“Where did you get this, David?”
“Off a banger who was watching the house the other night. He’s La Fam. Then I took a little field trip, too. Quite an operation at Jesus Is Lord. Good ole Barney.”
“You know you shouldn’t be doing this.” Her voice assumed a taut, supervisory tone. “If you see a suspicious vehicle, call PPD. This isn’t a county case and you’re personally involved anyway. I can’t believe you did that.”
But I did, so I just smiled at her, and let the silence collect between us.
“How’s Lindsey taking all this?”
“She’s concerned. She’s in D.C.”
“Already? Well, she’ll go far. Fighting cyber attacks is the growing field and she’s got the skills.”
I didn’t go for the distraction. I just watched her and kept my mouth shut.
“Look,” she said, “you know Phoenix is the center for people smuggling into the United States. The coyotes bring them across the desert and once they’re here, they spread out all over the country. Even corporations hire the smugglers to get them to the poultry and hog operations in North Carolina or the packing plants in Nebraska. We’re number one in kidnappings and almost all of that is tied into the people smuggling. Now the probability is high that we’ve become ground zero in the drug trafficking organizations’ ongoing expansion in this country. So if La Familia has shown up, it doesn’t surprise me.”
“And they say we don’t have a diverse economy.”
She didn’t smile. “Local law enforcement is not ready for what’s coming, David. That war down in Juarez and Tijuana—it could come here. The people behind their gated communities think this won’t touch them. They’re wrong.”
“But I thought tax cuts would solve everything,” I said.
“The thing is, we don’t just import and distribute, with all the bodies along the way. We’re probably the biggest hub for firearms smuggling back the other way.”
“The drug war in Mexico.”
“Exactly,” she said. “Calderon’s offensive has set off a bloodbath down there. The cartels get their guns from here.” The Mexican president had promised an offensive against the narcos, and the border had been convulsed with violence. I wondered when we would have a failed state on our southern flank. And the firepower for the bad guys was courtesy of the good old U.S. of A.
I asked her if it was that easy.
She nodded emphatically. “The gun laws are so lax. There are six thousand licensed gun dealers in the border states and we have two hundred agents to police them. Try to get an Arizona jury to convict these gun dealers. Not going to happen.”
I listened as she explained the enterprise: American citizens can take the guns across the border—they won’t be searched going in. The smugglers hire Americans with clean records, have them buy three or four assault rifles, and take them south. Sometimes they buy at gun shows where there’s no requirement to notify the authorities. Other times they use licensed dealers. She said, “Most of the time it moves below the r
adar. Hundreds of individuals going south with guns. Drugs and money moving north to pay for them. It’s very hard to detect.”
The Jesus Is Lord Pawn shop didn’t seem hard to detect. I described the store.
“I’m aware of it.” And that was all she said.
So I detailed what else I saw: the black Suburban, the well-dressed Hispanics, and the large quantity of boxes they loaded. “They were a tad out of place there, to say the least.” Springsteen sang “One Step Up.” I fought against my guilt and gloom like a man trying to stay standing in a brutal windstorm. Emotional honesty and mordant guitars were not what I needed at that moment. And then it occurred to me. “Mexican cops, right?”
Amy Preston sipped her white wine and shook her head. “You know I can’t comment…”
I finished the sentence for her: “on an ongoing investigation.”
“Exactly.”
I said, “My problem is personal. The people who are watching Robin, the ones who chased us with guns, they’re ongoing, too. So everybody needs to understand there’s an innocent civilian here and I’ll do what I have to do to protect her.” My machismo didn’t carry me far. I watched her face and ran it all through my head. So after a pause, I added, “I just don’t want to get in somebody’s way.”
But I knew that I already had.
12
Maybe we should have canceled the trip to Washington. Maybe we should have gone and stayed. I’ll never know.
We went and came back, a long weekend. It gave me a chance to wear the good, navy wool topcoat and gray fedora that I had bought years ago in Denver, and of course to see Lindsey. It was cold and the sky was the color of granite for those five days, a nice change for a native Phoenician. As our jetliner took off for home, snow began to fall. By the time we touched down at Sky Harbor twelve inches were on the ground back in D.C.