Dry Heat

by Jon Talton

  “Goddamnit!”

  The speedometer read one hundred and twenty-five. The speedometer stopped at one hundred and twenty-five.

  I flew low-altitude across the Short Stack and descended into the center city, staying in the HOV lane, heading to the Third Street exit. Now the trooper was right on me. I could see sunglasses and a grim expression. Another DPS cruiser was behind him. A buddy. Everybody ought to have a buddy. I held up my badge like a fool. I didn’t slow down.

  The Olds surged off the freeway doing a responsible eighty miles per hour, as I tried to raise the communications center on the cell phone. Behind me, the trooper’s siren insisted I pull over. I gunned it through the yellow light at McDowell and heard screeching tires off to the left. I didn’t want to look. Somewhere in my mind the moving violations were adding up: speeding, reckless driving, refusing to stop. I was half a mile from Lindsey.

  Then I was at Central, heading north. A couple of Phoenix PD cars had joined the chase now, and I led a festive little procession up the northbound fast lane, past the Phoenix Art Museum, the Viad Tower, and the church where we had been married. Sure, something inside told me I wasn’t thinking straight. I was thinking only of Lindsey right at that moment. And I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach when I could see emergency lights outside the condo tower.

  Something wrong.

  Something bad.

  The palm trees hurtled past. Then I was slowing, stopping suddenly, slamming the gearshift into park, running toward the entrance to the building. Men were milling about. Men with guns. They noticed me and started out the door.

  “Lindsey!” I yelled. “Where’s Lindsey?”

  Behind me I heard voices, commands.

  Then a great weight fell on me from behind. The ground came up fast. I felt sharp pain, sudden force. I was losing altitude. Then I wasn’t really there. It was only in a little closet of my consciousness that I noticed my arms being pulled in an unnatural direction, and I heard a sound that reminded me of handcuffs locking.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “You’re gonna be OK. You just got the air knocked out of you.”

  “Do you know what day it is?”

  “Don’t try to talk. Just breathe.”

  “Do you want to go to the hospital to get checked out?”

  “He’s fine. He doesn’t need to go.”

  People were having a conversation in a language I didn’t quite understand.

  “He’s a deputy. He’s on the job. Take those off.”

  I inhabited a hidden control room just behind my eyes, working an air machine of some kind, vaguely aware of things going on around me. I was attached to something heavy. Then everything turned sideways and my stomach was headed up my throat…

  “Don’t try to stand up. That’s right. Keep your head down. Just concentrate on breathing.”

  “Lindsey!”

  “She’s OK, she’s OK. Just sit there.”

  I came around. “There” was the grass in front of the condo tower. I was surrounded by redwood-sized men, a couple of paramedics, three Phoenix cops, two sheriff’s detectives whose names I could remember if you gave me a few minutes without my passing out. A DPS trooper was glowering at me, putting away his cuffs. I squeezed my hands just to make sure they were still there. He must have weighed 280 pounds, and I suddenly felt every one of them on my back and ribs. My left arm was swelling painfully, in the grasp of a large man in a blue T-shirt.

  I came around enough to notice the SWAT officers arrayed around the entrance to the building. Men in black jumpsuits, black Kevlar helmets and goggles, black bulletproof vests. My mouth thick with dread, I asked my question again.

  “She’s safe. She’s gone. Just sit there and take it easy.”

  I focused on Chief Deputy Kimbrough, looking dapper in tan slacks, blue blazer and a rep bow tie on a blue and white striped Oxford shirt. The paramedic peeled the blood-pressure cuff off my arm and called out a number to his partner—at least I wouldn’t die of high blood pressure.

  “She’s safe,” Kimbrough repeated. “We had to move her. There was a security breach.”

  “What the hell?” I got on my knees and tried to stand, wobbled, then found a lamppost to support me. Every joint in my body felt swollen and stiff. I asked, “What breach? Why do you have SWAT teams here?”

  “Somebody tried to get into the building,” Kimbrough said. “After you called Lindsey she called down to the deputy in the lobby. He called backup, and they found a ladder leaned up against the building.”

  “What?”

