High Country Nocturne

by Jon Talton

  “So he leaves you a message on the first business card. Don’t try to find him.”

  I nodded.

  She put her hand lightly on mine. “I know you’re tired, love, but if he really is undercover, shouldn’t you leave this alone? If you muck around digging into the case, you might put it at risk and endanger him.”

  “You mean, be a hotdog.”

  I ate in silence. She was right. Perhaps. One of my many character flaws was getting into target-acquisition mode and immediately going to afterburners. Sometimes I needed to slow down.

  I said, “But he left the second card. He knows I love trains. He knows I love the Flagstaff depot. He called Sharon from a pay phone there, made sure she heard the railroad in the background. Sure enough, he had left a message where I would find it. That would indicate he wants me to be involved.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe something went wrong. Or, he is not undercover but being coerced into this robbery.”

  She pointed to the newspaper. “Nothing subtle about it. If he wanted the diamonds, he could have overpowered the other guard before they got to the mall. Instead, he shot him there and did it on camera.”

  “That gives him more credibility going deep undercover.”

  “And ruins his good name.”

  “For now.”

  “But something went wrong and now he needs you?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know. The more I ate, the more my body wanted to sleep.

  She applied a dainty napkin to her mouth. Then she swigged the coffee like a truck driver. “What if he really did it?”

  “Lindsey!” I lowered my voice. “How can you even think that?”

  “The man gave his life to serving the people of Maricopa County.” She looked around at the breakfast crowd. “And they kicked him to the curb because suddenly it’s unAmerican to be Hispanic in Arizona. It’d make me want to get a little revenge.”

  “That’s not him. He was philosophical about losing the election. We were the ones who were angry.”

  “We have to look at this dispassionately,” she said. “That’s the way you would approach any other case.”

  I nodded.

  She leaned toward me. “Maybe he wanted to prove something.”

  “Prove?”

  “The white supremacist took his gun, remember? You had to rescue him. That had never happened during his career.”

  Peralta and I had never discussed that incident, but what Lindsey said was true. Mike Peralta’s credo was never give up your weapon. But in that situation, he had been blindsided, disarmed, and strapped to a chair in a room with explosives. By the time Peralta was unstrapped, two bad guys were dead. But all through it, he had been, for probably the first time in his life, helpless.

  “He may be feeling old,” she continued. “Feeling as if…”

  After a few minutes, I finished her sentence, “Feeling as if he needed to prove he was still capable. So maybe that drove him to accept a dangerous assignment.”

  “Or,” she sipped her coffee, “become a jewel thief.”

  We finished breakfast in silence. I knew what she was thinking: nobody really knows anybody else.

  Afterward, we boarded the train and rode down Central to the Encanto station, we walked two-and-a-half blocks to the 1928 Spanish Revival house on Cypress Street. The street was blessedly free of satellite trucks, black SUVs, and strawberry blond DPS troopers.

  The temperature had warmed into the high sixties and the air was dry and magical. It would be the kind of day when you could say, yes, this is paradise. When I was young, it had been a flawed Eden, a garden city surrounded by citrus groves, farms, and the Japanese flower gardens, and beyond that the empty majesty of the Sonoran Desert.

  That was almost all gone now that the builders had turned the Valley into fifteen hundred square miles of lookalike housing developments, shopping strips, and tilt-up offices and warehouses built on spec. Even Baker Nursery, a reminder of the days when even the most humble place was lovingly landscaped, had closed. Newcomers threw down gravel and thought they were being responsible. “We live in a desert,” they would say. They knew nothing about this wettest desert in the world and the oasis they were profaning. There was Scottsdale and Paradise Valley, if you had the money. But it wasn’t my paradise anymore.

  Time was, we had seven lovely months and five hellish ones. Now it had almost flipped. It didn’t cool down until after Halloween and the heat kicked up in March. The temps had gone up ten degrees in my lifetime, and that was local warming, replacing the groves and farms with concrete and red tile roofs. Nobody wanted to talk about what climate change would do here. I kept friendships by not bringing it up

  But on Cypress Street, in the historic districts, especially within this property line, here was the magnet that kept me in Phoenix.

  Inside, I thought momentarily about driving into the office and going through recent cases we had worked, everything I could discover about the diamond runs. To find Matt Pennington.

  But I made the mistake of going into the bedroom to change clothes and then I was on the bed. It took about two minutes for me to fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  Chapter Seven

  The sun was low by the time I woke up. It didn’t seem as if it should still be Saturday, but it was. Lindsey was sitting beside me in bed with her laptop open.

  “Any news?”

  “Hashtag Peralta is the most trending item on Twitter in Phoenix,” she said.

  I asked if that was a good thing.

