Camelback Falls

by Jon Talton

  “I had to drive a long damned way for a pep talk.” I said. It came out badly. “I mean, thanks. Consider yourself acting chief of detectives.”

  “But…”

  “Nope,” I said. “I’m the sheriff. You have the job. What did you say about fucking with them? Now go find Peralta’s shooter.” I walked toward the BMW, feeling bad for Dean Nixon and sick of this day. “I’m going to check on him, then have a martini with my girlfriend and go see some hoops.”

  “Damn it, Mapstone,” Kimbrough said. “That’s what this is about. We’ve found the damned trail of Peralta’s shooter, right here.”

  I stopped in my tracks, then faced him.

  “What the hell?”

  He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a clear plastic evidence envelope. It held a business card. I took the bag and peered through the plastic. It was an MCSO card. “Mike Peralta, Sheriff,” it said.

  “What the hell?” I mumbled, then turned it over. In block handwritten letters was a name. “Leo O’Keefe,” and a phone number in the city.

  I handed the bag back, feeling a numbness in my hand, as if I’d touched something toxic.

  “That was found in the pocket of our deceased former brother officer back there,” Kimbrough said. “You know what it’s talking about?”

  I pulled off my coat and draped it over my arm. It was almost dark but it suddenly felt hot.

  “Leo O’Keefe,” I said, “was involved in a shoot-out in Guadalupe. Years ago. May 31, 1979. Two deputies were murdered. Two suspects were killed. Leo was arrested as an accomplice. So was his girlfriend.” I licked the dust off my lips. My stomach hurt again. “Two of the deputies on that call were Nixon and Peralta.”

  Kimbrough was impressed. “You’re a hell of a departmental historian, Sheriff.”

  I said, “I was there.”

  Out on the highway, a truck downshifted loudly and knocked away some of the images going through my mind.

  “I was there.”

  Chapter Six

  Peralta and I could work an entire shift and never say five words. That was just the way he was. It drove rookies crazy. They were already intimidated by his size and stage presence, that way he seemed to fill up a room just by walking in. And when he didn’t say anything, they might spend an entire shift trying to get a conversation started. Not me. Three years before, when I ran my first training shift, I realized he was most comfortable sitting in the heart of a long silence. It was also good for police work: listening and watching, while others revealed themselves. It was my first eureka moment with him.

  That seemed a long time ago. He was a sergeant now, but we rode together this night as part of a county plan to double up deputies and save gasoline. Last month, it had been a ban on driving more than fifty miles during a shift. Energy crisis. Inflation. It was always something. Riding with the sergeant kept me off the most routine calls. But it didn’t matter this shift. We were bored as hell.

  So much of police work is bone-achingly dull. Especially a shift like we were having, where even a minor accident or a low-grade burglary report would have been a welcome break. Instead, we cruised slowly through the unincorporated roads that ran off the dry riverbed, several miles of cinder block buildings, high cyclone fences strung with concertina wire, and some of the nastiest bars and massage parlors in the Valley. Neither Tempe nor Scottsdale wanted the land. So it stayed under county jurisdiction. But today even Ace’s Tavern and Terry’s Swedish Massage Institute (“real coeds”) were quiet.

  Peralta drove. He had new mirrored sunglasses that totally obscured his eyes. It unnerved people who looked at him, and I knew that secretly pleased him. From the passenger seat, I watched the streets without appearing to watch. That, I had learned early on the job, was part of the demeanor of a veteran. To rubberneck or glance to-and-fro marked you as a rookie, or, worse, a hotdog. And I listened to the radio without appearing to listen. That yielded little. A burglary report out by Williams Air Force Base. An auto accident west of Phoenix.

  Peralta finally said, “Mapstone…” But he never finished the sentence.

  “Nine-nine-nine! Nine-nine-nine!” A shout burst out of the radio speaker.

  First I thought it was garble. Did we really hear that? Then, all nerve endings and stomach acid.

  “Fuck,” Peralta said, turning up the speaker. The code for officer needs emergency assistance was “999.” It was the doomsday call for any street cop.

