“What’s your piece of the action?” Peralta asked.
“Wish I had some, el sheriff.” He spat toward the sidewalk. “For us, it’s all about maintain. We just fighting to keep the business we got.”
“Just a hard-working businessman, huh?”
He nodded. “Exact.”
Peralta stood. “Thanks. You stay safe now.” He nodded to me and we walked back across Central.
Behind us came, “Hey, what are you going to do for me, Peralta? What about El Verdugo? Cut me some slack!”
“See,” Peralta said. “He can’t help himself.”
“What’s a mayate?”
“Now, Mapstone, I wouldn’t want to make you go all politically correct on me.”
***
Back home, Robin lit the Peace and Prosperity candle and sat with me in the study. After the day of visits to the most scenic parts of the city, I still didn’t know where Peralta was going. It felt as if we were up against an army of ghosts and impossible odds.
“Was I just a fool?” Robin asked, her face in her hands. “I always thought, the way I grew up, I had a pretty good bastard detector. But not with Jax. Pedro Alejandro Vega. El Verdugo. What a moron…”
I reached over and touched her shoulder.
She stood, stepped in front of me, and bent down. I felt her long fingers against the sides of my face and then her lips on mine. I kissed her back with minimal stabs of guilt, grasping her waist to pull her closer. Her hair spilled around me and our tongues found each other. It wasn’t the best kiss I’d ever had, but it was close, damned close, and if only for a moment it vanquished all the fear and grief and hurt. When I said I didn’t trust Robin, it was about this. I didn’t trust myself.
“Take me out in the back yard and let’s look at the stars,” she said.
Our back yard was indeed a good place for stargazing, despite being in the heart of the city. Fourteen-percent humidity would do that. I told her it was too dangerous.
She sighed and sat back on her haunches in front of me. “David, are we ever going to have sex?” She held both my hands. “I don’t know about you, but I really need sex.”
“Robin, I love Lindsey. I made a vow.”
“Love is complicated,” she said. “Anyway, she released you from it.”
I looked away.
“I know what she said to you in Washington. I know it word for word.”
I met her gray eyes. “How can you know that? Lindsey and I were alone, walking on the mall.”
“Because she told me.”
Contingency is the great trickster of history. Abraham Lincoln might have given in to the South and let the warring sister go in peace, but he refused. In the desperate months between the election and inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt, when the country faced depression and potentially revolution, a gunman fired at the president-elect. He missed. Housing prices were supposed to go on rising indefinitely, justifying all manner of risk and financial mischief, especially in Phoenix. Only they didn’t. And after a long, long dry spell, last May-the causes were the prosaic ones that settle into marriages, even when love and affection persist, and I was as much to blame as she… After that long drought, Lindsey and I had made frenzied love with the air conditioning washing over our bodies. She didn’t take time to put in her diaphragm but she thought it would be safe.
