Phoenix Noir

I was going to protest more but a thick, sharp whistle echoed through the dry air. I leaned over and could see a headlight in the distance. I pulled out my nearly empty pack of Luckies, offered one to Mose, and lit them both.

“I’ve got to go to the freight station, do Simms’s dirty work.”

Mose stared toward the black masses of the South Mountains. “You got your reasons, son.”

Now the train was close enough that I could hear the engineer start to sound the bell.

“There’s no goddamned justice in this town.” I said it in a conversational voice, to no one in particular, drowned out by the locomotive’s approach.

“You just finding that out?” Mose shook his head and laughed. “Oh, Jimmy, you a piece of work.”

Then the train was on us, passing quickly. It was double-headed, with two powerful steam locomotives. Then a pair of baggage cars rolled by, one with an odd set of antennae on top, followed by a pair of sleepers. The last car rumbled heavily. It had new dark green paint that glowed under the plat-form lights and fresh lettering on the side said, PULLMAN,

but unlike every other car it had no number. The shades were down. Yet the rear window had light, and there … right there inside. The familiar patrician head, the jaunty jut to the chin, even the cigarette holder in his mouth, just like in the newsreels. He looked at us. Mose stiffly saluted.

Then the train was gone. Nothing was left but the red marker on the last car, which quickly went around the slight curve and continued east.

Mose put his arm around me. “On his way home from a tour of bases on the coast, and the Espee handled it all the way,” he said proudly. “See, boy, happy days are here again.”

I walked toward the freight station and the song was in my head. But my head played it too slow, like a dirge.

THE EIGHTH DEADLY SIN

BY CHARLES KELLY

Hassayampa Valley

Father Carty O’Toole could see the hard-knocked Dodge pickup beating down on him from a half-mile away, dust huffing from its tires and settling on the mesquite, a tiny torpedo tracing the western edge of the White Tank Mountains. Walberto must have the goods today. Sweat clutched at O’Toole’s crotch beneath his black robes, his heart bounced. The buzzing of the cicadas in the crazy heat tweaked his nerves. He had a Colt .357 Python stuffed full of potential detonations hidden in the confessional. Fine. But the varnish smell of the sin-box was cut through by the stringency of Hoppe’s No. 6 gunpowder solvent, and that could give away O’Toole’s play. He steadied himself, fought for faith. Surely, God would not let that happen, assuming God wasn’t taking a day off. That happened from time to time in the Hassayampa Valley.

O’Toole stood well back in the shadow of the vestibule of Mission Santa Dolores, taking what comfort he could from the relative coolness offered by the packed-earth walls. Built in the 1920s, a replica of older and more-honored antiquities, the church had been long abandoned, replaced by a modern church twenty miles away with the soaring lines of a department store. The mission was too old and shabby and isolated to serve the spiritual needs of the population oozing westward from Phoenix, but O’Toole had not let it languish. Carrying out a bit of personal penance, he had set himself the task of dusting and polishing the pews, swabbing down the tile, cleaning the plaster angels and cherubs that festooned the reredos behind the altar. In this heat, it had been exacting work for a fat man pushing sixty. But the police were so bothersome in this part of the world. Better to stay out of their way.

He’d had to break the lock on the door to get in, but of course that was no problem for him. He’d been at the cleaning for a week, while he waited. It gave him a cover story if someone came by, but nobody did. And aside from the psychic payback it offered him, it was something to do. There was no television or even a radio in the abandoned priests’ quarters out back, his comestible needs and water supplied by a Coleman camp refrigerator, his literary cravings fulfilled by some dusty paperbacks replete with the adventures of hard-nosed men and abandoned women. A small electric generator fed the battery that kept his cell phone alive.