  “Just listen and breathe, Mapstone. You look like you’re about to pass out. We found a ladder that had been leaned up against a second-story balcony. Nobody was home in that apartment, but the balcony door had been pried, and the door to the hallway was unlocked. We got her out. Now we’re searching the building. Our friends from PPD think it might just be a burglary or a careless maintenance man. But the sheriff didn’t want to take a chance.”

  I shivered in the warm breeze blowing down Central. “Show me.”

  I limped along the front sidewalk, then through some hedges to the south of the entrance. Sure enough, around a corner and just out of view, an aluminum ladder was raised to the balcony. A SWAT officer on the balcony glared down at me.

  “So much for the safe house,” I said.

  “Peralta thinks Yuri found it by following you.”

  I stared at the chief, too sore to argue. He went on, “Whoever followed you this afternoon might have been trying to keep you away from here. So they could make their move. They want Lindsey.”

  “I guess they succeeded in keeping me away,” I said quietly.

  “Obviously it’s not just Yuri. He’s got help.”

  “And we can’t seem to do anything to stop him.”

  “Did you get a tag?” Kimbrough asked.

  I shook my head, a jolt of pain driving into my shoulder blades. I ran through what happened, from the time I noticed the Hummer on my tail. Then Kimbrough wanted it again, from the time I left the condo that morning. I was certain I wasn’t being followed. Yes, I had gone through all the agreed upon procedures. No, I couldn’t be sure that the blond man at Encanto Park was a bad guy. When I was done, I just wanted to go to Lindsey.

  “You can’t,” Kimbrough said.

  I asked why.

  “It’s a federal case. The FBI has taken over, moved her to a secure location.”

  “Sounds like a kidnapping.”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass, this is serious. This was a close call.”

  “No shit,” I said. “How do you know she’s safe now?”

  “I know!”

  “Where is she?” I knew I was babbling. I couldn’t stop myself.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “They won’t even tell me.”

  “Then how do you know anything?”

  “My detectives took her to a rendezvous with the feds. One of our men will be with the federal agents. You remember Patrick Blair, from Robbery-Homicide Division? He’ll stay with her.”

  “Damn it!”

  “You don’t have to shout,” Kimbrough said.

  Amid all that was coming at me, I realized my ears were ringing loudly. In a lower voice, I asked, “When can I see her?” Kimbrough said nothing, and the frustration made every ache worse.

  I tried it another way. “What if she’s asking to see me?”

  “She’s being told the same thing,” Kimbrough said. “Every member of her team is now in protective custody.”

  “So she doesn’t have civil rights, just because she works for the Sheriff’s Office? This is nuts. You promised this would be for two weeks. Now, she’s gone God knows where, and you have nothing to say to me?”

  “I don’t have the answers, David. Wish I did. You’re lucky you’re not in jail after what you pulled on the freeway with DPS. You’ve got to be a professional about this. Lindsey is at risk, and any of us could bring her into danger without even realizing it. I feel li
ke I had a role in this, too, finding a way for you two to stay together when maybe that wasn’t such a smart thing. Now we’ve got to let the people with the real experience deal with this.”

  A city cop came up and told Kimbrough the building was clear. Whoever had used the ladder was gone. The cop was all of twenty-five, with a dirty blond crew cut, and he kept calling Kimbrough “dude.” Kimbrough glared at him each time, but the kid was oblivious to social skills, protocol, or any breaches thereof.

  Kimbrough watched the cop walk away. Then he reached in his coat, and his features relaxed into a benevolent smile. “Here’s a voucher for the Hyatt. We’re shutting down this safe house. You need some rest. The sheriff will get with you tomorrow. I know he’s interested in the progress of your case. He’s at a fund-raiser at the Boulders, or he’d be here now. I promise we’ll get you some information about Lindsey as soon as possible.”

  I waved the envelope away. “Nothing personal, Chief,” I said. “You’re a good guy. But this situation is fucked. I’m going home.”

  Kimbrough gave me an alarmed stare. “You can’t. . .”

  “Yes, I can,” I said. “I’m going upstairs to get the cat.”

