Camelback Falls

by Jon Talton

  “You didn’t know they were going to kill those cops,” I blurted suddenly, inappropriately chivalrous.

  She looked at me, a look like the young girl Marybeth had in that vivid photo from Camelback Falls.

  She said, “Yes, I did.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  We delivered Beth to the huge, glassy Sandra Day O’Connor Federal Building in downtown Phoenix. To me, it still looked like a call center in the suburbs. Inside, we sat through hours of interviews with the U.S. Attorney’s staff, through a magnificent Arizona sunset out the big windows, and then Beth went off into protective custody with two marshals. What I really wanted was a shower, a drink, and a long sleep with Lindsey curled up against me.

  “Sheriff!”

  It was Kimbrough, waiting at the foot of the escalator as we descended into the enormous glass shell of the atrium. He shook my hand, then gave Lindsey an awkward hug.

  “Congratulations,” he said, “We’re not waiting for federal indictments, either. We’ve already picked up two of these bounty hunters. And they’ve given up two other scumbags, former deputies, who were working with them. And we have arrest warrants issued for all the ones you said on the phone.”

  He looked at my face. “Man, that must hurt,” he said. It did. It looked worse. On a trip to the men’s room, I spent several minutes scrutinizing the colors of my shiner.

  “Don’t ask about Peralta,” he said. “I don’t know anything new.” We walked past the metal detectors and out onto Washington Street. Outside, it was nicely brisk—balmy compared to the weather in Denver or out on the Navajo Reservation with Beth by the roadside.

  “You know Beth cleared him,” I said.

  He bit his lip. “I know she backed away from saying he stole that cocaine.” We stopped on the street, facing each other. “Look, don’t make me the bad guy in this, Sheriff. I’m just doing the job. We still have to deal with Peralta’s badge number in Nixon’s payoff book.”

  “Maybe we don’t,” Lindsey said. A little clot of traffic passed by, and she went on.

  “While Dave was getting beaten up, I took all the badge numbers in the book and set up a database to handle other information we had about East County deputies for April, May, and June 1979. Things like personal logs, court appearances, overtime reports, sick time. Then I created a program to make some comparisons.

  “Here’s the thing: It doesn’t make any sense the way Nixon recorded it. He lists a payoff of $1,200 to Peralta’s badge number on April 3, but for most of that month Peralta was at an FBI school in Quantico.”

  I remembered. He was.

  “The same result comes out in several other instances. A payoff is given to a badge number, but the deputy is on sick leave. Another payoff is listed, but that badge number goes to somebody who’s been transferred to the West Valley.”

  “So,” Kimbrough said, “you’re saying it’s all bogus?”

  “Not necessarily,” Lindsey said. “It might be pretty simple. They might have thrown in some innocent deputies on that list to provide cover, just in case they were ever caught. Or it might be a code. For example, maybe Peralta’s badge number in the logbook actually means somebody else. I ran some scenarios that way, and they came out in a way that would make sense. Maybe not airtight for a courtroom, but enough to point us to the real dirty cops. Certainly enough to clear Peralta.”

  “Wait a damned minute,” Kimbrough said. “I want this to be a happy ending, too. But you’re using technology that didn’t even exist twenty years ago, and if it did no damned sheriff’s deputy knew how to use it.”

  “They wouldn’t have to,” I said. “It would be as simple as a sheet of paper with the real dirty cops and their badge numbers on one side, and the decoy badge numbers on the other. Just a simple key. Now I don’t know why that key wasn’t with Nixon’s book. But the bad guys obviously thought we had it.”

  Kimbrough stuck his hands in his pockets and stared at the sidewalk. “OK, Sheriff,” he said. “Maybe it gives us a starting point.”

  I leaned over and whispered to Lindsey, “You’re pretty smart for a propellerhead.” She lightly stroked my cheek.

  “Sheriff Mapstone!”

  It was a federal guard, walking briskly from the building. “You got a message. It came through the security office. From a woman named Sharon at Good Samaritan?”

