Dry Heat

by Jon Talton

  Could the man from the pool, the dead man without a name, maybe nicknamed Weed, have walked these streets? It was a long shot. Only a meal card told us he could.

  We were in sight of the nicest new investments downtown, the Dodge Theater, Bank One Ballpark, and America West Arena. But these streets held blocks of bleak single-story warehouses, some close to falling down. The produce businesses were gone. Almost everything was gone. One building held the Interfaith Cooperative Ministries. Another said it was the Joe Diaz Top-Level Boxing Gym (“There is no substitute for experience”). Concertina wire flashed menacingly off fences and rooftops. Vacant lots glistened with broken glass. A few early bungalows sat incongruously beside the industrial buildings—if you could have moved one to one of the historic districts and fixed it up, you could have sold it for half a million bucks.

  The streets were covered with the memory of pavement. Curbs and sidewalks were cracked, broken, or nonexistent. Long unused railroad tracks ran down the center of the cross streets, Jackson, Harrison, Madison, heading nowhere. As we drove slowly up Ninth Avenue, they appeared. Singles, pairs, and clusters of people. They stood or walked aimlessly up and down. Most were black, but there were also plenty of Anglos, a few Indians. On one corner a man huddled by an open water faucet, rinsing his face. An ancient-looking Anglo hobbled across railroad tracks using stainless steel crutches. Across the street, a black woman pulled what looked like a new wheeled suitcase and two small children.

  “Jesus Christ,” Kate Vare said quietly.

  “Don’t you remember the Deuce?” I asked. The old skid row in Phoenix had been centered around Second Street, hence its name.

  “No,” she said. “I moved out from Wisconsin in 1989.”

  “When the city proposed tearing the Deuce down to build Civic Plaza, a few people asked where the transients would go. Here’s where they went, as well as to every neighborhood park in the center city, behind big billboards, at camps down at the riverbed…”

  “Mapstone,” she said, “Spare me your history lessons.”

  “Sorry. It’s just interesting.”

  “Maybe to you,” she said. “You know, I am so unimpressed with the great Dr. David Mapstone.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Oh, please. Spare me the false humility, too. The famous David Mapstone is the genius who solved the disappearance of Rebecca Stokes from the 1950s, who discovered the bodies of the Yarnell twins who were kidnapped in the Depression. What else? Oh, yes, the David Mapstone who uncovered the scandal in the sheriff’s office from the 1970s and helped free an innocent man.”

  “He was killed,” I said quietly, stopping so a man in pink pants and a long yellow prospector’s beard could pull his two shopping carts laboriously across the potholed street.

  “You’re famous, Mapstone. I read about you in the newspaper. I see you on TV, even if you don’t watch. I’m just a police officer who plays by the rules and works as a professional. I work on real cold cases—crimes from 1982, say, or 1990, where real people are waiting for some word of what happened to a loved one. I can’t just deliver some bullshit scam graduate history seminar. Like I really have time to waste on this wild goose chase.”

  She went on, growing more animated. “I worked to get where I am. I didn’t go off for fifteen years to teach college and then come back so my buddy the sheriff could get me a job.”

  “Good for you, Kate,” I wished I could get out of the car. The top being down helped relieve the oppressiveness of the talk, but the sun was starting to broil us. We bumped across the Southern Pacific tracks. Off on one corner, as far from the technology economy as I could imagine, sat unattended stacks of shrink-wrapped computer screens. Maybe for recycling? Maybe “fell off the truck”?

  She said, “The point is, I’m working with you because I have to, not because I want to.” She readjusted her sunglasses and stared straight ahead. “And I hate this old car.”

  I pushed against the seat to ease my stress-made backache. “Gosh, Kate, I’m crushed. You’re so charming, even flirty, if I may say, that all this comes as a surprise to me.”

  “Fuck you.”

