The Night Detectives

by Jon Talton

  20

  Back at the desk in the study, I wrote a report for Peralta. This was my element, as it was back in the days at the Sheriff’s Office, where I was his in-house egghead clearing cold cases. In thirty minutes, I had shot all the holes I could find in the shoddy and rushed work of the San Diego cops, and then I printed out the report.

  A few seconds later, the house phone rang. We had cordless phones in other rooms, but the phone on the desk had belonged to Grandfather, with a real dial, now a retro amenity, and the old-fashioned ring that could put a nail of dread into your brain. As in the old days at the Sheriff’s Office, I would answer and he would announce one word, “Progress?”

  Only it wasn’t Peralta.

  “Doctor Mapstone.” It was an average voice, neither young nor old, lacking any accent, be it from the Midwest or from the heart of Mexico. An unfamiliar voice. And he was using Doctor Mapstone, exactly as Felix did—the inflection even reminded me of Bobby Hamid, the gangster that Peralta sent to prison for life. I was easy to find. I was in the phone book of whatever company currently owned the former Mountain Bell. I switched on the recording device that Lindsey had added.

  “Yes.”

  “How could anyone fail to get tenure at San Diego State University?”

  “I always surprise. Are you calling to offer me a job?”

  “Perhaps. In a way.”

  “Go on. I need options.”

  A fine laugh followed, not villainous at all. The kind of laugh you could have a beer with. “I bet you do. You have something that I want.”

  “What would that be?”

  “Don’t fuck with me.” No emphasis or emotion entered his voice. He might as well have said, “Excuse me.”

  He went on, “You have something I want, and I am willing to give you something in return.”

  “Did you make that same offer to Tim Lewis when you were breaking his fingers one by one?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  At least that was settled. I wasn’t talking to the tenure committee, calling to say they had made a mistake and wanted me back as a professor. I was talking to a stone-cold killer. Caution flooded my nervous system: he had the baby. I had to be careful not to bait him into further death. I wasn’t sure one could negotiate with a man who would slit Tim Lewis’ throat and paint the wall with blood, but I had to try.

  “He claimed that he didn’t have it. So I can only assume that you do. But you present a bigger challenge because of your law-enforcement connections. I have to take a different approach.”

  “I bet. You’re a murderer and I’m coming for you.”

  So much for David the Negotiator.

  The voice remained steady and calm. I hadn’t gotten under his skin. He sure as hell was under mine. Smooth and calm and very sure that I wasn’t tracing him. He seemed in no hurry to hang up.

  “I know you want to come for me, Doctor Mapstone. I learned how you settled your Mexican trouble. Impressive. I don’t underestimate you.”

  “I didn’t have Mexican trouble. I had criminal trouble. You’re no different.”

  “You’re wrong there. We might even be on the same side, using different methods.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He cleared his throat. “If I told you we were in a battle for this country, for whether it can remain a white nation, you’ll dismiss me as a racist nut. You work for a Mexican. And you’re an academic. You’ve been brainwashed. Samuel Huntington has it right about the clash of civilizations, but it’s happening in America. In fact, it’s killing this country. You don’t want to face the facts.”

  He was mighty chatty and had done some reading. I said, “I’m not sure Professor Huntington would agree with you.” God, I wish I were tracing the call.

  “David,” he switched to the familiar, “I don’t want to kill you. I had a chance already. I didn’t take it.”

  I wondered if he even had the ability to change baby David’s diaper and feed him. I asked him about that chance to kill me that he didn’t take.

  “The apartment. You’re very physically impressive for a man your age, getting out the way you did. But I helped you by waiting to detonate the Claymore. Do you have a new cell number since your old phone went with you into the pool?”

  A man my age? Fuck you.

  I said, “So you were watching.”

  “How do you think I gave you time to get out of the apartment? Now answer my question because I won’t give you time ever again.”

  I gave him the number of the temporary phone I had bought at the truck stop in El Centro.

