I took another chance that evening following cocktails. After getting Robin in the guest room and setting the alarm, I walked around the corner to a bungalow on Encanto Boulevard. It belonged to a neighbor who we had over for dinner parties, when we used to have them, and saw at Central Church on Palm Lane, before Lindsey had decided that if God really did exist she hated him. The door opened after the first knock and Amy Preston invited me inside.
She was fair-haired and attractive, in a girl-next-door way, wearing her mid-thirties well. As usual, she was dressed in a conservative pants suit. If asked where she worked, she would say, “the Department of Justice.” But she really worked for what I kidded her was the “fun agency”: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The joke had been spoiled somewhat when the feds added “explosives” to the title.
I met her when she first moved into the neighborhood and had stopped by to ask if a homeless person was camping behind our house. The answer was no—the camper had temporarily bedded down behind the overgrown back yard of a nearby house, owned by an elderly couple whose kids I had gone to school with. But that was how we met. It took a long time to realize that her businesslike restraint was not just because she was the supervisor of an elite federal law-enforcement unit, but also because she was shy.
“David. My God, are you all right?”
I told her I was and took a seat on one of the mission-style chairs in her perfect Pottery Barn living room.
“I guess not completely, since you’re packing.”
I had the Python under my windbreaker. I said, “An armed society is a polite society.”
“Yeah, yeah. I read about what happened. Did you know this…person? The story only said it was an unidentified male.”
“It was Robin’s boyfriend. You never met him.” I turned down her offer of wine. “He claimed to teach at NYU and was in town writing about sustainability. It’s the latest fad in academia.” I paused. “Unfortunately, it all seems to have been a scam.” I continued: Now the cops had an entirely different assumption, all based on the man’s ring that I had found in the death house. I described the design.
“El Verdugo.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “He’s been on the radar for several years.” She added, “If he’s real. Some analysts think he’s an amalgamation of different hired killers, but the myth is more powerful to the cartel.”
“The bogeyman.”
Her eyes were still. “Something like that.”
Amy was circumspect, even though we both worked in law enforcement. At one time, I would have been inclined to think: typical fed. Now I was more willing to accept that she had secrets she had to keep. We didn’t talk shop and I had never asked her for a professional favor.
“Are you still staying at home?” she said. “I’m surprised. Robin might be a target—I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. PPD’s providing protection, I assume.”
“I don’t count on it. The lead investigator is Kate Vare.”
“Ah, Ms. Professional Jealousy. Surely she wouldn’t let that get in the way.”
“I wish I could say that.”
The talk stoked my anxiety about Robin. But she knew the drill: if the alarm went off, she would immediately get in the safe space behind the steel plate, with the Chief’s Special, and dial 911. “Tell the dispatcher,” I had drilled her, “it’s a break-in that is in progress. They respond to those words, ‘in progress.’ ”
Amy sipped from the glass of white wine on the table beside her chair. The calm normality I felt in her house was so at odds with the intensity of our lives on Cypress that it broke my stride, diverted me from my mission. Then I heard Bruce Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love” album softly playing in the background. Just the kind of thing I had banned from my life lately. The Boss sang “Cautious Man” and the weights on my heart swelled. “Weights” was probably the wrong word. They were compartments in which I had placed recent disasters and sorrows — stuffed them full and heavy and tried every waking moment to keep the lids on. It was a learned skill and I was still learning. Fortunately she filled the silence.
“How do you like working for the new sheriff?”
“I’m not going to stay.”
I lied. I bent the truth. For the moment, there was no reason for Amy to think I didn’t still carry a badge. It was a useful fiction and I could use it for a few more days without getting caught; paperwork traveled slowly down on Jefferson Street. I had used my name and badge number that afternoon to run my scumbag through the NCIC. His wallet had two stolen credit cards and fifteen dollars cash, but his California driver’s license was true. And he was a member of La Familia—on parole after doing time for assault and weapons possession, the latest in a long and violent sheet.
