The Long Fall (7 page)

“It’s straight,” he’d said finally.

“No holes?” Jimmy asked.

“None that matter.” Frankie had gathered up his Camels and candy bars and raised his hand, signaling to the guard that the meeting was over.

Familia,
he’d said, shaking his head one more time before he left.

A master plan, Jimmy is thinking on the drive back, that’s what he needs. Not some scrawny, mewling runt of an idea, but a full-fledged master plan with all the accessories.

First, though, he has to make a quick detour to an Auto Zone for a quart of thirty-weight and some tranny fluid, replenishment for the beast he holds the pink slip on, which today, as usual, is burning one and leaking the other.

When he gets back on Route 10, Jimmy thinks he sees a flash of orange in the rearview, but it’s not there when he checks a second time.

The sun’s coming straight through the windshield and baking the cab of the truck. Jimmy had tried wedging a piece of cardboard into the skeleton of the visor, whose insides had dry-rotted away, but after a half hour of rattling and flapping, the cardboard had blown off and out the window.

Phase one of the master plan pretty much comes down to Jimmy trying to stay out of Ray Harp’s way until he can come up with something that will net him some quick cash without landing him in Perryville Correctional again.

Phase two is finding some way to get his inheritance back or, barring that, making his brother pay one way or another for what he did.

Jimmy’s still working on phase three.

When he checks the rearview this time, it’s definitely there. A bright splash of orange.

It’s there, and it’s closing.

Jimmy, he knows how it’s supposed to work. He’s seen all the movies, the action flicks, the hero tailed by the bad guys, then suddenly kicking it in and rocketing out of there, the bad guys cranking it up, too, high-speed-pursuit time, lots of smoking and screeching tires, blaring car horns, sharp cornerings, narrow misses with buses and trucks, running red lights, civilian cars swerving and tipping over, the hero redlining it, the bad guys blasting away at him, Jimmy, like everyone else, able to summon up all the choreographed chaos and mayhem, the fancy stunt maneuvers and all their variations, until the hero either loses the bad guys through a stroke of daring and luck, or the bad guys screw it up and crash into something in a ball-of-flame finale.

Jimmy knows how it’s supposed to work, but when he presses the gas, the Chevy starts shuddering, the transmission slipping into a long torturous whine before shifting up, and his breakaway move is a half-assed forty-seven miles per, barely two clicks above the minimum speed limit for Route 10. He glances in the mirror, hunches over the wheel, and keeps the truck pointed east.

The orange El Camino pulls into the space behind him. Newt Deems gives the horn a short tap.

Jimmy helplessly watches the 51st Avenue exit flip by. Even if he could run, he’d still have a hard time losing Deems. Not in Phoenix, he thinks. The streets in the city and every one of its subdivisions are laid out in a rigid right-angled grid. Eight hundred square miles of boxes. One, that’s it, just one damn street in the whole town, Grant Avenue, that runs at a diagonal.

Newt Deems pulls the Camino into the left lane and even with Jimmy’s pickup. Without looking at Jimmy, Newt hooks his hand over the roof and points at the sign for the next exit. Newt then punches the Camino into the right lane. Jimmy follows him down the ramp and a half block later into a dirt lot next to a roadside fruit-and-vegetable stand.

Newt Deems gets out and stretches, then walks over to the produce stand. Jimmy stays in the truck, trying to keep the engine at something approximating an idle, but it sputters and stalls out. Even with the windows open, the cab quickly fills with the smell of burnt oil.

Jimmy watches Newt approach. He’s carrying a brown paper bag.

Everything about Newt suggests something that’s been incorrectly assembled. He’s a big guy, with overlapping and awkwardly proportioned slabs of muscle covering a squat torso. His eyes are set too close together, lost between the wedge of bone running straight across the base of his forehead and the thick bridge of his nose. He’s sporting a long, thin bandito mustache and one of the most unfortunate haircuts Jimmy has ever seen on another human being—a seemingly impossible cross between a buzz and bowl cut.

You open a thesaurus, Jimmy thinks, and look up
gruesome,
you’d find Newt Deems listed as a synonym.

It’s the meaty right hand that always gets to Jimmy though. Covering its back is a minutely detailed tattoo of a tarantula, its head and bared fangs perched on Newt’s middle knuckles and its legs extending along the top of his fingers. Of the other three legs, one runs across the pad of flesh between thumb and index finger and down into his palm, and the other two curl over either side of his wrist.

