Something primal inside cocked my muscles to reach across the counter, pull his head down into the glass display case by his ears, and add to his facial deformity. I could have done it before he ever got his fat hand to his gun. I did a quick relaxation exercise Sharon Peralta had taught me. I took a deep, grateful breath. The past was gone and the future was unknowable, even if I couldn’t face it. All I had to do was be in that moment. My lungs filled with air.
“You okay, mister?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just thinking about how much money I’d like to come spend here.”
He smiled wide, showing a set of teeth right out of Hollywood. “Don’t let the old lady know. She’ll want you to buy furniture or some such shit. But if she’s a shooter, bring her by! Got an underground range!”
I thanked him and walked out the door, the laser sensor sounding a loud tone back in the store. From the speakers, Warren Zeavon was kicking in “Lawyers, Guns and Money.”
Robin was sitting in the car when I got back. Her hands were covering the Chief’s Special that sat between her legs. Today she had refused the protective vest and I hadn’t argued.
“Any trouble?”
“Just sitting out in this suburban hell. Maybe that’s unfair. Somebody built this, sweated over it, maybe was proud of it. I sat here wondering if anyone could paint this as a landscape…capture the desolation. How small it all is under the sky. I wish I had the talent to paint. I don’t, so I studied the ones who did.”
“You’re not through yet,” I said.
She smiled slightly. “What now?”
“Let’s sit awhile and watch.”
“I’ve never been on a stakeout. But why are we doing this?”
“Following a clue.”
“Why not let the lady cop who hates you do it?”
I shrugged.
“Because she doesn’t give a damn. She thinks you’re hiding something, and she wants to squeeze you.” That’s why we sat here. A connection between Jax/Verdugo and the gun store might be tenuous. It might be important. I had contacts beyond Kate Vare. I couldn’t protect Robin alone. Maybe I was a fool to think I could protect her at all. They won’t drop it, the scumbag had said last night. They never do.
Robin said, “Do you believe me?”
“Yes.”
I said it with a certainty that I rationally had confidence in. It wasn’t because of the nights we had spent side-by-side. I told myself that. The silence lasted long enough for the mood to change.
“You miss the cops, David. You do. Don’t deny it.”
She smiled wide, making her face beautiful, and starting to resemble her sister. I set that thought aside and pulled across the street into the lot of another decaying set of storefronts, then parked beside some clothing-donation containers. To the south, Shaw Butte and the North Mountains were befogged in the dirty air of three million cars. When I was in high school, Bell Road had been a two-lane highway through a mix of flat desert and used-car lots. The city planners had vowed it would be the northern boundary of Phoenix for decades to come. Now it was six lanes wide and the city limits were many miles farther north. The growth machine had come and gone, a freeway paralleled it a quarter mile north, and Bell had been left seedy for much of its route from Sun City across Phoenix until it became more prosperous-looking near the Scottsdale city limits. Every place changes. I wondered why my city had to change mostly for the worse.
