Cool in Tucson (7 page)

This Tuesday, every one of them was right on time with the correct change, bam bam, like robots.  Tilly had nothing to do but watch, and the money piled up in the drawer. 

Ace Perkins was the last one, due at ten-forty-five.  Ace was an anomaly, not a local but recommended five months ago by a reliable source.  And he had proved to be the kind, damn, you’d like to clone him, you know?  Biggest producer for the last three  months, had a string of solid clients that he took care of like a mother.  If he had any self-destructive habits Rudy hadn’t been able to spot them.  Sometimes Rudy worried that maybe Ace was too good to be true.

But his arrest record said otherwise.  Rudy paid a stipend every month to an inside man at TPD, so when he needed to know something he got it toot sweet, no arguments and no dealing.  Before he hired Ace he got a copy of his Arizona prison history, three-plus years served of a three-to-ten for cocaine trafficking.  Not extensive but not pussy either.  He had served his time in Florence where he got those dragon tattoos and, Rudy guessed, the crooked fingers that didn’t match the rest of his handsome appearance.   

He’d shown a lot of street savvy right from the start, had no trouble finding good corners for his crack business and quickly established a great roster of high-end clients for the snow.  He knew how to find the lawyers and real estate brokers, restaurateurs and high-end trophy wives who could come up with the cash, none of this whining around about credit that some dealers listened to.  Rudy had never seen anybody put together a client base from the low and high ends of the Tucson coke trade any faster than Ace had. 

The other thing he liked, Ace was as big a stickler for precision as he was himself.  Set your clock by the guy, almost.  So when his watch read five to eleven, Rudy began tapping his fingers on the desk.   At fifteen past he turned a puzzled face to Tilly Stubbs and said, unnecessarily, “Ace is half an hour late.” 

Tilly nodded, his shaved head reflecting the dim light in the tire store.  His hair had been strawberry blonde when he had any, and he’d kept the high coloring that went with it, pink cheeks and bright blue eyes.  An abused childhood had left him with an off-center nose and one oddly dented cheek, and the gang warfare of his youth in the rancid slums of Detroit had cost him several teeth and a piece of one ear.  So instead of the jolly appearance nature had designed for him, Tilly had a face that looked almost as dangerous as he actually was.  

He stood up, his white T-shirt straining to cover his massive chest and biceps, and said, “’M on it.”  Because his larynx had been damaged in a fight during his first prison term, his voice had the dry rasp of gravel sliding over rock.  Graceful for a big man, he moved without making any noise. 

He walked out onto cracked asphalt parking lot in front of the tire shop with his cell phone at his ear, calling Sanchez and Brody, Rudy’s other two street thugs.  Rudy’s  operation wasn’t big enough to need three goons full-time, so the other two men ran errands too and moved a little coke on the side.  Sanchez was Rudy’s main snoop, too, and Brody doubled as chauffeur and gofer.  Brody had once explained to Tilly why the boss loved to call at weird hours and get you to do these stupid chores that shouldn’t be your job at all. 

“That way he feels like you’re loyal, you’ll do anything he asks.  It’s nothing personal,” he added, resting a gritty callused fingertip briefly on Tilly’s huge forearm, “Ol’ Rudy, he’s a equal-opportunity ball-buster.”

After Tilly left, Rudy stayed where he was, sorting the money into piles by denominations.  He banded it, entered the total in a tiny spiral notebook that he carried in his shirt pocket.  Just the total, everything else was in his head.  He packed the cash in the bottom of a yellow plastic toolbox he’d bought on special at Sears twelve years ago, and covered it with a set of socket wrenches glued to a false plastic bottom cannibalized from an identical box.  He replaced the cantilevered upper shelf full of screwdrivers and pliers, snapped the lid shut and carried his toolbox out to his three-year-old Buick.  The dowdy older car worked for him just as the tire shop did, hid him in plain sight.  For the rest of the day he worked his carefully crafted magic, transforming drug money into payments for car repairs, groceries, booze, and the price of two used Toyotas. 

But under the stoic busyness of his day, the nagging worry ran like water under rock,
Where’s Ace?
  He knew very well what he controlled and what he could not control, had lived a long time with the fear that must never be mentioned but never went away. 
It will be some little thing that gets you if you stay in this too long,
he had told himself many times, s
ome stupid little thing you never saw coming. 
He was not a fool, he knew nobody beat the
system forever.  He only needed two more years, three at the most.  As careful as he had been, he thought, three more years was not expecting too much.  But all day Tuesday he asked himself,
Is this the day of the stupid little thing? 

CHAPTER SIX

Always some stupid little thing.  Damn.
  Sarah folded up her phone, grousing to herself, as she stepped out of the lab into the dazzle of a hot morning. An attorney trying one of her cases, yielding to an anxiety fit, wanted her to review the testimony of a witness—
how many times have we been over this?
—and call him back before noon.  She promised matter-of-factly to do it.  “Sure, no sweat.”  Because you could never have too many friends around the courthouse, could you?  But as she walked to her car she grumbled to herself.  She wanted to go back to her desk right now and type up this morning’s notes before they got cold.  Damn!  Never enough time in a day.

