cigarette and leaned against a brick wall, covering up the Pepsodent ad, hating some of the things I knew. One was that the Phone Booth was quietly owned by Duke Simms, and that he used a private room in the back for special meetings. I hated knowing about those too. Even with 65,000 people, Phoenix was still a very small town.
I walked out of the Hotel Adams at 8:15. A dry chill was drifting in from the desert and the sidewalks were jammed with soldiers and airmen in town on liberty. I was wearing a fresh shirt and tie, and the chief special agent seemed pleased with my report. To me, there didn’t seem much to it. I had checked the line through town, run some bums out from under the Tempe bridge, and looked over the blocks of boxcars down at the SP yard, searching for broken seals on the doors or other signs of pilferage. I had left word for Joe Fisher where he would find Mary Becker’s luggage. I carried my own kind of bag and it was full of questions, maybe even a little kit of suspicions inside. Who was the punk who had slapped Anna, and why had she been so upset? She had yelled at him and said the name of her sister. And she had ended up at a place nice girls shouldn’t even know existed in this town. Now all I could do was buy an evening paper and read it as I walked vaguely in the direction of the depot.
I was about to cross Jefferson Street when a car nearly ran me down. I jumped back and recognized the familiar black Ford. I followed it into the driveway by police headquarters. It was full dark, but the streetlights showed Frenchy Navarre getting out of the backseat, then pulling out another man. The handcuffs on the man’s wrists glistened under the light. He was a kid really, a colored kid in fatigues, and his head and body slumped against the car. Navarre leaned in close and was talking to him. When the kid’s head came up, I could see a bloody membrane where his lower jaw should have been. Then Fisher came around from the driver’s side and they led him into the station. I let them get inside, and followed.
Navarre had the kid at the booking desk when he looked around and saw me. “Get lost, bull.” He momentarily turned back to his prisoner to punch him in the kidney. The boy crumpled in agony. Navarre’s hand looked odd, but then I saw it, a seven-inch blackjack protruding, and it had fresh blood on it.
“Here’s your murderer,” Navarre said. “Nigger playing soldier, really trying to rape a white woman.”
“No, sir, I swear I didn’t … don’t know nothing ’bout this,” the boy pleaded with me, slurring his words through his ruined mouth. He spat a bloody tooth to the floor.
“Well, how you explain this, nigger?” Navarre held out an ankle bracelet. It had dried blood on it. “Tried to pawn it after you raped that girl and put her on the train tracks.”
“No, no …”
“Wasn’t too smart coming into Phoenix, was it, boy? We make our niggers behave, keep ’em south of the tracks. So the government gives you a uniform, gives you a gun, makes you think you’re special. You’re just a black nigger, you murderous son of a bitch.”
“Gotta call my commanding officer,” the kid said.
“Shut up!” Navarre roared, his eyes bright and primal like an animal’s.
I tried to catch Fisher’s eye. This seemed all wrong. Anna Becker had mentioned nothing about an ankle bracelet.
“Did you find the body?” I asked.
Navarre brandished the blackjack toward me. “We don’t need anything more than what we got to send this nigger to the gas chamber. Now get the hell out, bull.”
With that he advanced on me in three fast strides, raising the sap with one hand and reaching inside his coat with the other. I took a step backward and I was faster. He had a .38 Police Positive in his left hand, but it was frozen uselessly in mid-air. My Colt .45 was five inches from his broad, veiny, ugly nose. His eyes were obsidian, dead.
“Kill him!” Navarre commanded, but his voice shook.
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.
“I’ll kill
But his arm remained where it had been, the pistol pointed out into the room.
I aimed, staring at him down the heavy barrel of the automatic. “You like to hurt people … you like it …” Those were all the words that would come out.
Then I felt Joe Fisher next to me and the spell broke. “Let it go, Jimmy.” A stocky desk sergeant pushed Navarre away and I holstered the Colt.
“James, you’re walking like an old man. That’s not right.”
I turned to see Mose, resplendent in his immaculate sleeping-car porter uniform. We stood at trackside, and it was oddly quiet. The usual call of train whistles was silent. My eyes roved over the station tracks and saw spikes and blocks of wood driven into the switches that connected the array of tracks to the main line. Alarm shot through me:
“Why are the tracks spiked? No train can switch off the main line.”
“You’re gonna see, boy,” Mose said, his teeth huge and white.
“What are you doing here anyway, Mose? You should have departed an hour ago. Nothing seems to be moving.”
He gave his deep, melodious laugh. “Some things moving. The pilot train came through twenty minutes ago, right on schedule.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Mose clapped me fondly on my good shoulder. “Son, you would be the only person on the Espee who don’t know.”
I was going to protest more but a thick, sharp whistle echoed through the dry air. I leaned over and could see a headlight in the distance. I pulled out my nearly empty pack of Luckies, offered one to Mose, and lit them both.
“I’ve got to go to the freight station, do Simms’s dirty work.”
Mose stared toward the black masses of the South Mountains. “You got your reasons, son.”
Now the train was close enough that I could hear the engineer start to sound the bell.
“There’s no goddamned justice in this town.” I said it in a conversational voice, to no one in particular, drowned out by the locomotive’s approach.
“You just finding that out?” Mose shook his head and laughed. “Oh, Jimmy, you a piece of work.”
Then the train was on us, passing quickly. It was double-headed, with two powerful steam locomotives. Then a pair of baggage cars rolled by, one with an odd set of antennae on top, followed by a pair of sleepers. The last car rumbled heavily. It had new dark green paint that glowed under the plat-form lights and fresh lettering on the side said,
Then the train was gone. Nothing was left but the red marker on the last car, which quickly went around the slight curve and continued east.
Mose put his arm around me. “On his way home from a tour of bases on the coast, and the Espee handled it all the way,” he said proudly. “See, boy, happy days are here again.”
I walked toward the freight station and the song was in my head. But my head played it too slow, like a dirge.
THE EIGHTH DEADLY SIN
BY CHARLES KELLY
Father Carty O’Toole could see the hard-knocked Dodge pickup beating down on him from a half-mile away, dust huffing from its tires and settling on the mesquite, a tiny torpedo tracing the western edge of the White Tank Mountains. Walberto must have the goods today. Sweat clutched at O’Toole’s crotch beneath his black robes, his heart bounced. The buzzing of the cicadas in the crazy heat tweaked his nerves. He had a Colt .357 Python stuffed full of potential detonations hidden in the confessional. Fine. But the varnish smell of the sin-box was cut through by the stringency of Hoppe’s No. 6 gunpowder solvent, and that could give away O’Toole’s play. He steadied himself, fought for faith. Surely, God would not let that happen, assuming God wasn’t taking a day off. That happened from