  I tried to ignore her. A good night’s sleep had helped me set aside the sadness of the past two weeks. Good night’s sleep, my ass—I got laid. The universal antidote to heartbreak, loss, anxiety, frustration, second thoughts, and fears of mortality. Anyway, Kate was right: I had a good gig. I had come home to Phoenix and found a sweet little niche for someone burdened by something as useless as a Ph.D. in history. In fact, my life was rich with blessings: Lindsey, a good marriage, a nice house in the Willo Historic District far from lookalike subdivisions, good health—I was still in good shape, even if I was undeniably in middle age. Lots of people would think my life was a fantasy come true. Looking around at all the suffering souls on these streets was reminder enough of that.

  I slid the big car slowly up to a group of men wearing layers of filthy old clothes. I showed them the photo and they asked for money. I showed them my badge and they went away. Another man, his face frozen in a desperate contortion and baked red-brown by the sun, swore he remembered a guy named Weed, an old guy who claimed he had come from a rich family in New York. No, he didn’t know his full name. A prostitute walked up in a short, dusty dress and asked us if we wanted a partner for a threesome. A patrol car gave us the once-over and drove away. We crossed the railroad main line a dozen times, going back and forth. So it went for an hour. Most police work was even more boring than this.

  “Pull in there,” Kate said, pointing to a shady area under the overpass, “if you won’t put the damned top up. I need to check my messages.” She pulled a cell phone out. “Jesus, I can’t even see the phone display in this glare.”

  I was sweating, too, so I drove slowly toward the shade, north from Lincoln, right onto what looked like an access road beside the overpass. It was really old South Seventh Avenue, which once crossed the railroad at grade, and was frequently blocked by trains. After the overpass was built, it was blocked off at the tracks, making a street that went nowhere. We hadn’t checked back here for a lead on Weed or whatever the hell his name was.

  The area under the overpass was still seedy with industrial castoffs. I pulled back as far as the road went, letting my eyes adjust and feeling the temperature drop instantly when the sun went away. I slipped the car into park and looked at the lovely old mission-style building of Union Station, a hundred yards to the east and across the tracks. My grandmother had taken me there as a boy to see passenger trains like the Sunset Limited, the Imperial, and the Golden State. Now they were all history. The tracks were empty, torn out or sprouting weeds. It made me sad.

  My eyes adjusted to the dark and I realized we had landed in a little colony of some kind. Groups of men watched us from a distance, men whose clothes and skin had all been turned the same color of brown-black by the sun. I counted a dozen I could see. We had landed in their world, cut off from the street grid, shaded from the sun. I couldn’t believe we were welcome.

  Just outside my peripheral vision, I saw movement. I turned to see three men walking toward us from a squat building under the concrete pilings. They were younger, moving without the beaten down arthritic shuffle of the transients a block over. They weren’t walking past. They were walking toward us. Something in their expressions…

  “What are you doing?” Kate closed her phone.

  “I was a Boy Scout,” I said, pulling my Colt Python .357 magnum revolver from the locked console compartment and concealing it between my legs. “‘Be Prepared.’”

  “You got the time?” asked a muscular black man in a white sleeveless T-shirt coming to my side of the car. I told him the time. He said, “Nice car.” I agreed it was. His buddies surrounded us. I couldn’t see each of them at once. I felt my heart rate take off.

  “So what you want down here?” he asked. I kept my hands in my lap, covering the butt of the Python. He went on, “Score some crack? Never seen you before.”
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  His buddy said, “Lots of white folks come in from the suburbs to buy crack from the brothers, but we never seen you here before.”

  Another voice, high-pitched, said, “Maybe they just lost.”

  “Lost, my ass!” came a call from the gloomy periphery of the street.

  The leader, Muscle Man, thought about that, looking at us intently. “You lost, we give you directions. But you got to pay the toll.”

  The high-pitched voice behind me said, “Pay the toll to the troll.” Everybody laughed except Muscle Man. Even I laughed.

  Kate flashed her badge. “Get lost, asshole. We’re busy.”

  “Sure, Officer,” Muscle Man said. He walked in a small circle, breathing in and out deeply. He came to face us again. “You heard her, let’s get lost.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to get lost.” This from the Tenor. I turned my head enough to take him in. He was the biggest of the bunch, a giant with walnut-colored skin, wearing a very long lime green T-shirt and long-short pants. He also sported a sideways green ball cap atop what looked to my unhip eyes like a skullcap. His sneakers were smaller than destroyers. In other words, he looked like every suburban kid at the mall. He walked over to Kate’s side of the car.