Newt has this way of flexing his hand so that it looks like the spider’s moving, the mouth even appearing to chew. The verisimilitude’s kicked up a notch, too, by the fact that the back of Newt’s hand is hairy.

Newt walks up to the truck and opens the door. Jimmy follows him over to the El Camino. Newt perches on the hood and pulls out a cell phone, punches in some numbers, and says, “I got him,” and a moment later, “I wouldn’t count on it.” After giving directions, Newt slips the phone back into the breast pocket of a checked Western-cut shirt and opens the brown paper bag, taking out a nectarine.

Without taking his eyes off Jimmy, Deems unsheathes a buck knife and begins peeling the nectarine, his movements deft and practiced, the reddish-orange skin curling in one continuous piece no thicker than a postage stamp and dangling from the blade like a Mobius strip before Newt flicks it to the ground.

He holds up the nectarine. Its meat is wet and pulpy and glistens in the sunlight.

From where Jimmy’s standing, the nectarine looks like a freshly dissected organ.

Newt pops it into his mouth whole and begins slowly chewing, pausing along the way to work the pit to the front of his mouth and catch it in his teeth before leaning over and spitting it into the dirt next to the right front tire.

Jimmy left his sunglasses in the truck, and the sun’s cranking it up, the orange hood of the Camino starting to shimmer and ripple around Newt’s bulk. Behind Jimmy is the insect drone of passing traffic.

Newt scratches the back of his wrist and watches Jimmy. After a while he slides off the hood and wipes his hands on his jeans. “There we go,” he says, walking over to a blinding-white Continental that has stopped in the middle of the hard-packed dirt fronting the produce stand. Newt opens the rear passenger door and ushers Jimmy inside.

Ray Harp glances over, then returns his attention to the woman sitting in a modified fold-down jumpseat across from him. There’s a small tray in front of her. She’s working on Ray’s nails.

The driver pulls out of the lot and heads east and then south.

Jimmy cranes his neck and looks out the rear windshield. The El Camino’s following them.

“Get me a beer, will you, Jimmy?” Ray nods toward a small white ice chest on the seat between them. Ray’s got the Allman Brothers going on the CD player.

Jimmy cracks a cold one and hands it over. He hesitates, waiting for Ray to offer him one, but it’s snake-eyes on that idea, so Jimmy replaces the lid and watches Ray drain the beer in one long swallow.

You can’t take the biker out of the businessman,
Jimmy thinks. Ray’s in his mid-forties with thick salt-and-pepper hair fanning over his shoulders. He’s wearing a metallic blue three-piece suit but no shirt and a pair of needle-nosed ostrich-skin cowboy boots.

Ray’s the kind of guy who could make Darwin blush—an ex-biker with just enough smarts, luck, and muscle to oversee a significant cut of the crank trade in Phoenix and the surrounding region, Ray organizing the biker gangs into a loose confederation and then franchising the action, going on to clean up the labs, too, shutting down the half-assed amateur operations, upgrading equipment and coordinating the distribution of chemicals, establishing something approaching quality control for the product and thus keeping the prices regulated, Ray then buttressing his power base by working out some admittedly shaky but still mutually beneficial live-and-let-live deals with some of the more vicious Mexican crank gangs and going on to buy up enough local and state law enforcement officials to keep things running.

The driver keeps the Continental pointed south. They cross Baseline, headed toward the South Mountains, sticking to back roads. They pass weathered trailers up on blocks, run-down stucco and adobe farmhouses, faded tract homes set on bare lots, the space between things slowly opening up, the landscape bisected by the spine of the Western Canal system. In the distance, puncturing the skyline above the mountains is a tall cross-hatched cluster of radio and television towers.

The woman shapes and rounds Ray’s nails into perfect crescents. Her head’s bent, the wall of straight black hair hiding most of her face. She’s wearing a shiny green miniskirt that looks like it’s made of plastic and a pink-and-white-striped elastic tube top. Above it is a thin silver necklace with dangling pendants of the four phases of the moon. Her nails are the color of new dimes.

“Crazy weather, huh, Jimmy?” Ray says, gesturing out the window. “Here it is, June already, and it’s like everything’s out of balance. One week spring, the next summer, then back again. No middle ground.”

