The Long Fall by Lynn Kostoff

index finger and pulls it down.
    “Everything?” she asks. “Even the coins, Jimmy?”

ELEVEN
     
    T here’s always a pecking order, Aaron Limbe thinks. You can’t get around that. Sometimes it’s right up front and in your face, and at others, it’s hidden, but it’s there. Always.
    And that’s just and right and meet as far as Aaron Limbe’s concerned. A pecking order serves a purpose. It clarifies things. It separates the weak from the strong, the inferior from the superior. It’s necessary. God knew that. What else is Genesis if not the laying out of a grand pecking order?
    God made one mistake though. If He was going to fix things after the garden and the fall, He should have made Christ a cop and sent him back to set the world straight, reestablish the law and the rightful order of things. That’s what people needed, not the Mr. Softee we got stuck with. Christ just made everything worse by making excuses for everyone and calling it forgiveness. He blurred the lines of what had been there from the beginning, turning everything inside out with all that “first shall be last” lie.
    Aaron Limbe wouldn’t have asked for thirty pieces of silver. He’d have done it for free. Or better yet, he’d have stepped in and taken him out himself.
    There’s a place for everything.
    People, though, have either forgotten or ignore that truth.
    Aaron Limbe hasn’t.
    Limbe slows down when he spots two Tempe police cars set nose to nose with their blue-and-whites flashing in front of Frontier Cleaners. He parks at the curb and studies the scene, looking at it as if through two sets of eyes, one belonging to the cop he’d been and the other to someone who’s been reduced to working for a scumbag like Ray Harp.
    Harp had liked the idea of having an ex-cop in his employment. Aaron Limbe had left the Phoenix Police Department barely a step ahead of the Internal Affairs Division and DA and formal charges. The evidence had been circumstantial—Limbe, after twelve years on the force, knew how to tidy up a crime scene—and Limbe figured he could have beaten the case they were trying to make if it hadn’t been for the barrage of media coverage. Worried about public image, the bureaucratic boys and girls upstairs had predictably wrung their hands and then used them to cover their own asses.
    Even with that, Limbe might have ridden the whole thing out.
    But then, Jimmy Coates, the human monkey wrench, jammed up the works.
    Ramon Delgado was a high-profile Mex lawyer who had made a name for himself defending illegal aliens and the ones who brought them in. Delgado also maintained a number of safe houses off the books, putting enough paper between himself and their operation to keep himself comfortably insulated legally. He had a white girlfriend and drove a red Mercedes. He was a hero to all the taco-benders in Phoenix and knew how to play to the liberals in the media who cast him as an updated version of Robin Hood.
    Delgado and Limbe had had their share of run-ins. Leaving the courtroom after his last acquittal, Delgado had winked at Limbe.
    Aaron Limbe knew this: Borders were part of the pecking order. You draw a line. This side. That side. Things are clear. Everything has its place. Once you cross a border, the balance is upset. The natural order loses its definition. Why else call them illegal aliens?
    Aaron Limbe also knew this: A Mexican is nothing more than a nigger in a sombrero.
    Aaron Limbe had reintroduced Ramon Delgado to his place in the pecking order.
    He had staked out Delgado on his own time, waiting until the next bunch of bordergoats were set up in one of his safe houses. Limbe had then grabbed Delgado after hours in the parking lot of the Hibiscus Club and thrown him in his car.
    On the front seat between them were two jumbo bags of Milky Way miniatures that Limbe had purchased earlier in the day.
    Limbe drove one-handed, keeping his .38 on Delgado until Ramon had eaten the contents of both bags.
    I am going