by Jon Talton
Cartwright broke my reverie. “Peralta and I were in ‘Nam together. The sheriff’s a good man in a shitty situation.”
I agreed that he was.
We zagged to a stop. Cartwright hefted away a tumbleweed and unlocked a door that blended perfectly with the tan soil.
“This was an old mine,” he said. “There’s probably hundreds of them out here.”
Now I was really worried about rattlers. But beyond the door, I could see only bright lights and a clean concrete floor.
Getting inside required another sharp turn beyond the entrance. Nobody could open the door and start shooting at the occupant of Cartwright’s keep. We walked down a long flight of concrete stairs and made an abrupt turn into a short hall. He unlocked another door, metal and heavy, and closed it behind us.
We entered a space that looked about twenty feet long and wide enough for two men to stand comfortably. The ceiling was a foot above my head. On both sides, shelves rose six feet high holding meals-ready-to-eat, canned food, water, first-aid supplies, and ammunition. Boxes and boxes of ammunition for several calibers of firearms.
Beyond this supply area, the shelter opened up and held a bed, two chairs, and a desk with exotic radio equipment and other electronics. A well-stocked gun cabinet took up one wall. An American flag was posted to another. It was a forty-eight-star flag, the way it would have looked after Arizona was admitted to the union in 1912. Beside it were highly detailed U.S. Geological Survey maps of the area. The map fiend in me wanted to study them, but I felt mildly claustrophobic and unsure of my host.
“Ventilates to the outside,” he said. “But I’ve got filters against fallout and biological attacks. I can air-condition it, if I need to. Got two generators and plenty of fuel farther back into the mine. Redundancy on everything. There’s an emergency exit that comes out half a mile on the other side. I built it all myself.”
He was plainly proud of it and I suppose there were worse retirement hobbies as long as he didn’t wander down Tegner Street in Wickenburg and start mowing people down with one of the M-16s in that gun cabinet. The place was surprisingly free of dust and noticeably cooler than the outside, but I could feel myself only a few internal degrees from heat exhaustion.
I tried to be convivial, in an end-of-the world way, complementing his bunker. He seemed amiable enough, for an armed survivalist vet who might suddenly snap and kill me, stuffing my remains somewhere back in the old mine as varmint treats.
“Were you military, son?”
“No.”
I could have let him judge me in silence, but I made an effort to keep the conversation going. Get people to talk about themselves, as Grandmother always advised.
“So this is where you ride out doomsday?”
“You bet your life. We came within an ass-hair of blowing up the world in 1983. The Soviets picked up a launch signal from the continental U.S. Their computer system said it was an incoming American missile. It was a glitch, but they didn’t know this. They always expected an American first strike, and their strategy was launch on warning, so our missiles would hit empty silos.”
He jabbed a finger my way. “If it hadn’t been for a Russian colonel who suspected it was a false alarm and refused to send on the alert, they would have fired every ICBM they had over the pole at us and adios, baby. Hardly anybody knows how close we came.”
“Stanislav Petrov,” I said. That was the Soviet lieutenant colonel who perhaps saved us all.
“Very good. Don’t think it won’t happen again. All those missiles are still sitting there, waiting to be used. Damned Russians are building an underground city that’s as big as Washington. You look on the Internet. Israel and Iran. North Korea. China’s got miles of tunnels to hold their nuclear forces. Hell, we’re even allies with Hanoi now against China. Makes you wonder why anybody even wants to live.”
His agitation grew as he talked and he paced over to the gun cabinet and I placed a hand on the butt of my Python. My spinal cord was filling with ice.
“We got seven billion people on the planet, climate change, ebola and diseases we don’t even know about that can’t be killed by antibiotics. Your people did this.” His expression was accusing, his voice angry. “Couldn’t leave well enough alone. Had to conquer nature, but she won’t be conquered, kid.”
He sighed. “Anyway, it might not even go down that way. You take away the power and gasoline from five million people in Phoenix in high summer, and watch what happens. I’ll be fine.”
I had no doubt.
18
After fifteen minutes of this cheery conversation, we arrived back at the adobe, where Peralta was standing under the shade of the porch, smoking a cigar, and surveying the jagged treeless mountains on the horizon.
“You got another Cuban, Sheriff?”
Peralta produced a cigar and Cartwright ran it under his nose, inhaling like a connoisseur. “You people wouldn’t even have tobacco if it wasn’t for us.”
“Apaches didn’t have tobacco,” Peralta said.
“Well, then we would have killed the Indians that did and taken it. Thanks for the cigar. Now I don’t have to kill you.” He carefully slipped the stogie into his front pocket. “I see the kid here is a revolver man.” He pointed to the Colt Python in the Galco high-ride holster on my belt.
“He doesn’t trust semi-autos, thinks they might jam.” Peralta raised an eyebrow, an act of raucous comedy coming from that face.
“It can happen,” Cartwright said. “May I?”
Every instinct told me to decline, yet I handed the heavy revolver over, butt-first. He opened the cylinder, dropped out the six rounds in his left palm, and dry-fired it against the wall: click, click, click.