Ray drops the empty on the floor of the Continental. “You look outside and then at the calendar, you can’t make them match. You notice that, Jimmy?”

“Now that you mention it,” Jimmy says.

“I was wondering if maybe that was the problem,” Ray says, “why you keep forgetting to pay me. You know, if the weather’s got you confused. As of today, you’re past due for the third time.”

Jimmy takes it slow, laying out the details for Ray, keeping their sequence straight, starting with his plan to get the taxes on the parcel paid but then detouring into some R&R with Marci, the waitress who eventually introduced him to the friend of her brother who worked at America West with the Suns and had the inside dope on Penny Hardaway’s injury, Jimmy’s bet on the point spread against the Lakers, the bet backfiring on him, Jimmy taking the job at Big and Bigger Jones’s Old Wild West Park and getting fired, Jimmy regrouping, deciding to swallow his pride and ask his brother for a loan to pay off the back taxes on the Dobbins parcel, Jimmy figuring he could then put the place up for collateral and secure a loan that would let him pay off what he owed Ray, and that all disappearing when his brother pulled his fine-print power of attorney number with the paperwork on the place, Jimmy right back where he started when he got out of Perryville and went to Ray in the first place.

After Jimmy’s finished, Ray’s quiet for a long time, appearing to think over what he’s heard. The woman remains bent over Ray’s left hand, her movements small and delicate as she works on each nail. In the background is Duane Allman’s doomed voice.

With his free hand, Ray raids the cooler for another beer. “Ninety percent of business,” he says, “is image. People believe what they think they see.” Ray pauses to crack open the beer. “Take the Mex crank gangs, for example. Took me a long time to work out the agreements, get them to trust me and work together. Everyone’s making money, but still they’re suspicious of each other—of me, too. It’s the nature of things. Something like trust, it’s very fragile and complicated. That’s where image comes in. You got to make people believe what they think they see. Otherwise you’re tomorrow’s lunch.” Ray pauses again and looks at Jimmy over the top of his beer. “I don’t intend to be on anyone’s menu, Jimmy.”

Jimmy reassures Ray that he’s not interested in becoming an entree either.

A couple seconds later, Jimmy realizes they’re on Dobbins Road. He starts waving his arms. “Ray, up there in a little bit, on your right, that’s what I was telling you about, my grandfather’s property. Twenty acres. I don’t have to point out the development potential to you. Like I said, the city’s moving south. It doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”

The farmhouse is a faded brown stucco a couple hundred yards off the road. It sits on a flattened crest of a long, irregularly inclined slope dense with overgrown interlocking thickets of mesquite and brush. There’s no other house for a half mile on either side of it.

Jimmy yells, “Hey, I said slow down, okay?” He glances up and catches the driver’s eyes in the rearview.

Oh shit,
Jimmy thinks.

No one who’s ever met Aaron Limbe forgets the eyes. They’re the palest of gray and empty, absolutely empty. No life in them at all. None. Zombie peepers.

“Heard about your old man,” Limbe says, waiting a couple beats before adding, “I’m glad he’s dead.”

“Aaron’s two-fisted when it comes to holding a grudge,” Ray says. “He wanted to kill you the first tick past the repayment deadline.”

Again, the blank eyes in the rearview. Jimmy looks away, at the back of Limbe’s head, the sharp square lines of his haircut, the tendons on either side of his neck corded like twin stalks of broccoli.

Aaron Limbe’s grudge came down to this: He blamed Jimmy for getting him kicked off the Phoenix police force. That might have been technically true, but it hadn’t been personal on Jimmy’s part. Expedient, yes, since Jimmy had been in some tight circumstances at the time.

He’d just been nicked for grand theft auto and ended up making a deal with the police commissioner to get the charges dropped in exchange for info that directly implicated Limbe in a politically charged case involving the murder of a prominent Mexican American attorney and twelve illegal aliens.

It wasn’t like Aaron Limbe didn’t deserve what happened to him. As far as Jimmy was concerned, Limbe was the worst breed of cop. Not corrupt, but bent, badly bent.

The thing Jimmy had never counted on was Aaron Limbe finding out that it had been Jimmy who snitched him out. In addition to dropping the grand theft charges, the commissioner had promised Jimmy anonymity for anything he brought to the table.