The Long Fall (12 page)

Ahead, South Mountain National Park enfolds the southern boundary of Phoenix. From this distance, the mountains resemble an immense open accordion lying on its back.

“Loosen up, Jimmy. You’re acting like a little boy who’s been forced to invite a girl to his birthday party.”

Jimmy keeps his eyes on the road. “This Bonnie and Clyde thing you cooked up, you sure you want to go through with it?”

“We made an agreement, Jimmy. Nothing’s changed.”

Jimmy starts tapping the top of the steering wheel. “Why are you doing this? I still don’t get it.”

Evelyn reaches back and lifts her hair from the back of her neck, holding it up one-handed. “Don’t worry about my reasons. Just hold up your end.” She waits a moment, then looks over at Jimmy and says, “Speaking of which.”

“I’m setting something up, okay? I’ll fill you in, all the details, when you’re done shooting.”

“Sounds good.” Evelyn lets her hair fall back down over her shoulders.

Jimmy turns right on Dobbins, heading west. The farmhouse is a stucco rectangle setting atop a flattened crest, a long gravel drive curving along its eastern boundary.

He stops in front of a shiny new aluminum gate that Richard had put up. He gets out and picks the lock, then hops back into the truck, moving up the drive, the gravel jumping under the tires and popcorning the truck’s undercarriage.

“When I was a kid,” Jimmy says, pointing out the window, “my grandfather told me there was buried treasure on the place. Supposed to belong to a gang of outlaws who came to a bad end. Untold wealth, that’s what he said. The son of a bitch even went so far, drew out a map on some ratty paper, and then passed it off to me as something his grandfather had taken from a dead man’s pockets. Hell, I was eight years old. I believed him. Every chance I got, I was out here with a shovel. Gramps, there, sitting on the back porch in a lawn chair, big tumblerful of bourbon, egging me on.”

“What about Richard?” Evelyn asks. “Did he help you look?”

“Nah,” Jimmy says. “Richard, he had a paper route. Two of them actually. Even then he was branching out.”

Jimmy parks the truck on the gravel apron next to the house and gets out. The whole place has gone feral. He can barely match memory to fact.

The dark brown stucco walls of the house have been weatherworn to a dirty tan. The roof on the back porch has partially collapsed. There’s a papery gray hornet’s nest, squat and bulbous as a basketball, hanging from the eaves above the kitchen window. The front lawn, or what once passed for it, is four acres of tangle and choke.

Until Richard put up the gate, for over two decades the locals had been using the back seventeen acres as a dumping ground. Scattered among the evenly spaced rows of the orchard Jimmy remembers—now nothing more than a bunch of brittle sticks holding sickly golf-ball-sized oranges and lemons—are televisions and refrigerators and stoves and sofas and bedsprings and mattresses, piles of bald tires, an installment plan graveyard, even a rust-eaten carcass of an old Chevy Nova, sunk onto its shocks, its windows and engine missing.

It’s not the memories or the present state of things that matters though. What matters is the dirt under his feet and who holds the deed to it. Twenty undeveloped acres in a city ringed by mountains and very little space to grow. What matters is the raw potential, the cash cow that his brother had taken from him.

Jimmy watches Evelyn climb out of the truck.

He then walks into the ghost of the orchard and sets up targets—old paint cans, glass bottles, beer cans—on the spindly limbs and outcroppings of rocks. He walks back to the truck and takes out a canvas bag holding a Colt Diamondback .38 and enough ammunition to wipe out Utah. He loads the Diamondback and hands it to Evelyn.

“Pull the trigger,” he says, “and you’re in business.”

Jimmy drags the cooler from the bed of the truck and cracks a beer. Evelyn’s positioned herself about ten yards from the targets. Jimmy sits down on the lid of the cooler. He’s got an unencumbered view of the skyline of Phoenix, no thermal inversions, the day clear enough that he can see past Squaw Peak to the mountains on the city’s far northern rim. In the middle distance is Sky Harbor International, and he watches three jets circle and make their approach, wings blinking in the sun as they bank.

Evelyn’s watched too much television. She’s got herself set up in an elaborate shooter’s stance that might make for high drama on a cop show but won’t do her any good out here. She misses everything she fires at and walks over to the cooler.

