Camelback Falls

by Jon Talton

“Oh, David,” she said dully, “you don’t have to baby me…” She let the sentence trail off, then something bright and fierce crossed her face. “David, his insulin.”

  I didn’t make the leap with her. She said, “He’ll have to have his insulin.”

  I patted her hand. “Sharon, it’s a hospital, they have everything right here.”

  “David, he’s got to have it. It’s his prescription. Please. It’s in his office refrigerator. Please do this for me.” She took a heavy gold key off a ring and handed it out. “This is to his office.”

  I started to say something, but Lindsey put a hand on my shoulder.

  “We’ll be here, Dave,” she said, looking at me full-on with those incredible blue eyes. “Don’t be long.”

  I gave in to the irrational requests of the terrified and took the key.

  ***

  A few minutes later, I used the side entrance to the Sheriff’s Office headquarters building on Madison Street downtown. I avoided the clots of employees, all awaiting the same news I did. I took the shortcut down an empty corridor where an unmarked door was the back entrance into Peralta’s office.

  The outgoing sheriff had just moved out of his office that morning, and the county, in the inscrutable wisdom of large bureaucracies, was waiting two weeks to give the place new carpeting, drapes, and paint. So here I was in the familiar room where Chief Deputy Peralta held court all these years. The big desktop was bare and the credenza behind it was piled two feet high with reports. The county seal and Arizona state flag sat photogenically in one corner. An entire wall held photos from Peralta’s career. A framed map of the county took up another wall, the yellow urban mass spread ever more into the desert. It was a room where Peralta would sit with his boots up on the desk and philosophize about crime and punishment. Or bark at me, and not affectionately, about the progress on a case. It looked reassuring and familiar, and the events of the past hour were just outside the door.

  I squatted before the small refrigerator, and fished past a couple dozen caffeine-free Diet Cokes. I pulled out the insulin bottles and tucked them in my pocket. Peralta had never admitted to me that he had diabetes, and when Sharon told me a couple of years ago I was surprised to realize this invincible man, who seemed incapable of mere human emotions like fear or sentimentality, was as vulnerable as any of us.

  I closed up the refrigerator, and as I stood, my eye went to Peralta’s beaten-up Franklin Planner, resting precariously on a pile of files. It was open to today, and of course he’d made no notation of the most important event of his career. On the facing page was only one item to do. It read: “Mapstone—Camelback Falls.”

  Camelback Falls? I made a quick mental list of everything he had me working on: the unsolved disappearance of the minister’s wife from 1964; a reassessment of a murder investigation from 1982, because the murderer had been granted a new trial; the Web version of my Sheriff’s Office history, which was actually selling well at bookstores in the Valley. I didn’t have a clue about “Camelback Falls.”

  Suddenly, the side door opened and I had company.

  It was Jack Abernathy, still in uniform, his bulk stretching at the fabric of the tan shirt. His Charley Tuna face reddened and his mouth crooked down.

  “Mapstone, what the hell? What are you doing in here?” His voice was raspy and soft, a Texas drawl poking out on certain words.

  He’d never liked me. He was old school Sheriff’s Office, where you did your time, kept your mouth shut, and didn’t think too much. I failed on all three counts.

  “I had to get something for Sharon Peralta. The sheriff is in surgery now.”

  He stared at me. I said in a steady voice, “What are you doing here?”

  He started to speak. Then he turned suddenly and stalked out the door. Under his breath I heard, “Fuck you!”

  Chapter Three

  I left the commandeered sheriff’s cruiser at headquarters to find its way home, and I drove back in Lindsey’s old white Honda Prelude. I flipped the radio over to AM, where all the news stations were reporting on the shooting of Sheriff Peralta, just hours after he was sworn in. One newscaster called it an “assassination attempt.” “Critical condition” was repeated over and over. Then the station cut to a commercial for Waterworks, a chain of waterbed stores that had somehow survived the 1970s. I felt like an ice spike was lodged in my stomach.

