garfield district, then past the darkened art galleries on the other side of Seventh Street, bumped over the light-rail tracks by Trinity Cathedral, and headed home. I circled the house twice with the car lights off. Our PPD minders were off tonight. The street seemed empty. Then I took the chance of turning down the alley, where we could be hemmed in and ambushed. I kept the lights off. But the only commotion was the barking dog two doors down.

Later, after some time spent on the computer, I lay in bed in a T-Shirt and sweatpants. The Python under my pillow, the Five Seven on the nightstand, and I went through the events of the evening and tried to formulate a plan. How had they picked us up at the Sonic? I didn't see any tail when we had first pulled out of the garage into the alley, then onto the street. Nobody had been watching us; my late-night walks around Cypress told me that. I had missed something, screwed up…what? I lost it in a deep sleep. When I woke up, Lindsey was next to me. But it wasn't Lindsey. It was Robin, curled against me, facing away, with her hair in my face. It was soft and fresh smelling. I wasn't startled and thought about running her out, but I could hear her quietly crying, feel her chest shaking and heaving. I put my arm around her and pulled her closer, felt her warmth radiate against me, and we were both quiet. In the morning I was alone on the mattress and sure I had imagined the whole thing.