Arizona Dreams

by Jon Talton

  8

  Napoleon said he wanted lucky generals. I couldn’t tell if my luck was getting better or worse. A likely homicide victim had been discovered in Maricopa County—that was a plus. The sheriff was distracted elsewhere, so he wouldn’t be bothered with more concern about my writing habits—definite plus. But then there was the missing Dana, no phone number, no address. That was my carelessness. Big minus. And the timetable. This was no historic crime; the body had been there for no more than a few weeks. I could just walk away. That was good, right? I had other things to do. It seemed smart not to push my luck. I walked back to the car and started out to the highway.

  About a mile down the dusty road, the desert started to roll and the vegetation became nothing but spindly creosote bush. I was thinking about Dana. This pleasant nobody woman. I could run her name through the Miami University alumni association. Maybe I also should check the NCIC—maybe she had a record beyond a college transcript. But I had a gut feeling, the part of my gut that wasn’t still aching from the impact of a large boot, that I wasn’t going to find her. So the question was why she put on the pose. We’d find easily enough who really owned the land. No, I corrected myself. Blair and Snyder would find it. I was free.

  That’s when I saw something bobbing above the brush. Something moving. I slowed the car so I wasn’t making a dust trail, and rolled down the window. That buzz again of ATVs. My body kicked up the panic juice. It’s amazing how one beating can make you feel more afraid. Make you feel vulnerable and old. Funny old Mapstone, it was probably just some kids out for a harmless ride. I was about to roll the window back up and get going when there was a break in the creosote brush, and I saw them. They were about five hundred yards away, and moving on an angle toward the road. Somehow I thought I would pick out the giant if he had been five miles away. I looked at the police radio hanging from the dashboard. Reached for the microphone, heard it scrape out of its metal clip. Then I put it back. My mouth was suddenly dry. It had been years since I’d had a drop of water. I made myself slow my breathing and make a plan.

  This time I made sure to make dust. I drove about half a mile, keeping an eye on the pair, then stopped in the middle of the road. There wasn’t much time. I stepped out of the car and grabbed the three-cell black Maglite from the passenger seat. By then, the two ATVs muscled into the road, leaving behind four tracks indelible in the ancient desert soil. They stopped on the other side of the car and slowly dismounted. Gunfighters dropping from their horses—although a quick scan showed no shooting irons. This time I had a better look at them. Not being face down in the dirt getting kicked will allow that. The younger one still had on a white football jersey with ghetto in blue letters. Obviously no time for laundry out here. He looked about twenty, had a sandy buzz cut and a mouth that looked prone to drooling, and probably thought the girls adored him. The big one didn’t look so big on second viewing. He wouldn’t stand out in a big-city skyline. He had that pumped up look you get courtesy of the state prison system. Besides the black mullet, the other thing I noticed was his eyes. Worlds could be lost in those eyes.

  They started around the car from different directions. I walked to the rear, toward the giant. I had no time for David and Goliath musings, although as I recalled, David had superior technology. By the time we met at the back bumper, I had my right side away from him, just the way I wanted it. He started, “You don’t…” But by that time I had made an uppercut into his crotch and the Maglite was attached to my hand. He let out a massive burst of breath, foul enough for me to smell it. Next I jammed the heavy steel flashlight into his ribs, a pain center they teach you at the academy, if not in academia. And he was on the way down to the blond desert dirt.

  I wheeled on the kid and had the Colt Python .357 Magnum in my hands.

  “Get on the fucking ground!” I commanded, trying to lower and steady my voice. My blood was up and I was barely containing my own terror. So I was careful to keep my finger outside the trigger guard, unless he gave me a reason to shoot him. He was about one second from giving me a reason, but he immediately stopped, and pissed his pants. I could actually hear it, then see a large dark stain spread down the leg of his khaki cargo pants. He stuttered something. I backed away so I could keep an eye on both of them.

  “Reach in that car and get the handcuffs that are in the glove box. If you take more than five seconds, I’ll shoot you.”