  “Oh, Dave, not in this case. Most of it is ugly, racist stuff. So much hate in one hundred forty characters.”

  “Someday we’ll have social media trials and summary public executions.”

  She cupped my face with her hands and kissed me. That always took away the darkness and made our little oasis a bright and hopeful place.

  Afterward, we had cocktails, Beefeater martinis, stirred, with olives. It was one of our healing rituals against the crazy place that began outside the property line, where the voters were such fools that they had kicked my friend out of office. Cocktail time was sacred.

  As we watched the last light outside the picture window, I told her what some sleep had enabled me to realize. I had kept saying that this was an ordinary diamond run. But it actually wasn’t.

  “There were two guards, not one. In the past, Peralta had gone alone.”

  I didn’t know much about this part of our business, only that it was good money, plus the background that Peralta had given me.

  Up until about 2000, the jewelers themselves had transported the diamonds. That stopped after a couple of robberies, including one where some Colombians had murdered a jeweler in the lobby of a Florida hotel and took his suitcase.

  After that, many jewelers set up armed security teams in every state that picked up the diamonds, took them to the shows, and returned them to the jeweler at the airport.

  But some firms hired two local guards to meet the jeweler at the airport outside the secure area—where they could still carry their weapons. They would take the diamonds, worth anywhere from three hundred thousand to a million dollars, to Kay, Zales, and other stores for special shows. Then they would return them to the jeweler, waiting safely at the airport.

  “The companies didn’t mind losing a guard but they didn’t want to lose a jeweler.”

  Then, around 2005, they cut back to one guard, I told Lindsey. A few months after we became private detectives, Peralta won a contract from Markovitz & Sons to transport diamonds in the Phoenix area. The most recent job before yesterday had been to take special-show diamonds to an invitation-only event at the Royal Palms Resort. Peralta told me Charlie Keating had been there.

  “Don’t forget the ‘savings-and-loan kingpin’ part,” she said.

  “Peralta said Charlie was still complainin
g that the feds wouldn’t pay for his knee replacement when he was incarcerated in Lompoc.”

  That transport had gone according to standard procedure. Peralta took the suitcase back to Sky Harbor and handed it to the jeweler, who went back into the secure area and discreetly examined the contents. I only knew the details because Peralta wanted to tell his Charlie Keating story.

  “But this time it was two guards,” she said.

  “That’s what the FBI told me. I assumed Peralta was going alone.”

  Lindsey asked who had provided the second guard. I didn’t know. Mann had told me that he was a private investigator.

  “Who Peralta shot.”

  “Winged,” I said.

  “I can find out who he is.”

  “Lindsey, your computer snooping worries me.”

  “Nobody can catch me, Dave. Trust me.”

  I knew she was the best. She had been the star of Peralta’s cybercrimes unit and then she had spent a year in Washington working for Homeland Security. It still concerned me. The FBI would be all over us and in ways we couldn’t tell.

  She distracted me by suggesting fajitas for dinner. We sliced onions and peppers together in the kitchen. I made guacamole. Then I grilled the veggies, steak, and chicken inside the old chimneria in the backyard while she warmed the tortillas in the oven and assembled the salsa, shredded cheese, and sour cream.

  I was way too full and loving it when Lindsey said, “I found Matt Pennington.”

  Before I could learn more, the front door registered a knock. Three loud thumps. Whoever it was didn’t bother to use the wrought-iron knocker.

  Maybe it was a neighbor. Maybe it was the tamale women selling door-to-door or a television crew wanting to know about the “gem heist.” Whoever it was, I moved quickly to the front bedroom and peeked outside.

  The porch light showed a black Ford Crown Victoria was sitting in the driveway.

  Crown Vics with their wonderful Interceptor engines were on their way out as the standard police vehicle in North America. They were becoming rare. Ford had stopped making them. This one had an eight-inch scratch on the right edge of the push-bar that was attached to the front bumper. It was one of the vehicles of the sheriff’s personal security detail.

  The three thuds came again. That was the way cops knocked.

  I opened the door to see one man. His partner had stepped into the flowerbed to peer in the picture window. One of Lindsey’s impatiens was under his boot.

  “May I help you?”

  Peralta’s old detail had been reassigned, of course. Still, I knew one of this pair, a sergeant named Gordon who had been in the patrol division under Peralta and was on the edge of being fired for what appeared to be a righteous brutality complaint. The other one, two decades younger than Gordon, came back to the step and showed his star.

  As if I didn’t know.

  They could have been brothers. Both were about five eleven, wearing cheap Dockers and polo shirts to show off their biceps. Both had thinning-hair crew cuts. They looked like personal trainers at a second-rate health club. Gordon’s partner was giving me the cop squint.