  I pointed down Cypress Street, into the lush old trees of the Willo district. “Then I’m going home.”

  ***

  A fleet of thunderheads over the South Mountains was set ablaze by the fading sun. The sunset seemed to electrify the prism edges of the Bank One Center, tallest building in downtown, until the tower was defined by the bright straight lines of reflection from the west. Airliners took off from Sky Harbor, two by two, flashing in the last of the sunlight as they made their turns. Gradually, the sky gave way to an infinite, India ink blue-black, silhouetting the palm trees against the incandescent twilight.

  Under this vault of big sky, I was a puny human sitting on his front porch, in front of the 1924 stucco house with the big picture window. The porch was dark and the house behind it was dark. I was in a dark way, not feeling quite human, aware of the comforting bulk of the submachine gun on my lap. The grass needed cutting and mail had gathered inside the door. Lindsey’s old Honda Prelude—the bumper sticker read KEEP HONKING. I’M RELOADING—needed washing. Otherwise, the house looked much as we had left it more than two weeks before. Just to make sure, Lindsey’s old gray tabby, Pasternak, prowled every room. That left me to assess the damage of a large highway patrol trooper hitting me from behind at speed, sandwiching me in between him and the pavement. The knees of a pair of Tommy Hilfiger chinos were a lost cause, and beneath them David Mapstone’s knees weren’t doing much better. The small of my back felt on fire, with devilish little arsonists spreading the blaze to each vertebra. My earlobes hurt—go figure that out.

  I thought about whether I had really put Lindsey at risk. Whether I had been protective or selfish in demanding to be with her after the Scottsdale shooting. “Protective,” my heart said, for this was apparently an open-ended threat, and our friends in law enforcement had proven remarkably inept in dealing with it. My head stayed silent in the debate, preferring to concentrate on its headache.

  All these SWAT cops in their paramilitary attire, what did this mean for the health of American civil society? Like surveillance cameras everywhere, pre-employment drug tests, and other subtle assaults on the Constitution. Was it this way with the Roman Republic, the gradual loss of liberty under the guise of continual warfare? Cicero, eloquent, impotent…(Yes, David, distract yourself with a Big Thought.)

  A pickup truck roared down the street. It was one of those two-story-tall four-by-fours, and he was doing at least sixty. My finger went automatically to the gun trigger. He raced by, heading to Seventh Avenue, no more able to stop for a pedestrian or a wayward child than a supertanker. People drove with such rage in my town. Maybe it was true everywhere now. I wondered: was this the way we would live now, Lindsey and me? Under constant threat, mistaking any speeding blockhead for Yuri or his agents.

  Patrick Blair. Patrick Fucking Blair. Some personal history here: Lindsey and I split up once. It was after we’d been seeing each other for a year, and under pressure of circumstances and personal griefs, we just stopped seeing each other. There was no grand announcement. But jealousy is a powerful, primal thing, and I knew at the time Lindsey was working with a handsome young detective named Patrick Blair. We had never talked about those two months apart. And my hands weren’t clean, either. But that’s another personal history story. . .

  My eyes were on a big man lumbering west on Cypress, crossing Third Avenue. He was walking with a pronounced limp.

  “Just sittin’ on the porch with an automatic weapon, eh?” Peralta emerged from the heavy twilight. He was wearing brown uniform pants with oversize cargo pockets, and an MCSO polo shirt. The cargo pockets were so full they made him look a bit like a cavalryman wearing jodhpurs. He was holding something to his face.

  “I thought you were schmoozing campaign donors in Carefree?”

  He sat heavily in the other chair. “Stopped to help some deputies,” he said. “Haven’t been in a fight like that for quite a while.” He was holding a cold pack to his left cheek, mashing the flesh against his temple. “Dirtbag was already arrested, and he broke out the window of a patrol car and took off. So they ran him down a little off Bell Road, and he’s fighting like a son of a bitch. Bites a deputy. Hits me square in the face, I mean nails me. So I had to change and get cleaned up. Another one of your misunderstood homeless guys. . .”

  He adjusted the cold pack and looked at me. “Did you tell her you love her this morning?”