  “Yessssir…” Ghetto stammered, and did as I asked him.

  “Now, get down on the ground, facing me, face down. Do it now.”

  When he was face down in the road, I moved closer to the heap that had been Goliath. He was on his knees, in a kind of face-down fetal-position, moaning. I kicked him in the side as hard as I could.

  “Were you going to say I don’t listen too good? My boss says that all the time.” I would face the police brutality charge later. I needed him to stay down. And my foot felt broken from the impact with his tree-trunk of a body. I walked over and retrieved the handcuffs from Ghetto.

  “If you stand up I’ll shoot you. If you roll over I’ll shoot you. If you look up I’ll shoot you.”

  “Yesssssir.”

  “Keep your goddamned face down in the dirt. Shut up.”

  I holstered the Python and cuffed the giant, barely. I double-locked the handcuffs. As a young deputy, I had seen big guys break out of handcuffs. But he didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Then I popped the trunk, found another set of cuffs and did the kid.

  “Stand up, get your feet under you.” I leaned him against the car, facing me. After I read him his rights, he was wide-eyed.

  “You’re a cop? We didn’t know.”

  “Well now you know.”

  “We’d a never…”

  “Oh, you just beat up civilians?”

  “It’s private property…” He was starting to blubber. My heart was hard.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “We’re supposed to keep people away, that’s all…”

  “It’s a hell of a way to do it.” I searched for enough saliva to speak. My mouth was a dry wash bed.

  “I didn’t want to hurt you. It was Nelson.” He nodded toward the giant.

  “Why are you supposed to keep people away?”

  He gave a great sniffle and said, “I can’t tell you, dude. I can’t…”

  I watched him for a minute, then said. “Everything you’ve heard about prison rape is true.” I watched his eyes. “Good-looking kid like you. They’re going to have a field day. Assaulting a police officer—you’re going to be in prison until you’re an old man…”

  I opened the car door and started to push him into the back seat.

  “No,” the kid sobbed. His head was so far down on his chest it looked like it might just roll off into the road. I leaned him against the car, also keeping an eye on Nelson.

  “If I help you, can I get off easier?”

  Amazing the influence of television; everybody knew their roles when the police came calling. Unless the kid had done this before. “Maybe. Depends on your record.”

  “I’m clean. I swear to God.” He sniffled and gulped, a sickening sound. Then he said, “We were hired by Jack Fife.”

  “Who is that?”

  “He’s some kind of private security dude who works for a land company. Has this big office in North Scottsdale. He told us to keep this land clear. Said it was private property.”

  “Why was he so worried? It’s miles from anything.”

  “I don’t know, dude. I swear to God.”

  By that time a sheriff’s cruiser was pulling in behind me. I had something I wanted hauled downtown. Later I would have time to be afraid, to sit alone and feel the point of panic in my middle, to wonder why the hell I hadn’t just sat and called for backup. But even then, I would feel good about my luck.

  9

  The city kept growing. Forty-eight thousand new houses a year. One hundred twenty thousand new residents annually. Five hundred square miles of urb
an area with Phoenix, the nation’s fifth largest city, surrounded by two dozen suburbs and two Indian reservations. They called the suburbs “boomburbs”: Gilbert from 10,000 to 200,000 in twenty years; Mesa, with 450,000 people, now larger than the cities of St. Louis, Minneapolis, or Atlanta. To accommodate all this, the growth machine that is the Phoenix economy ate at least two acres of desert every hour. The swimming pools and golf courses, landscaping and water taps consumed millions of gallons of water daily, virtually all coming from manmade reservoirs and canals. The experts predicted only more growth. But all that seemed somehow removed from my life. I was embedded in the old city—old meaning the part of town that existed prior to 1950. I lived in a 1924 house and worked in a courthouse that was built in 1929, right on the brink of the Great Depression.

