Phoenix Noir

vatos getting pulled in for questioning and fingerprinting on the off-chance that they might be him. Once he was far from Santa Fe he’d be safer, and safer still when he was out of the state. They’d be looking for him to head for Mexico, but that was okay with him because he wasn’t going to Mexico …

The place Vanjii moved into was in an apartment complex on Phoenix’s west side. There was a public phone out front with a sign that said, in Spanish, YOU CAN CALL MEXICO FROM HERE. Someone was always using it. Most of the people in the complex had jobs, some had phones and some didn’t, and none of them had any money.

Vanjii shared the apartment with two other people. Carlos, who’d been introduced to her by an old high school friend, had come to Phoenix from Santa Fe to learn to be an auto mechanic. He was hardly ever home. School and work kept him busy during the days and evenings, and he spent many of his nights at his girlfriend’s place.

The other roommate was Jaimie. She was a native of the city, and had been doing well in her life until she’d suffered a head injury when a stranger stomped her for no reason that anybody knew of. Now she was frightened all the time, and never left the apartment unless she had to. She would often forget what she was talking about in the middle of a sentence. She worked part-time as what she called a “telephone actress,” talking dirty to men who called a phone sex company which patched the calls to her home number.

After paying her rent in advance, Vanjii had less than forty dollars. Her father had given her the money for the rent and the bus trip to Phoenix. She knew it wouldn’t be hard to find a job, but she didn’t have a car, and the bus service was a joke.

The apartment was on Seventeenth Avenue and Highland, about a mile away from the Spectrum Mall. On her third day in Phoenix, Vanjii walked to the mall and talked a clothing store into hiring her.

The walk to work was dreamlike. Some of the streets had no sidewalks, so she walked in the gutter. Everything seemed too huge, fast, and loud to be real. The cars blasted by, the drivers sometimes yelling at her just because she was walking. She felt so tiny. The only other people she saw walking were homeless, and they always came up to her, and they always said the same thing. Hey. Hey, I ain’t panhandling. It’s just that my car ran out of gas a couple miles away, and I lost my wallet, and my wife and kids are in the car, and … Vanjii had nothing she could give them.

The heat didn’t seem too bad while she was walking. But when she headed into the mall, with its air- conditioned chill, and sat down, the sweat came out so fast she felt like it was spurting out of her pores. She’d go into the restroom, take off her shirt, and wipe herself down with paper towels, then put on some deodorant. She’d work all day, stopping only to eat the lunch she’d packed. When she walked back home, it would be getting dark and she’d be nervous, but she knew it wouldn’t be long until she’d have saved a few hundred dollars and could buy a car.

Vanjii wondered about Luis, but it all seemed so far away that it didn’t hurt as much as she’d thought it would.

Luis had been in a bar on Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe when it all started to go to shit. He was talking to a guy about selling a little pot, something to make some quick money, to keep eating and maybe pay next month’s rent. It was about 7 in the evening, happy hour in the bar. The place was crowded, and the parking lot was full, so Luis had parked in a small lot across the street.

Luis crossed the street in the darkness and walked into the lot. When he reached his car, he saw that it had been wheel-clamped.

He stood and looked at it. Then he got in the car and sat there. “Fuck!” The word came out on a breath of laughter, but his face was wet with tears. He wiped his face with his hands and sat breathing quietly, trying to get ahold of himself. Then he stepped out of the car and walked around the building, hoping it was still open. It wasn’t.

As he moved back to his car, a white man approached him.

“Is this your car?”

“Yeah.” Luis pointed to the clamp. “I don’t get this.”

“I did it. I’m Dan Ward, I’m a partner in this company—”

“What company?”

He pointed at the building. “This company. We’re a security company. This parking lot’s private property.”

“I didn’t know … Sorry. I didn’t see no sign.”

“It should be obvious that this isn’t public parking.”

“Yeah. Sorry. I had to meet a guy in the bar over there, I couldn’t find a place to park. I didn’t see nobody here, so I thought it’d be okay.”

“Well, you can see that it’s not.”

“Can you take that thing off my car and I’ll go?”

Dan Ward nodded. “Sure. If you want to pay me your fine now.”

“What?”

“There’s a forty-dollar fine for parking here.”

“Bullshit. You can’t do that. You can’t just decide to fine somebody. You can tell me to get out of your parking lot, that’s all.”

“I’m not interested in a legal debate. I’m telling you there’s a clamp on your car, and it’s not coming off until you give me forty dollars.”

“I don’t have forty dollars.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Honest to God, I got about twenty, and I need that. It’s all the money I got.”

Ward looked at him and said nothing.

“Look, how about if I give you my address and you can—”

“Yeah, sure.” Ward laughed. “How about if you come back here when you’ve got the money, and you can have your car back.”

“Okay,” said Luis. “Okay. I’ll give it to you now. Here …” He reached inside a pocket of his jacket.

When he had the knife out, Luis swung it in a big circle, holding it with both hands, like someone swinging a baseball bat. It went into Ward’s body with such force that Luis felt the impact like a car hitting a wall. The momentum threw Luis to the ground and he held onto the knife and tore it across Ward’s lower abdomen and then slid it out. Luis jumped back up, still holding the knife, and saw that Ward was running away from him, letting out a noise that sounded like a mule braying. Ward made it a few steps, trying to ignore the things that were spilling out of him. But some of his intestines were trailing on the ground, and when he stepped on them his head seemed to shatter in a scream that never made it past his lips as he fell and the pain swallowed him.

Luis stood over Ward, raised the knife, hammered it into his spine, and left it there. Then he walked to the car, unlocked the door, got in. Blood was dripping from his hands. His body was shaking but he felt calm. He opened the glove box and removed a few things—sunglasses, the break-up letter from Vanjii, the Bulldog .44 she had hated. He put the sunglasses and letter in his jacket pocket and stowed the gun in the waistband of his jeans.

He walked out of the parking lot into the street. As he moved, he felt his wet shirt chafe his skin. There was a 7-Eleven a couple blocks away. It had a phone outside. Luis dropped two quarters into the phone and dialed Miguel’s number.

He got voice mail. “Hey, it’s me. Something just happened … you’ll probably hear about it. If you can, come and meet me tomorrow morning at the place where you hurt your ankle that time. Bring me some clothes. Come at around 9 o’clock. If you don’t want to, that’s okay. Later.”

He hung up the phone and walked away. After a few minutes he stopped, turned around, and walked back to the 7-Eleven.

The guy behind the counter was named Randy. He was twenty-two. There were no other customers in the store when Luis walked in, trembling, clothes bloody, blood in his hair, head swiveling, glancing around the place.

“Hey, man, you okay?” Randy asked. “You need an ambulance or something?”

Luis pulled the Bulldog and pointed it at him. “Open the register. Give me the money. Don’t touch an alarm or I’ll fucking kill you.”

“Please don’t fucking kill me.” Randy opened the register, started taking the cash from it and putting it on the