“The Combat Magnum. Listen how clean that action is.” His tone was that of a wine connoisseur. “It was the first gun to be bore-sighted with a laser, you know. Finest mechanism you’ll ever find in a revolver. Tight cylinder. Highly accurate.” He handed the gun and ammo back. My pulse pulled off the fast lane. I was fortunate that the house was air conditioned and dark inside, to cool me down and conceal my apprehension.
The living room was furnished with handsome leather chairs and sofas. Books were everywhere: in floor-to-ceiling shelves, on tabletops, and sitting in stacks on the hardwood floor. They were not of the Anarchist’s Cookbook genre. Instead, literature, philosophy, poetry, political science, and, of course, history filled the room. Classics and new, important works. I’ll admit it: I took stock of a person by the presence of books and their titles, and I almost started to let down my guard. I could see no television or newspapers. He might not even know that Peralta was no longer sheriff.
Cartwright returned from the kitchen with bottles of Modelo Especial and we sat.
“What brings you out to my humble outpost, Sheriff?”
“One guy shot and killed earlier in the week with an AK-47.” Peralta took a swig and a puff. “Then my partner here almost bought it with a Claymore.”
Cartwright made a tisk-tisk-tisk kind of sound. “Walk down memory lane, eh? Did you tell him about the way we used Claymores to ambush the slants back in the day?”
Peralta nodded. “Whoever did the shooting with the Kalashnikov was damned good. Pumped ten rounds into the victim sitting in a car. The shooter was in another car. Only one shot failed to hit the target. And this was daylight, right on Grand Avenue down in town.”
“Sounds interesting.”
Peralta waited.
Cartwright sighed. “I’m retired, Sheriff.”
“Bullshit. You know things. You know more than me when it comes to assholes seeking illegal weapons.”
“Is there such a thing as an illegal weapon in Arizona anymore?”
“If there is, you’re selling it,” Peralta said.
So he was an arms dealer.
“Not true,” Cartwright said. “Driv
e back to Wittman or Circle City or Mesa for that matter and you’ll find guys who can fix you up with anything you want.”
Peralta sat back, wreathed in cigar smoke, his expression losing its amiability.
He said quietly, “They can’t fix you up with a Claymore.”
Cartwright spoke softly, too. “I’m not a rat. Never have been.”
Peralta had handled the tribulations of the past several months better than me. Of course, some of them hadn’t affected him quite so personally. Still, I was the one who seemed angrier about his loss of the election and the ugly, racist campaign that preceded it. He had turned philosophical and, if such a word could be applied to him, mellow.
But watching his face now, I could see the flickering of the old anger and impatience. Cartwright spotted the launch signal, too, and knew it wasn’t a glitch. Still, he tried to escape.
“You know I’m not in the game anymore. Give an old man a break. I’m tired now. I need to rest.”
“You were up to your ears in Fast and Furious,” Peralta said, referring to the federal operation meant to disrupt the flow of guns to Mexico that had gone horribly wrong. It had cost the U.S. Attorney his job, brought hearings in Congress, and even become an issue in the presidential campaign.
“My part worked.” Cartwright glared back at him.
The two dark stone faces faced off. Cartwright’s was cut with gullies in geometric precision, while Peralta’s aging congregated around the crow’s feet beside his eyes. His hair was still naturally jet black. He was actually better looking than he’d been at thirty-five. He wore distinguished well.
Neither seemed willing to give. I tried to imagine them as young infantrymen, fighting for a country with a poor record of treatment for Apaches or Mexican-Americans and yet there they were, brothers in arms, in Southeast Asia. That bond showed in their expressions, too.
Finally, Cartwright stood and walked slowly at first, as if his hip hurt. Then he strode out of the room. In five minutes, I heard his tread and something landed in my lap. It wasn’t as heavy as I imagined.
“Your boy’s pretty cool,” Cartwright said.
Peralta watched me. I can’t tell you why I didn’t make the jump of the startled or run screaming from the house once I saw he had dropped a Claymore on me. Instead, I carefully studied it: “FRONT TOWARD ENEMY” the same as the one in Tim and Grace’s apartment, two sets of extendable legs, and a small housing on top where wires, or another kind of detonation mechanism, could go.
Cartwright eased himself into a chair across from me. “You’re lucky to be alive, son.”
He hefted an AK-47 in his hands. “Mikhail Kalashnikov’s baby. Cheap to make, easy to use. One of the first true, mass-produced assault rifles. Seventy-five million of ’em all around the world.” He quickly field stripped it and put it back together, his pudgy fingers working expertly. Anybody who watched television had seen AKs in the hands of freedom fighters or terrorists, take your pick.
“How do you know your guy was killed with an AK? Was the weapon recovered?”
“No,” Peralta said. “I heard it.”
Cartwright nodded. He understood.
“Anybody can buy an AK. You know that. Using it with such precision is another matter. And why would you want to? There’s too many good, modern weapons available. Maybe your suspect has a thing for the gun? Maybe it’s his bad-ass signature. You should run that through ViCAP.” The FBI’s violent criminal database. “It’s probably not some disgruntled ‘Nam vet. We’re getting too damned old. But the older we get, the tougher we were.”