  “Yeah?” I felt a cold bolt driven into my legs.

  “She wants you at the hospital. Said it’s urgent. Does that make sense?”

  “I guess so,” I heard myself say.

  “Here,” Kimbrough pointed us toward the curb. “We can take my car.”

  ***

  The elevator moved upstairs slowly. It was sized for two or three hospital beds, but the three of us just seemed to move involuntarily into one corner. The cables and gears churned quietly. The panel glowed with a single button depressed to the correct floor. And then we were there. The doors opened with a heavy jerk. I forced myself to walk quickly down the hall, half-lit now for night running. Across the polished floor tiles: Step on a crack…My stomach felt that hard thumb of pain again. My panic attack, if Beth was to be believed. To have come through all this just to…

  “Mapstone.”

  Peralta lay in his bed, halfway raised, his large dark eyes wonderfully open. His skin was too pale and his lips were badly chapped. But he looked at us. We bunched up in the doorway, afraid to walk farther.

  “Mapstone,” he repeated, his voice reedy and soft. “Where the hell have you been?”

  Sharon was sitting in a chair beside the head of the bed. She looked up at us and began to tear up. “He woke up two hours ago. Just woke up.” She swallowed hard. “I’m taught to discount miracles. I’ll take this one.”

  I stepped forward and put a hand on his big shoulder. “Good to have you back,” I said.

  He shook his head. “You got beat up, Mapstone.”

  “I hurt ’em back,” I said.

  His eyes followed me. “Did you get the bad guys?” he asked.

  “Almost,” I said. “We’re about to get them all.”

  “You know about Camelback Falls, the River Hogs?” he whispered insistently.

  “David, let him rest. . .” Sharon prodded.

  I pleaded with her with my eyes. I glanced back at Kimbrough, then Lindsey. Then I pulled up a chair and let him talk.

  He filled in some gaps for us. Told us what we needed to know. I could hear Kimbrough scratching some notes on his pad.

  Peralta closed his eyes for a second, then gave in to some coughing—also a wonderful relief to hear. He looked at me again, and this time his voice had some of the old steel in it.

  “Well,” he said. “Don’t get too used to that title, Sheriff Mapstone.”

  I smiled so wide my face convulsed in a dozen points of pain. It felt great.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  I watched the sunset that night, a prisoner of the glass of the federal building, and it was a tragedy. It had rained while we were in Denver and then cleared. The sky was scrubbed clean. The twilight spreading out from the west deserved the full wonder that came from standing in endless space and breathing wild dry Western air. But the view through the window would do. At least once a month, Lindsey and I tried to take in a sunset from the Compass Room at the top of the Hyatt, just to remind ourselves that for all of Phoenix’s flaws, we lived in a place of daily miracles.

  It was already full dark when Kimbrough delivered us to Cypress Street. Off on Seventh Avenue, some moron was gunning his car, trying to find someone to impress. But Willo was dark, quiet, and safe. The house was safe. The cat was glad to see us. And a note was sandwiched in the windshield wiper of Lindsey’s Prelude.

  That’s why an hour later I turned off Camelback Road onto Arcadia Lane and followed the street as it wound its way up the mountain. I parked in a dirt turnoff, shut off the lights, and stepped out. The night was cool and dry, magical in the way that only 14 percent humidity can do. Around me at dis
creet distances, multi-million-dollar homes sparkled like miniature galaxies glimpsed through enchanted telescopes. I’d never own one of those houses on a professor’s paycheck, much less on a deputy sheriff’s.

  Jonathan Ledger had done all right. His glass-and-marble dream-house still clung to the side of the mountain. Some ornamental lights marked off the gate and the path down to the house, but otherwise the place looked like it hadn’t been lived in since Reagan was president. A Realtor’s sign. Another sign warned of alarms. I thought of Yeats’ poem, but ignored the sign. I lifted a heavy iron latch on the gate, swung it open, and stepped inside.

