Concrete Desert dmm-1

by Jon Talton

  At the Squaw Peak Parkway, he turned north. I followed behind, maintaining a steady ninety-five as we left behind the mere mortals in the slow lanes. I hoped the Blazer’s engine, emasculated for California smog regulations, would hold together. The sun glinted off the BMW as we entered nicer and nicer neighborhoods, then rolled past expansive houses sitting on the sides of cliffs and mountains.

  He turned east again on Shea Boulevard and pulled into a little strip mall. I drove on past about a block and doubled back, parking at a Carl’s Jr. restaurant across the street. He didn’t have a clue what I drove, anyway. He was sitting in the parking lot with the engine going. He sat like that for maybe ten minutes. Then a black Mustang with dark-tinted windows pulled in beside him and a man I’d seen before got out and climbed into the passenger side of the BMW.

  The last time I’d seen that short, muscular man, he was pointing a machine gun at me.

  My heart was pounding. I could unholster the Python and walk across the street, Dirty Harry-style. Or I could call for backup.

  I did neither. This was all just too damned strange. I picked up the cell phone and called Lindsey.

  “Hi, beautiful.”

  “Dave, you made me day.”

  “Guess what I’m doing?”

  “Uh, writing about the effect of the Great Depression on the Rocky Mountain states?”

  “Close,” I said. “I’m watching the majority leader of the state senate talking to the man who tried to blow me away at Metrocenter the other night.” I read her the license plate of the Mustang and heard her emphatically typing it in.

  “Hang on,” she said. “The system’s been down all day. Are you safe? They can’t see you?”

  “I’m across the street.”

  “You want backup? I can roll PD.”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Okay, we have liftoff,” she said, then read me the information. I wrote it down and then watched them inside the BMW. Brent McConnico was gesturing violently as the small, muscular man sat impassively.

  “Thanks. You’re my hero again.”

  “I’m speaking in cliches,” Lindsey said. “But be careful.”

  “I will. We’ve got plans tomorrow night.” I hung up.

  Across the street, the muscular man, whose name was apparently Dennis Copeland, got out of the BMW and closed the door. Then McConnico waved him back to the driver’s side, rolled down the window, and spoke again. Dennis Copeland dismissed him with a wave, climbed into the Mustang, and roared off. I pulled in behind him and got on the cell phone.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  We descended back into the Valley on the Squaw Peak Parkway and exited at Indian School Road, going the speed limit. I held steady about half a block behind the Mustang. We were headed toward Central when my cell phone squealed.

  “Deputy Mapstone, look behind you.” A Phoenix cop was on my tail. “I’m Officer Brenda Jackson. Chief Peralta tells us you need some help.”

  “It’s the black Mustang just ahead of me,” I said, pushing it to make the light at Sixteenth Street. She was still with me. “He’s the guy from the Metrocenter shooting.”

  “How long has it been since you’ve done a felony traffic stop?” Brenda Jackson wanted to know.

  “A little while,” I said, lying. It had been fifteen years. “But it’s like riding a bicycle.”

  She laughed. “We’ll pick up another unit at Central and then we’ll box him. I want you to be on his outside as we rope him in. By that time, other units should be with us. If he starts to run, let him go at a distance.”

  “Ten-four,” I said.

  He continued westbound on Indian School Road and crossed Central almost leisurely. Just as Brenda Jackson had said, I saw another PPD cruiser in the rearview mirror. He came up very quickly and passed us all, positioning himself ahead of the Mustang. Traffic was fairly thin. The sidewalks were deserted and few buildings were close to the street. It wouldn’t get any better than this.

  “Let’s do it,” Jackson said.

  I pulled into the outside lane and punched the accelerator to close the gap with the Mustang. Jackson came right up on his tail and hit the emergency lights. Then the cruiser ahead slowed suddenly. I pulled up beside the Mustang and the trap was closed. All I could see through the dark tint of the windows was the outline of a man.

  Jackson hit her siren and he was forced to slow again by the cruiser right ahead of him. Then he slammed on the brakes, and we were all out of our cars, facing him with pistols drawn and automobiles between us and him.