She’s wearing a pair of faded denim shorts, a crisp white T-shirt, and a pair of espadrilles. No makeup or sunglasses. She’s pale-skinned, the shade you find on the inside of an orange peel.

Jimmy gives her a beer and shows her how to reload the Colt. He’s not in the mood to do much more than that right now. She takes a box of bullets and goes back to her original position and starts blasting away.

This whole crime thing, Jimmy has no intention of disappointing Evelyn and landing himself back in prison, not now when he can use the green from his share of the dry-cleaning holdups to get himself clear with Ray Harp.

Jimmy also has no intention of ending up in prison again from committing a crime with an amateur for a partner.

He’s set something up that’s safe and sweet.

Yesterday, Pete Samoa had intro’ed Jimmy to a guy named Vic Stamp, who owns a large volume-discount shoe store. Vic has a little problem with some of his stock, in particular, a line of athletic shoes he can’t move, the shoes neon green on purple with thick yellow soles and flashing red lights embedded on the sides of the heels. That they’re ugly is bad enough, but the death kiss on sales is the dye they used on them, which has the unfortunate tendency to run every time the shoes get wet.

The manufacturer, after stalling on returns, has gone Chapter Eleven, so Vic Stamp’s stuck with five hundred pairs of Force One footwear. He needs someone to come in and rip off the overstock so he can collect on the insurance.

The job’s a straight grand, plus whatever Jimmy can lay off the shoes for. Pete Samoa’s offered to pick up the lot for seventy-five cents a pair, which Pete will then turn around and fence through a deal he’s cut with one of the government agents on the reservations.

Everybody’s happy. Evelyn gets her crime. Vic collects on the insurance. Pete turns a tidy profit. Jimmy pockets his share of the thousand and can pay the balance on what he owes Ray Harp. And until the first rainstorm, five hundred Native American kids will have some snazzy new sneakers.

Evelyn will never have to know about the insurance angle. Jimmy can pass the job off as a straight burglary, giving it a little glamour and danger to sweeten it up for her. Vic Stamp wants them to hit the store tomorrow night when they’re doing after-hours inventory. He’s arranged it so the manager will go on break around ten and forget to set the alarm. Jimmy and Evelyn will have a little less than thirty minutes to get in and out.

Jimmy lifts his head at the sound of glass breaking. Evelyn’s finally zapped a target. She walks over and Jimmy gives her a beer, takes another for himself. Evelyn’s face is flushed from the heat, and there’s a dark wedge of sweat running from the neckline of her T-shirt to the middle of her chest.

“Shooting’s harder than I thought it would be,” she says, tilting back the can.

“That’s your problem,” Jimmy says. “Thinking about it. You shouldn’t do that. You need to think with your body.”

“How are you supposed to do that?”

“You jumped rope when you were a girl, right? You start thinking about jumping rope, you can’t do it. You’ll trip yourself up. Same thing with shooting a gun.”

Evelyn finishes the beer and drops the can on the ground. “Show me,” she says.

Jimmy reloads the Diamondback and walks over to where Evelyn had stood earlier. He points out three bottles he’d set among the limbs of a dying lemon tree and two cans resting on top of a ledge of rock. He takes a deep breath and slowly lets it out, then raises his arm and gets off five quick shots, hitting everything but one of the cans.

“I thought you didn’t like guns,” Evelyn says.

“I don’t. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to use them.” He hands Evelyn the Colt. She steps up and points out two cans.

“Those,” she says.

“TV time,” Jimmy says, shaking his head. He walks over and puts his hand on the small of Evelyn’s back and presses so that she drops the semicrouch action and stands straighter.

“You don’t need both arms either,” he says, reaching over and disengaging her left hand from where she’s locked it to her right wrist. “The Diamondback’s not that heavy.”

He tells her to stand there for a minute and breathe. Empty her mind of everything, then simply raise her arm and fire.

She misses both cans. But not by as much as earlier.

“This time, the trigger,” Jimmy says, stepping closer. “You’re pulling the trigger and throwing off your aim. Squeeze it instead.”

Jimmy stands just behind Evelyn’s right shoulder. He reaches down and lays his arm over hers, encircling her wrist with his fingers, and moves her arm so that the gun is pointing straight down. He keeps his arm where it is.

“Do like I told you,” he says. “Breathe.”