  The horrid 1980s tower of Good Sam appeared. It looked like a spaceship from a low-budget science-fiction movie. Outside, the TV satellite trucks were stacked into the parking lot and spilling out onto Twelfth Street. Four reporters, spaced apart like saplings with a wardrobe allowance, were doing live feeds. Inside, cops guarded entrances, patrolled hallways, and stood around looking bored and fingering their gunbelts. After being challenged a half dozen times, I finally returned to the little waiting room where I’d left Lindsey and Sharon. All I wanted was for Peralta to be OK.

  He wasn’t. He was in a coma.

  I sat on a too-comfortable chair as Sharon, now flanked by her daughters, told me what they knew. Two bullets hit Peralta. One entered his back, missed the spine and aorta by no more than an inch, then blew out his chest, fracturing a rib. The second round hit the top of his head. The bullet fragmented, although most of it didn’t enter his skull—“His hard old head,” Sharon laughed and sniffled. Whether that was lucky enough, nobody knew. They did some exploratory surgery. They did a CAT scan. The chief of neurosurgery was called in, along with a half dozen other specialists from around the city. All they could say was that his brain had been shocked, was under pressure from swelling, and it would take time to know how serious his condition was.

  Then, feeling foggy and for the first time sore from where Peralta fell on me, I followed Sharon and Lindsey past more deputies to the ICU.

  “They don’t know anything” Sharon whispered vehemently, running a hand through her dark hair.

  “The doctors?”

  “The police,” she said.

  “They didn’t make any arrests?” I demanded.

  “No suspects, no motive,” Lindsey said. “How could somebody escape from a room with a thousand cops in it?”

  Sharon said, “One set of detectives was asking questions about whether it was a hate crime. He’s the first Latino sheriff here. Another bunch asked if it could have been a random shooting, that he wasn’t the target. Nobody has any answers.”

  I thought of all the enemies Peralta must have made in his long law enforcement career: drug dealers, skinheads, the Mexican Mafia, the Bloods and Crips, assorted killers and big-time con artists. I kept it to myself.

  Then I was looking through a window at the sheriff. Only his hand was recognizable: that meaty brown fist, with the wedding band still on the ring finger. It still looked formidable. Everything else before us was a mound of gown, covers, tubes, electrodes, monitors, meters, and elaborately joined plastic bags with what looked like whole blood and some kind of IV solution. I felt sick and unreal. I put my arms around Sharon and Lindsey, and we just stood there a long time, saying nothing. A nurse in green scrubs came in and fiddled with some kind of electronic device on the IV line. Finally, Sharon said what we had all been thinking.

  “I thought he was indestructible.”

  ***

  There was nothing to do but sit and wait. We were on hospital time now, something marked by the comings and goings of people in white lab coats and green scrubs, by the traffic of metal carts holding medicine, linens, trays of hospital food, by snippets of TV shows overheard from open rooms, by the occasional scream or cry for help that escapes the carefully orchestrated calm. I had waited like this when my grandparents died. They had raised me after my parents had been lost in a light-plane crash when I was a baby. I had imagined the wait they had for word on their son and daughter-in-law, off to Colorado in a fragile little Cessna. I had no memory of my parents, and yet I carried billions of DNA messages inside me from them. Those messages made me lousy at waiting in hospitals. At 9 P.M., a nurse
ran off the non-family members, and we left the Peralta women with hugs and promises to return immediately if anything changed.

  Outside the hospital, it was just Monday night in Phoenix. The night was dry and chill, the temperature hovering in the low 50s. A yellow-white slice of moon was rising above the mountains to the east. Lindsey and I fell against each other, walking out with arms entwined around backs and waists, her head nuzzled into my chest. A couple of cops looked on disapprovingly; we were still in uniform. A nurse coming on duty smiled. I felt a camera flash off to the side. God, I felt tired.

  We stopped by a drive-through taqueria and picked up burritos. Then, back at home in the 1928 Monterey Revival house with the picture window on Cypress Street, Lindsey made martinis while I peeled off the bloody uniform. There was even blood on my boots. I took a long, hot shower, feeling the caked blood and dirt come off my skin.

  “Are you as OK as you can be, History Shamus?”

