Wrong Thing (19 page)

When his food arrived, it seemed like the best thing he had ever eaten. He paid for it and left.

He headed back into Phoenix. He exited on Seventh Street, went along to Monroe and drove west a few blocks, until he saw McCaffrey's, the pub he and Vanjii had once gone to, adjacent to the hotel they had spent the night in. He found a parking space down the street, parked and walked to the bar.

It was busy. There were people who'd come for happy hour and never managed to leave, and people just arriving after movies or the hockey game at America West Arena. At one end of the bar, a band was playing folk songs. The Kid ordered a beer and sat at the bar and listened to the band.

At the beginning of a song, a woman and a man got up and started to dance, standing right in front of the musicians. They danced slowly, holding each other close. The man was balding and the woman had gray in her hair and the Kid somehow knew they had been together for years. It felt like a knife in his spine.

When the band took a break, he pulled Vanjii's letter from his pocket, looked at the phone number, and dialed it on the bar's public phone. It rang busy. He tried again just before the bar closed, but it was still busy.

Louise was in the living room, working the phone, talking to men as they jacked off. Carlos, as usual, wasn't home. Vanjii was in the kitchen, drinking coffee and staring at the table. She hadn't told Louise anything and didn't think she was going to. She didn't even know how to tell it to herself.

A fly landed on the table. It sat there, eyes sending images to the brain, lungs receiving oxygen, heart beating with certainty. Vanjii didn't think, she just slapped with her hand, coming from behind so the fly saw nothing, and then the fly was crushed flat, just a stain on the wood. Vanjii washed her hands and made more coffee. She wondered when she'd be able to cry.

When the Kid left the bar, he walked around for a few minutes. At one in the morning, it felt hardly less warm than a summer afternoon in Santa Fe. The downtown streets were so clean they looked sterile, and a person slept in every other doorway. The Kid wanted to walk for longer, but he could find nowhere to walk to, so he went to his car.

He was almost out of gas. He stopped at a Circle K on First Avenue and Van Buren. As he was pumping the gas, a guy came up to him. “Hey. Excuse me . . . ”

The Kid looked at him and didn't say anything.

“Listen,” the guy said. “I real need a favor. My little girl's sick, and she's at Thirty-Fifth Avenue and Camelback, and I need to go there and see her tonight, but I got no car. If you can just give me a ride up there, I'll give you five bucks for the gas.”

The Kid didn't question the guy's story, because he could see right through it. The reason the story wasn't more credible or better explained was because the guy was junk sick, and he wanted to go visit his dealer.

“I been asking lots of people, and they all said no. I really need to see her, man.”

“Okay,” said the Kid. “I'll take you there, but I ain't got time to wait for you and bring you back.”

“That's okay, that's no problem. I just need you to take me there. Thank you.”

The drive took about fifteen minutes. The junkie clumsily tried to make conversation, and the Kid went along with it. “Okay, right here,” the junkie said, pointing to an apartment complex. The Kid slowed down, and the junkie got out. “Thanks a lot, man,” he said to the Kid. “Really.”

“Sure,” said the Kid. The junkie tried to pay him for the gas, but the Kid shook his head and drove away.

That junkie was me. It was the only time I ever met the Kid. And it was the first time in years that anybody had helped me out when they didn't have to. I don't know why he did it, I just know he did.

The neighborhood was nicknamed “Gangs R Us,” and the cops were going there more and more often, trying to show a presence. As the Kid drove away, he passed a cop car waiting at a corner. When the cop saw the New Mexico plates, he thought the Kid might either be a visitor who'd gotten lost and could use some advice on neighborhoods to stay out of, or else a drug dealer doing some interstate networking. Either way, the cop felt like talking to him, so he fell in behind him and turned on his lights.

When the Kid saw the lights, the panic rose up inside him like vomit, and he fought to control it and decide what to do. He knew Miguel hadn't reported the car stolen yet, so unless the cops had somehow found out, that couldn't be it. But even if it was just that he had a light out or something, the cop would ask to see a driver's license.

The Kid pulled over and turned off the engine. He watched the cop get out of the car and walk towards him. When the cop was near at his window, the Kid started the car and took off, as the cop sprinted back to his car.

The Kid turned a corner, hit the brakes, jumped out of the car and ran. He heard the cop car appear behind him. He ran harder, shrieking air into his lungs, looking for cover, a place to hide. There wasn't any.