  Past the gate, the mountainside desert encased me in silence. The path was paved and led downhill at a steep angle. I walked as silently as I could, past some overgrown stands of jumping cactus and creosote bush. Civilization was never far away: breaking the surface of the sandy soil were some metal conduits, leading down to the house.

  The place was bigger than it looked from the road. It hugged the side of the mountain and cascaded down in two levels. Rock-encrusted walls disappeared into Camelback’s soil. An interior courtyard was guarded by a black, wrought-iron gate. Around on the side facing the city, I got a sense of the place. It was mostly glass, framed by stone and what looked like redwood timbers. It was dark inside—the owners were who-knows-where in the global economy. But I swore I could make out the smooth surfaces of the interior fountain, Camelback Falls.

  “I didn’t think you’d come.”

  The voice came from behind me, and then a figure stepped out onto a flat promontory beside the glassed wall. He was small and slender. I could just make out the light reflected in his eyes.

  The voice continued, a pleasant tenor without an accent. “That night, when I called you. I was sure everything was ruined, and you’d think I shot the sheriff and was trying to kill you.”

  “What really happened?” I asked. I felt as if I had stumbled upon the unicorn. I was afraid to step forward.

  “I had to get out,” he said. “I had to try to escape. They would have killed me otherwise. Nixon got word to me that I was going to be killed. I didn’t have a choice. Have you talked to Nixon?”

  “He’s dead,” I said. I felt a touch of vertigo, standing on the slope, a nice slide of 1,000 feet through rock and cactus just a step away. I saw Dean Nixon’s face so clearly. But it was the face of a nineteen-year-old, stupid and hopeful and untouched by the world.

  The figure came closer. Leo O’Keefe shook his head and said, “Oh, dear God, will this never end?”

  He looked over his shoulder at the city lights, then back at me. “Nixon contacted me six months ago. He wanted to go to Chief Peralta, tell what really happened in Guadalupe. How the cops were on the take, how they stole the drugs. How those convicts were really in with them.”

  “Why did he have a change of heart?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “He said he’d fallen in love with a woman, she was a Christian, and he’d been doing a lot of thinking about his past. About what the River Hogs did to me. Whatever the reason, he came out to the prison, and we met several times. He wanted to help me make a case for a pardon from the governor. But somebody found out in the Sheriff’s Office, and Dean got scared.”

  “Twenty-one years ago,” I said. “Did someone talk to you after you were arrested? Somebody who told you what to say?”

  “God, yes,” he said, and named the name.

  “That’s what Beth said. She’s come back from Denver to testify.”

  Leo shook his head. “I always forget she’s changed her name,” he said. “It makes her mad when I call her Marybeth.”

  “But you killed a man, Leo. We can’t undo that.”

  His body language was calm. He just stood there, a figure in half-darkness, rooted to the mountainside. He said, “I know that. Does it make any difference that he tried to kill me? He was sent by the River Hogs to take me out. They didn’t trust me to shut up. But I used to work in the peanut mills, in the summers, back in Oklahoma. Hauling around those bags. I was stronger than I looked. He made a stupid move, and I let him fall on his knife.”

  “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “I’ve only been trying to tell it for twenty years.”

  That was the last sound I heard before the gunbarrel exploded.

  A flash came from the direction of my left shoulder, and Leo was lifted off the ground and deposited in the rocks five feet away. My first instinct was to hit the ground. My second was to run to the little man who sprawled unnaturally on his back. Neither move was particularly smart. But there I was, kneeling before Leo O’Keefe. He looked like a broken mannequin. A dark liquid trailed out the side of his mouth. In the reflected light I could see deep creases cut into his face, and how his ponytail was gray. He was younger than me. I cradled his shoulders helplessly, letting the burrs and rocks cut into my knees. He stared up at me and tried to speak.

  “Nice job, Sheriff. You got your man.”

  I stayed on my knees, trying to keep Leo’s airway open. But I could clearly see a face when I turned toward the house.

  “Too bad you’ll be fatally wounded in the capture,” Bill Davidson said.

