The Long Fall (16 page)

She lets out her breath and looks away. Outside the bay window, there’s a fat dollop of yellow moon and a salting of stars over Camelback Mountain. Evelyn leans over and undoes the straps on her shoes, then slowly levers each off, toes to heel, and leaves them in the middle of the kitchen floor. “Let’s go upstairs, Jimmy,” she says.

The crime lab people would have a field day if they dusted the place.

It’s 3:00
A.M.,
and Jimmy, barefoot and in jeans, unable to sleep, is downstairs, moving around his brother’s house. It’s a big place, a two-and-a-half-story, with a long steeply sloping roof, its exterior a mortared wall of light gray rocks of different sizes and shapes set at angles to each other, like a landslide that’s been arrested midfall. Inside, the rooms are wide and airy, the ceilings crosshatched with dark exposed beams.

Jimmy wants to make his presence felt. He passed on the idea of taking something from the house, settling instead on making whatever lay within an arm’s reach his. He’s leaving his prints on every available surface, touching everything, imprinting himself on his brother’s life and possessions, hoping to subtract something each time his fingers make contact.

There are Remington prints hanging in the dining room and den. A cavernous fireplace whose mantle is lined with Paiute and Tohono O’odham woven baskets interspersed with kachina dolls. Hardwood floors with brightly dyed Navajo rugs. A framed territorial map circa 1830. A mahogany gun case. A rack of cowboy hats. Two crossed ceremonial cavalry sabers. A black wire sculpture of a thrashing bronco. A dented tin bucket mounded with silver dollars. Collections of arrowheads mounted behind glass. A horse-hoof ashtray. Immense wagon-wheel chandeliers. Vases, everywhere, filled with dried desert flowers. The furniture, squat and low, upholstered in shades of tan and brown and soft orange.

Richard was a big fan of the fact that their ties to the region went back to the founding of Fort McDowell at the close of the Civil War through the reopening of the original canal system built by the Hohokam tribe. Their great-great-grandfather had been instrumental in stealing the territorial capital from Prescott and getting it moved to Phoenix, and their great-uncle had helped bankroll the commission for the blinding-white angel of mercy statue that eventually stood on the copper dome of the capitol building. Their grandfather and his brood had pulled a lot of heavy-duty political strings when it came to support and funding for the Roosevelt Dam and Salt River Project, and he then went on to make his money in agriculture, primarily cotton and meatpacking, when Phoenix’s slaughterhouses were the largest, outside Chicago, in the country. Late in his life, their grandfather subtracted a long line of zeroes from the family fortune when he invested in a series of resort projects lavish enough to make a sultan blush and everything went belly-up shortly after the groundbreakings.

Along the way, Jimmy’s ancestors dropped enough coin in the name of art and culture and regional heritage to qualify as the Valley of the Sun’s version of solid citizens, and that’s the part Richard loves and plays to with his country club pals and chamber of commerce buddies.

Jimmy eventually moves to the kitchen. It’s going on 4:00
A.M.
Hanging near the phone is a wooden key chain. He spots the letters
RC
on one of the sets, snags it, and walks through an enclosed breezeway and into the garage.

He gets behind the wheel of his brother’s silver Lexus.

His brother’s got a system of shelves and wall hangings so that all the tools and hardware are ordered and in place, and Jimmy feels like he’s back on some grade school field trip, the teacher lining them up in front of a museum display that contains a lesson for their own good.

The garage is easily three times the size of his room at the Mesa View.

Jimmy’s suddenly thinking grand theft auto and arson. Sitting along the base of the north wall of the garage are five gallons of high-test unleaded in a squat red plastic container.

He fingers the pack of matches in his shirt pocket.

He’s considering taking the unleaded and burning his initials in the front lawn, a little signature work, twenty-foot letters charred in the St. Augustine grass like a brand.

Then maybe take the Lexus over to Pete Samoa’s and negotiate some chop-shop action and pocket the take.

Jimmy slots the key in the ignition and then reaches up for the door opener clipped to the visor and does an open sesame, the garage door slowly coming to life, rumbling and clanking on its tracks.

He keeps running through the various combos of crimes against property, and they’re all holding TRY ME signs, but he’s jammed up. They all fit and simultaneously fall short of what he’s feeling. His brother’s got to pay, but Jimmy can’t settle on the right amount.