“Hey, asshole. Stop right now or I'll shoot.”

The Kid stopped. Raised his hands. Turned around.

The cop had gotten out of his car and was pointing his gun at him. “Lie down and put your hands behind your back.”

The concrete warm against his cheek. The handcuffs closing around his wrists.

M
adison Street Jail was only a short distance from the pub where he'd spent the evening. The Kid was booked in and fingerprinted and put in a cell.

It was known as the Horseshoe, and it was like no jail the Kid had ever heard of. People would be rotated from cell to cell, so that they lost track of time. The cells they put him in were completely covered with men. There were men sleeping curled around the toilet that had shit dripping off the sides and piss all around the floor. Men were sleeping on top of other men. Others were using toilet rolls as pillows. They lay on the trash that was scattered everywhere from the sack lunches that were provided. The smell was like a kick in the face by a dirty foot.

No one is sure how long the Kid stayed there, but it wasn't very long.

Jeremy Ruvin should have been a cop. He loved cops, and cops loved him. Like many veteran cops, he was a legend in his own lunchtime. But Ruvin wasn't a cop. He was a reporter.

He had spent twenty years at the
Phoenix Weekly,
a free sheet that was distributed throughout the city. It was part of a national chain of weekly papers, and it regarded itself as the only real news outlet in the Valley. This wasn't much of a boast; Phoenix was a city without a real newspaper. The main daily, the
Arizona Republic,
was almost devoid of news and existed to further the interests of the corporations that were developing the city. Its rival, the
Tribune,
had a publisher who openly supported the banning of reporters—including the paper's own—from government meetings to discuss whether public money should be given to aid corporate development. A famous local swindler once observed that, in Phoenix, when you try to sell people out, they take the first offer.

The
Phoenix Weekly
was a tabloid full of long, turgid stories that few people read. But Ruvin's stories won Arizona Press Club awards every year, and had done for as long as anyone could remember. Although his stories were as slanted as those of his peers, they were packed with lurid detail. The cops gave him access that they gave to no one else. Because, no matter what the facts might be, Ruvin would make them look good.

This was something they needed. Phoenix was among the leaders of the country when it came to unjustified police shootings. The city had to pay out millions in lawsuits, and more were pending. But, in the world of Ruvin, every cop on the force was a heroic figure who only shot or beat up unarmed civilians when it was strictly necessary. He never actually lied in print; he just stayed away from stories that might show the police department as it really was.

Ruvin had few hobbies. The only thing he cared about was his identity as a reporter, and the only people he hung out with were the cops and prosecutors he wrote about. In his mind he was famous, his world a black and white movie in which he wore a raincoat and fedora with a tag that read P
RESS
and talked out of the side of his mouth. He imagined the raincoat and fedora so vividly that when you were in his presence you felt like you could almost see them.

When the cops realized that they had the Kid, then realized that they didn't have him anymore, the first reporter they called was Ruvin.

Ruvin and Detective Zack Blantyre had been friends for years. Blantyre had asked Ruvin to write a biography of him, and Ruvin had been sporadically working on it. Now they sat in Durant's restaurant on Central Avenue, and Ruvin asked Blantyre what had happened.

“We don't know what happened,” Blantyre said.

“Zack. You find out you have a triple murderer in your jail. Then you find out he's not in your jail anymore. And you're telling me nobody knows what happened?”

“Okay, off the record—for now, okay . . . ”

Ruvin nodded.

“We do know. He just walked out of there, him and four others. Somebody forgot to lock a door, and five of them just walked. We know it happened, we just don't know how it happened.”

“Zack, no matter how I say it, you know that's not going to look good.”

“No shit. No shit. I mean, it's not like it's the first time this kind of crap's happened at the jail . . . But a fucking three-time killer. You know as well as I do, most of the guys in there are there because they're fucked in the head and got no money . . . but you get guys like this sometimes. I've been saying for a long time that something like this was gonna happen down there someday if they didn't start hiring people who know which way is up.”

“He's from New Mexico?”

“Yeah.”

“So what did he come here for?”

“How should I know, Jer? While we're asking stuff, what did he kill three people for?”

“I'll sit on this,” Ruvin said. “But I can't for long.”

“I'm not asking you to. I just wanted to let you know about it first.”

“Appreciated. Look, I'm not gonna wait and eat lunch. I'll get something on the run. I'm gonna head out to New Mexico today.”