Cool in Tucson (30 page)

Who needs Tucson anyway?  Fuck the whole fucking desert.  So what if it’s dry heat, it’s still heat.
 

He had done well for himself in Tucson, his money stash was bigger than when he came.  Only thing he regretted, he decided as he passed the Red Rock turnoff, was never meeting that policewoman again, the one that looked at him that day in front of Ace’s apartment.  He had thought of her several times since that day, and each time he found  himself wondering,
What would it be like to do a woman like that?
  

Tilly’s entire knowledge of sex had been gained with prostitutes and occasional free-lancing druggies willing to trade sex for his help getting a fix.  He knew what his face looked like, people had been making fun of his looks ever since fifth grade when his stepfather put him in the hospital the second time.  So he had always treated sex as a fair-traded commodity, tried to get what he paid for and didn’t expect extras.  He never risked the contempt he was likely to get from an approach to an unpaid woman, and judging from the endless bitching of men in bars about their women he had concluded he wasn’t missing much.  But ever since he’d seen that woman detective…he didn’t even know how to say it, exactly.

Passing that weird-looking mountain with the funny name, Picacho, he figured out what it was that made her face stay in his mind: that woman had been looking straight at him and thinking about him.  Like she thought he was…interesting.  She wasn’t afraid, and she wasn’t coming on to him.  She wasn’t hostile either, she was just…thinking about him. 

Now why the fuck is that a turn-on? 
He didn’t know but it was, his crotch had warmed up and he was squirming in his seat to get some more room in his jeans. 

Maybe I could get me a regular job of some kind,
he surprised himself by thinking as
he approached Eloy. 
Work daylight hours, have more of a life
.  It was his second radical thought in the space of a few minutes and it made him feel…warmed up even more.

Tilly cranked the A/C down a notch, put the Escalade on cruise control and aimed its nose toward his bankroll in L.A.  He tuned the radio to a hip-hop station, nudged the sound up a little and nodded to the beat, thinking about the possibilities of life in the  slow lane
.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Hector woke slowly, out of a dream of being in a car in a heavy rain.  Somebody in the car with him kept yelling, from the backseat, “No, stop, oh, please stop!”  But Hector laughed and said, “What are you talking about?  It’s hardly raining at all,” which it wasn’t, just a sprinkle.  A minute later, though, he felt his car lurch out of control and saw they were floating down a big wash and into a river.  It was the Rillito, he saw, usually just a dusty ditch but now full of dirty water, right up to the top of its banks.  As the torrent flowed past the back doors of stores and restaurants, people called out to him from their open doors, saying things he couldn’t quite hear.    

His passenger kept on screaming, but Hector, still cool, said, “Don’t worry, I got a plan for this.”  He rolled down his window and each time they came to a bend in the stream he leaned out and grabbed for a branch or a fencepost.  But he was never quite close enough and the water was flowing so fast, when he grabbed for something it slid through his fingers.  The person in the backseat got louder and louder, other people were yelling too and then Hector noticed that the car was sinking, he was going under. 

He sat up in bed, suddenly awake.  But the screaming went right on, a woman’s voice crying out in rage and pain.  Her screams were punctuated by sounds Hector had never heard before, insane animal grunts, and after every grunt came more thumps and crashes and another scream.

            The couple next door was having a raging fight.  Last night’s fun was all forgotten, they were trashing their room and there was more yelling, now, from the manager who was knocking on their door.  Hector knew right away he had to get out here, this kind of a fight made people call the police.   

            His pants and sandals were on the chair by the bed, he was dressed in a few seconds.  He grabbed his duffel and had his other hand out, reaching for the door handle, just as the noises changed.  Harder knocking, now, next door, and a deep voice yelling, “Police!  Open up!” 

            Hector froze.  The knocking and calling continued until one of the occupants, the man, opened the door and muttered something like, “What’s up?”  Hector had watched this scene more than once in his neighborhood and knew how it was going to go: the person answering the door always said something utterly stupid like, “Whaddya need?”  and then stood there, wavering, convinced he looked so innocent he could bluff his way out of breaking up a roomful of furniture and putting lumps all over a woman.

            Listening, Hector longed to fast-forward this idiot’s life so he wouldn’t have to wait for it to play out—the sobs of the woman, the denials of the man, their joint declarations that nothing at all was going on.  You don’t have to put those cuffs on him, the woman wailed, he’ll be fine as soon as he sobers up.  But the patrolman had backup now and besides the empty vodka bottle in the room the officers found weed, and then a lot more weed and some heroin and the paraphernalia for that and soon the woman was in cuffs, too, still weeping.    

            Hector pressed against the door, afraid to peek out through the blinds for fear the officers would spot him and want to ask questions.  Cops loved witnesses.  And what if they noticed his car?  It wasn’t connected to Ace’s murder in any way that he knew about, but what if his parole officer had a search order out for him?  He was afraid to move for fear of attracting attention to himself. 

He kept looking at his watch, in agony as the digital numbers showed eight-thirty, nine, nine-thirty.  The motel manager got back into the mix, wanting to be paid for the damage to the room.  They tried to leverage some cash out of the couple, but the man let them go through all his pockets to prove he had hardly any money left on him and the woman couldn’t even find her purse. 

