On the sidewalk, I called PPD and told them I had just seen the woman who had murdered Robin walk into an apartment. The first units showed up in three minutes. I could clearly identify her and would have great credibility on the witness stand as a decorated former deputy sheriff. The murder weapon and money were there as evidence. I would take my chances with the justice system I had spent so many years serving. This time.
27
The next night I drove toward the blinking red lights of mountaintop communications towers again. Something kept drawing me back to south Phoenix and I didn’t know what it was.
When I was a boy, our weekend drives to the Japanese gardens were down Seventh Avenue. Often we stopped at Union Station along the way so I could watch the passenger trains, or see the freight cars switched across the many tracks-seventeen as I recall-that crossed the street at grade level. Now Seventh Avenue soared across the tracks on a concrete overpass, but it didn’t matter because Union Station was closed, the passenger trains were gone, the thriving industries that once lined the tracks were empty lots or decaying buildings, and most of the tracks were long gone.
Back then, we drove through the poor side “south of the tracks.” No bridge carried cars on Seventh Avenue over the Salt in those days-we simply followed the pavement across the dry, wandering riverbed. One of the many quarries was near the road and it contained a pit nearly always filled with water. I imagined it as a fathomless depth, and for a child from a place with dry rivers, even passing close to this tiny inland sea filled me with terror. The city gradually fell away, replaced by pastures, fields, groves, and irrigation ditches, presided over by the South Mountains and the Sierra Estrella. I hiked both of them as a boy and from their summits, the green fields, this civilizing enterprise, which went back centuries to the Hohokam, only barely kept the desert wilderness in check. The wild West and the frontier seemed very near.
Almost all this was gone as I drove south now. Seventh was a wide arterial with curbs and sidewalks. It crossed the river on a span with no character or beauty, matching the built environment of the entire route. If the tree restoration along the river was moving this far, I couldn’t see it. The quarries had moved farther west and the river had been confined to an unnatural dredged passage to prevent flooding. I saw one old farmhouse and a rickety barn that transported me back to being ten years old. But it didn’t last. When I hit Baseline Road, I turned east on just another look-alike, six-lane Phoenix highway, known locally as a “street.” The agriculture, and of course, the flower fields with their fantastic spectrum of colors, were long gone.
If you followed the road in the opposite direction, it led to a spot that marked the Gila and Salt River “baseline” for the surveys of the territory and the state. It was one of the most important manifestations of the white man’s conquest of the land. In many ways, it was the beginning of everything you saw now. Hardly anyone knew about it. The only way you might get their attention would be to say that the baseline is near Phoenix International Raceway, but you wouldn’t keep their attention long. This wasn’t their hometown. They had come here to escape history.
But history would not be evaded long. Perhaps that’s why I kept coming down here. South Phoenix had always been the poor side of town. The barrios and shantytowns near Buckeye Road and Seventh Avenue were slums so atrocious that they were identified as some of the nation’s worst during the Depression, this when Phoenix was smaller than a hundred other cities. Much of the area lacked even running water or a sewage system. This was where Father Emmett McLoughlin toiled for decades to help the poor, and the Henson housing project was built in 1941 as a beacon of hope-not the crime-infested danger zone I later knew as a young deputy.
Now an ugly new apartment complex had replaced even that, a good intention I was sure, but the trees and shade that had once made Henson livable had been torn out, swapped for gravel and off-the-shelf suburban architecture. The old black community had diminished and although the Hispanic population had soared, the barrios had been disrupted and in many cases destroyed.
The Anglos who ran Phoenix historically thrived on ignoring the south side-prospered through its cheap labor, kept comfortable in their soft apartheid. It was a place to put the landfill, the toxic disposal outfits, and all manner of not-in-my-backyard enterprises. It was a place whose history was to be overlooked and marginalized. Now I wondered how much had changed, despite the newer subdivisions along Baseline, the tilt-up warehouses that were raised on spec, or the city signs that proclaimed this “South Mountain Village.”
The well-off had decamped for north Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, and the fringes, leaving millions of working poor all over the city that once haughtily neglected these neighborhoods. Every place outside of the newer areas was partly south Phoenix now. But this place, south of the tracks and, especially, south of the river, was also special, anointed by its unique history, and it had soul and edge, however many cheap, new houses sat behind walls along Baseline, no matter how horrid the fast-food boxes that squatted at Central and Baseline.
I turned north, the city lights briefly before me, before I crossed the canal, passed the Catholic church, and started the long, slow glide back to the valley’s center. The gaudy lights at the Rancho Grande supermarket were misleading. No place had been hit harder by the combination of the recession and the anti-Hispanic fervor of the Anglos than South Phoenix. The Ed Pastor Transit Center was nearly deserted, with only one bus idling in the bays. A man filled large jugs from a water machine while his children yelled from the open windows of the car. Did the water machines mean the families didn’t have operable plumbing? For whatever reason, they proliferated here.
It was this reverie that prevented me from noticing the vehicles that swarmed me.
They executed the maneuver as expertly as cops handling a felony stop. We were just south of the Central Avenue bridge. I was boxed in by a tricked-out Honda in front, a white car behind, and, what finally got my attention, a jacked-up, extended cab pickup truck. Before I could fully react, the truck swung over and bumped the Prelude into a warehouse parking lot. Then the car ahead suddenly stopped, forcing me to brake hard. I had the insane thought: Was this where the old Riverside Ballroom stood? I had a choice between using the cell to dial 911 or pulling out the Python. I chose the latter. But by then, six men were on the far side of the car, M-4 assault rifles with scopes and laser sights leveled at the windshield and door. All wore black protective vests.
Oh, I wished I had the Five-Seven. I wished I had backup. I wished Robin’s laughter still graced the world and that my wife loved me and that our child would have lived a long and full life and remembered us well. Instead I had six rounds in the Python and two Speedloaders. Eighteen rounds in all, but no time to reload. The Prelude was not, to put it mildly, armored. More men appeared around me, but they evidenced no gang hauteur. Instead all moved with a military-like competence. If this wasn’t the ATF, I had only one hope. It had little chance of success, but it was all I had.
South Phoenix Rules.
I was not afraid as they tore open the driver’s door and dragged me out, taking the Python, pinioning my arms at my sides, and roughly backing me up against the side of the car. My spine bent painfully backwards. The men all spoke Spanish. They were not the ATF.
“Let him go.”
This command came in accented English, his voice sandpapery. My arms were released.
A dark-skinned man walked close. He was my height with bad skin and dressed all in black, including a Kevlar vest. Now I really missed the Five-Seven. He spat in my face.