He chuckled. Peralta didn’t.
I was half-listening to the ordnance talk. The Claymore sat a few millimeters from my genitals. I kept looking at the instructions stamped on the front. Such a funny thing. So you don’t forget and aim it wrong. I shouldn’t even be here right now. Why did I get over that apartment railing and into the pool with only seconds to spare, when Robin hadn’t been safe in our back yard? Contingency was the god damndest thing. Robin would have made the better mark on the world if she had lived and I had died.
Peralta tapped an inch of ash into an amber glass ashtray. “I’ve thought about all that, Ed. Quit stalling.”
“The Claymore is a different matter entirely.” He cocked his head. “Is this connected to the explosion in San Diego on Friday night?”
So much for being cut off from the world.
Peralta said, “You know it is, so quit playing games.”
To me, he said, “How far did you get into that apartment before you realized you were in the danger zone?”
I told him.
He let out a long whistle.
“So you see,” Peralta said, “This is personal and it might get a hell of a lot more personal.”
Cartwright set the rifle in his lap.
“Do you know how far my ass is already in a sling even by talking to you?” he said. “Even by you being here?”
“I don’t care.” Peralta swiveled his head.
“So give me something to work with?” Cartwright folded his hands over the assault rifle. “Who was killed with the AK?”
“Anglo, thirty-five or so,” Peralta said and went on to describe our first client including the expensive prosthetic leg and the multiple names and identifications.
“Nobody I know,” Cartwright said.
I said, “He had yellow eyes. Very well dressed. And he had a silver Desert Eagle on his passenger seat when he was killed.”
Cartwright shook his head slowly, but I caught the involuntary tic of his left eye.
“Didn’t do him much good,” he said. “You’re probably lucky he got killed when you weren’t in the line of fire. One less dirtbag in the world and the kid here survived. What’s not to like? Now I need to take a nap.”
Suddenly, a fury rose in me. Tim Lewis’ face hovered in my mind. And the baby I had held in my arms.
Cartwright asked me what I was doing.
“How do you set this thing off?” I was fiddling with the Claymore.
“You can’t.” He smiled at me like I was an idiot. “It’s disarmed.”
That did it. I threw the Claymore straight at his face. When he reached to catch it, I was up, crossed the eight feet separating us, and picked up the AK-47 from his lap.
“What the…” He let the dummy Claymore fall. It clattered on the wood floor. Next he reached for the pistol on his belt.
I chambered a round in the AK-47, although I didn’t aim it at him. Yet.
Peralta said, “I wouldn’t move, Ed. Mapstone here had a run-in with Los Zetas where they tried to put a hand grenade in his mouth, so he’s PTSD’d to the moon.”
Through his teeth, Cartwright said, “Why is he alive then?”
Peralta spoke softly. “That’s why I wouldn’t move.”
He spoke quietly, “How do you even know how to work that thing, kid?”
“A million child soldiers in Africa can work it. Want to take a chance that I can’t?”
He studied me through angry but uncertain eyes, his hand still on the butt of his sidearm.
If Cartwright had even started to pull the weapon, I would have pumped several shots into him before anything like judgment could have caught up with the rage I felt. A savage stranger’s voice started speaking. It was coming from my mouth.
“You listen to me, old man.” I spat out the last two words. “I’ve got two young people murdered and a missing baby. Now I’ve got an armed whacko survivalist sitting in front of me who thinks he can get off a shot before I send him to hell. Who knows how many weeks before they find your body? What I don’t have is time to waste finding that baby, and that means you don’t have time.”
“All right, son. Please calm down.”
I swung the barrel to his chest.
“Now you have ten seconds less time.”
He saw my finger was on the trigger and a sheen of sweat appeared across his forehead.
“A dozen Claymores went missing from Fort Huachuca last month,” Cartwright said.
Peralta shook his head. “That’s an intelligence installation. What are anti-personnel mines doing there?”
“The military has this stuff everywhere. Makes it hard as hell to track. Who knows how much walks away from bases and nobody ever knows?”
I wanted to know who took it.
“Word is, soldiers.”
“Active-duty soldiers?”
He nodded. I didn’t lower the weapon.
He swallowed. “White supremacists are in the military. That’s not new. You remember a guy named McVeigh in Oklahoma City. Now there’s more of them. We’ve spent more than a decade at war, and we’re sending home killing machines.” He sighed. “Anyway, the word is, that’s who took the Claymores. I don’t know if it was to sell or to use.”
“What about prostitutes? Are they involved in running high-end whores?
“That’s all I’ve heard, son,” he said. “Do what you please.”
He closed his eyes and in the terrible silence that followed he put his hand in his lap. I lowered the assault rifle.
Peralta said, “Give me that and wait for me at the truck.”
My blood was still up but I did as he asked.
Before I walked out, I heard Cartwright’s voice.
“You have an unusual name, kid. I read a book by somebody with that name once, about the Great Depression.”
“He wrote it,” Peralta said.
“It wasn’t bad,” he said. “But you should have written more about the effect on the tribes.”
He was right. I closed the door behind me.
