South Phoenix Rules (David Mapstone Mystery 6)

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?”