  “Driver of the Mustang,” Jackson announced on the PA system. “Roll down your windows so we can see you. If you have any weapons, throw them out on the driver’s side. Keep your hands where we can see them. Slide across and get out on the passenger side-repeat, the passenger side. Keep your hands in plain sight.”

  A long time seemed to pass as cars whizzed by behind me. She repeated the order. The driver just sat there behind his dark windows. A thought crept into my head: What if it’s the wrong guy? The cop from the lead car edged in toward the Mustang, semiautomatic pistol drawn. He was tall, skinny, blond, and very young.

  Then his face just disappeared in a mist of blood and smoke and the splinters of his sunglasses, followed by a massive boom and echo. His body snapped backward and fell heavily to the pavement.

  I squeezed off a round, the big Python jumped in my hand, and the window on the driver’s side of the Mustang exploded from the impact of the.357. But Copeland was already moving fast, kicking open the passenger door and rolling out onto the sidewalk. I couldn’t see him.

  “He’s going east on foot!” Jackson yelled. I could see her talking into her walkie-talkie, calling for assistance. I scuttled low around the Blazer and the police cruiser in front of the Mustang. The young cop was flat on his back and his face was gone. I felt for a carotid pulse in the gore. Nothing. I was shaking, and I thought very clearly, Copeland must have shot through the windshield of the Mustang.

  Then the side windows of the police cruiser came apart and bullets were whizzing past me. I fell to the asphalt and immediately got burned from the heat. I rolled and rose to a crouch. I could see his feet. Then I didn’t know where he was. Somewhere on the other side of the police car, maybe. Or maybe coming toward me.

  I heard Brenda Jackson on the other side of the cars, ordering him to freeze. I rose, still separated by two vehicles, and watched him turn toward her, a long-barreled.44 Magnum in one hand and my old friend the machine gun in the other, both traveling upward. Three quick cracks. She was firing.

  “Fuck, he’s got body armor!”

  He fired a burst from the machine gun, and she went down, groaning, squeezing off more rounds herself. I fired in his direction but couldn’t get a good aim because of the sun. I felt terrified and useless. I fired again, and he fell to the ground.

  Then part of the cruiser’s light bar disintegrated as he fired the Magnum at me. A ka-boom and the echo, more like artillery than a pistol. The lead cruiser’s back window blew out and the bullet kept going, smashing into a sign across the street. I scuttled and crawled counterclockwise toward the back of the cars.

  I backed up to Jackson, the Python at the ready. I still didn’t know if he’d run or try to finish us off. She was back against the rear bumper, sliding a new magazine in her semiautomatic pistol.

  “I’m okay,” she mouthed. But she was bleeding. “Go!” she whispered, nodding toward Copeland.

  I fought off my fear and came out low and fast on the other side of the cruiser. But he was gone. I ran east on Indian School Road. One block, two. I ran and crouched, ran again and crouched. The heat burning in my lungs, I scanned the low-rise office buildings and condos for a sign of him. Nothing. I could hear sirens coming up the street behind me.

  My first memory of a police officer being killed in the line of duty was when I was ten years old. A motorcycle cop was shot at a traffic stop near downtown Phoenix, and another motorcycle officer respondin
g to the call for assistance was killed when a car ran through an intersection and hit him. It happened at Seventh Avenue and Roosevelt, not all that far from our home, in a city that seemed miles removed from the riots and mayhem of the 1960s. The photos of the two dead cops were on the evening news for days afterward, and it seemed unalterably grave and sad. I remember Grandfather, who had many old-fashioned notions, saying that killing a police officer in the line of duty was the worst crime because it was an attack on society itself.

