Jon Talton - South Phoenix Rules

“You’re an idiot,” I said. “You rat out your old pals, get witness protection to resettle you here, and pretty soon you’re selling black tar heroin to high-school kids. You can take the goombah out of the rackets but you can’t take the rackets out of the goombah.”

“I opted out of witness protection a year ago,” he said. “They check in every now and again, but you know how it is, war on terror, budget cuts and all.”

“You might have gotten away with it if you hadn’t paid ten thousand dollars to that woman to kill Robin and me.”

“It would have been twenty thousand if she’d done the job right. I should have had Tom do it.”

“Like he did the job right on Jax Delgado.”

He moved his finger off the trigger, curious.

“It was meant to look like La Familia’s work,” I said. “But because you’d seen Jax with Robin, you figured she was a risk, too. So you had Holden send her his head. That way, when she ended up dead, the cops would think it was another killing by Mexican gangs. Nobody would ever suspect you. So far so good? But you learned her brother-in-law was a deputy sheriff. You backed off. You’re a careful guy. You wanted to know what Robin had learned from Jax: so you did the Judson Lee thing, gave us a cold case, quoted Napoleon on history. You provided us with just enough information that our findings would tell whether we knew the secret about Jax and you.”

He moved the Beretta to his lap, watching me intently. I remained sprawled on the sofa.

“Robin didn’t know anything.” I spoke slowly, letting each word hit him. “She was just a thorough researcher. It got her killed.” A voice in my head: David, you got her killed . I said, “You killed her and it made me curious why.”

“I don’t like curious guys.”

“That’s why you killed Jax, too. Too bad he was a federal agent.”

Moretti opened his mouth but nothing happened except a string of saliva separated between his lips.

“Oh, you didn’t know that, Sal? You thought he was El Verdugo and he’d go to work for you? Be some insurance against the cartels?”

“What the hell are you talking about? You’re a crazy man!” He stood and backed away, keeping the gun on me. At a 1950s-style bar cart, he poured himself Scotch, neat. He didn’t offer me anything. Slipping the gun in his pocket, he consumed two fingers of the booze in one gulp.

“Jax Delgado was ATF,” I said. “He discovered that you were off the witness protection reservation. But it wasn’t the heroin he was after. It was the Jesus Is Lord Pawn Shop, which you secretly own through your friend Barney.”

The two black eyebrows slithered up his forehead. “Smart guy. How do you know this?”

“Just destiny.”

He slapped the glass down hard and paced the large room. It was amazing how isolated the space felt, but it was designed to be that way, so people could come in their garages, watch television and play video games, and never notice what might be going on outside their front doors.

“Nobody can prove it!” His voice echoed into the high ceiling.

“I thought you old-school guys didn’t kill cops, code of honor, and all that shit.”

“It’s no shit! It’s real. This Mexican passed himself off as a contract killer. The best! I don’t kill cops. Don’t you realize I could have killed you and the girl anytime? I could have had you killed in that parking lot with those spics, but I didn’t. I am a man of honor.”

“Forgive me, Salvatore.” I said it with the old-world flair of Judson Lee, and then laughed slow and low. I thought he’d shoot me right then, so I continued quickly.

“Johnny Kurita,” I said. Moretti’s tan dialed down by half. He slowly returned to his seat, gripping the gun. “Jax wasn’t just here to take down your gun pipeline. He wanted you on personal business. It was the kind of personal business his bosses didn’t know about: the murder of Kurita by your grandfather, Eugene Costa.”

Now the pigments reversed: a stroke-red blush broke its way through the stony brown skin.

“Personal business? Now you’re talking nonsense. What was I to him, huh?”

“You helped your grandfather in the killing.”

That was just a wild pitch, an improvisation that suddenly came to me-I didn’t have any evidence-but it found its way across the plate and he went for it.

He nodded very slowly and stared past me. “You do live up to your reputation, Mapstone.” He idly stroked the pistol in his lap, trying to figure me out. The young Sal the Bug would have killed me by now. The man before me knew he was in trouble, knew there were now too many loose ends. He stood again, agitated, and for a moment I thought he would pull out his own box of mementos. Then he sat again and said what was logical: “How the hell do you know?”

“I talked to Johnny Kurita’s little sister today.”

He watched me in silence for long minutes. The grandfather clock chimed.

“They were both hotheads.” Moretti was reliving the long-ago moment. “Grandfather and that Jap kid. They argued, then they fought each other right out there in the flower fields. I wasn’t going to let that Jap disrespect my grandfather.”

The black brows, the only trace of hair on his head, narrowed. “He came back from the war, this Kurita, and thought he was a real American, that the world owed him something. He wanted that land back. It wasn’t his anymore! Japs couldn’t even own land down there on Baseline for years, you know. Then they started coming in like locusts. When the government took the Kuritas’ property during the war, we got it fair and square. Hell, we’d have even leased it back to them.”

“You stole it. And Harley Talbott made it all look legal down at the courthouse.”

His mouth crooked down. “So what? Talbott owed my grandfather. Talbott owed the Moretti side of the family back in Chicago. The Costa side, the heirs all became totally legit, and sold that land for millions in the nineties. Funny, we buried the Jap right behind the flower shed that night. Now he’s under a parking lot by the swimming pool.”

I didn’t speak until he stopped laughing.

“What is history but a fable agreed upon, right?”

He was silent. The pistol drooped slightly in his hand.

Then, “None of this had to happen. I was minding my own business when this Jax, this man who you say was an agent, shows up at my home and starts asking questions about my grandfather Costa. He was a Mexican, for Christ’s sake. Supposed to be a hit man, supposed to only go through Barney. How the hell did he even know where I live? How did he know what happened in 1947? He wasn’t even born yet. The flower fields are a goddamned bunch of apartments now.”

“Maybe he didn’t even care about the land.”

“What the hell would he care about?”

“Simple justice.” I waited two beats. “Because Johnny Kurita was his great-grandfather.”

A palsy ran down the left side of Moretti’s face.

“Before he enlisted in the Army, Johnny met a pretty Mexican-American girl who was working at the Poston relocation camp. When he came home, he married her, and they had a baby boy. That little boy’s grandson was Jax Delgado.”

“And you’ve come here unarmed to tell me this? You have a death wish because I killed your sister-in-law?”

“Yes. What about you?”

“What the hell do you mean, ‘What about me?’”

“Don Salvatoré, you’ve been double-dealing so long you don’t even know right from left,” I said. “Selling guns to Sinaloa, selling guns to the Gulf cartel, too. Having your buddy Tom assassinate four top La Familia men. Why? Because you were afraid of what they might tell us? Because you want to set one side against the other like back in Chicago? You think you’ll profit from it. Well, you’re not in Chicago anymore, asshole. You’re playing way out of your league.”