  “Drive to the Park Central parking lot. Be on the south side of the lot in five minutes. Come unarmed. Wait and I’ll call. Stay in your car. If any police are with you or near you or I even suspect you’re fucking with me, you won’t get what you want.”

  Even the profanity was said with a businesslike calm.

  Then the line went dead.

  I switched off the recorder, checked my watch, and called Peralta. After I gave him a quick update, he told me to get moving, follow the caller’s instructions.

  “Where are you?”

  “Camelback Mountain.”

  “It’d be nice to have some backup.”

  “Get moving, Mapstone. I’ll get there when I can.”

  Wondering what he was up to, I pulled the heavy Python and its holster out of my belt and set them on the desk. The freshly cleaned Airlite .357 magnum slid into my pants pocket and was barely noticeable. I added a small Ka-Bar “last option” knife, with a serrated blade, inside my waistband. As the name implies, it is for use if you get in a fight for your weapon and are afraid you’ll lose. I further armed myself with a bottle of frozen water.

  Halfway to the car, I stopped, turned around, and went back in the house. In the office, I rooted around in Lindsey’s tech drawer and found a blank flash drive. If I had to trade, at least this might buy me some time to assess the situation. If the mystery caller actually made contact with me, I could show it. Then he would have to show the baby. Then things would get interesting.

  Less than three minutes later, I pulled into the bland assortment of low-slung buildings that was Park Central.

  When I was a child, it had been the first shopping mall in Phoenix, a sweet, modest, open-air affair on the site of an old dairy. For the past two decades, since the Midtown skyscraper boom collapsed with the 1990 real-estate crash and retail fled toward Scottsdale, it had been mostly offices. Most were medical-related, tied to gigantic St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center to the west.

  Local wags were calling St. Joe’s “Mr. Joe’s” now, after the bishop had withdrawn its Catholic affiliation because an abortion was performed to save a woman’s life. It was a mere kerfuffle in the many local rows of the moment. Even without reading the newspaper, I knew Peralta’s successor was doing “sweeps” to pick up illegal immigrants and holding news conferences to trumpet this as a huge triumph of justice. The Legislature was an insane asylum. Nobody in power was talking about anything real or important.

  Like almost everything in Phoenix, Park Central was surrounded by a large surface parking lot. In Phoenix, the word “park” often doesn’t mean a recreational space but an asphalt place to leave your vehicle. Those were among the reasons why the weather kept changing for the worse. Today the lot was nearly empty, except for cars near the popular Starbucks on the southeast corner of the former mall. All of Midtown Phoenix was virtually deserted on Sunday. I eased the Prelude in that direction, hoping to find some shade from the skyscrapers lining Central Avenue.

  The best I could do was to catch a little relief from the sun in the shadow of the Bank of America building. Nothing looked unusual: nobody following me, nobody sitting in a car waiting. A light-rail train slid by, its electronic bell penetrating the sealed passenger compartment of the Prelude. Across the street were
two mid-century towers, one tall, one short. The tall one once had an outside glassed-in elevator, which, I am told, was a popular spot for a quickie before it reached its only stop at the top floor. The short tower had been the site of the Phoenix Playboy Club. Back in the day, Midtown Phoenix could swing.

  Ten minutes later, the phone rang. It made an annoying xylophone sound. I listened on my headset.

  “You’ve done well so far. Go through the Jack in the Box and get something to eat from the drive through. There are only two cars in line.”

  The incoming call readout said, UNKNOWN.

  I sped a hundred yards over to the Earll Drive exit, drummed my hands on the steering wheel for the light to change, and turned north on Central. It was so nice that he was concerned about my eating. Sure enough, only two cars were ahead of me. I checked the mirrors, craned my neck around. Nothing.

