Cactus Heart

by Jon Talton

  I sat back on the slick vinyl of the seat. “How do we know?”

  “Confidential informant,” Hawkins said. “You guys at the S.O. ought to try it on the Strangler case.”

  “Eat shit,” Peralta growled. “Suspect is Hector Gonzalez, age twenty. Has a long record for burglary and assault. He was in county jail Wednesday night for beating up his girlfriend. He started talking shit in jail, and the informant heard him talk about killing somebody named Yarnell.”

  Hawkins crowed, “A burglar, Mapstone. ‘Yarnell curse,’ my ass.”

  Peralta went on, “He’s apparently crashing with some friends at one of these scummy little motels that has been turned into apartments. It’s about two blocks west of here.”

  “In the city of Phoenix,” Hawkins added.

  Peralta passed back a jail mugshot of a young man with exotic eyes and a sullen, small mouth.

  Hawkins smiled. “When the cavalry comes, we’re going after him.” He eyed me. “Stay back and don’t get in the way.”

  Peralta winked and handed me a vest. I strapped it on and wished I had brought Speedloaders for the Python. I was supposed to stay back. Six rounds should be enough.

  The cavalry came in the form of four more unmarked police cars. We formed up in the lot, listened to some redundant instructions from Hawkins, then drove leisurely two blocks to where Hector Gonzales, age twenty, was supposedly waiting for us.

  Behind a faded neon sign that proclaimed “Thunderbird Auto Court” stood two long, low brick buildings overlooking a concrete parking lot that had been patched too many times. We bumped over cracked pavement and deep chug holes, coming to a halt in front of a door labeled 1-A. Instantly, half a dozen cops in flak jackets jogged to the sides of the door and headed around to the rear of the building. Peralta and Hawkins took up positions right by the door, guns drawn. I stayed behind the car, maybe ten feet away, and knelt down behind the fender.

  We were too late. A dozen young Hispanic men dashed out of the back and scattered across Buckeye, bringing shrieks of tires and car horns from the traffic. Hawkins rose and kicked in the door, shouting commands in English and Spanish. He was knocked backward suddenly and landed face up on the pavement just as the roar of a shotgun blast reached my ears. I hit the ground and drew the magnum. A spray of machine-gun fire erupted out of the room, echoing weirdly under the eaves of the little motel. Then there was silence.

  From under the car, I saw Hawkins roll to the side and then be pulled away by other cops.

  “I’m fine, goddamnit!” he rasped. They had him off to the side of the door, sitting upright in the dirt. He had a tight little pattern of birdshot in the middle of his vest. I leaned in the car door, grabbed the microphone and gave the radio code for “officer down, needs assistance.”

  Then it was over, just as suddenly as it started. I heard some voices calling out in Spanish, then some guns were tossed out. Two guys who looked no older than fourteen swaggered out, all cheap machismo. They were dragged to the ground and handcuffed by the cops. Peralta planted a knee in one suspect’s back and his Glock at the base of his head. Neither kid looked like Gonzales.

  “Secure. Code four,” a male voice called from the motel room.

  I got on my feet, dusted myself off and walked over to Hawkins. He had the air knocked out of him, at the least. I pulled the flak vest off, and he moved his head in a little circle, looking around. The shot hadn’t penetrated the vest, but raising his T-shirt, I could see an ugly purple bruise on his chest from the impact of the round. Like mom always said, never go out without your bulletproof vest.

  “We get the little bastard?” he demanded in a slurry voice.

  “Not yet.”

  “What do you mean not yet?” He focused on me. “I told you to stay out of the way.”

  I leaned him against the wall again and stood.

  I walked south along the building to work a charley horse out of my calf. Behind me, I could hear sirens coming down Buckeye. In about three minutes, half the cops in the district would be here, along with paramedics, firefighters, and the TV stations.

  The Thunderbird Auto Court was still and silent now. But I could feel eyes watching us from behind the dirty window screens. One partly opened door was carefully closed again. The place was oppressive in its layers of age and dirt and despair. Then I passed a little carport marked by a large pool of ancient grease and Hector Gonzales was standing just inside.