Evelyn keeps getting in the way.

He could have mailed Evelyn’s panties to Richard and finished things right there. He could have ignored the message Richard left on the answering machine. But he didn’t do either. Or couldn’t. A jump ball on that one.

The garage door clicks to a stop. Jimmy’s looking at a rectangle of driveway and lawn swimming in moonlight.

Scottsdale itself is part of the problem, with its country clubs and golf courses and art galleries and upscale boutiques and quaint restaurants and resort complexes, and there’s the Lexus he’s sitting in and the wedding cake landscaping and the big stone monument that Richard calls home, everywhere the presence of money and the truths it can buy so that even the air feels different, as if it has been jacked up a couple of extra molecules.

Richard wakes up to all of this every day. It’s his. Jimmy will never be able to touch it.

There’s a power in the right address and zip code that rivals any threat Ray Harp can level at you.

And then Jimmy’s back to thinking about Evelyn again.

And when he pulls the keys from the ignition and points the remote and watches the door accordion itself to a close, he’s thinking about how over the years he’s been accused of thinking with his feet or of thinking with his dick; and as he climbs out of the car and walks back into the house and heads for the stairway that will take him to the master bedroom and the woman who’d bushwhacked him earlier with her beauty, he’s starting to wonder just what part of him is doing the thinking now.

Evelyn’s lying on her side, propped on an elbow. The sheets have slipped to the rounded curve of a hip. Her hair’s falling in her eyes, and she’s practicing a pout, the sexy kind that Jimmy always associates with French women, though he’s not sure exactly why, since he’s never met one.

“You were talking in your sleep,” she says.

Jimmy lifts his head from the pillow. Across the room, morning’s burning in the window. He remembers sitting behind the wheel of his brother’s silver Lexus, coming back into the house and having a couple of drinks, but beyond that, nothing.

“Who’s Debbie?” Evelyn asks, pinching him. “A rival for my affections?”

Jimmy frowns, then shakes his head. “Mystery woman. Can’t place the name or the dream.”

“You sure?” Evelyn’s smiling, her hand slipping under the sheets and moving south. “You sounded a little lovesick, Jimmy.”

The fingers of the hand she’s slipped between his legs have turned into tiny bustling hives, and suddenly the name’s there.

“Debbie Greene,” Jimmy says.

He laughs, looks over at Evelyn, and then jump-cuts to the fifth grade. He tells her about his first official boner. Not the generalized or unfocused boners that came from the texture of flannel pajamas or the chaos of wet dreams, but a boner with a point, though one that Jimmy only dimly understood at the time, sitting with his opened lunchbox in the school cafeteria a table over from Debbie Greene and her wild red hair punctuated with yellow butterfly barrettes. Jimmy had been sitting with Don Ruger and Larry Talbert and unsuccessfully trying to cut a deal involving Cheetos and bologna sandwiches when he saw her glance his way. Once, just once.

But it had been enough.

Jimmy felt the sudden confusion in his jeans as the deal for the Cheetos fell through and Debbie Greene sat giggling with her friends a table over, Jimmy taking an orange out of his lunchbox and beginning to peel it, slipping his finger under the rounded navel, the skin giving away, his fingers finding pulp and juice, the smell of the orange mixing with the smell of warm milk from the small waxy container setting next to his elbow.

The boner had still been tenting the front of his pants when lunch period ended, Mrs. Lidd, his fifth-grade teacher, coming over and getting on his case about finishing on time, Jimmy not wanting to get up from the seat, Debbie Greene and her friends walking by and giggling as they got in line, Mrs. Lidd hovering over him, Jimmy slipping a piece of the orange peel in his shirt pocket as his boner reluctantly subsided and Mrs. Lidd loudly cataloged the various problems Jimmy had in the attitude and discipline departments and made dire predictions about his suitability as a future citizen of the republic.

Evelyn laughs and asks what happened to her.

“Mrs. Lidd?”

“No,” she says, still laughing. “The girl with the butterfly barrettes.”

“Oh,” Jimmy says. “I only saw her a couple of times after that. Her old man was a manager at the Motorola plant in Chandler and they transferred him out. I think Denver.”

Evelyn doesn’t have anything to say to that, and in the silence that suddenly crops up between them, Jimmy finds that he doesn’t either.

