Cool in Tucson (23 page)

“I can’t get in.  They got one of them special locks on it.”

“I know.  But keep nosing around.  And we’ll all need new phones, I’ll do that tomorrow.”   

Rudy didn’t worry about surveillance much.  He assumed he was being watched by the local narcs, but so what?  They watched everybody in his part of town.  Now and then they nailed a load and put somebody in jail.  It never changed anything.  He kept most of his business out of sight, but even so he was doing too well in South Tucson not to attract some curiosity.  And he was
la raza
, Latino.  Cops always suspected them first though they said they didn’t. 

The trick, he had always thought, was to keep his lifestyle and possessions so low-key that drug interdiction people would think that he was just a small cog in the big wheel of drug traffic that rolled through Tucson year after year.  Unless something obvious forced them to come after him, he thought, they’d probably go on waiting for him to lead them to the Big One. 

Any luck, by the time they figured him out, he’d be the Big One that got away.

What he did worry about, every day, was the wild card you couldn’t predict.  For instance, Hector Rodriguez.  “What about that silly-actin’ kid worked with Ace, that Hector?  You find him?”

“Not yet.”

Rudy allowed himself to look annoyed.  Maybe even Tilly needed a fire lit under him sometimes.  “What’s so fuckin’ hard about finding a snot-nose kid from the neighborhood?  Shit, he grew up here, everybody south of Twenty-Second Street must know who he is.”

“They do, and nobody knows where he is today.  His old beater car’s gone from beside the house where he always kept it.  Hasn’t been back since we been watchin’ the place.  His Mama says she hasn’t heard from him and I believe her. I can see she’s worried.  He’s just
out of town
.”

“You know—” Rudy rolled a toothpick from the left side of his mouth to the right, thinking, “he might be gone in Ace’s car.  The cops haven’t found it.”

“How would he get Ace’s car unless—”  Tilly shifted in his chair, looked at Rudy and then away.  “There’s no way Hector is tough enough to whack Ace Perkins.”

Rudy took a sip of his Dos Equis.  The skin of his face seemed to be growing darker.  “Didn’t you check this kid out after Ace hired him?”

“I did and there was nothing.  One little stretch in juvie, otherwise he boxed up groceries, worked at the car wash, lived home with Mama.”

“But now he’s starting to look good for Ace’s killing?”

“Rudy, I don’t think that figures at all.  Ace was too smart—”

“It figures if he’s got Ace’s car.”  Rudy set his glass down sharply and stared at Tilly.  Red veins had begun to show in the whites of his eyes.  “What’s the use having you for a fixer if I gotta find out everything myself?”

“I ain’t done yet, Rudy.”

“You ain’t even started as far as I can see.  What about Hector’s mama?  Any chance she’s pushin’ for somebody else?”

“Rudy, she lives in a mud adobe down on Ohio Street, she ain’t in the life.  She does laundry for Anglos and sells Amway products.  Combs her little girls’ hair every morning on the step, gives them a coin for the half-price lunch at Middle School.”

“A ton of dope gets pushed through Tucson every day by housewives and janitors.  Get Sanchez to ask around, see what else she peddles besides soap.” 

He turned away from Tilly Stubbs toward the bank of large-screen TVs on the wall across the room, and watched eight horses bolt out of the gate at Palm Beach.  A youngish man in tight black jeans stood watching the race intensely.  When the number six horse won he walked past them tearing up tickets, and sat down at a table by himself, cursing bitterly.

“I got a better idea,” Rudy said, turning back.  “Never mind farting around with Sanchez.  All he brings back is stupid gossip.  You go on over to that Rodriguez house yourself in the morning, put the arm on those two little girls and get their Mama to tell you where we can find Hector.”

“Rudy, these are people with a lot of friends, the neighbors ain’t gonna like—”   He quit talking when Rudy Ortiz slammed his beer glass down on the table so hard it broke. 

Very red in the face, paying no attention to the tableful of beer raining onto his knees or to the blood running out of the cut on his hand, Rudy leaned across gleaming shards of glass and hissed, “I lived in this town all my life, asshole, you think you need to tell me what people here don’t like?”

“I’m just sayin’—”

“And I’m sayin’ don’t say.  Who needs you to fuckin’ say?”  His voice had become a raspy whisper, he seemed to be choking on his rage. “I pay you top dollar to be my enforcer, now get your candy ass on the street and start breaking bones.  Next time I see you,” he wheezed as Tilly got up and employees in aprons came running with towels, “you better be handing me Hector Rodriguez.” 

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Hector pulled into a Super Kmart on the north side of Broadway and parked. He needed to sit still a minute and think.  It was getting harder and harder to keep his plan straight. Really, now that he’d killed Bernie, he should get out of town
right away
.  But first he had to drive this old Dart back to the Fry’s store and pick up Ace’s SUV.  Then he’d go home, peel his money off the bottom of that loose tile under the bed, pack a few clothes.  From there he could roll right onto I-19 and be on his way.

            That was the plan.  But now he had this problem: Ace’s money was missing.  His mind kept asking,
Where the fuck?  How the fuck?
  The money envelope had been in the Trader Joe’s bag, no question about that.  He hadn’t taken it out of there because he hadn’t had time to find the shoulder pouch he wanted to carry it in.  And he hadn’t let the bag out of his sight since he picked it off the ground by Ace Perkins’ body.  Had he? 

