parked in the dirt lot, and the detective noticed the first TV news truck pulling up to the gate out on Van Buren.
“Shit, here we go,” he muttered.
Ron Wheeler dug working at Brookshire’s Coffee Shop. It was one of the few twenty-four-hour restaurants in central Phoenix and the place was always packed with good-looking chicks, especially after 1 o’clock when the bars closed. The coffee was strong and drinkable, not like that watered-down shit they served at Denny’s, and for a greasy spoon the food wasn’t bad. He’d only been there for a few months but he was already popular with the customers and the tips were great.
Ron usually worked the graveyard shift, which suited his lifestyle. A few months back he’d moved out of his parents’ house into a studio apartment off Twenty-fourth Street and McDowell, just around the corner from the restaurant. In the evening he’d hang out with friends, maybe smoke a little weed, and practice the guitar. Then he’d work all night until 7 a.m., go home, crash until late afternoon, and do it all over again. His best friend Brian Cortaro had a bass guitar and they planned to start a band. Ron was thinking of asking his new girlfriend Kelly if she’d be interested in taking a stab at singing. He’d graduated from East High in ’82, two years back, and his twentieth birthday was coming up in a few days.
To celebrate, Kelly had taken him to see X, one of his favorite bands, over at the Silver Dollar Club. Billy Zoom was his guitar god. Ron thought he was the epitome of cool with his slicked-back hair and silver Gretsch, his fingers racing over the fret board while he just stood there with that insane smile. Yeah, Billy Zoom was bad-ass, and Ron’s copies of Los Angeles and Under the Big Black Sun were all scratched to hell from playing them so much. He’d sit there with his crappy Memphis Les Paul copy and twenty-watt Peavey amp and try to fig-ure out the songs. Zoom’s guitar parts were deceptive—they seemed straightforward enough, but then the sneaky bastard would slip in a weird jazz chord or some damn finger-picking run that would fuck with Ron’s mind.
He’d taken to calling Kelly his “devil doll” after one of his favorite X songs. She definitely had that Exene Cervenka look, like a lot of the girls in the punk scene—tousled Raggedy Ann hair, thrift store dresses, Dr. Martens. Occasionally she’d do the Dinah Cancer thing—leather pants, gauzy black tops, ghoul makeup. Kelly had the body to pull it off, but her stepmother didn’t get her fashion sense at all. “You’re such a pretty girl,” she’d say, “why do you try to hide it so much?”
To Ron she was beautiful, way out of his league. They’d met at a TSOL gig over at the Metro earlier in the year. That night he’d learned that she’d gone to Xavier High, and, although they were almost exactly the same age, Ron suspected that she was more experienced than he was. Several weeks later when they had sex in Ron’s twin bed, he’d lied when Kelly asked him if it had been his first time.
After the X show, they drove around downtown and killed the last few beers from the cooler in the backseat. Kelly always had booze around. Ron didn’t know much about her father, but he did notice that adults seemed to treat Kelly differently when they found out who her dad was. He’d met the old man only once, when Kelly had invited Ron over for a sit-down meal at the family spread in Paradise Valley. Hodge had seemed irritable and distracted, excusing himself from the dinner table several times to take phone calls. Kelly’s stepmother Charlotte was right out of central casting—late-thirties cokehead, former model and dancer, peroxide-blond hair, year-round tan. Bitch even drove a fire engine–red Camaro. Ron thought she looked like Morgan Fairchild, but not as hot. He’d made up his mind that the old guy was a dick, but Hodge obviously doted on his only daughter.
Ron asked Kelly to pull into a U-Totem on Seventh Street, just north of Roosevelt. Nobody in the car was of legal age but it was easy to buy beer in Phoenix if you knew the right places to go.
“Dude, think your uncle’s working?” Brian said from the backseat.
“I don’t know, man. Probably.” Ron’s uncle Cliff was one of those Vietnam vets who’d come back all messed up and