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.The deputy shook his head dramatically.But even an infamous used car salesman like Apache Ray Molina ain’t gonna have no luck with that pitch since working for Los Jarros County Sheriff’s just too hard a job for too low a pay these days like everybody knows.Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be on the side of the Law, Pal.Rodeo left the courthouse and bought a few groceries from Safeway then drove back to his casita and shot his guns for a while.When he was tired of killing tin cans and scaring rabbits, he put some beans to soak in a cast-iron lid skillet on his propane stove and then took a long siesta.Late in the afternoon he got up and poured the soakwater off the beans and started cooking the beans in fresh water with some hogback and then studied gun bibles for a while as he listened to his mother’s LPs, mostly opera neither he nor she had ever understood.When the heat of the day had dissipated, Rodeo put on a pair of ragged gym shorts from his Ranger College days and a pair of old Chuck Taylors and jogged from his house down Elm Street to the Agua Seco Road with the dog lagging behind him.On the way back Rodeo stopped at the pile of concrete building blocks from which yellow crime scene tape now fluttered in shreds.He stood for a minute staring at the killing spot, then he sprinted the last quarter mile to his house where he sat on the side steps of his casita until his breath and the dog returned.Rodeo fed and watered the dog and gave him his vitamins and medicines.He pulled the bean pot off the stove and let it sit while he took a short tepid shower, then he re-dressed in Wranglers and a white T-shirt and ate his dinner, drank one Tecate and then spent the rest of the evening reloading spent shotgun shell hulls at his workbench.At ten o’clock he took a spoonful of Eagle Brand for dessert, then brushed his teeth at the kitchen sink and read the Bible in bed until he fell asleep.* * *The next day Rodeo got up well before dawn, took a sink bath, dressed in tub-washed, line-dried clothes, packed a big duffel including the ten-gauge riot gun with rubber ordnance, the Colt.357 revolver in a perforated leather sidearm holster, a two-shot derringer in a chamois-lined ankle holster, ammo, a Kevlar vest, metal and plastic handcuffs, two Tasers and an adjustable neck brace and stowed these all in the stainless-steel gear box of his truck.Rodeo also carried away from his casita a pair of creased Wrangler bootcuts and two heavy-starched Larry Mahan snap-button shirts on hangers and in plastic dry-cleaning bags, a tooled leather belt with RODEO embossed on the back and his Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association National Finals trophy buckle on the front, a pair of alligator Luccheses and his 100X Beaver riding hat, both in plastic form-molded cases.Into his El Paso Saddleblanket Company saddlebags went his Toughbook laptop, an assortment of regional maps, his camera, eavesdropping and recording gear, binoculars, pepper spray, a sap, a Tony Hillerman and a Little Green New Testament.In his toiletries kit was a chunk of Ivory in a silver-plated soap travel dish, Crest and a toothbrush, a twenty-tooth comb and a bottle of Porter’s Lotion.Rodeo loaded the dog in the truck, checked the Ford’s oil, topped off the radiator with coolant and slammed the hood of the pickup closed.He checked the load in his 9mm and slipped the Glock under the driver’s side of the bench seat, inserted an eight-track cassette of Bill Monroe into the tape player and drove to Tucson, arriving there just in time to encounter the second wave of morning work traffic.To strains of “Y’all Come!” Rodeo pulled off I-19 and drove east on Valencia Road, steered the pickup into the parking lot of Denny’s, settled the dog, grabbed up his saddlebags and then went into the restaurant, ordered a Grand Slam and an “endless-cup-o’” coffee and for most of the next hour used Denny’s free Wi-Fi to double check Luis’s research.* * *He found stories about the death of Samuel Rocha in the archived Web editions of The Tucson Citizen and The Arizona Daily Star but these were the same reportage as in the file Luis had assembled for him.Carillo’s Funeral Home had provided the memorial services for Samuel Rocha but no next of kin for the young man were listed.In a minor way Samuel Rocha’s death had also figured in a larger piece in the local liberal rag, The Tucson Weekly, which article also came up in a Boolean search for “gangs and Tucson.” In this extended report, Samuel Rocha’s death was only mentioned as “another recent victim of South Tucson gang-related violence,” a violence that, according to the Weekly writer, “had become a chronic epidemic stealthily creeping north of Twenty-second Street, the historic demarcation of South Tucson from Tucson Proper” and that was indicative of “the spread of the Drug Wars from the lawless borderlands of Sonora, Mexico, into the very heart of middle-class America that is downtown Tucson, Arizona [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]