Well, except…with sudden perfect clarity he remembered running up the aisle at the Catalina Theater with Ace’s phone ringing in his hand. 
But then I turned the phone off and went right back in, and the bag was exactly where I left it, in front of my seat.
  The little girl was still sitting in the seat next to it with her eyes glued to the screen, looked like she hadn’t moved or even breathed, hardly, since he left. 

Anyway, come on, it was beyond crazy to think that a grade-school girl in braids could have grabbed his money.  She wouldn’t have dared! 

But who else had access?  He had bought tickets with that money when they entered the theater, and the only time it was out of his sight after that was when he stepped outside with the phone.  He was sure of it now. 

So it had to be her.  Shee-it.

l find that fucking rotten brat I’m gonna strangle her with her own braids. 

How was he going to find her, though?  He didn’t even know her last name. 

He rocked in his seat and ground his teeth from the aggravation of having his plan screwed up like this, time after time.  After he’d worked so hard and been so careful, why did everything have to get so—
wait
.  He stopped rocking and made a small happy sound, “Ooh!” 
You’re sitting in her Mama’s car, Dickhead
. 

He punched the button on the glove compartment.  The door dropped open but of course no light came on, stupid pileashit car.  But the registration was in there, all right.  The dome light didn’t work either, so he got out and walked over to the light from the front of the store to read it.  It was made out to Janine Lynch, with an address on Lurlene Street.  Couple blocks south of the Fry’s Store, just like the kid said.  He folded the registration, stuck it in the cargo pocket of his pants, and got back in the car.  In less than a minute he was back in westbound traffic, looking for a place to
make a U-turn and go back to Kolb Road.

The clock in this heap was running, but of course the time was wrong.  It said ten minutes to nine and he knew it had to be later than that.  He looked at his watch, squinted and looked again.  Ten minutes to nine, was that possible?  It seemed as if hours had passed since he left that little girl sitting in the theater.  

Well, but then…girls that age, he knew from his sisters, they really got
into
a movie, and
Master and Commander
had at least another half hour to run.  Denny would still be sitting there, staring up at those sailors on the screen.  Why go to her house and wait when he didn’t even know how she’d get there, or when? 
Wake up and smell the coffee, Hector
.  All he had to do was move his ass and he could still find her where he left her.    

Less than half an hour after he shot Bernie Estes, he was back in the Roxy parking ramp, parking the old Dart again. 
Goddamn, I’m glad I don’t have to explain this to anybody
, he thought as he walked down the cement slope. 
Hector Rodriguez, gonna be a big man in the drug trade but right now he’s chasing the cash that was swiped from him by a little girl with braids.  Shee-it.

 He fished his ticket stub out of his pocket, lucky thing he kept that at least.  He walked in the front door and straight across the lobby, showed it to the ticket-taker at the podium on the far side.  Said, “Hadda run out for a minute,” and got an impatient nod.  Padded softly up the carpeted stairs to Number Six, holding his breath.     

He had thought hard during the drive about the quietest way to take the money away from the kid. 
Get a hand over her mouth and pat her down quick.
  People right close around might notice, but he could be out of there before they decided what to do about it.  It wasn’t as if he had to kill her.  Even if she had the nerve to complain to anybody, who was going to believe a wormy-looking little brat had stolen all that money? 

And grabbing it away from her would be easy.  No purse, no jacket, the money had to be right there in her clothes. 

But when he got inside he couldn’t see her.  He knew exactly where they’d been sitting and she wasn’t there.  Why would she move?  He patrolled both sides, walking quietly down the aisle and then really taking his time on the way back up, scanning the faces carefully in the light from the screen.  The theater was less than half-full, it was a school night so there were hardly any children.  In a couple of minutes he had satisfied himself that she was gone.

He stood behind the back row for a few seconds with rage burning a hole in his gut.  He had seen how she looked at the screen, as if she wanted to crawl in it and live there.  She would never have left the movie, he felt sure, for anything but that money. 

Well, so Evil Mama had an Evil Child, that figured.  But what, he asked himself in a hot surge of self-pity, had he ever done to deserve the rotten luck that led him to  their worthless car? 

Well, he would just have to do it the hard way, go to her house and take it away from her there.  He walked down the aisle one more time, and opened the door under the light.  Then for reasons he didn’t want to think about he resurrected an old trick from the days when he and his buds used to skip Junior High and sneak ten little gang-bangers into the movies on one ticket.  He pulled Denny’s ticket stub out of his pocket and inserted it carefully between the latch and the doorjamb.  Just in case.  Because things had been happening very fast, the world was getting a kind of a flaky feel to it, so you just never knew. 

He walked up the stained cement stairwell, heard a funny sound, and stood still on the third step from the top, listening.  After a few seconds a bad knot of pain began to grow in his stomach, and he decided that in some weird way, maybe sometimes you did know.  He was hearing the unmistakable static-infused crackle of a police radio. 

A loud but hard-to-understand dispatcher’s voice said something like, “Fifty-two, say again your location?” and a voice near by responded, deep and clear, “Copy, I’m on the top level of the Roxy Theater parking lot, corner of Campbell and Grant.  Looking at the brown 1976 Dodge Dart, license—” he read off the letters and numbers—“mentioned in tonight’s BOLOs as the car stolen out of the Fry’s parking lot on Kolb Road.”