  Ten years later, when I joined the strange, closed world of the police, it was not so rare for cops to be murdered. We started wearing flak vests and carrying backup firearms. I remember one winter night when a two-man unit stopped a car at a citrus grove south of Guadalupe, not knowing it held two prison escapees from Oklahoma. The convicts had automatic weapons and the.38-caliber revolvers of the deputies were no match. Both deputies were two years away from retirement. We pulled up with the gun smoke still in the air, and Peralta jumped out of the car with a pump-action shotgun before I could even open my door. It was the first time I really saw his fury. He killed both cons where they stood, a surreal scene, like something out of a Western. And he said just what Grandfather had: To kill a cop in the line of duty was to attack society itself.

  My mind returned to the young officer obliterated by the man in the Mustang. In the line of duty. Duty was an increasingly quaint idea to most Americans. My colleagues in academia scoffed at such a notion. But it must have at least partly inspired this young man to take a job paying $27,000 a year, where the most he could hope for was to be spat upon and called a pig as his marriage crumbled and his debts grew. His name was Glenn Adams, he was twenty-four, and he had a new wife. All his hopes and dreams ended on Indian School Road on an ordinary summer afternoon.

  In a few days, I would put on my uniform for the first time in a decade and a half. I would drape my gold star with a bar of black tape and join my comrades at Glenn Adams’s funeral. We would honor his sacrifice and vow to keep him in our memory always. It is what we would hope for ourselves.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  A half hour before midnight, I finally headed home from Madison Street. Was it still Tuesday night? I couldn’t even remember. The term bone-tired, I understood.

  I’d been through several hours of interviews with the Internal Affairs team from Phoenix PD, then the IAD investigators from the Sheriff’s Office (who were wondering who the hell I was). Then the Public Affairs officers from both departments: The TV stations were all leading their newscasts with “Cop killing on city street in broad daylight.” Then came several layers of brass, asking the same questions over and over. The Sheriff himself came to ask some questions, patted me on the shoulder, and then left to brief the reporters waiting in his pressroom.

  Then an extended private ass-kicking from Peralta: Why had I been following Brent McConnico? How could I be sure Dennis Copeland was the same man I’d seen at Metrocenter? Why hadn’t I waited until more backup was available? How could I have let such inexperienced officers try to stop Copeland? Why was I such a bad shot? How could I have let Copeland escape-twice? And-the heart of the matter-why did I “screw the pooch,” as he called it, with his bete noire, the Phoenix Police Department?

  It was a bad scene, as we used to say in the sixties. Peralta had moved past his demonstrative anger-the shouting and thundering and pounding on his desk-into a barely controlled rage of pedantic lectures and nasty questions, over and over. It was Mike Peralta at his worst. The Brent McConnico factor left an especially bad taste in my mouth. Peralta claimed to disbelieve that McConnico had even been at the strip mall on Shea Boulevard, meeting Dennis Copeland. I wasn’t my best, either. I accused Peralta of soft-pedaling McConnico’s role to preserve his own political skin. That started him all over again. The only thing that saved me was Peralta being summoned to a disturbance at the jail. I’d had enough for one day.

  I walked down the dimly lighted corridor totally spent. I was exhausted and sore. The palms of my hands hurt from the 130-degree temperature of the asphalt I’d hit earlier that day. Even my ankles hurt.

  In a little alcove by the elevator, Lindsey was sitting with her feet propped up on another chair, dozing. In sleep, there was something darkly reassuring about her beauty, gold stud in her nose and all. I sat down beside her and gently brushed her hair away from her face. The indirect light caught the rich browns and auburns in what had first appeared to be nearly black, fine, straight hair. My raven. She smiled and sighed and stretched.

  “Hey, Dave,” she said. “I figured you could use a friend.”

  “You figured right,” I said.

  “I told you to be careful.”

  “I tried.”

  She reached out her hand and I pulled her up. We took the elevator and escaped into the night.

  We went to her apartment in Sunnyslope, where we sat on an old couch covered with a comforter, drinking Chardonnay, listening to angry young music, and talking for hours.

  She had a cat, a big languid gray tabby named Pasternak, reflecting a late-teen obsession with Russian literature and history. We talked about Dr. Zhivago and Lindsey said she had always been touched by the character of Lara, wrenched from love and doomed by revolution. In the movie, there was the streetcar scene, of course, where Yuri and Lara see each other years later but are hopelessly separated by time and motion.