T
here’s a lopsided moon outside the kitchen window and a stillness to the night, a kind of space between breaths, that reminds Aaron Limbe of his stint in Nicaragua.

Six years in the army, the last four in Special Forces, then twelve years on the Phoenix PD, the last seventeen months working for Ray Harp, all of it leading up to where he is standing now, in the kitchen of his childhood home, a tilted quarter moon in the window, and Aaron Limbe holding an eight-by-ten of Evelyn Coates in a white half-slip, one bra strap loose and slipping over her shoulder, her head tilted so that her hair swings free, as she leans into the kiss from Jimmy Coates.

Coates, shirtless, has his hand resting against her neck.

Aaron Limbe carries the photo from the kitchen through a small foyer leading off to the front door and into the living room. He adds the photo to the others. Thumbtacked on its north wall in precise floor-to-ceiling rows are seventy-two black-and-white photographs of Coates and his sister-in-law.

He then walks down the hall toward his bedroom, his footsteps echoing in the narrow space, the light dim from the single ceiling fixture.

Limbe pulls a black footlocker from under his bed and, with effort, carries it back to the kitchen.

He works the combination and takes out a Marlin .45 semi-automatic rifle, a Sig Sauer P239, a Charter Arms revolver, and Taurus auto-pistol and places them on the kitchen table. He then sorts through the locker matching ammo to each. He dismantles the guns one at a time and starts cleaning them.

The phone rings. Limbe has disconnected his answering machine, and he lets the phone ring itself out.

Limbe swabs out the barrel of the rifle and then attaches a night scope. At his left elbow is a compact pyramid of stacked ammo boxes.

Aaron Limbe is coming to judgment.

The waiting’s over.

Limbe has waited, because that’s what he’s learned, the true weight of time when you placed it on the scales and waited for them to right themselves and balance.

He is approaching an absolute and true clarity, the same kind he found in the middle of the night in a small cement block room in a nondescript building on the far western outskirts of Managua. It was the kind of clarity only an interrogation room could produce.

Aaron Limbe knows this: Tie someone to a chair in a bare room, and with enough time and enough questions, you eventually come down to one essential truth—every heart is a crime scene.

Limbe finishes cleaning the Marlin semiautomatic and starts on the Sig Sauer and Charter Arms.

The phone again. Sixteen rings before it cuts off. Two more than last time.

Above the house is the low rumble of an F-15 making its approach to Luke Air Force Base.

If he closes his eyes, he can see the exact sequence of photos he’s thumbtacked to the north wall of the living room, eight rows down and nine shots per row, seventy-two black-and-whites of Coates and his sister-in-law doing what his master sergeant had called the Gland Dance.

Limbe massages the back of his neck. That’s where they always start, the headaches, just below the base of his skull.

Gathering the evidence had not been difficult. Coates and his sister-in-law were as predictable as lab rats. After some of the reconnaissance work he’d done in Nicaragua, tracking two amateur adulterers obsessed with each other’s orifices hadn’t been a stretch. They didn’t see Limbe, because they weren’t looking for him. He’s been following them for over a month and a half now.

Limbe sets down the Charter Arms and picks up the Taurus. It’s one of two throw-down guns he’s kept from his time on the police force. The Taurus is light, just a little over twelve ounces with a nine-shot .22-long magazine, and easily concealed and therefore handy in tight or unexpected situations.

Within the next three days, he will kill Jimmy Coates.

He’s waited patiently, very patiently, for two conditions to manifest themselves. One is that Jimmy Coates must not see his death coming. It must be totally unexpected, something he cannot prepare for or prevent. The second condition was trickier. His death must rob Coates of something important. Coates had to die right at the point where he’d found something that mattered to him.

His death, in other words, had to duplicate what he’d done to Aaron Limbe when Coates had cut the deal with the police brass, claiming he could put Limbe and Ramon Delgado together the night of the safe-house fire, and Limbe had been forced to resign from the force.

With a loser like Coates, the first condition had been easy from the start. Coates had never been able to see anything coming. His whole life was a testament to faulty wiring. The second condition was another story. From what Aaron Limbe could see, Jimmy Coates had the complexity of an amoeba. Everything about his life was insignificant. Nothing had ever mattered to him.