  I drew down on him. “Deputy sheriff,” I said in a shaky voice. “Policia!”

  But he already had the drop on me. As my eyes adjusted to the relative shade of the carport, I could see he held a silver-plated revolver in his right hand, and the barrel was on a disconcerting trajectory to my head.

  “Fuck you,” he said. “I ain’t goin’ back to jail.”

  “Nobody’s dead or hurt yet,” I said, hearing the sirens getting louder, wondering if anybody even knew I was back here.

  “Oh, yeah?” The exotic eyes were bright. “Well, put down your gun, then.” He wore filthy cargo pants and he had no shoes on.

  “That’s not going to happen.” It was Peralta’s first rule: You never give up your piece. Never.

  “Why did you have to walk back here?” he demanded, his eyes turning sleepy.

  “Just bad luck,” I said, doing a quick calculus of armed standoff: with my heavy-grain, hollow-point .357 rounds, I could drop him with one shot. With luck, it would have enough force to keep his finger from squeezing a round into me. I needed to do it now. The longer I waited, the more things fell to my disadvantage. A huge lake of sweat opened up down my back. The precise, twin sights of the Python were aligned on his heart. I didn’t take the shot.

  “What do you know about the Yarnell killing?”

  “What the fuck?” he said. “I didn’t kill nobody. Yarnell, he…”

  “Drop your weapon!” It was Peralta. “Drop your weapon!”

  “Back off, Mike,” I shouted, keeping the drop on the kid, who took a harder aim at me. “What do you mean?” I shouted at him. “What do you mean you didn’t kill anybody?”

  “Don’t make us kill you, kid!” It was another cop, off to my right. I couldn’t see anything but that silver-plated barrel. I had to take the shot.

  “Tell me!” I shouted.

  He shook his head slowly, his front teeth biting into his lower lip, a tear falling down his cheek. He raised the revolver.

  “Drop it now!” More cops.

  “Do it now, son!”

  “Put the gun down!”

  Just as I took in a breath, they opened fire. I expected a bullet in return but it never came. He did an absurd little dance, and a spray of dark blood ejaculated from his back, and the exotic eyes were still staring at me as his body crumpled backward onto the dingy concrete.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  I swam in the ocean at night. Me, a desert rat who refused to swim in places where I couldn’t see the bottom. But I had lived seven years in San Diego, where the ocean was always in your sight or your nostrils. One night, on a first date luminous with connection, conversation, and laughter, my new friend and I had gone for a walk along the beach. When we came to a little cove, she had stripped off her clothes and run straight into the surf until only her blond head had been visible in the blackness of the waves. Then I had waded into the blackness, too, casting aside my native caution, letting the seaweed sweep against my legs and the fish bump me. I am a strong swimmer, so I had no trouble keeping up with her as we swam against the sea until finally we had become part of the swell and tide ourselves. When we were maybe a mile out, she had pointed back toward the land. I had turned to see, from our vast solitude, a dazzling necklace of lights on the horizon.

  After I had married her and we had moved into a little house a block from the beach in La Jolla, I often swam out at night, often alone. The Pacific off San Diego is usually so calm that you can get careless. I always remembered that first night of revelation, when I had swum to catch her, fighting
my own fear of being consumed by this world-making thing, and then finding myself a part of it. And I had always tried to remember the terrible power waiting in the gentle waves.

  One night, angry over some now-forgotten academic feud, I had driven home from the university, changed into my trunks, and plunged recklessly into water that looked as calm as black glass. I had swum until every muscle burned with pain and I had ejected the argument from my mind. I recall very clearly thinking how much simpler it had been being a deputy. And then I had felt the current change beneath me.

  A cold, black wave had hit me full on, then it pulled me straight down into the swell. Salty water had forced its way into my nose. I had felt as if I did a somersault and didn’t know the way to the surface. My lungs had ached for new breath. But the cold had kept my head straight, so I just let the wave carry me out to sea. In a few seconds, that seemed like something less than a year, I had popped to the surface again. Then I had swum as best I could parallel to the lights, feeling a current insistently bearing me south. By the time the ocean let me go, I had been carried a mile away, down to Pacific Beach.