            Standing by the door grinding his teeth, Hector listened as the motel manager signed the damage report, complaining to the cops that you never got paid for the time it took or the inconvenience to your other guests. 
You hit on something there, my man
.  His cheek against the door, Hector closed his eyes and told himself to stay cool.  Finally they were all going down the stairs together toward the squad cars, the two prisoners unsteady on their feet, the man cursing. 

Hector risked a look when he heard car doors slamming.  Each cop had one prisoner in the back and they were pulling out of the lot.  Finally Hector opened his door a crack.  Nobody moved in the rooms around him, so he carried his duffel out onto the walkway.  He could see the top of his car below him, and was starting down the stairway when he wondered—
why was the hood popped like that?

            He ran down the steps, noticing as he did that the Brat was sitting funny, too.  He had parked at the end of the row, against the corner formed by the el of the building.  At the time he had been too tired to think about the fact that one side of the car was in the dark and out of sight of the office.  Not that anybody in this two-bit fleatrap ever checked the lot anyway, probably. 

Hector had often joked with his friends that even south of Twenty-Second Street, his car was perfectly safe because it was too worthless to steal.  But he had bought new tires and a good battery for it, in case he might be driving it to Mexico.  Now he saw that the good battery was missing and on the side away from the office, not just the back tire but the whole fucking wheel was gone. 

He had been awake and anxious for hours without any breakfast, hunger was growling in his gut.  But he found the strength to hurl curses at all the rotten fucking bad luck that had robbed him of Ace’s car and the quick easy start out of town that he had worked for and earned.  Red tongues of rage danced in front of his eyes as he thought of all the work he had to do next: hunt through salvage yards─fucking Rudy’s stupid salvage yards─for a wheel for this old Brat, and then buy a new tire, and a battery, and get it all installed. 

Even as he cursed, though, he knew that in another minute he’d get at it, because he didn’t have the juice left to steal another car.  He didn’t know why but his luck was all gone in this town, his bad moon had risen, his plan was shot to hell.  There was no way to know how many people were looking for him, and he was running out of time and money.  He would have to use all his poor boy skills, beg rides and borrow tools from friends, sweat and humble himself all morning, into afternoon if it took that long, maybe even stay in this lousy excuse for a motel again tonight—he knew he couldn’t go back to Ohio Street. 

And now it wasn’t optional any more, he absolutely had to get Ace’s money back.  As soon as the Brat was running again he was going to find that rotten skinny grade school girl and put a hurt on her she’d remember for the rest of her life.  He let his mind linger for a minute on the pleasure of doing that, because Christ knew he had a little pleasure coming.  The sounds he had heard from the room next door came back to him, and the muscles in his shoulders quivered.  He imagined Denny with tears running down her face, begging him to take his money and go. 

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Is this whole department stuck in a swamp?
  Sarah rubbed her hands together, pulled her earlobes and did a restless sitting tap dance.  She was waiting for fingerprint reports, a search warrant, the final on the autopsy, the decision on the GPS tracking. 
I could try looking through that
computer again by myself
.  She knew she would have to be very lucky to find anything Harry Eisenstaat had missed. 

Where else could I look?
  She needed to know much more about Ace Perkins, the squeaky-clean seller of illicit street drugs, whose lifestyle was so wrong for his modus operandi.  A tough ex-con…
Ace Perkins wouldn’t go down easy
…who lived, if that was the right word, with a nearly empty computer in an apartment as uncluttered as a monk’s cell.  A snitch who took meticulous care of his classy wardrobe and read library books. 
I could find out how long he’s had that card
.  Was he a native Tucsonan, come to think of it?  Almost everybody in Tucson was from someplace else, but—what if there was family nearby?     

Perkins, Adolph Alvin didn’t come up in City Directories past or present, or as an alumni of any school in the Tucson Unified School District.  He was not listed as a member of any local club or fraternal organization.  His Arizona driver’s license and his car registration dated from the day before he rented the apartment.  Same week he opened that account at the bank. 

Let’s see how he was doing the month before that.

She got an outside line, dialed the Florence prison, and asked for Warden Cluff.  A secretary said, “He’s away from his desk today, can anyone else help you?”

“Uh…sure, I should think so.”

“Hang on, I’ll see if I can locate Deputy Phelps.” She clicked off and the phone system treated Sarah to several verses of a canned Roy Orbison ballad.  Finally the song cut out and a very deep, cordial male voice said, “This is Sgt. Phelps, how can I help you?”  Sarah identified herself, explained she was investigating the murder of a former inmate, gave Ace’s full name and told Phelps she was looking for additional information about the prisoner. 

“You bet,” Phelps said heartily, “hold on.”  She ground her teeth while Orbison finished saluting
Calypso
and Kaye
Starr started bargaining for a doggie in the window.  Why did the very worst songs have the longest half-life on Muzak?  When Phelps came back on he said, “Adolph Alvin Perkins was in detention here from 18 August Two Thou—”

“Wait, wait.  I have his detention records, that’s not why I called.”