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are…?”
    “Her son.”
    She picked up her phone.
    “Could you have a seat over there, sir? Someone will be with you shortly.”
    Within minutes a young Eurasian woman wearing a starched white lab coat, jeans beneath, came through locked doors. Low wooden heels ticked on the concrete floors.
    “You’re here to see Mrs. Daley?”
    Driver nodded.
    “And you’re her son?”
    He nodded again.
    “I’m sorry. Do please forgive our caution. But records show that, all these years, Mrs. Daley has never had a visitor. Could I ask to see some ID?”
    Driver displayed his driver’s license. Those days he still had one that wasn’t a double or triple blind.
    Almond eyes scanned it.
    “Again,” she said, “I apologize.”
    “Not a problem.”
    Above almond eyes her eyebrows were natural, straight across with almost no arch, a bit unkempt. He always wondered why Latinas plucked theirs only to draw in thin arched substitutes. Change yourself, you change the world?
    “I regret having to tell you this: your mother died last week. There were a number of other problems, but congestive heart failure is what finally took her. An alert nurse picked up the clinical change; within the hour we had her on a ventilator. But by then it was too late. It so often is.”
    She touched his shoulder.
    “I’m sorry. We did our best to get in touch. Apparently what contact numbers we had were long since invalid.” Her eyes swept his face, looking for cues. “Nothing I can say will be of much help, I’m afraid.”
    “It’s okay, Doctor.”
    Brought up on tonal languages, she caught the slight rise in pitch at sentence’s end. He hadn’t even known it was there.
    “Park,” she said. “Doctor Park. Amy.”
    They both turned to watch as a gurney came into view down the corridor. Barge on the river. African Queen. A nurse sat astride the patient, pumping at his chest. “Shit!” she said. “Just felt a rib crack.”
    “I barely knew her. I just thought….”
    “I really must go.”
    In the parking lot he leaned against the Chevy, stood looking off towards the mountain ranges ringing Tucson. Catalinas to the north, Santa Rita to the south, Rincon east, Tucson west. The whole city was a compass. How could anyone ever have gotten so hopelessly lost here?

Chapter Twelve
    Second and third runs with Irina’s husband went well. Driver’s gym bag on the closet floor under shoes and dirty clothes fattened.
    Then the next run.
    Everything started out fine. Ducks in a row, all on track, according to plan. Target was a low-end, homegrown shop offering check cashing and payroll advances. It hunkered down at one spare end of a Sixties strip mall, next to an abandoned theater with posters for dubbed science fiction movies and foreign-made crime thrillers featuring out-of-work American actors still under glass. To the other side sat a pawn shop so erratically open it didn’t even bother to post business hours. Its real business took place through the back door. Garlic, cumin, coriander and lemon from a falafel shop aromatized the region.
    They’d gone in at nine, first opening. Metal shutters got pushed up then, doors unlocked. Only hired help about, workers getting minimum wage with no incentive to hold out or really give much of a shit, boss never around till ten or after. That time of day, even if there was an alarm, you could count on police being tapped out by rush-hour traffic.
    Unfortunately, cops had the pawn shop staked out and one of them, terminally bored, happened to be looking at Check-R-Cash when Standard’s crew went in. He had a thing for the tall Latina who manned the front desk.
    “Well, shit.”
    “Wha’s wrong, she don’ love you no more?”
    He told them. “So what do we do?” Not even close to what they’d been waiting for.
    DeNoux being senior officer, it was his decision. He ran a hand through bristle-cut gray hair. “You guys as tired of this detail as I am?” he asked.
    Tired of eating crap? Getting broiled