  Treading water, exhausted, feeling the ocean say, Don’t mess with me. I will kill you, my mind had calmly rested on things I didn’t think of much on land. Things like God and family and the measure of a man’s life. A sense that I had let too many sunny weekend afternoons slip on by, and now maybe I wouldn’t make it back to shore before I froze to death or that rip current came back. When I walked across the rough sand, safe, I had promised myself I wouldn’t lose that clarity.

  I wasn’t making promises Monday. I was shaky and nauseated. My ears rang from gunfire in a confined space. The only lucky break was that the elevator at the courthouse was working again. I went up to my office, closed the door and locked it. I sat at the desk and just stared into the bright Arizona sky and thought of swimming at night in the ocean. Still, I couldn’t stop shaking, couldn’t tone down the metronome in my chest.

  I sat long enough that my eyes focused on the edge of an unmarked brown envelope. It had been set up against the door last week. I had brought it in and forgotten it. Now I pulled it out of the new pile of files that partially obscured it, pulled it across the desk. It didn’t even have my name on the outside. I ran a letter opener through it. Two sheets of papers were inside. They were Photostats. The quality was rotten—but good enough to make out. I read them and set them aside, staring up at the old high ceiling. Then I read them again. By that time I wasn’t shaking.

  “Talbott. He wasn’t…” I realized I was talking to myself. Grandmother had done that when she was older, and now I wondered if it was hardwired in the family. The first Photostat was the same booking record Zelda Chain had shown me. John Henry Talbott, also known as Jack Talbott, was arrested for misdemeanor drunk and disorderly at 1:10 on the morning of Nov. 27, 1941. The second record was new: it was a Phoenix City Jail prisoner release for Talbott, two days later.

  Maybe a burglar had murdered Max Yarnell. Maybe the attack on James Yarnell had been completely unrelated. But Jack Talbott couldn’t have been at Hayden Yarnell’s hacienda on the night of the twins’ disappearance.

  I had the phone in my hand with the first two numbers of Peralta’s extension dialed, but I stopped. There wasn’t enough information yet. I knew that Talbott claimed he was framed for the kidnapping, that Win Yarnell had done it. The Photostat before me showed Talbott couldn’t have done it. That Thanksgiving night he was in the city jail one floor above my office. I also knew that Hayden Yarnell had a codicil in his will that implied he had doubts about who had taken his grandsons. But why had Talbott gone to Nogales, and why was he carrying part of the ransom money and children’s pajamas when he was arrested? And what had gone wrong in the kidnapping that had led to the deaths of Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell?

  And who had dug up the release record that seemed to clear Talbott of at least direct involvement, then put it in a plain envelope and placed it before my door? Someone who was interested that I make progress on this investigation. It couldn’t have been Zelda Chain; it was delivered the day I was visiting her. Not Peralta: he would have lorded it over me that he had found a record that had eluded my searches of the city and county records. Bobby Hamid? More likely. It seemed like a lot of trouble just to consummate a real-estate deal. But this was Phoenix, after all.

  I must have visibly jumped when the door opened, and then Gretchen was running across the room to embrace me, saying how worried she had been after hearing about the shooting. Suddenly it felt so damned good to be alive. It felt so good to be alive to hold and kiss this beautiful woman, who looked at me with adoring eyes. The other feeling that kicked me was guilt, for momentarily thinking about Lindsey and missing her.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  That night the rain came, watery inflections on the pavement. Seven inches of rain water this desert in an entire year, so every drop is memorable. Every streak from a seldom-used windshield wiper. Every patter on the bedroom window. Every misty sprinkle on my face on a cool December evening.

  When the winter rains come, the sidewalk restaurants move inside. The Fiesta Bowl promoters worry. The resorts cover up the pool furniture, and the snowbirds grumble. But we Phoenicians quietly exult—that after all the punishing months of sun and heat, the sky brings back the healing water. That, after all, the desert is God’s chosen, sacred place.