Evelyn has her hair pulled back in a careless ponytail, and there are two small moles side by side where her hairline meets her neck. Her skin’s flushed from the heat and lacquered with a thin sheen of sweat. He smells traces of sunscreen and shampoo. He leans closer and whispers into the seashell whorl of her ear, “Don’t think. Move when I do. Then squeeze.”

He lifts her arm in one fluid movement and stops. She fires. The can somersaults off the ledge.

“The other one now,” he says, turning her slightly. She’s not wearing a bra. Her breast shifts and bunches against the underside of his arm.

She squeezes. The second can jumps and disappears into a thicket of mesquite.

He’s about to let go of her arm when she turns her head.

She hesitates. Then he does.

He’s thinking she’s going to step to the side and away.

She doesn’t.

He has no idea how long the kiss lasts.

Neither of them says anything when they break apart. Jimmy can see her nipples through the T-shirt. A muscle in his stomach jumps.

“I’ll decide if that happened or not,” Evelyn says.

Jimmy looks at her, shakes his head, and then walks back over to the cooler.

A few seconds later, there’s a pistol shot. Jimmy ducks.

The hornet’s nest under the eaves of the house explodes.

Fifteen yards away, Evelyn lowers her arm and slowly lets out her breath.

A
aron Limbe hangs back, keeping at least six cars between him and the truck. He’s working his own clock tonight, not Ray Harp’s, and holding the tail’s about as difficult as striking a match. The truck’s a boxy rental, a caution-light yellow, with an enclosed bed. Coates is sticking to the center lane, going north on route 17.

Limbe had trusted to instinct and staked out the Mesa View Inn, and Coates and his sister-in-law had not disappointed him. She had pulled up in the yellow rental a little after 9:00
P.M.
and headed straight for room 110. They left ten minutes later.

Tonight, Limbe misses his uniform, the night-blue fit, its sharp, precise creases, the weight of the badge on its pocket. Buttoning the shirt had been as familiar as writing his signature. He misses the way the uniform placed him and established boundaries.

At times like this, when thinking of his fall from the police department or of being reduced to working for a lowlife like Ray Harp, it becomes a test of Limbe’s will not to simply go on and kill Coates outright.

But he must stay strong, he tells himself, and inhabit what he knows.

Jimmy Coates is the last tie to Limbe’s old life. His death cannot be insignificant.

Aaron Limbe must get it right.

Jimmy Coates must fully learn the nature and breadth of consequence.

Aaron Limbe unwraps a breath mint and slips it onto his tongue.

Besides, he thinks, the sister-in-law is a wrinkle he hadn’t expected.

The rental truck’s turn signal comes to life, and Limbe follows it off the Camelback Road exit, Coates heading west now, toward Glendale.

The sky’s lower than the mountains tonight, thick and churning with clouds strong-armed by constant winds and skeined by lightning. Everything’s in motion.

Coates slows as he passes Shoe City. The lights in the store are on, but no cars are in the lot. There’s a portable billboard out front advertising an Inventory Reduction Sale starting tomorrow and a large revolving shoe sprouting from the store’s roof.

Coates takes the next side street off Camelback and pulls in behind the store.

Aaron Limbe goes on for a block and circles back. He parks away from the halogen light on the corner under a line of date palms and watches Coates back the truck up to the loading bay. Above Limbe, the palm fronds snap and rattle in the wind.

Jimmy Coates stands outside the truck for a moment, looking around, and then climbs up on the loading bay. Evelyn Coates gets out and opens the rear door of the truck.

Aaron Limbe grips the steering wheel. He can feel the storm coming in, the sudden drop in barometric pressure, the wind shifting from a hiss to a roar, grit and sand pinging against his car, the palms’ clatter now sounding like a pencil thrust between the blades of a fan.

The headaches again.

Not now, he tells himself.

He wills back the sky.

But it’s as if the wind has found its way into the veins running beneath both temples. Limbe looks down at his hands white-knuckling the steering wheel and then slowly lifts his left and cups the crown of his head.

If he’s not careful, the headaches take him away from himself.

Through a tight squint, Limbe watches Jimmy Coates and his sister-in-law scramble, moving armloads of boxes from the rear of the store and dumping them in the truck. As they cross the loading bay, the wind rips the top off most of the boxes, scattering them across the lot and pinning them to the wire fence bordering the street.