Camelback Falls dmm-2

by Jon Talton

  Camelback Falls

  ( David Mapstone Mystery - 2 )

  Jon Talton

  Jon Talton

  Camelback Falls

  Chapter One

  We wore our uniforms the day Mike Peralta was sworn in as sheriff of Maricopa County. It nearly made me late to the ceremony.

  In the quiet of my forgotten office in the old county courthouse, behind the plastic doorplate that reads “Deputy David Mapstone, Sheriff’s Office Historian,” I fiddled with the tribal fashion of cops. The tan uniform blouse with epaulets and pocket flaps, the opening above the pocket made for a cheap Cross pen, and the gold-plated “MCSO” letters running parallel on each side of the collar. In one of his moments of cruel whimsy, Peralta gave me two gold book pins for my collar. I refused to wear them.

  The shirt had a reinforced grommet to hold a badge. I slipped my gold star out of its wallet case, gave it a last polish, and pinned it on. The five-pointed star proclaimed me “Deputy Sheriff…Maricopa County,” on scrolls cut into the metal surrounding the Arizona state seal. Ditat Deus, the seal says: God enriches. The ACLU is suing to have the words removed.

  Dark brown uniform slacks were pressed crisply, and the legs draped to a slight break over the hand-tooled leather cowboy boots, glistening with a regulation spit shine. An off-white felt Stetson sat on my desk. We might be one of the largest urban counties in the United States, but we kept our Old West traditions.

  Finally, I pulled on the heavy belt, also highly polished, that held handcuffs, flashlight loop, Mace canister, keyring, Speedloaders, and the holster that housed my Colt Python.357 revolver. I loudly snapped the leather keepers that held the gunbelt to the pants belt. Ready at last.

  I usually dressed like a civilian, although I liked nice clothes more than the average Arizonan and way more than my paycheck could handle. But that day I stood before the mirror and looked something like the young deputy I had been twenty-three years before, when I was a rookie, out on the street for the first time with a veteran named Peralta. I’m six-foot-two and broad-shouldered, with wavy dark hair that goes any way it chooses. Lindsey likes my brown eyes. They don’t look like cop’s eyes, she says. But that day everything else about me looked cop. I tilted the Stetson at a slight angle and locked up the office.

  Outside, the miracle of a winter day in Arizona. The palm trees and paloverdes lining Cesar Chavez Plaza sat lush and spring green. The spare modern towers of downtown Phoenix looked puny under the bright blue firmament of dry desert sky. It was nearly perfect: You could barely see some pockets of yellow-brown smog skulking up against the rocky head of Camelback Mountain. The temperature was in the sweet zone of the seventies. Tourists paid high-season prices for days like this.

  I crossed Jefferson Street and went through the metal detectors into the County Supervisors Auditorium. Then I saw no way to get to my seat but to cross the stage, shaking hands with the cluster of family and friends of the new sheriff. Sharon Peralta looked ten years younger in a stylish navy pinstripe suit, her shoulder-length hair expensively done. She’d taken a rare morning off from her radio show to be here at her husband’s big day. She smiled to see me in uniform. Their daughters, Jamie and Jennifer, lived in the Bay Area and practiced law. I remembered when they were babies, and I didn’t feel old. Judge Peralta, Mike’s father, courtly and ancient, grasped my hand strongly in both of his and held me before him for a long time, saying nothing. For just a moment, I felt a strange flutter below my breastbone.

  Peralta himself had yet to make his entrance. I shook hands with the department brass, most of them not so sure why I should even be up there. Bill Davidson looked, as always, like the Marlboro Man, tall and craggy with a lush mustache turning steel gray. He was the longtime patrol boss. Jack Abernathy, short legs attached to a beer-barrel chest, was in charge of what was now called “the custody bureau”-the county jail. Both wanted to be chief deputy now that Peralta was in the top job. E.J. Kimbrough, his head shaved like an ebony bullet, clapped me on the arm. He was the captain of the major crimes unit, and he was an ally, maybe a friend. I hoped Peralta would make him the new chief of sheriff’s detectives. Last, the outgoing sheriff, controversial and wildly popular. He brought back chain gangs and housed inmates in tents. I’d been a little part of his show. Now he was off to Washington as the new administration’s drug czar.

  “The history professor,” he said, his tone ambiguous, his icy gray eyes unmoving.

  I passed the color guard of Boy Scouts and took my place at the end of the stage, where Deputy Lindsey Faith Adams had saved a chair for me. Lindsey favored black miniskirts or jeans. But today, she too wore MCSO tan, her straight black hair parted in the middle and pulled back demurely, her small gold nose stud nowhere to be seen. Even so, Lindsey didn’t look like a cop. And if she weren’t the star of the cybercrimes task force, she’d probably be making big bucks at a dot-com company. She gave my hand a discreet squeeze. I squeezed back and felt the engagement ring I had given her three months before.