  “Unit identify yourself and your 10-20,” came back a cool female voice. The dispatcher wanted his location. But all we heard was the empty air. Sweat congealed under my uniform shirt.

  I didn’t recognize the voice, but we probably had two dozen patrol units scattered around the east county, not including the lake patrol. The inside of the car suddenly seemed unbearably hot. Peralta impatiently fiddled with the radio’s squelch control, but we still heard nothing.

  “Who the hell was that?” he demanded, to no one in particular.

  The voice was so distorted by panic and static it could have been anybody. I said, “Nixon has some rookie with him.” A rookie would commit that kind of unforgivable breach of radio protocol: failing to identify your unit first.

  Peralta grunted and picked up the microphone. But the department had a procedure for everything, and the dispatcher was already ahead of him. She ordered all east-side units to switch to channel two and give their locations, to see who was missing. Dean Nixon called in safely from Chandler. I had slandered a rookie without cause, not for the last time. I gave our “10-20” but it was changing rapidly.

  Peralta wheeled the big Chrysler south and gunned the V-8 police high-performance special. We shot out of the riverbed and flew at 80mph through Tempe. Hayden Road turned into McClintock. The sun slipped behind Hayden Butte and we were in half twilight.

  “What?” I said.

  Peralta compressed his lips violently, taking away half the real estate between his nose and his chin.

  “It’s Matson and Bullock,” he said. “I bet you.”

  “Reserves?”

  “Matson’s a reserve deputy but Bullock is full-time. Usually works the day shift at the jail.”

  In Peralta’s shorthand, that meant he was an old-timer, close to retirement.

  He sensed what I was thinking, an eerie quality he had. He said, “We were shorthanded this shift. But I stuck ’em down in Guadalupe. Nothing ever happens there on a weeknight but a family fight.”

  “You sure about that?” I cracked, partly to ease my tension. Peralta retreated behind his mirrored shades. He got on channel one and tried to raise them. No response came back but a testy dispatcher telling him to keep the channel clear for emergency traffic.

  We hit Baseline Road and turned west, into the radiant pink sunset. We swept through south Tempe, where new subdivisions were chewing up the old farmland at an alarming rate.

  Five minutes after a “999” call we still didn’t know who was involved or where they were. I said aloud, “How fucked up is this?”

  But Peralta seemed to know. He switched frequencies and broadcast his theory. Indeed, Matson and Bullock, in unit 4-L-20, had not checked in. Peralta demanded to know their last location.

  “56th Street and Guadalupe Road,” the dispatcher said, obviously reading from a log. “Stated they were at the convenience store.”

  “Send all responding units to that location,” Peralta ordered. He re-holstered the microphone and switched on the toggles for the emergency lights. The speedometer needle passed 90.

  “Why don’t we wait for the cavalry,” I said, realizing how close to Guadalupe we were.

  Peralta said, “Too many cops will just get in the way.”

  I nervously fingered the Speedloaders on my belt. Peralta had been in a dozen firefights, and he’d been in Vietnam. In three years on the job, I’d never done more than draw down on an occasional burglar.

  The radio was alive now. The dispatcher repeated the address. But I knew exactly where it was
. Guadalupe was a little closet of a town notched between Phoenix and Tempe, walled off by Interstate 10. It had been settled by Yaqui Indians displaced by the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s, and it still looked like a poor Mexican village. Right across the line from Tempe’s burgeoning suburban neighborhoods was this little huddle of whitewashed adobe buildings and dirt streets. And right now it was about to get scary.

  The furrows of a cotton field swept past off the side of the road. The South Mountains loomed ahead. “It’s probably a fake call,” Peralta said. But his brow was creased. He didn’t believe it. He had the cop’s sixth sense, better than any of us.

  We turned onto 56th Street off Baseline and rolled in the last half mile with no lights, not even headlights. The sense of speed, darkness, and the bulk of the cruiser made everything seem like it was past tense. I saw people run inside small houses.

  In the distance, the orange ball of the Union 76 gas sign glowed reassuringly. We bumped into a gravel parking lot, empty except for a sun-bleached Pinto that probably belonged to the clerk.

  “Fuck,” Peralta said. “Put us rolling 10-6.” I told the dispatcher we were on the scene. No other sheriff’s car was in sight.