  The gentle months slipped away. So did the immediate memory of my adventure in the Harquahala Desert. My assailants were quickly fed into the criminal justice thresher, with only a few dozen hours of my time spent writing reports and testifying. The big guy was going home—he’d spent half his life in prison for assault and robbery. The kid was another sad loser who never got past eighth grade and washed out of construction jobs. The detectives told me they were cheap help hired by a land company that owned adjacent property to keep out illegal dumping—and of course the company considered them independent contractors and was fully indemnified against such uh-ohs as assaulting a deputy sheriff. The fools hadn’t even been protecting the right property.

  The body turned into another bizarre Arizona story. He was Harry Bell, the landowner, aged eighty-two. Not a “Z” to be found—Harry’s middle name was Truman and he drove rock and gravel trucks for a living. He convinced his brother to bury him out there when he died, as he did in his sleep in a trailer in a dusty lot in a little hamlet named Hyder, southwest of the city. It was Harry’s last wish, to rest on the land he owned. Stranger things have happened in my state. The writer Edward Abbey, who hated modern man’s incursions into the desert, is said to be buried somewhere on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, in a hidden grave dug by his friends. Bell’s autopsy turned up nothing unusual, the detectives seemed satisfied, and if the county attorney prosecuted anyone I never heard about it.

  Harry Bell had no children, only an ex-wife he hadn’t seen in thirty years and a brother. No daughter named Dana. There was no record of a Dana Underwood in the Miami University alumni association, and the Dana Watkins the association showed was twenty-four years old and living in New England—too young to be my soccer mom on the edge of middle age. Why she came to me and sent me on an errand to find the body of Harry Bell—I had no answers. With Peralta demanding to see a manuscript, I decided not to press the matter. The mysterious Dana became a statement in a detective’s file, although Patrick Blair didn’t keep her “father’s” letter. So I dropped it in a rarely opened desk drawer. It was my “get to it someday” file. It was a full drawer.

  The gentle months slipped away. I received no more broadsides from the county supervisors. Lindsey and I were looking forward to our first real vacation in years: a late-June train trip across the Canadian Rockies. It was an indulgence we shouldn’t have considered, so of course we did. Until then, we reveled in our nights and weekends on Cypress Street. Lindsey had her gardens, where she exploited the long growing season and outwitted the merciless sun. When she came in sweaty and covered in dirt, she was gorgeous. The evening often meant martinis on the patio, where we talked about our day and solved the world’s problems. At night, we read to each other, often in bed, where she would drape a leg across me. We went through Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt and David Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear. The tamale women came to the door every Monday night and we bought a dozen each time. I gave Lindsey backrubs every night before bed. We walked to Encanto Park, and went to spring training games, which Lindsey loved.

  Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes. Somebody said that—Tolkien, I think. I didn’t take anything for granted. But I liked to think we had both met at a point in our lives where we didn’t have anything to prove, where we knew that what was rare and precious couldn’t be valued in money. I knew I not only loved Lindsey, but I liked her and admired her.

  My days fell into a comforting routine. If I was working at the office, I took the bus down Central to Washington, then walked to the courthouse. At home, I sat at Grandfather’s old desk, in the study that opened off the western end of the living room. I picked a dozen of the cases I had been handed since coming back home to Phoenix and being given a job by Peralta. Back then these had just been cases gathering dust in the records bureau, ignored by the cold-case detectives.

  At first, he had taken pity on me. I knew that. I was recently divorced and denied tenure. I never intended to stay. But I found that I had a knack for the work. At least that’s what I hoped, outside the moments, which were many, when I felt like a fraud in two worlds, academia and law enforcement. Having a county supervisor take a bead on me only reinforced that insecurity. Still, I recalled cases such as the murder in the 1950s of the mining executive. It hadn’t been solved by DNA, or the autopsy, or cop luck. It was solved when, four decades later, I had applied a historian’s touch. That key statement—it was untrustworthy because the supposed witness was a business rival, even an enemy, and was not even in the city on that date. Then I had found the investigating officer’s notes—primary sources—which contradicted the press reports—secondary sources. Those discoveries had turned me toward a new interpretation of the sad events, then evidence—enough to indict, if the suspect had not gone on to a tougher court years before. Sure, a skeptical detective or journalist might have done the same. But I had done it two dozen times now with success. Recalling it made me feel better about these four years back at the Sheriff’s Office, and more secure against the attacks of county supervisors.