  It was 11 A.M. on the second Monday of January.

  “So, Mapstone, you ready to take a real job in this department?”

  I had to lean over to hear Peralta. The well-worn gymnasium at Immaculate Heart Church must have been filled with a thousand people, all there to wish the new sheriff well. A line of them was snaked around us. The governor, the county supervisors, and the mayor of Phoenix had already come through. But I bet another hundred were lined up behind me. I noticed a bigwig from Phelps Dodge, the managing editor of the Republic, the head of the Phoenix Symphony board. Peralta held me by the arm in a nearly painful grip and repeated his question.

  “How about it? Are you ready to take a real job in the department?”

  “I like what I’m doing, but you could give me more money,” I said.

  “I’ll ask the new sheriff about it,” he said. “I’m sure we could get you an off-duty gig as a security guard at Bashas’.”

  He didn’t smile. He never smiled. But he looked happy today. As happy as he could look. Peralta had the surprising bulk of a Victorian armoire. He stood six-foot-five, and if he could have fit into a 48-long coat I would have been surprised. Little of his bulk appeared to be fat. His broad, brown face carried the same impassive expression as always. But his large eyes, where all his emotions congregated, held a little gleam, just like the light hitting the four stars freshly pinned on his uniform collar.

  Peralta had spent a quarter century in the department. When I left to go teach college history, he stayed as a sergeant and a comer. During the years I was gone, we stayed in touch as he rose to lieutenant and captain, and I wrote a history book that may have sold a few hundred copies. He had been chief deputy so long that the words “Chief” and “Peralta” seemed inextricably linked. And three years ago, when I failed to get tenure and came home unemployed and more than a little broken, the chief gave me a job in the department researching old unsolved cases. I worked as a consultant, using the historian’s techniques but also carrying a badge. I got $1,000 for every case I cracked.

  He snorted to himself, breaking me out of my reverie.

  “Hell,” he said. “I may make you the new chief deputy.”

  “I’m not qualified.” I laughed.

  “I did the job for ten years,” he said above the din. “I’ll decide who’s qualified. That’d frost these fucking climbers.” He nodded toward a small cluster of brass standing uncomfortably over by the refreshment table.

  I tried to change the subject. “This is a great place for the reception.”

  “I know you’d rather be drinking martinis at the Phoenician,” he said. “But this is a sentimental thing.”

  “You, sentimental? When we were deputies together I had to re
mind you to get Sharon a card for your anniversary.”

  His glare hardened. I was one of the few people who dared mess with him.

  He said, “I went to first and second grade here, before they had to close the school. My father went to high school here. Who knows how much longer it will be around before your yuppie friends gentrify the neighborhood?”

  He added, “And holding the reception here is not a bad way to shore up my support with the Latino voters.” He arched his eyebrow, a gesture of enormous humor for him. “I’m just a simple boy from the barrio.”

  “You’re about as simple as quantum physics,” I said. I nodded toward the people waiting behind me. “You have lots of VIPs who want to congratulate you, Sheriff,”

  He ignored me. “See, Mapstone, I know you. You can’t revise your past with me like some professor’s resume. You always should have stayed in law enforcement. So you took a fifteen-year detour as a teacher? Now you’re back in Arizona, back home at the S.O. Where you always should have stayed. Even if you’re a pain in the ass sometimes and you read too much. Admit it, Mapstone, you’re happy here.”

  He was right. The “black dog moods,” as Churchill called them, came less often. I was teaching myself that tomorrow’s misfortune wasn’t an inevitable byproduct of today’s happiness. Lindsey made me feel terrifically lucky. The turn of a new millennium had come and gone benignly, as had my twenty-fifth high school reunion. I was even feeling better about Phoenix, a place that could break your heart if you grew to love it.

  The noise picked up, with a mariachi band and the sheriff’s office bagpipers engaging in a merry duel.

  “But we need to make some changes in the department,” he said.

  “People may not like it. And I’m serious when I say I expect you to step up when asked.”

  “Yeah, security at Bashas’,” I said “I can also help carry groceries. I know you’ll make all the right changes for the department, Sheriff.”

  “I’m a lawman, Mapstone,” he said. “I’m no politician.”

  “Well, you did pretty well, then. Getting 70 percent of the vote.”

  “Oh, hell, I’d just have to break in somebody new as sheriff if I didn’t do it myself.”

  I shook my head, awash with affection for this impossible, stubborn, lionhearted man, and I couldn’t suppress a wide smile.

  “What the hell are you so giggly about?”

  “You,” I said. “Never mind.”

  He let go of my arm. “Come by my office tomorrow. I really do need to talk to you about something.”

  “A new case?”

  He gave his head a half nod, half shake. “Come by. You’ll find out.”