  I always remembered Zhivago’s brother, the Soviet officer, who talked about how Yuri and Lara were among the millions murdered to realize the Communist ideal, which of course was a sham. Tens upon tens of millions killed in this bloodiest of centuries, all in the service of murderous ideologies that sought to kill even history-especially history! — a trail of inhumanity and rage and social disintegration, a steady return to barbarism that led even to Maricopa County, Arizona, and young women left dead in the desert.

  This was the point at which my dating life usually self-destructed, but Lindsey stayed with me, for some odd reason genuinely interested. “I wish I could have studied history with you,” she said.

  The cat purred at my feet. I let it sniff my finger and then chucked it under the chin. “Pasternak likes you,” she said. She took my hand and stroked it lightly, skin on skin, touch on touch. She had long, elegant fingers. “I do, too.”

  She held my hand against her warm lips and kissed it.

  “I don’t have any answers,” I said.

  “I don’t want any.” She ran a finger down my face, tracing the curve of my cheek, mapping out my lips.

  I looked at her. Her eyes were a subtle blue, something I had not noticed before, overpowered by the monochromes of her dark hair and clothes and white skin.

  “I don’t know the human heart.”

  “I don’t, either,” she said, and kissed me lightly.

  “I failed in my marriage,” I said.

  “Stop living in the past, History Shamus.”

  “I’m thirteen years older than you. I don’t have movie-star looks or a sailboat. I don’t even have a real job.” I sighed. “I’m feeling pretty broken right now.”

  “I like the way you’re broken,” she said, and kissed me again, our tongues touching lightly. “I know what you are.”

  I started to open my mouth, but she put two fingers against my lips. “Shhhh.”

  And so I took her in my arms, Lindsey Faith Adams, and kissed her like I’d wanted to from the first second I ever laid eyes on her.

  In the morning, I cooked us breakfast, Mexican omelettes and English muffins, and we sat in bed eating and reading about the shooting in the Republic. As usual, the media got the story only half-right. Pasternak went out on the balcony and provoked a mockingbird, who fussed at him loudly.

  “So what’s your unified field theory?” Lindsey asked.

  “I prefer lying in bed with a beautiful naked woman, reveling in what a sexy, wonderful find she is,” I said. I felt sore in all the right places, all the forgotten, out-of-practice places. “Out there!”-I nodd
ed out the window-“they can all go to hell.”

  Lindsey ate a forkful of omelette. “This is very good, Dave.”

  “My theory?” I said. “Add Brent McConnico, the next governor, to our list of people who have landed in bad shit. I kept thinking this Copeland guy from the Metrocenter had to be tied into Phaedra’s murder. But I guess-and here’s where my theory runs out of track-he’s connected to McConnico, which means he’s connected to Rebecca Stokes, who was murdered forty years ago. But he’s no damned ghost.…”

  “Something from that long ago still matters,” Lindsey said. She put some preserves on a piece of muffin and fed it to me. “Something matters enough to kill for.”

  “So we get a break in one case, and it knocks the legs out of the other one. Shit. I just need to let that go. Let Peralta throw Julie in jail forever.”

  She read my face and said, “You know this isn’t going to be a happy ending with Julie, don’t you, Dave? Are you sure you want to go there?”

  I tried to smile. “You’re pretty smart for a computer nerd.”

  “It’s the database of the heart,” Lindsey said.

  “I’m with you,” I said, kissing her hand. “It’s where I want to be.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m glad for both of us.”

  Afterward, I took our plates to the kitchen and then climbed back into bed. Lindsey draped a long leg across me. Young, taut skin-the most amazing feeling.

  “So let’s tie up some loose ends,” I said. “Why did Julie say she was being followed?”

  “We know she’s truth-challenged,” Lindsey said. “But if she’s on the level, maybe she first saw this guy Copeland when he was actually watching you.” She smirked. “She obviously thinks every man wants her. Then Copeland sees Julie with you and decides to find out if she’s important, so he follows her.”