“Here’s a gift for lighting your backyard grill.” I reached into my windbreaker pocket and tossed Amy the yellow book of matches. She studied it all of five seconds.
“Where did you get this, David?”
“Off a banger who was watching the house the other night. He’s La Fam. Then I took a little field trip, too. Quite an operation at Jesus Is Lord. Good ole Barney.”
“You know you shouldn’t be doing this.” Her voice assumed a taut, supervisory tone. “If you see a suspicious vehicle, call PPD. This isn’t a county case and you’re personally involved anyway. I can’t believe you did that.”
But I did, so I just smiled at her, and let the silence collect between us.
“How’s Lindsey taking all this?”
“She’s concerned. She’s in D.C.”
“Already? Well, she’ll go far. Fighting cyber attacks is the growing field and she’s got the skills.”
I didn’t go for the distraction. I just watched her and kept my mouth shut.
“Look,” she said, “you know Phoenix is the center for people smuggling into the United States. The coyotes bring them across the desert and once they’re here, they spread out all over the country. Even corporations hire the smugglers to get them to the poultry and hog operations in North Carolina or the packing plants in Nebraska. We’re number one in kidnappings and almost all of that is tied into the people smuggling. Now the probability is high that we’ve become ground zero in the drug trafficking organizations’ ongoing expansion in this country. So if La Familia has shown up, it doesn’t surprise me.”
“And they say we don’t have a diverse economy.”
She didn’t smile. “Local law enforcement is not ready for what’s coming, David. That war down in Juarez and Tijuana—it could come here. The people behind their gated communities think this won’t touch them. They’re wrong.”
“But I thought tax cuts would solve everything,” I said.
“The thing is, we don’t just import and distribute, with all the bodies along the way. We’re probably the biggest hub for firearms smuggling back the other way.”
“The drug war in Mexico.”
“Exactly,” she said. “Calderon’s offensive has set off a bloodbath down there. The cartels get their guns from here.” The Mexican president had promised an offensive against the narcos, and the border had been convulsed with violence. I wondered when we would have a failed state on our southern flank. And the firepower for the bad guys was courtesy of the good old U.S. of A.
I asked her if it was that easy.
She nodded emphatically. “The gun laws are so lax. There are six thousand licensed gun dealers in the border states and we have two hundred agents to police them. Try to get an Arizona jury to convict these gun dealers. Not going to happen.”
I listened as she explained the enterprise: American citizens can take the guns across the border—they won’t be searched going in. The smugglers hire Americans with clean records, have them buy three or four assault rifles, and take them south. Sometimes they buy at gun shows where there’s no requirement to notify the authorities. Other times they use licensed dealers. She said, “Most of the time it moves below the radar. Hundreds of individuals going south with guns. Drugs and money moving north to pay for them. It’s very hard to detect.”
The Jesus Is Lord Pawn shop didn’t seem hard to detect. I described the store.
“I’m aware of it.” And that was all she said.
So I detailed what else I saw: the black Suburban, the well-dressed Hispanics, and the large quantity of boxes they loaded. “They were a tad out of place there, to say the least.” Springsteen sang “One Step Up.” I fought against my guilt and gloom like a man trying to stay standing in a brutal windstorm. Emotional honesty and mordant guitars were not what I needed at that moment. And then it occurred to me. “Mexican cops, right?”
Amy Preston sipped her white wine and shook her head. “You know I can’t comment…”
I finished the sentence for her: “on an ongoing investigation.”
“Exactly.”
I said, “My problem is personal. The people who are watching Robin, the ones who chased us with guns, they’re ongoing, too. So everybody needs to understand there’s an innocent civilian here and I’ll do what I have to do to protect her.” My machismo didn’t carry me far. I watched her face and ran it all through my head. So after a pause, I added, “I just don’t want to get in somebody’s way.”
But I knew that I already had.