  “Go in and ask the clerk,” he said, and I opened the door. But his hand suddenly caught my arm.

  I turned back in the car and my eyes followed his gaze.

  We both spoke in unison: “Holy shit.”

  Five minutes later in the twilight and we wouldn’t have seen it. It was an alley, maybe 500 feet to the south, past a cinder block wall, an abandoned adobe house, and some mangled old cottonwood trees. I could clearly see the rear bumper and trunk of a sheriff’s patrol car. Two pairs of boots lay in the dirt, the soles facing toward us. They were attached to bodies wearing uniforms, splayed out on their backs on either side of the car. Then I saw movement and two men were over one of the bodies. They were going through his pockets.

  I unsnapped my holster and drew my service revolver. Peralta floored the Chrysler and we shot across the street, into the gravel alley, past the adobe house and the cinder block wall. A scene quickly materialized: a patrol car parked directly behind a ratty blue Chevy, two deputies faceup on the dirt, two other men standing over them and carrying automatic weapons.

  Peralta slammed the gearshift into park. I pulled up my door handle. The windshield disappeared. Sharp glass fragments sprayed my face like chunks of hard, hot ice. My ears rang from the noise of the shots. Then there was nothing between me and a bulky, sunburned man with long yellow hair and filthy jeans. He was cradling an M-16.

  I sighted him down the barrel of my service revolver, raising it as fast as I could. My hand shook violently. Sweat ran off my wrist. I was still stuck in the car, now absurdly exposed. He aimed at me, tensed, and I knew I had lost the race.

  Then the air exploded and his middle turned into a dark red mess. He jolted back in the air as if slapped by a giant hand, then collapsed on the ground. Peralta walked toward him, a big man in a tan uniform, still holding out the shotgun for lethal business. I rolled out onto the dirt, keeping my head down.

  Under the car, I saw jeans and black biker boots run toward us from the front of the other cruiser. An angry screaming, a sharp string of gunfire. Then another low boom from the direction of Peralta.

  I forced myself off the ground, and we were alone. Peralta and me and four dead men. A layer of gunsmoke lingered as a chest-level cloud, ghostly in the fading light. It almost seemed tinged red with blood turned aerosol by the buckshot.

  For the longest time the night grew around us and was utterly silent. Then I heard calls for help in Spanish, and finally the sounds of sirens, growing louder.

  That’s how I remembered it.

  Chapter Seven

  Lindsey wrinkled her nose as if something smelled bad. “The seventies,” she said. “Yuck.”

  “I thought you liked the music,” I challenged. A light band of freckles spread across her nose. You’d miss it in most lights. Her tiny gold nose stud gleamed in her left nostril. She was out of uniform, wearing black jeans and an oversized gray sweater.

  “I like the music, sometimes, because it’s campy and fun. I also like Sleater-Kinney and Beethoven, Dave. I’m unpredictable.”

  “I love that.”

  She studied her shot glass, bent down close to the table, and sipped off the golden meniscus of Glenlivit, her winter drink. “But the seventies seems pretty gross.” She arched her eyebrow. “You baby boomers.”

  “Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, baby.”

  She brushed back a strand of dark hair that had fallen over her right eye. “I bet you had a pair of polyester pants.”

  “I’ll deny it. But I also had a pair of platform shoes. Made me six-foot-eight.”

  “It’s all coming back in style.” She curled her lips slyly.

  “OK, I agree. Yuck.”

  We sat at a back table in the My Florist Cafe, a neighborhood bar that had taken over a former flower shop on McDowell. The Willo Historic District started to the north, where a neighborhood of 1920s houses somehow had survived Phoenix’s destructive ways. Below McDowell Road, lovely old neighborhoods had been obliterated by an underground freeway in the 1980s and for years it looked like the victim of a small-scale nuclear war. Now the area was slowly coming back. New upscale apartments and condos were going up next to Margaret Hance Park. The bungalows in the palm-lined streets around Kenilworth School were being rehabbed. Even the stark coppery box of the city library—everybody called it “The Toaster”—was looking more appealing.