  She stood at the door as I toweled off. Then she handed me a drink, just the way I like it: Bombay Sapphire, dry, with one olive. She had changed into a gray sweatshirt and jeans, and her straight dark hair, parted in the middle, swept against her shoulder as she cocked her head. Her face, with its economical eyebrows, friendly lips, and fair skin, was never far from that look of ironic insolence that had first attracted me. When she wore her oval-shaped tortoise-shell glasses, as she was doing now, she looked impossibly sexy. But as we had cleaved together the past two years, I had learned more of the subtle tones of her expressions. Tonight, it conveyed safety, “we-ness,” as she would say. She could soothe me with just her presence. I let the gin warm my throat before I tried to answer.

  ***

  At ten minutes before midnight there was banging on the door. We were in bed, and I peeked out the front window to see half a dozen people clustered on the porch. Uniforms. Suits. One was Sharon Peralta. Beneath the porchlight was the unmistakably rigid carriage of Judge Peralta. I felt a chill creep up my feet.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “He must have…”

  In a minute, they were arrayed around the living room. Kimbrough was there and made introductions: The woman in the pastel blue dress was Kathleen Markham, the chairwoman of the board of county supervisors. The fifty-something man in the blazer and polo shirt was the county manager, Dan Pickett. Sharon took my hand and looked at me through tears. A younger woman in a black pants suit, Lauren somebody, was with the county recorder. A couple of young deputies stood in the background. The judge, in a suit, moved naturally to the imposing leather chair that had been my grandfather’s and eased himself down. Kimbrough looked like hell in the face, creased and ashen, but he had changed into a tailored navy suit and natty bow tie. I didn’t want anyone to speak. I didn’t want to know.

  Finally, Kimbrough said, “We have a situation.”

  “What?”

  “How is he?” Lindsey said. “How is Peralta?”

  “Oh, David,” Sharon said, sighing. “He’s the same. I realize what you must have thought. No, he’s stable.”

  I sat cautiously on an ottoman. “What then?”

  “David.” It was Judge Peralta. His voice had its usual tone of deep but disengaged gravity. Did I just imagine the layer of exhaustion in it?

  “We are here to ask you to be acting sheriff.”

  I heard Lindsey inhale sharply. I said, “Are you nuts?” I added, “Sorry, sir.” I looked around. All of them were staring intently at me.

  “We have a crisis, Mapstone,” Kimbrough said. “Somebody who is still out there tried to kill the sheriff today. The sheriff may be out for a month. Or he may be…” He looked at Sharon and stopped.

  “My point,” he said, “is that the department is at a critical time. We don’t know what brought on this attack. I have guards with the county supervisors. And we have to name an acting sheriff.”

  “What about the old sheriff?”

  “He has declined,” said Markham “He is already in Washington. He left right after the swearing in. And the timing just isn’t right for him to stay on.”

  I was shaking my head. “What about the brass? Any one of them is qualified to be acting sheriff.”

  Kimbrough coughed and cleared his throat. “The senior bureau heads are all competing for the chief deputy job, Mapstone. It’s politically delicate.”

  I just stared at him, not wanting to understand.

  Kathleen Markham said. “The top officials in the sheriff’s department are all ambitious men. Among the county supervisors, Bill Davidson has his supporters and Jack Abernathy has his. Even Mr. Kimbrough here has his backers.” Kimbrough shifted uncomfortably. “We didn’t have to be concerned with that when the obvious leader of the department was Peralta. Now, nobody wants to make a move that could be misinterpreted.”

  “That’s not my problem.”

  “Mapstone,” Markham said, “the brass all recommended you. It was the one thing they could agree on.” My mind rewound the scene in Peralta’s office with Jack Abernathy cursing me under his breath. That was the esteem the brass held me in. And I thought again, What did Peralta mean by the notation “Camelback Falls”?

  Lindsey put a hand on my shoulder. I looked into the high ceiling of the living room, scanned the tall bookshelves and the ornate iron railing of the staircase, anything to avoid these faces.

  “I am not qualified. And I don’t even see how this is legal. The elected sheriff is alive. He is going to recover.”