  My destination put me more on edge. The drive-thru was hemmed in on one side by the restaurant and on the north and east by the fancy One Lexington condo tower and its swimming pool. I had heard stories about those pool parties. Maybe the caller had a different party in mind for me. If he wanted to trap me from behind, then walk up and spray the Prelude with machine-gun fire, this would be the ideal place.

  “Welcome to Jack in the Box, would you like to try two Jack Tacos for a dollar?”

  The disembodied voice startled me. I said two Jack Tacos were fine and waited for the line to move, my hand on the Airlite. Did I want to add an order of curly fries? Hell no. So far, no car pulled behind me. An ancient Toyota Camry was belching fumes ahead, two young children yelling and beating on their mother’s shoulder with shopping bags.

  He might have been sitting under one of the umbrellas outside the Starbucks across the street, but no—he couldn’t have seen the Jack in the Box line with such precision. The caller was mobile. He implied that he had something I wanted. That could only be the baby. And what I had was the flash drive. How did he know I had it? Torturing Tim Lewis would easily have given up that answer.

  I got my order and pulled to the edge of Central. The phone rang again.

  “What?”

  “Drive north to Indian School. Go the speed limit. I’m watching.”

  “I want to hear…” I wanted to hear the baby’s voice before continuing, but he didn’t give me a chance to finish. Now would be a really good time for Peralta to show up. But he didn’t call, and I didn’t dare tie up the phone calling him again.

  So I did as told. I let a few cars pass. Nobody goes the speed limit in Phoenix. Aside from people waiting at the light-rail stations in the middle of the avenue, I could count the pedestrians on one hand. One was a man in a red cap running south with six dogs on leashes in front of him.

  Once upon a time, the city’s leaders had intended Central Avenue to be Phoenix’s version of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. It didn’t work out. The old corporate headquarters, banks, and shops that made Central the most important business location in town were bought or closed or lost in the savings-and-loan crash. Much of what remained moved out to Scottsdale or other suburbs as Phoenix became a back-office town, heavily dependent on population growth and real-estate hustles, and then the Great Recession had cleaned our clock.

  As a result, this part of Central held an assortment of bland skyscrapers with massive parking garages behind them. A few quirks of the older city remained, such as the curved “punch card” building that was once the headquarters of Western Savings. When the thrift went bust in the savings-and-loan scandal, the tower went mostly empty. A pair of domed, two-story circular buildings complemented it. They had been retail bank branches and their mid-century appeal endured. I recalled that inside, each building had a sunburst skylight. In a healthy city, one such as San Diego, they might have been remade into a jazz club or a restaurant. Instead, both sat empty, the blinds hanging as if the savings and loan had closed the day before.

  Other Central landmarks passed by as I drove north: an inverted pyramid and Macayo’s restaurant, whose façade was meant to resemble an Aztec temple. And much empty land.

  Somebody had bought it long ago, gotten the City Council to zone it for high-rise, and cleared the old single-story buildings or bungalows. But development never happened. Speculation and flipping did. Because it was zoned for high-rises, no developer could afford to do less than build towers—for which there was no demand. So the land stayed bare, aside from an occasional plan that went nowhere.

  Farther north, back in the 1980s, somebody had promised to build the tallest building in the country. That site was still bare. Absentee owners were banking it on their asset sheets for someday, even as decades went by. This was the heart of the nation’s sixth-largest city, but these parcels might as well have been World War II Dresden after the debris from carpet-bombing had been carted away. I had read that forty-three percent of the city of Phoenix was empty land. What were a few art projects on vacant lots against that?

  Hardly anyone knew what had been lost, first by the skyscraper rush, then by the mass abandonment. But these blocks had once held hundreds of bungalows and adobes of the same kind that were now protected and coveted in districts such as Willo. These had been neighborhoods people cared about.

  Back in the 1940s, most of Central had been lined with queen palms and handsome haciendas, irrigation ditches, and citrus groves. When I was young, most of these had been replaced with shops and businesses, but it was a vibrant street. “Cruising Central” was an essential tradition on Friday and Saturday nights until the police banned it.