Back at the station she caught a little break, though; Jimmy was still out and all the other detectives in her section were up on third floor, checking in evidence from the shooting out on Speedway.  Nobody wanted to talk to her.  She grabbed an orange out of the snack bar in the break room, peeled it quickly and ate it a section at a time while she pushed herself through the drudgery of reading through case notes from last spring.  When she finished the call-back to the attorney, she laid her notes from today’s crime scene by her keyboard and typed them up quickly with no interruptions. 

Pleased with herself, wanting somebody to brag to, she looked around for Ibarra., He was at his desk.  She walked back to tell him that Animal had set the time for tomorrow’s autopsy.

“Two o’clock, and that’s pretty firm, there’s only one case ahead of us.”

“Damn!” Ibarra said, and smacked his desk.

“What?”

“Something’s gotta give around here,” he said.  “How can I be at the lab with you tomorrow while I’m talking to all these family members that want to give me information in the Grayling shooting?”  He held up a fistful of phone messages.  “And Delaney’s on my tail to finish the interviews from that stabbing over on Miracle Mile.  What the hell?”  He threw his pencil down on the desk.  It flew off across the room, narrowly missing the detective at the next desk, who sent him a black frown but went on with his phone conversation.  “Shit, the faster I work the deeper I dig the hole!”   He slammed some papers around on his desk for a few seconds, then calmed down and looked sheepishly at Sarah.  “Sorry.”

“You need some Tums?” 

“I’m not having gas, I’m having a hissy fit.”

“We don’t both have to go to the autopsy,” Sarah said.  “I’ll take good notes and you can read them.  Or are you really having a hissy fit about something else?”

He rubbed his face hard with both hands, got up and picked up his pencil, came back and sat down.  “Good call.  Two of my kids have got sinus infections.  Sandy and I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since last week some time.   You’re talking to the walking dead.”  He did a zombie imitation, eyes rolled back and tongue hanging out. 

“Jimmy, why don’t you put in for some family leave?”

“I’m saving it up for when I get my vasectomy,” he said, and they both laughed.  Jimmy’s family planning negotiations with his devoutly Catholic wife had regaled the section for years. 

“Forget the autopsy,” Sarah said.  “I’ll handle it.”  She was secretly pleased.  She always thought she learned more at the investigations she did alone.  But she went back to her desk reflecting that Jimmy’s family situation was going to damage his career if he didn’t find some way to get it under control.   She wished she knew how to help; she had been to the edge of that cliff herself.     

She was answering e-mails when her phone rang.  A man’s voice yelled, “One thing I hate it’s a smartass.”

A little buzz of satisfaction raced along her nerves.  “This wouldn’t be Bud Ganz, by any chance?”

“Not if he could help it but yes, this is Ganz-by-any-chance.”

“And are you calling to tell me that you’ve already found a match?”

“I sure as hell am, lady.”

“Well now, ain’t that a hole in the boat?  How come so fast?”

“My next work order after I talked to you, there was a mistake in the request so I had to send it back.  So I said to myself, “Self,’ I said, ‘let’s show that uppity Sarah Burke she may look good in pants but she isn’t any smarter than the rest of us.’  He coughed again, terrible whoops that made her hold the phone away from her ear.  She put it back fast when she heard him say, “But now instead of that, goddammit, I gotta call and tell the uppity woman she was right.”  Actually he was bursting with pride, she thought—over the moon in love with himself.

“Where’d you find him?” 

“Florence.  Your victim is Adolph Alvin Perkins, a.k.a. ‘Ace’.  Cute, huh?  Ace.”  He made a rude noise.  “Served three years and three months of a 3-to-ten for dealing cocaine, released early this year.  I’ll copy this to your e-mail.”

“Good.  Just that one conviction, huh?”

“Well, in Arizona.  I’ll do the nationwide search some day soon, but you seemed like you wanted this before the body got cold, so
¾
”

“Yes.  Has anybody mentioned to you lately that you do very superior work?”

“Go ahead, flatter me shamelessly.”

“I mean it.  I owe you a big one.”

“You want to pay up?  Sex is always good.” 

Ganz always made verbal passes at her, but in a routine way that made it easy not to take offense.  In a workplace that was still mostly male, Sarah picked her fights carefully, but tried hard to win the ones she couldn’t dodge.  She traded a few more giddy jokes with Ganz before she thanked him again and hung up.  As soon as his e-mail arrived she  charged out of her cubicle, crowing, “Hey, Jimmy, we got an ID on our victim already!  Bud found him for us!”

“No kidding?  Lemmee see.  Oh, this is great, Sarah.”  When he’d read the record she laid in front of him he said, “Why don’t you get somebody on the support staff to do a search for his address and phone number?”

“I will.  And if they find it, you and I better take a look before we let the tech staff in there.  Oh, but you’re too busy today, aren’t you?”

“Hey, I’ll make time for that.”  He looked at his watch and did a jittery little sitting-down dance of conflicting impulses.  “But listen, I’ve got a carload of Graylings waiting to talk to me right now—”

“No problem, I have to get a warrant anyway.  How long will you be?”

“An hour.  Two at the most.” 

“Go.”  He grabbed his recorder and headed out the door.  Sarah sent her information requests to the support staff and called Delaney. 

“Good job, Sarah.”  Delaney was too fair not to give her the praise she had earned.  “Good call.  You found an address yet?”

“We’re searching—should have it any minute.”

“Good.  Next step is a warrant, right?”

“You bet.”