  More secular thoughts were on my mind as I cruised the parking lot at Biltmore Fashion Park for ten minutes before finding a parking place anywhere close to the Coffee Plantation. I had reluctantly turned down Gretchen’s offer of company tonight. Maybe it was the post-shooting jitters, or maybe it was the fact that the Yarnell kidnapping was still unsolved, and these loose ends, forgotten for decades, were still my loose ends. So I worked. The buildings were draped with white holiday lights and steam came out of the car exhausts. The cars glided across the wet parking lot like a dream. By the time I got inside, a familiar blonde in a smart suit with a high hemline was waiting for me. This time the suit was pink. She was sipping from a tiny espresso cup.

  “I told you on the phone I shouldn’t even be speaking to you,” said Megan O’Connor, looking around as if bulky Yarneco security guards might spring from under the empty tables nearby. “I thought the crime had been solved. That awful young man, they ran his mug shot on the news tonight. Of course, it’s terrible you had to kill him, but I understand you were doing your job. In any case, I’m meeting my fiancé in just a few minutes. We need to do our Christmas shopping.”

  I sat down with her. Taking time to get anything to drink seemed too risky. This skittish bird might fly.

  “I didn’t shoot the kid.” Why was I making that point? “There are still a few things we need to clear up. I’m interested in a codicil to Hayden Yarnell’s 1942 will. Are you familiar with it?”

  You would have thought I had caressed her fine inner thighs. Her eyes grew wide and she pulled back.

  “You know of it?” I asked again.

  She gave a slight nod and looked around again.

  “Is someone following you?”

  She laughed. She had a big, fun laugh and it made me smile. She said, “I’m sorry, Deputy Mapstone. I know this seems absurd. You work around a company like Yarneco for enough years and you get paranoid. Yes, I know about the codicil. Working for Max meant that I did a good deal of work with the Yarnell Trust.”

  I asked her about that. She ran a long finger around the rim of the cup in front of her.

  “The trust supports twenty-seven heirs of Hayden Yarnell and his sister. I know, must be nice. Few of them live in Arizona any longer. Anyway, the trust is entirely funded by the wealth that Hayden Yarnell left, plus the investments made since then by the bank, advised by an independent board. Not even Max or James Yarnell were given seats on the board.”

  “It doesn’t sound like Hayden Yarnell trusted his family.”

  “He was a self-made man,” Megan said. “And I guess he saw what a little mon
ey and leisure time did to his son, Hayden Jr.”

  “The one they called Win.”

  “Right. Anyway, this always struck me as strange. But when I started dealing with trust business, I heard about this codicil. I thought it was just a family legend. But one day I was researching something, and there it was. If it turned out that any family member had conspired or participated in the abduction of his grandsons, the conditions of his bequests would change. Among other things, the trust would be liquidated and given to charity.”

  “That sounds extreme.”

  “It’s very odd,” she said. “Before I went to work at Yarneco, I had worked at a big law firm that did a lot of estate planning. I never saw anything like it before. Kind of like vengeance beyond the grave.”

  “Did Max ever talk about this?”

  “Never. The one time I asked, he got really flustered.”

  “Did he talk about the kidnapping?”

  “No. It was understood that we didn’t discuss it.”

  “You were close to him?”

  She flashed angry eyes at me; they were green. “Not what you think, deputy.”

  “I didn’t think anything. I’m just trying to understand.”

  She kept sipping the espresso, but the level of the liquid never seemed to go down. I needed to develop that technique with liquor. After a moment, “Max said his grandfather died a bitter, crazy old man. He said the codicil was a result of that. He also doubted it could even be enforced by a court.”

  If that were true, it made me wonder why he became flustered, to use her word.

  “Max wasn’t close to his brother?”

  “You could say that. Or you could say they just despised each other. James still controlled a share of Yarneco—within the parameters of the trust, of course—and he would vote against Max, just for spite, it seemed to me. James lives in this art world. He’s very connected and handsome, charming in a way his brother never is. Was, I mean. He doesn’t know anything about business.”