  Now the most influential people rarely if ever saw the torn heart of the city, much less gave a damn. It was the only place I felt at home. I drove the streets and the history of the place formed the effortless backbeat in my mind, memory stitching together memory. I was helpless against it.

  Half a mile later, I reached Indian School Road and he called again.

  “Go into the park and wait.”

  Steele Indian School Park stood on part of the grounds of the old Phoenix Indian School. The choice acres facing Central had been given to a big developer and, naturally, sat empty. The rest, meant to be a grand central park for the city, wasn’t much. The imposing brick entrance signs were the most impressive features. Otherwise, it lacked the shade trees of old Encanto Park and the city never seemed to have the money or vision to make it into anything beyond sun-blasted grass with a couple of historic buildings saved from the Indian school and plenty of hot concrete sidewalks.

  Today, it was nearly empty. A Hispanic family was having a picnic under an awning. I put the car into park and munched on a Jack Taco, waiting, watching. No other cars came or went. He could see me from the parking lot of the VA hospital to the east. Note to self: keep some binoculars in the car. Lindsey’s Prelude smelled of fast food. My watch ticked around to five minutes, then ten, fifteen, twenty.

  At twenty-one minutes, he called again and ran me around. My efforts to start a conversation were immediately cut off. I followed the instructions and drove east on Indian School to Sixteenth Street, south a mile to Thomas, and then back west into the core. Traffic remained light. If someone was following me, he was doing a very good job staying hidden. I thought about pulling off into a sidestreet, backing into an alley, and seeing if I could catch him behind me. But it was too big a chance. I stayed with his itinerary.

  Another call: “Go to the McDonald’s on Central. Pull into the parking lot facing east. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  This next leg took me about five more minutes, back the way I had come before, a few blocks north of the punch card building. I drove to the east end of the long lot and waited. Ironically, the FBI offices were in my view to the northeast. Otherwise, it was acres of empty blight, adorned here and there with a dead palm tree looking like a giant burned matchstick. During the 2000s boom, before the biggest-ever collapse of Phoenix’s only real industry, real-estate speculation, t
hese lots facing Central were supposed to become twin, sixty-story condo towers. I don’t think anybody ever believed it would really happen. It didn’t.

  As I drank cold water, the airplane came in low from the east, a small, single-engine private craft. It was flying very low. Dangerously low. Immediately before it passed to my right, it jettisoned something. That something fell straight down and landed in a plume of dust on one of the empty lots. I didn’t need a phone call to make me speed a block to the landing zone. If I had that pair of binoculars, I might have gotten a tail number, but probably not. The airplane pulled up and disappeared into the sun.

  I slammed the gearshift into park and sprinted into the empty lot. It was a stupid thing to do, but I was powered by a panicky instinct, adrenaline, and dread. Dust was still in the air as I approached a parcel little more than a foot long wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. Something red was leaking through. My chest felt as if all its bones had suddenly collapsed.

  That stopped me enough to return to the car for the evidence gloves that I had always kept there from my time as a deputy. I got the gloves and scanned the side streets: nothing. Then I saw him: a man was walking toward the parcel. He was tall and thin with stringy hair the color of urine.

  “Stop!”

  He ignored me. He looked like a homeless man, but I had my hand on the revolver as I walked back across the empty ground.

  We faced off.

  “My stuff!”

  Was he really a street person or a watcher? I decided on the former.

  “This is police business.”

  He looked at my PI credentials, not too closely thank goodness, and shuffled quickly toward Central.

  I watched him go, then pocketed the wallet and pulled on the gloves. Call the police, call the FBI—this was what my interior voice was saying. I ignored it, dropped to my haunches, pulled out a small knife, and cut the twine. It might be another bomb, came the interior governor that had saved me so often in the past. I ignored that too, and carefully unwrapped the parcel.