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I said, “I don’t want her to do it. This is too dangerous.”
She sighed heavily and squeezed my hand. “Let’s do it.”
Four figures were already walking into the lot. The car headlights remained on. Peralta left the truck idling, our lights on, too. They barely cut through the gloom of the vast space. I opened the door and swung myself out, eager to find firm ground. I unzipped my jacket.
We walked at an easy pace toward the silhouettes. I made Robin walk behind me, and I moved in step with Peralta, a pitiful skirmish line. Robin had a different analogy.
“It’s like the old West,” she said softly.
“If anything goes wrong, you run back and drive away,” I said over my shoulder. “I mean it.”
I forced down the dread inside and felt the calm that extreme situations always gave me. I didn’t understand it. Panic attacks when I was in the quiet shelter of scholarship. Clarity and focus in an emergency. “Frosty,” as Peralta, the Vietnam vet, said approvingly. It seemed to go against something I had heard years ago, attributed to Confucius: about three methods to gaining wisdom. “The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is imitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.” Maybe it’s why I didn’t feel wise. I didn’t even know if Confucius had actually said it.
Peralta slow-walked so the four men arrived at the center of the lot first. He was plotting one of those tactical solutions, maybe several.
“Well, well, well, the former sheriff of Maricopa County.”
The speaker was a man of medium height, wearing a zippered cotton warm-up top with horizontal stripes and a stylized L on the breast pocket. He had large, dark eyes, a stubble goatee, and mustache setting off a wide mouth. Beneath a red ball cap, he looked as if he could go from zero to thug in under six seconds. On his chest was a gold cross with Christ crucified upon it, gleaming in the strange light. Except for the cross, everything was in the half-shadow of the contending headlights. His buddies reminded me of the Hispanic bangers I had watched that hot day last summer, as we waited for the gasoline to flow. They were lean and muscled, wore jeans and sleeveless white shirts to show off their tattoos. The three silent ones carried compact automatic weapons and they were aiming them at us.
“And who are you?” Peralta’s voice was familiar and comforting.
“Mero Mero.”
“Good. I wouldn’t want to deal with el pequeño.” A little one.
“We’ll have your guns,” Mero Mero said.
“That doesn’t seem sporting.” Peralta’s tone was unchanged but he subtly shifted his posture.
“Too bad. Rules is rules.”
We all stood and watched each other for what seemed like several eras. I didn’t know everything about Peralta’s moods and moves, but here I was certain.
“Okay,” Peralta said, affecting his peculiar insouciance. “No problem.”
Now I was afraid.
Peralta pulled out his Sig Sauer P220 Combat semi-automatic, chambered for .45 caliber. He held it by the barrel, an offering.
“Go ahead, Mapstone. Take out your guns.”
I looked at him.
“Do it,” he ordered.
One of the bangers laughed. “This bolillo’s so scared he has two.” He tilted down his gun and spat heavily on the ground. And they all laughed. Part of my mind wo
ndered where he had picked up the old Chicano slang for white boy, not meant in a favorable sense.
The frivolity provided the nanoseconds for Peralta to drop the .45 back into shooting position and have it aimed at Mero Mero’s head. The bullet only had to travel two feet.
By that time I had the Python in my left hand and the Five-Seven in my right. I had trained for years on left-handed shooting. Peralta demanded it, in case a deputy was shot or injured in the hand he favored. I clicked off the safety of the Five-Seven, aimed at two of the other men. The spitter looked at me with wide eyes.
I said, “Si levantas esa arma, te mato.” If you raise that weapon, I’ll kill you. Or that’s what I hoped I said: the gun stayed down.
“I guess this is what they call a Mexican standoff,” Peralta said. “But it’s not really, because I can kill all of you before my partner here even has to exercise his trigger fingers.”
Seconds turned into minutes. Spitter didn’t raise his gun. Every now and then the whoosh of an oblivious motorist cut into the silence.