  “What?”

  “Did you tell her you love her?”

  “Of course.”

  “We do dangerous work, Mapstone. You, me, the same as these deputies this afternoon who had a prisoner fight them. I live with that burden for an entire department. Some days good men and women aren’t going to come back.”

  “When the hell did you decide to become compassionate?” I was still feeling less than human. I stared out at the street, where the houses were starting to light up with a merry hospitality I didn’t feel.

  Peralta refused to take easy bait. Instead, he ordered me to fix drinks. So I set aside the gun and went into the kitchen. In five minutes I returned with a shaker and glasses, and filled a Gibson for Peralta and a martini for me. He had moved only enough to produce two cigars, his favorite Anniversario Padrons. He clipped one and handed it to me. We each lit a cigar in silence, watching the flame become a corona around the tip. I am only an occasional cigar smoker, mostly with the sheriff. We last smoked cigars after his father’s funeral, smoked and sat in silence in Peralta’s study.

  Now I let the smoke waft across my palate, and my muscles relaxed notch by notch. Peralta lifted his glass and gently clinked mine.

  “Salud,” he said. I added gin and vermouth to the taste of fine Dominican tobacco.

  “Patrick Blair is protecting my wife,” I said finally, instantly feeling adolescent and small.

  He grunted. “Why, don’t you trust her?”

  “Fuck you.”

  He sighed and sipped. “David, sometimes you can be a real asshole. You probably don’t even know when you’re doing it.”

  Fair enough, I thought. I sipped the gin, feeling the cold liquid burn my throat. All my aches felt instantly better.

  “Separation is good for a marriage,” he ventured.

  “Is that the way it is for you and Sharon?”

  He ignored me. “You act like I’m all-powerful, like I can control and fix everything. . .”

  “That’s an impression you strive to convey,” I snarled, angry from two weeks of hiding, two weeks of a toy investigation into the fate of an FBI badge. I was still nursing wounds from his angry lecture after Kate’s press conference.

  “Get it straight,” he hit right back. “Yuri, the Russian mafia, the shooting in Scottsdale, Rachel Pearson’s kidnapping—that’s all new. I can’t snap my fingers and fix it.” He let an inch of fine ash fal
l off the tip of his cigar.

  “So what you’re telling me is that I may never see my wife again, and nobody can change that, and you don’t give a shit.”

  Frustration was talking. And a little booze. Once again, though, he declined to escalate the war I was trying so hard to start. And, deep down, I knew I was safe bitching. Peralta’s temper was like a nuclear weapon. You couldn’t detonate it by hammering on it. You had to know the physics. You had to have the codes. So we drank and smoked, wrapped in a smoky haze as the neighborhood surrendered to full darkness.

  By the start of the second drink, he asked about George Weed.

  “The rummy, as you call him? I thought he didn’t matter.”

  “You’re being an asshole again, Mapstone.”

  So I drank, too fast, and told him what I knew. George Weed was sixty-six years old when he died. He’d been born in 1938. He had a Social Security number. All this came from a county hospital card he held in the early 1980s, when he was being treated for stomach ulcers. He was a native Phoenician. His birth certificate said his parents were Aimee Jones Weed, sixteen years old, and Homer Weed, twenty-five, whose occupation was listed as “laborer.” In between birth and his death in the green swimming pool, Weed worked as an elevator operator and a janitor. He rented an apartment for years just north of downtown. The apartment was now a vacant lot. He had been on the streets for years, at least a decade. The Reverend Card had watched him for three summers, said he was “paranoid.” Peralta asked, “Any family?”

  “No one has claimed the body,” I said. “We’ve run his photo on TV and the Sheriff’s Office Web site. As far as the old county hospital card, I couldn’t find any corresponding records listing next of kin.”

  I knew what that meant: soon the sheriff’s chain gang would take George Weed and put him in the potter’s field by the White Tank Mountains, a desolate desert graveyard with numbers denoting the dead buried at the county’s expense.

  “Not bad, Mapstone,” Peralta said slowly, speaking around the cigar in his mouth. “Pretty good detective work.”