  I was just grateful for a place to relax close to home. I was working on my second martini, feeling light and calm for the first time all day, retelling the twenty-one-year-old story of the Guadalupe shootout. It was the easy unwinding when we told each other of our day. We never made it to the Suns game.

  Lindsey said, “And you were how old when this happened?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “Twenty-three.” She looked me over. “I bet you were hot stuff, History Shamus.”

  “Nobody thought so,” I said.

  “I doubt that, Dave. But if the shootout ended with the dirtballs getting killed, how does that tie into the shootings of Peralta and Nixon?”

  I said, “It wasn’t over yet.”

  I again walked her back twenty years and through what happened next. With the second suspect down, I pulled myself off the gravel and checked the two deputies on the ground for pulses. They were both faceup dead. Then I looked toward this old blue Chevy, still idling directly ahead of the sheriff’s cruiser, and a head bobbed above the seat and disappeared. I drew down and ordered them out. Peralta came up on the other side of the car and chambered a new round in the shotgun. Then Nixon and his partner rolled in. A woman’s voice begged us not to kill them.

  They slowly crawled out of the backseat. The woman looked like the girl next door, if you stuck the girl next door right in the middle of a multiple homicide: surfer-girl blond hair, straight and parted in the middle, prom-queen face. Her companion was a small man with very long black hair. They were younger than me. She started crying and talking. I told her to shut up, Mirandized her, and pushed her down into the gravel and burrs. I cuffed her to await a search from a female deputy. Then the guy. Peralta had him on his knees, the shotgun not six inches from his face. I cuffed him and pushed him face-down next to her, ordered him to shut up, too.

  “You guys didn’t just beat confessions out of suspects back then?” Lindsey smiled darkly.

  “We were very professional,” I said. “I didn’t want them to get shot in all the confusion and adrenaline. Cops get nervous trigger fingers when two of their colleagues have just been shot down like dogs.”

  Lindsey finished her scotch. “These two in the backseat. They were involved?”

  I nodded. “The guy was named Leo O’Keefe. He went to prison as an accessory. The girl, Marybeth Watson, was his girlfriend. She got probation, I think. They were all Okies, in the big ci
ty.”

  Lindsey stared at the table, her long, slender fingers making a V around the shot glass. “And Leo O’Keefe was the name written on the back of Peralta’s business card, found in Dean Nixon’s pocket…”

  “Right,” I said. “It’s weird. It’s a new card. Peralta is listed as sheriff, not chief deputy.”

  “Would he have been in contact with Nixon?” she asked.

  “I can’t imagine it,” I said. “He never said anything to me.”

  “So where does Leo O’Keefe come in?”

  Two more drinks appeared.

  “On the house, for the new sheriff,” the waitress said. She looked like one of the models who sang behind Robert Palmer on the video for “Addicted to Love.” I recalled her name was Jodie.

  “Acting sheriff,” I said. “And you know I have to pay. But thanks.” I suddenly felt deflated and exhausted. At the bar, people were talking like they had a future. Good-looking young people with leather jackets and cell phones. Peralta lay a few blocks away near death. I turned back to Lindsey. “Kimbrough checked on O’Keefe, and he escaped from prison two weeks ago. It’s not inconceivable that he’s out to get revenge on the officers involved in his arrest. The phone number went to a fleabag hotel out on Van Buren, but a man matching O’Keefe’s description left two days ago.”

  Her blue eyes flashed alarm. “Dave, if he went after Nixon and Peralta…” She stared at me. “You were at Guadalupe, too.”

  I started on the third martini, wishing I hadn’t, feeling the chill gin warm my throat. “Every law enforcement agency in the West is looking for this guy.”

  “Jesus!” Lindsey leaned toward me, elbows on the table. Her sleek forearms peeked out of the sweater sleeves. “Are you packing?”

  I pulled back my coat to reveal the Python in a black nylon holster on my belt.

  “You and that damned revolver,” she said.

  I patted it lightly. “It’ll never jam.”

  She wrinkled her nose again. Like all the younger cops, she preferred a semiautomatic pistol. It was fast and held more ammunition. She unconsciously put her right hand on her backpack, which held her Glock.