  In the light reflected from the city he still looked like the Marlboro man. Tall, slender, rugged—getting more handsome every year he got older. He wore a Western-cut white shirt and nicely aged denim. In his right hand was the blued barrel of a revolver. In his left was a semiautomatic.

  “So that’s how it still works?” I said. “Do what you want. Plant the evidence to back it up.”

  He shrugged. “There’s nobody to blame for this but David Mapstone,” he said. “You could have stopped this at any time. God, I made you sheriff. And that damned idiot Abernathy went along with it. But, yeah, that’s how things play out now. I shot O’Keefe with this weapon.” He hefted the semiautomatic. “And I’ll leave that with you. I’ll shoot you with this revolver, which I’ll leave with Leo.” His teeth shone in the light. “You’ll have a grand funeral, Sheriff.”

  I said, “Nobody will believe it. I’d never carry a semiautomatic.” That seemed to throw him off stride, but he moved closer. My Python was in my belt, an impossible six inches away from my right hand. I stood slowly.

  “Don’t you fucking move!” he ordered, his deep voice quavering. “Why couldn’t you let this go? This was nothing to you.”

  “Just that someone tried to murder my friend.” The Python weighed heavily on my waist.

  “He could have let it go, too,” Davidson said. “Peralta didn’t have to reopen this. That scumbag Nixon stirred it all up again.”

  “The past has a way of coming around,” I said. “Like that night in Guadalupe. You told me you were off duty, with a sick child. What you didn’t tell me was that you came downtown later, plainclothes, to threaten Beth and Leo to lie about the dirty cops they saw.”

  “Dirty cops,” he snorted. “Do you know what a joke you were as a cop, Mapstone?”

  “I never rated the River Hogs,” I said.

  “Damned straight,” he said, without irony. “We kept the fucking peace out in the county. I never took a vow of poverty.”

  “It was that simple?”

  “Let me tell you something, it was the simplest thing in the world. One night, Nixon and I were working undercover. We busted these two scumbag drug dealers out in Apache Junction. They’ve got like a trunkful of pot in their trailer. And the phone rings. It was one of their fucking customers. Nixon and I just looked at each other, and we knew what we were going to do. We didn’t bust them. We sold them the drugs.”

  “And that was the River Hogs?”

  “That was my River Hogs,” Davidson said. “The bunch of guys who went drinking down in the riverbed off duty, they might get a piece of the action if they could be trusted. If they got it.”

  “Like Matson and Bullock got it,” I said.

  “They were idiots,” Davidson said. “Nixon let ’em in. Not me. But I had to come in and clean it up in
the end.” He waved the semiautomatic at me. “Nixon was nuts. He was high half the time. He was off playing stud at that rich doctor’s sex parties.”

  “What about Peralta? How’d you buy him off?”

  Davidson laughed like an executioner who liked his work. “Peralta wouldn’t be bought. The son-of-a-bitch. I offered him a stake. He threw it in my face. So I made sure we recorded his badge number when we were handing out the bonuses, just in case he decided to take it to Internal Affairs.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “How the hell should I know? After the shooting, everything changed. We stopped the parties. Nixon and I kept running a few scams, just for pocket change. But I shut up those two kids. Peralta was off climbing the ladder. Everything would have been fine if that fuck Dick Nixon hadn’t decided, twenty years later, to grow a conscience.”

  “It’s a bitch when that happens,” I said quietly. “And if you have to ruin the lives of two kids…”

  “I can’t solve all the problems in the world,” he said. “I have to look after me and my own. You expect me to do it on a deputy’s paycheck?” He waved one of the guns at the lights of the mansions on the mountainside. “Look at these fuckers, living this way. They do it because we protect their asses from the bad guys. Protect and serve.”

  “Davidson, you’re one of the bad guys.”

  “Goodbye, Sheriff,” he said. “You understand why I’ve got to end this here.”

  “Don’t move!” A shout from below.

  They looked like mutant fireflies, those little red laser beams on Davidson’s chest. He looked down at them calmly.