  I let my eyes again take in our surroundings. The street around us was really not much more than an alley. Old warehouses rose up on either side of us. Traffic rolled over us on the overpass. In the distance I could hear jets taking off from Sky Harbor. A train whistle came from the west. We might as well have been a hundred miles from any help.

  “You hear?” said Muscle Man. “We don’t want to get lost.”

  “Maybe we’ll take this car, understand what I’m sayin’,” said the thin man.

  It was a curious expression, “understand what I’m sayin’.” Was it born of unempowered people desperate to be heard, accustomed to the powerful classes failing to “understand”? That would be a fine politically correct paper to present at the Modern Language Association—my amused subconscious was actually thinking this. My conscious felt the heavy butt of the handgun against my concealing hands as the thin man walked up beside my door and leaned a dirty arm on it. He had large black freckles on his face, large, expressive eyes. His hands were scarred and sinewy.

  “Maybe we’ll take her badge,” said the Tenor. “Badge like that bring some good money on the street. Shit, maybe we’ll take her.” He slouched against Kate’s side of the car, giggling “Pay the toll to the troll.”

  Someone from the shadows repeated, “Pay the toll to the trolls.”

  Another voice from the gloom: “Kill him and rape the bitch!”

  This is how it was going to go down: the Muscle Man was on my side of the car, joined by the thin guy with freckles. On Kate’s side, the giant Tenor, his hat cockeyed. The chorus surrounded us at a distance, the monochrome street people watching the little drama, maybe ready to join in if we appeared weak enough.

  I was watching the hands of the three surrounding the car. Nobody seemed armed, but I couldn’t really tell. I kept my hands in my lap, feeling a huge lump of panic in my middle.

  A little bit of long-ago training bubbled up. I turned the ignition and put my hand on the gearshift. “’Bye, trolls,” I said.

  But in that instant, Muscle Man dove at me. I wasn’t fast enough. Strong, rough fingers closed around my throat. I almost blacked out right there, but turned my head a little sideways, sucked in some air, and drove my arms up viciously to break his grip. He fell back. I heard an ugly murmur from the shadows, and before I could get out of the damned seat Freckles came at me. I slammed the heel of my hand into his nose and he snapped back, falling on his ass. But Muscle Man dove over the door, grabbing for the gun. He had all the leverage of a strong, standing man fighting a man who was pinned down in a car seat. I could feel myself losing the fight. Didn’t want to imagine the consequences. Couldn’t.

  But I fought dirty. When he reached for the pistol, I grabbed one of his fingers with both my hands and torqued it in a direction nature didn’t intend. I felt the finger snap, heard the bone and cartilage separate. He screamed, lurched back, and fell out of the car, landing on his back. I rose right up after him, leaped out of the car-without even opening the door. I had a foot on his chest and the big Python in his face. Freckles was also in my field of fire, raised up on his elbows staring at me, blood streaming out of his nose.

  Kate was being pulled from the car by the big guy. She had received a nasty blow to one eye, and I could see him reaching for her holster, with her desperately trying to keep his hands away. High-voltage panic shot up my spine.

  There was no time for negotiation. I kicked Muscle Man in the nose to stun him, took a chance on Freckles staying down, and ran to the other side of the car for a clear shot. I got within five feet, dropped into a combat stance and leveled the Colt Python at the chest of the big Tenor. I did some quick arithmetic: six .357 hollow-point bullets, three targets, shaky hands, and my Speedloader reloading magazines were in the glovebox. And all that assumed nobody from the shadows decided to get a piece of us.

  I was not articulate: “Die, asshole.”

  He stared at me, stared at the gun. A large drop of sweat materialized on his forehead and ran to his eye.

  He sighed. “Fuck.”

  He let go, and Kate used her suddenly free arm to deliver a nasty haymaker. He sprawled on the asphalt, holding his face. I noticed Freckles was on his feet, thinking about intervening. When I moved my gunsights to his chest, he took off to the south toward Lincoln. I could see Kate tense, ready to give chase.

