South Phoenix Rules (David Mapstone Mystery 6)

“To show their power. They can find El Verdugo in this very respectable cover he’s taken on. They can kill him. And deliver his head to his girlfriend in a very public demonstration of their power. And don’t forget you live there, too. A deputy sheriff, and one who was in the media with his old cases. They showed, ‘We can do this.’ And maybe it was nothing more than that.”

“I never picked you for the cockeyed optimist.”

“That may not be our biggest problem. Whoever killed those four La Fam guys wasn’t some banger. You see where this is heading? It’s only been a matter of time. Maybe this is it.”

Robin said, “The war going on down in Mexico is here now.”

The truck rumbled to life. “That’s why I want to talk to Antonio.”

I asked about us.

“Go home. Have a drink for me. Have two.”

17

Peralta had already driven away when I saw the FedEx package leaning neatly against the front door. It was letter-sized. Too small to contain a head; eyeballs or ears, maybe. Anthrax or a small explosive, definitely. I asked Robin if she was expecting anything—neither was I. On the long walk up to the door, I thought about calling the police. I scanned the dark sidewalks, seeing nothing, not even a car parked on the street. But I was so damned tired, had seen so much death that night, that I just picked it up and unlocked the door.

Once the alarm was disarmed, I took the envelope into the study and zipped it open, keeping the opening away from my face. Inside were some Xerox copies of old newspaper clippings and a five-thousand-dollar check drawn on the account of Judson Lee, Attorney at Law. It wasn’t signed. He had included a note: “My offer still stands.”

“He wants you pretty bad,” Robin said.

“But I don’t want him.”

“It might do you some good. Get outside yourself for a while. I know you can use the money.”

“Peralta wants to rope me into being a P.I.”

“A private dick, huh?” Her eyes gleamed merrily. She undid her bun and shook out her hair across her shoulders. It gleamed with colors ranging from light brown to gold. “I’ll help you. I’m a good researcher—a curator has to have those skills. This would be a healthy break from trying to keep track of all these cartels and gangs. It can be the return of the History Shamus.”

That had been Lindsey’s nickname for me, but I didn’t mind that Robin used it. It actually felt good. My eye wandered to the photo on the desk. It showed me, Lindsey and Robin last summer in Flagstaff. The weather was gentle in the high country and our smiles genuine and joyous. Robin was the only other person who knew that Lindsey was pregnant, and this drew them even closer together. We decided we would wait until Lindsey passed the three-month mark to tell anyone else.

Our new reality was only beginning to settle in. Much of our conversations revolved around the kind of parents we wouldn’t be. We wouldn’t call our child a kid, which is a goat. We wouldn’t take a newborn into the Sheriff’s Office and parade it around like some consumer product bought at Walmart. Our child would be raised in a real neighborhood with front porches and neighbors who knew each other, in a house with books, music, and ideas, a doting aunt who would teach her about art, and most of all, a house of love. She would go to a public school, just as we had done. I called the baby a she, and Lindsey was convinced it would be a son. We laughed over it and agreed to let God surprise us.

Robin picked up the photo, studied it, and replaced it on the desk. She sat on the blotter and looked down at me.

“When we were growing up, there was such…chaos.” Robin searched for that

last word. “Linda had Lindsey Faith when she was sixteen. So you can imagine the sexual competition between the two, when Lindsey was sixteen and luminous, and Linda was an attractive woman in her early thirties.” She smiled. “I paid good money to therapists to learn all this shit. Lindsey Faith was the peacemaker, my protector. She kept the family together through it all.”

“Why do you call her Lindsey Faith?”

“Because it’s a beautiful name.”

“What’s your middle name?”

“Someday I’ll tell you.”

“You were the teenage rebel,” I said.

“How’d you guess? We moved every couple of years. There was always a new boyfriend and most of them were creeps who wanted to sleep with Lindsey or me. Seriously. This was what we grew up in. Our mom wasn’t a bad person. She was just very creative and very overwhelmed by life. She wanted to be an artist and she ended up working as a cocktail waitress.”

“Lindsey said she had schizophrenia. That’s why she had always said she didn’t want children. And it was all right with me.”

Robin tilted her head, closed her eyes, summoning a past both sisters would rather forget. “My bet is Linda was bipolar and it was aggravated by drugs and anger and heartbreak in her life, but what do I know?”

“And Lindsey lived her life to not become her mother.”

“Yes. And I think it was a struggle for her. Mother and daughter were very alike when I think back on it. I was the foundling. She fought to be normal and stable. She had her devils, always hearing Linda’s voice in her head, that she wasn’t good enough, that she was a screw-up. I used to joke with her and say, ‘Turn off your Linda Unit’—that critical voice she heard in her head. She never did. She just kept those devils chained up.”