Cool in Tucson by Elizabeth Gunn Page B

would do it for fun on the days they’d been using the product themselves. But weed was becoming so common that the price was coming down, there was less money in it every year.  Profits in the cocaine business, on the other hand, were extraordinary; the prices people would pay for this crazy white powder were freaking unbelievable compared to what they’d give for something they really needed like a wheel alignment.  As soon as he started dealing coke he saw that the biggest problem was going to be hiding the money.
    He bought a restaurant and bar where he could launder a large volume of cash, and thought hard about the problems of dealing with cocaine suppliers.  An important component of his success had always been his ability to accept the truth about himself, like the fact that although he was ruthless enough about manipulating people and cheating the government, he knew next to nothing about killing and was probably too old to learn.  That was a problem because the men he was dealing with now were like jungle cats, they would pounce if they sensed any weakness. 
    He made inquiries and hired Tilly Stubbs, who had been in and out of the prison systems of several states since the age of fourteen.  He was new to Tucson; Sanchez found him by following a rumor about a monstrous-looking thug who threw two men out of a bar on East Speedway.  “Two at once into the middle of the street during heavy traffic,” Sanchez told Rudy.  “One of them with a broken jaw.”
    “I don’t need no crazy guys,” Rudy said.
    “He ain’t crazy.  He was gone by the time the cops got there.”
    “What was he fighting about?”
    “They were making fun of his looks.”
    “Oh?  What about his looks?”
    “Somebody beat him up a lot when he was a kid, I guess.  His head’s kinda funny-looking.” 
    Rudy met him in front of the Sears Store in the Tucson Mall.  They walked through the aisles of jeans and bras, talking softly.  For the job Rudy had in mind, Tilly’s looks were perfect: a deeply dented forehead, a cauliflower ear and a nose that angled noticeably to the left.  He had hands like anvils, too, and slabs of muscle across his chest and shoulders.  He was ugly and thuggish but not stupid.  Rudy offered a thousand a month more than he had intended, gave him cash in advance and a cell phone. 
    He was very glad to have Tilly along the day, a month later, when two hard-eyed couriers tried to take Rudy’s money and skip the delivery.  When he saw that Tilly had arranged to have the other two enforcers in port-a-potties near the park table where the delivery took place, he congratulated himself on hiring a planner.  Brody knew a spot in the desert where a couple of bodies could be quickly buried, and Tilly brought back the heads of the hard-eyed men as Rudy had asked.  
    Rudy stuffed the correct payment in their open mouths, wrapped them in plastic so they wouldn’t leak and Fed-Exed them to their employer with a note saying, “Next time send the honest ones.”  The note was in bad Spanish because Rudy couldn’t ask his elders for help, but the dealer in Hermosillo got the message and Rudy had no more trouble with his shipments. 
    The day after he mailed the heads, Tilly asked for a sizeable raise in pay.  Usually Rudy haggled tirelessly over raises, inserting so many new demands on the employee that he ended up almost even or sometimes a little ahead.  But he was so pleased with Tilly’s skill sets that he gave him his raise without argument. 
    Sanchez and Brody gained status from that day’s work, too; Rudy began to treat them less like gofers and more like the full-fledged goons they were turning into.  Each of the four had knowledge, now, that was worth a death sentence for the others, from either the government or the drug trade, depending.  Bound together in a new, edgy equilibrium, they watched each other carefully, and before long Sanchez and Brody got raises, too.         
    But in