  “Let him go,” I said. “We can find him through his buddies here.”

  The Tenor looked at me mournfully. Kate had a wild look and had retrieved her semiautomatic and handcuffs.

  “Face down on the ground,” I ordered, keeping my finger on the Colt’s finely machined trigger.

  I looked around: the street was empty. Everyone was gone. I said merrily, “Toll booth is closed.”

  But Kate mouthed something silently, looking at me. If I had been a lip reader, I would say she called me a bastard. And she said, “You’ll pay.”

  Chapter Six

  “Dave, I continue to be amazed…” Lindsey paused to watch Luis Gonzalez slam a single past the second baseman. She cheered like a banshee, took a sip of beer, and continued. “I am continually amazed that a bookworm like you gets into such trouble.”

  It was Saturday night and we had our usual nosebleed seats at Chase Field, our way to take in the Diamondbacks—unless Peralta was treating and we could enjoy his season tickets two rows above the home dugout. One of the surprises about getting to know Lindsey was to see her evolution into a rabid baseball fan. This night the D-Backs were six runs ahead of the Braves headed into the eighth inning, a margin comfortable enough even for a fatalistic fan like me.

  “You haven’t been a street cop since you were in your early twenties.” Lindsey continued, a carefully kept scorecard on her lap. “So how come you get in a confrontation with some drug dealers and you know how to save your bacon?”

  “Luck,” I said. “And truck knowledge.”

  Lindsey said, “Truck what?”

  “Truck knowledge,” I said. “It’s the stuff you know so deep that you can get hit by a truck and still remember. Like good training at the Sheriff’s Academy. You learn moves that kick in even if you’re tempted to panic. That’s truck knowledge.”

  “I like that.”

  “It was a phrase I learned from Dr. Milton.”

  “He must have been a character,” she said. “I wish I could have had a chance to meet him.” She put a hand on my leg. “But your scrapes with the wild side of Phoenix scare the hell out of me. You need to stick to the library; History Shamus.”

  I could still feel a stranger’s rough fingers digging into my neck. Rolling my head from side to side only exaggerated the soreness. Lindsey was right, of course. We had been lucky as hell. The confrontation beneath the overpass could have turned out ver
y differently, very unhappily. Somehow I had a gene in me that let me remember my training, and fight back when I was scared—even though most people living comfortable, middle-class lives would have been terrified into paralysis. And I had been lucky.

  I sat back high above home plate, surrounded by 30,000 friendly strangers, and felt glad to be alive. Phoenix had come a long way from the dusty little farm town that my great-grandparents discovered when they came to Arizona before statehood. In good ways, with big-city amenities like the beautiful downtown ballpark, with its retractable roof, air-conditioning, and right-field swimming pool. And bad: with the rough characters like the kind Kate Vare and I encountered the day before.

  They were in Peralta’s jail now, wearing stripes and eating green baloney. But a fleeting hope that they might somehow be connected to the old FBI badge—what with the one scumbag’s comment about taking and selling Kate’s badge—had led to nothing. They were ordinary drug dealers and low-life generalists seeking whatever criminal opportunity presented itself. So we were still nowhere on the investigation. The medical examiner was behind on autopsies and cranky, so we didn’t even know if the old guy in the pool was a homicide. My request to see the FBI file on John Pilgrim’s death was somewhere in the outer rings of bureaucratic perdition. There was nothing to do but turn off our pagers and cell phones and go to a baseball game.

  When the game ended in triumph, we spilled out with the crowd, down the big escalators, past the murals with scenes of Arizona, past the dedication to the People of Maricopa County. That was when two burly uniformed deputies intercepted us.

  “You David and Lindsey Mapstone?”

  I asked what the problem was.

  “Sheriff Peralta needs you in Scottsdale immediately.”

  I started to protest, but they were already hustling us into a service elevator. “We’ll drive you,” one said.

  “We couldn’t reach you on pager, sir,” his partner said.

  “Can’t I just call Peralta on the phone?” I asked.

  “No, sir. He was very specific. He wants us to bring you.”