She said, âMost of the time it moves below the radar. Hundreds of individuals going south with guns. Drugs and money moving north to pay for them. Itâs very hard to detect.â
The Jesus Is Lord Pawn shop didnât seem hard to detect. I described the store.
âIâm aware of it.â And that was all she said.
So I detailed what else I saw: the black Suburban, the well-dressed Hispanics, and the large quantity of boxes they loaded. âThey were a tad out of place there, to say the least.â Springsteen sang âOne Step Up.â I fought against my guilt and gloom like a man trying to stay standing in a brutal windstorm. Emotional honesty and mordant guitars were not what I needed at that moment. And then it occurred to me. âMexican cops, right?â
Amy Preston sipped her white wine and shook her head. âYou know I canât commentâ¦â
I finished the sentence for her: âon an ongoing investigation.â
âExactly.â
I said, âMy problem is personal. The people who are watching Robin, the ones who chased us with guns, theyâre ongoing, too. So everybody needs to understand thereâs an innocent civilian here and Iâll do what I have to do to protect her.â My machismo didnât carry me far. I watched her face and ran it all through my head. So after a pause, I added, âI just donât want to get in somebodyâs way.â
But I knew that I already had.
12
Maybe we should have canceled the trip to Washington. Maybe we should have gone and stayed. Iâll never know.
We went and came back, a long weekend. It gave me a chance to wear the good, navy wool topcoat and gray fedora that I had bought years ago in Denver, and of course to see Lindsey. It was cold and the sky was the color of granite for those five days, a nice change for a native Phoenician. As our jetliner took off for home, snow began to fall. By the time we touched down at Sky Harbor twelve inches were on the ground back in D.C.
Before I left, I had asked a retired cop in the neighborhood to keep an eye on the house. He didnât ask questions. A former Marine with a gruff exterior and a great sense of humor, he was now an artist living off his copâs pension. He liked to walk around the neighborhood and keep an eye on things, talk to people. I dubbed him âthe Mayor of Willo.â As we drove home, I hoped his walks had been uneventful.
On the flight I tried to make sense of things. Some things. Robinâs boyfriend had been murdered in the signature style of one of the most notorious gangs anywhere. His identity was a fraud and if the ring was his, it meant he might be a hit man for the Sinaloa Cartel. So far the criminal calculus worked fine. The hit man had gotten crosswise with his employer, who outsourced his assassination to La Fam. The thug watching our house that night had La Familia connections, too. So far, so good.
But why Robin? They sent her an emphatic message via FedEx. Then they tried to ambush us outside the Sonic. What had she seen or heard? We had talked about it so much that I was convinced she really didnât know. And Kate Vareâs behavior was strange, tooâthe case going from priority to back-burner in days. Then there was Deadeye and his gun shop, with Mexican cops, the feds, and my La Fam watcher all drawn to the store up on Bell Road. Maybe the feds had backed Vare offâbut if so, why hadnât they tried to contact and interview Robin?
I could make more sense of this jumble than anything that had happened in Washington, where Lindsey was not wearing her wedding rings.
Now we were back under the big sky in time for a spectacular sunset and seventy degrees. People paid the big bucks at resorts for this. We lived here. Of course they were gone by the time summer hell arrived, and most of them werenât targets of a drug cartel. The car flowed into the maze of ramps where Interstate 10, Loop 202,
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