  For the book, I went through those case files again, crimes from 1932 and 1948 and 1959. Wearing headphones and listening to jazz CDs, I organized research and outlined chapters. Lindsey had set me up with a new Macintosh laptop, but I still loved working through paper files, making notes on cards and legal pads. Then, music off, I started writing. It was like grad school again, without the student loans. Once I settled down to the work, I found myself enjoying the writing. At night, during cocktails, I would read the manuscript to Lindsey. Sometimes I imagined returning to history writing—and not the tedious, statistic-laden stuff I had been forced to write to get published as an academic. David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing was on my desk at work, and in spare moments I went through it—pure pleasure!—and wondered if I could do as well.

  It was the second Thursday in May when Peralta sat in my office as I read a few chapters. One of the big windows was open because the sheriff had brought two Cuban cigars, Cohibas. It was against at least a page of county rules, but I wasn’t complaining. It gave him something to do instead of stopping me to question a minor word choice or make a suggestion I hated. Finally, he sat contentedly wreathed in tobacco smoke, closed his eyes and listened. The old office seemed at home with men smoking cigars.

  “Maybe it’s time for me to retire, Mapstone.”

  I stopped reading and looked at him. Then I laughed. He just stared at me with his coal-black eyes until I stopped.

  “You ever hear of Mara 18?”

  “A gang,” I said.

  “Yeah, well…” He let some ash fall off his cigar and let it sit in the ashtray, a little Cuban smokestack industry on my desk. “I’d call it a terrorist organization. Mara 18 started in LA. Back in the ’70s it was Mexican immigrants. Then in the ’80s, they started recruiting Centro Americanos—all these rootless young men who came here to get away from the wars down there. Only this wasn’t the Boys and Girls Club. Their big enemy is the Salvatruchas—that’s mostly Central American, Salvadoran, you know.”

  “They’re operating over here?” I asked.

  “Don’t let the chamber of commerce know,” he said. He took his
cigar again, took a puff, kept it in his hand. “A little before seven this morning, a carload of Mara 18 gets out at an apartment, it’s in a county island over by Tolleson. They go in and kill five people. Only four of those people are under six years old.”

  “God…” It was all I could say.

  “None of the neighbors wanted to talk, of course. Nobody wants to talk and get killed. But there’s a utility crew working across the street. They said the guys in the car had tattoos on their faces, their foreheads. That’s the way these gang members look.” He rubbed his eyes, then slowly shook his head. “Turns out, the apartment was being used by Salvatruchas—but of course the men aren’t there. How long before we get a retaliatory hit on Mara 18? A day? A week? Places in this town are like Baghdad, or the West Bank.” He sighed and watched the tip of the cigar.

  “I get tired of this shit, Mapstone,” he said, in a tone of voice I had never heard from him before, a far-away voice. “It’s like the world is just crazy. And what kind of future do I have anyway?”

  “Governor Peralta has a nice ring to it,” I said.

  “Not in this state,” he said. “Maybe I need a change. I could be making money in real estate, just like everybody else.”

  “As you said to me about teaching, ‘you’d be bored,’” I said. “You were born to be the sheriff of Maricopa County.”

  He was about to say something when the door opened. Lindsey and Robin came in laughing.

  10

  That night I dreamed of men with tattoos on their faces. Blue ink was etched into their foreheads and cheeks. I couldn’t read the words, but they were in English, not Spanish. The tattooed men were digging a grave in the desert, then they were trying to bury me in the grave, slamming bowling-ball-sized rocks onto me, and the rocks didn’t hurt but I was fighting for my life in dream slo-mo. I couldn’t breathe. Then I was in our bedroom, watching the bluish moonlight coming in from the street. The only sound was Lindsey’s quiet, regular breathing. I put my hand on her hip, and let her warm, soft skin reassure me that this was reality.