“What the fuck you saying?” Slack’s voice rose. “El Verdugo? Here? In Phoenix?”
“No, at Disneyland, genius.”
Slack was silent. He desperately wanted to look around him, see who might be lurking, but he wouldn’t let himself. El Verdugo had a reputation.
He pushed away the tray of food and Peralta helped himself to more fries. “Nobody’s been killed down here we don’t know who did the killing,” Slack said.
When he went sullen, Peralta prompted. “But…”
“Look man, we used to own this area.”
“Competition sucks,” Peralta said. “The creative destruction of the underground economy.”
Peralta, the anti-intellectual, channeling the ghost of Joseph Schumpeter. Now that was new.
“All these fucking ‘Cans coming across the border. Bring their gangs with ’em. Keep having babies. What the fuck part of illegal alien don’t they understand? The pie’s only so big. Only so many white motherfuckers with money to buy drugs. ’Specially now. Bloods are American fucking citizens.”
“What about guns?”
Slack hesitated slightly. “You’re not even a fucking cop. Why am I talking to you?”
Peralta picked his teeth. “Because you’re afraid of El Verdugo. To him you’re just another mayate.”
“Fuck no!” He rose halfway up, puffed out his chest, showed the silver-plated pistol in his waistband, and sat back, all conventions satisfied.
He went on in a conversational voice.
“Word on the street is La Familia is moving in from Southern California. They’re taking over some of the foreclosed places out on the west side, using them as safe houses and moving guns for the Gulf Cartel.”
“Now why would the cartel want a bunch of bangers when they can just buy from Anglos with clean records making a trip south now and then?” Peralta almost echoed Amy Preston’s words.
“It’s volume, my man,” Stack said. “Word is, La Fam has a smuggling route where they can get truckloads of guns across into Mexico.”
“Don’t fuck with me,” Peralta said. “Smuggling route, my ass.”
Slack was undeterred. “Word is, they go across the Indian rez. They’ve got some Border Patrol on the payroll. Some say they’re working directly with the Mexican cops.”
“What’s your piece of the action?” Peralta asked.
“Wish I had some, el sheriff.” He spat toward the sidewalk. “For us, it’s all about maintain. We just fighting to keep the business we got.”
“Just a hard-working businessman, huh?”
He nodded. “Exact.”
Peralta stood. “Thanks. You stay safe now.” He nodded to me and we walked back across Central.
Behind us came, “Hey, what are you going to do for me, Peralta? What about El Verdugo? Cut me some slack!”
“See,” Peralta said. “He can’t help himself.”
“What’s a mayate?”
“Now, Mapstone, I wouldn’t want to make you go all politically correct on me.”
Back home, Robin lit the Peace and Prosperity candle and sat with me in the study. After the day of visits to the most scenic parts of the city, I still didn’t know where Peralta was going. It felt as if we were up against an army of ghosts and impossible odds.
“Was I just a fool?” Robin asked, her face in her hands. “I always thought, the way I grew up, I had a pretty good bastard detector. But not with Jax. Pedro Alejandro Vega. El Verdugo. What a moron…”
I reached over and touched her shoulder.
She stood, stepped in front of me, and bent down. I felt her long fingers against the sides of my face and then her lips on mine. I kissed her back with minimal stabs of guilt, grasping her waist to pull her closer. Her hair spilled around me and our tongues found each other. It wasn’t the best kiss I’d ever had, but it was close, damned close, and if only for a moment it vanquished all the fear and grief and hurt. When I said I didn’t trust Robin, it was about this. I didn’t trust myself.
“Take me out in the back yard and let’s look at the stars,” she said.
Our back yard was indeed a good place for stargazing, despite being in the heart of the city. Fourteen-percent humidity would do that. I told her it was too dangerous.
She sighed and sat back on her haunches in front of me. “David, are we ever going to have sex?” She held both my hands. “I don’t know about you, but I really need sex.”
“Robin, I love Lindsey. I made a vow.”
“Love is complicated,” she said. “Anyway, she released you from it.”
I looked away.
“I know what she said to you in Washington. I know it word for word.”
I met her gray eyes. “How can you know that? Lindsey and I were alone, walking on the mall.”
“Because she told me.”
15
Contingency is the great trickster of history. Abraham Lincoln might have given in to the South and let the warring sister go in peace, but he refused. In the desperate months between the election and inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt, when the country faced depression and potentially revolution, a gunman fired at the president-elect. He missed. Housing prices were supposed to go on rising indefinitely, justifying all manner of risk and financial mischief, especially in Phoenix. Only they didn’t. And after a long, long dry spell, last May-the causes were the prosaic ones that settle into marriages, even when love and affection persist, and I was as much to blame as she… After that long drought, Lindsey and I had made frenzied love with the air conditioning washing over our bodies. She didn’t take time to put in her diaphragm but she thought it would be safe.
When she told me she was pregnant, I withheld my reaction.
“Are you struck dumb?” she asked. “You’re the talker in the family, the passionate man whose opinions get him in trouble.”
That was true enough, especially in this situation. Yes, the news was so comprehensively staggering that I was struck dumb. But I also knew that Lindsey didn’t want children, probably especially not since she had turned forty that year.
But as her dazzling blue eyes grew wet, I just said it. “I’m so happy!” And we embraced tightly, for a long time, laughing until we cried, hugging like silly kids at an eighth-grade dance, our pelvises eight inches apart as if any pressure would somehow damage the life that was growing inside my wife’s womb.
“I am too,” she said, sobbing and kissing me all over my face. “I didn’t know, Dave. I didn’t know if I could handle it, a child…” Her voice skipped between weeping. “But, God, I want this child. I want this child with you. You, my true love. My true north.”
Now it was my turn to cry, from deep down inside chambers of my emotions and history that I didn’t even know existed.
“I want to quit and stay home, be a real mom,” Lindsey said. “Will you think less of me? Think I’m Donna Reed?”
“I had a thing for Donna Reed.”
“Bap, bap, bap.” She shadowboxed my face.
Of course, it was all right. Lindsey had always loved the house and the garden more than her job at the Sheriff’s Office, talented as she was. The house was paid off. We had some savings. I would still be employed by Peralta. We would make it work.
I wanted to make martinis to celebrate, but of course that was out, at least for Lindsey. As she joked and danced around me in the kitchen, I made one for me, and put shaken cold water in a glass for her.
It was the beginning of the three happiest months of my life.
Peralta called the next night. He said to be ready to go out at ten.
“Go where.”
“To meet La Familia. Did you think I was just taking you on a free tour of gangland yesterday? Arrangements had to be made.”