  “At which point you will return power to him,” said Markham. “But this is not only legal but necessary. Tonight we adopted a resolution.” She waved her hand at the woman from the recorder’s office, who passed me a legal-size page with thick black paragraphs and a seal cut into the paper. “It names you as acting sheriff of Maricopa County.” She looked at Judge Peralta. “And we have a distinguished retired state appeals court judge to handle the swearing in.”

  I sat there listening, feeling an ache growing in my neck and back where Peralta had lurched into me and we had fallen to the floor. Pain and numbness and reality. I wanted to run from the room and lock myself away, just like I was ten years old.

  “David,” Kimbrough said. “You are the right person for this. You are a sheriff’s academy graduate, the media know who you are, you’re a smart guy, and you’re disinterested. You’re the one person everybody could agree on.”

  “Please stand, David.” Judge Peralta lifted himself painfully out of Grandfather’s chair. The effort shifted the knot on his red rep tie off to one side. “You know this is what my son would want.”

  Now he wasn’t fighting fair.

  The judge looked at Lindsey. “Do you have a Bible, Miss Adams?” She retrieved one from the tall bookshelves by the stairs, and he positioned her to hold it before me.

  I felt my legs tense and then I was standing up, my right hand raised, my left on the rough black cover of Grandmother’s family Bible. Lindsey gave me a secret smile. The burrito growled loudly in my stomach. In a raw voice, I repeated he oath from Judge Peralta.

  Chapter Four

  “Good morning, Sheriff.”

  Lindsey lay between my legs, kissing the inside of my thighs, brushing her soft hair across my awakening skin. Her hair color is just one notch lighter than black, but when the light hits it right you can make out some auburn, too. The light was hitting it right, the intense winter sun flooding joyfully through the tall bedroom window that faced Cypress Street.

  “Acting sheriff,” I whispered, my mouth feeling cottony and hung over.

  “I’ve never blown the sheriff before.”

  “Lindsey!”

  “Stop thinking, Dave.” She nibbled, kissed, teased.

  “But…”

  After a long anticipatory ritual, she took me in her mouth.

  She murmured something indecipherable. I moaned and clutched the sheets. Later I would think about my sleepless night, rewinding and playing yet again the events in the Immaculate Heart gym. Peralta festooned with tubes and wir
es, in a coma. The blood everywhere. Later I would think how, as Lindsey told me, I was lucky the first shot didn’t come through Peralta and hit me. That worry pain in my middle, right below where my ribs met the breastbone, would resume, goaded by the memory of all the other times I had waited helplessly for word from a hospital. And I would stew about the events at midnight out in the living room, which suddenly had launched us all on a trajectory that seemed guaranteed to turn out badly. But that was later.

  Lindsey murmured, and I moaned. She knew just how to play me. To hell with my dying friend, the sheriff. We had the deep history now, Lindsey and I. Three years ago I was lucky enough to stop by her cubicle to get help on a case. I had spent too many years entwined in love affairs with overcomplicated, overwrought women. Lindsey wasn’t like all the others, as she said. She loved books. She loved sex. She had turned thirty the month before. But she was an old soul, my dark star, full of kindness and good sense and a brave heart. I had made love at twilight with Lindsey, and it didn’t fill me with dread or sadness.

  So I contracted the world to the two of us and stopped thinking. The sheets were getting comfortably old. The room smelled of sex. A wintering cardinal banged into the window, then fluttered away. My hands fluttered ecstatic against her fine dark hair.

  Afterward, we held each other more tightly than usual, and we let go with reluctance when the phone reached the third ring.

  “Good morning, Sheriff.”

  I cleared my throat and said, “I’m only the acting sheriff. Who are you?”

  “Communications center, sir. I’m Sergeant Robin Greene,” came the voice on the other end. I waited and she went on. “This is your morning briefing. Sheriff. I am the communications day watch commander.”

  I instinctively swung out of the bed. My feet felt swollen and creaky. I looked across the hall to the empty guest bedroom. Pasternak sat in the doorway watching me with his old gray tomcat eyes. Two years ago Peralta had lived in that room, during a time when he and Sharon were close to a rupture and life was getting way too complicated.