  I nodded, then my eyes went to a small, intense flash in the air above Peralta’s left shoulder, and I remember thinking he’d be freshly annoyed that I wasn’t looking him in the eye. Only later would I recall two distinct, terrible cracks sounding above the clutter. Suddenly Peralta fell into me heavily and we both crashed backward hard on the floor.

  I felt the quick panic of having the air knocked out of me. Something wet shot into my eyes. My back screamed in pain from the weight that quickly sandwiched it with the floor. A woman gasped and called for God’s help. As my mind refocused and my lungs refilled, I feared Peralta had suffered a heart attack. Then I saw the blood all over us.

  Chapter Two

  Lindsey commandeered a patrol car and we sped the mile up Seventh Street to Good Samaritan Hospital. The digital clock on the dash said the trip took four minutes. To my internal clockworks, it felt like about a decade.

  “I didn’t even hear the shots,” she said over the siren. “I got there as soon as I could.”

  I touched her leg. The buildings and traffic flew by, but in my mind was the image of Peralta bloody and unconscious. Maybe he was dead and the paramedics just had to go through their little show.

  “Could you see a shooter?” she asked, slowing suddenly. A minivan meandered through a red light, oblivious to the lights and siren of our onrushing sheriff’s cruiser.

  “A flash, maybe. That’s all.” It occurred to me she was trying to distract me, focus me on the job rather than the heap of shallowly breathing, traumatized flesh that was my friend. Did I look distraught? I kept my voice steady.

  “We didn’t seal the building soon enough,” I said. “There was too much chaos. I’m not sure they got the guy.”

  “Maybe it’s not a guy,” she said.

  Chaos. It was like the thunderstorms in the Arizona high country that begin slowly but can suddenly turn nasty. A tense surprise moved through the crowd around us after Peralta fell. Only after seeing the blood was there something like a collective gasp. I regained my wits with only a mouthful of panic and, as gently as I could with such a big man, I rolled Peralta over on his back, and made sure his airway was open and he was breathing. He was, but he stared emptily and only made a long, exhaling sound, his powerful hand grasping my shirt shyly.

  Then Lindsey was there, shielding us, sweeping her arm toward the shooter with her baby Glock 9mm semiautomatic, “ready to rock ’n’ roll,” as she puts it. But no more shots came. I heard her directing other deputies, heard them running across the old wooden floor toward where the gunfire originated. Somewhere above us. As word spread through the crowded gymnasium, civilians tried to get out while cops tried to take charge or get information. Finally the music stopped. Fragments of the crowd swelled around us, nearly stepping on us, until some Phoenix cops set up a perimeter to keep people back. They let Sharon through after a fuss. TV lights flared behind me. Somebody said the paramedics had arrived.

  At Good Sam, I saw the dazzling red fire department ambulance was empty, its rear doors still open. Peralta was already deep inside the vast brightness of the trauma center. City cops and deputies milled around officiously. We parked in a space for emergency vehicles and walked quickly to the automatic doors.

  “Gurney!” shouted a red-haired nurse as I walked in. I tried to step aside for this next victim, but the nurse was headed straight for me.

  “He’s OK,” Lindsey said, holding out her hand as if to direct traffic. “He’s just a mess.” She smiled back at me, her twilight blue eyes calm.

  “Chief Peralta,” I said, then caught myself. “The sheriff. Where is he?”

  Just then Sharon strode past the nurse and hugged me tightly, despite the blood all over my uniform. Lindsey looked at me and flashed something in lover’s code.

  “You’re OK?” Sharon demanded, her voice metallic and a notch louder. I nodded. Her eyes were rimmed red but she wasn’t crying.

  “Where are the girls?” I asked.

  “They left to take the Judge home before the party,” she said. “Thank God they weren’t there when it happened.”

  Sharon Peralta holds a doctorate from UCLA and she’s a best-selling author. She’s made more money the past year than I’ll see in my lifetime. She’s the most popular radio psychologist on the West Coast, dispensing exquisitely nuanced advice from nine to noon every weekday for the latte-and-whole-grain crowd. But walking toward me she looked just as scared and awkward and at sea as the twenty-five-year-old cop’s wife she had been the first time I met her. It lasted just a minute.

  “They won’t even let me in,” she said. “He’s in emergency surgery.” We moved by instinct into an otherwise deserted waiting room. Sharon sat on a greenish sofa, me and Lindsey on either side.

  “Oh, David, I thought I didn’t have to worry about this anymore. I just thought he’d be a politician now. All those years when he’d go to work and I never knew if he’d…”

  We all silently stared at the wall. Sharon said, “God, I still remember that night in Guadalupe, back in 1979, when you and he were patrol deputies. You remember?”

  I nodded, recalling a bad shooting years ago. Peralta was a hero. I was scared shitless. If he was, it never showed. I said, “He came out of that just fine, Sharon, and he’s going to now.”

  “Oh, David,” she said dul
ly, “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.