  Gordon said, “The sheriff wants to see you.”

  Chapter Eight

  I did not walk out to the Crown Vic without consideration.

  They wouldn’t say what “the sheriff” wanted of me—and it felt like a metal file being dragged across my teeth even to hear the title connected with anybody but Mike Peralta, certainly not this pretender.

  Don’t think I didn’t consider that they might not really be deputies. Too much was in flux: Peralta on the run, his messages to me, and the mysterious traffic stop early this morning. But I recognized the car and I knew Gordon from my days with the department.

  I decided to take the chance, but not before I excused myself. In the bedroom, I slipped my easily concealed BUG—backup gun—into a holster in the small of my back and covered it with a blue blazer. The Smith & Wesson 442 Airweight revolver held five potent .38 special hollowpoint bullets. If the worst came about, it would be my last resort.

  Back in the living room, I looked at Lindsey. She smiled and winked at me, See what they want.

  I paused in the long twilight to admire the cool breeze, and then I climbed inside. The personal trainers even let me ride in the front passenger seat, with Gordon driving.

  “I didn’t even know this neighborhood existed, Mapstone.” Gordon took in the elegant period-revival houses as we went west on Cypress and then turned south on the one-way that was Fifth Avenue. On the other side of McDowell Road were bungalows more than a century old and beautifully restored.

  “Thought everything downtown was a slum, but this is something. Reminds me of back home in Minnesota, the old houses and front porches.”

  “It’s not downtown.” My voice was friendly. “It’s Midtown. Downtown only goes as far as Fillmore.”

  My pedantry shut Gordon up. We were passing Kenilworth School, where I had passed kindergarten through eighth grade, when I heard Gordon’s partner behind me.

  “So how is Miss Cheerleader Legs?”

  In the history department, his query would have led to a disciplinary action for using sexist language and objectifying a woman, followed by sensitivity classes and perhaps therapy.

  In the cop shop, the proper response would have been, “Your wife looked fine after I fucked her this morning, kid. Thanks for asking.”

  But I wasn’t a cop any more.

  I didn’t answer.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gordon give his partner a “back-off” glance and the voice behind me fell silent.

  The kid was too stupid to stay on an elite detail. Soon enough he would find himself alone on a dark road with a guy less forgiving than me. One who would cause him much pain and require years of facial reconstruction and he would squint because it hurt to open his eyes.

  Dark road—I thought again of Strawberry Death. I was still not persuaded by Lindsey’s explanation.

  At Van Buren Street, we jigged east to First Avenue. I dreaded seeing the new occupant in Peralta’s former office suite, where I had spent many sessions hearing his demands for progress on a case. That seemed like another person’s life now.

  But the car turned left on Jefferson Street and pulled in to valet parking for the Hotel Palomar.

  Nobody said anything. We merely got out and I followed them inside.

  The Palomar was the crown jewel of CityScape, the latest attempt to revive a downtown that the city had nearly killed in the sixties.

  The development had been presented in the newspaper with renderings of audacious skyscrapers. The reality was vapid and suburban, turned in on itself instead of recreating a walkable downtown commercial district. Still, it was better than the brutal empty plaza it had replaced, and Lindsey and I spent as much as we could at the limited selection of shops. We tried to be civic stewards, supporting downtown rather than driving to Scottsdale or the Biltmore.

  Inside the hotel was another matter. The Blue Hound restaurant and bar had a flashy LA feel, with dark wood, swag lamps, large mirrors hung at menacing angles over the tables, leather sofas in front of a fireplace that was lit even in the summertime, textured walls, and a big crowd.

  I followed the plainclothes deputies past the fun to the elevators. We rode up in silence.

  The car opened onto a rooftop bar called Lustre. With the temperature still above seventy, it was a beautiful night to be here. But the place was empty. A sign said, “Reserved for Private Party.”

  That would be the casually dressed man at the bar with a messenger bag on the floor beside his feet. He stood up and smiled at me. Then he extended his hand.

  And I shook it.

  He saved me the impossibility of speaking his title by saying, “Call me Chris.”

  Then he dismissed the detail with a “thanks,
guys” and led me to a table.

  Christopher Andrew Melton was completing his first year as Maricopa County sheriff. Not being a big television watcher, especially what passed for local news, this was my first opportunity to really see him.

  He was my size and my height. I had so hoped he was a short little guy. I had dreamed most of his hair had fallen out, leaving only dust bunny tufts. But, no, it was still there, golden and expensively cut. His voice was measured and harmonized with education, not the redneck twang I expected. He was further helped by the kind of limpid blue eyes that were ubiquitous in British costume dramas.

  He had moved to Sun City West after finishing twenty-five years with the FBI. He invested in some houses and made top dollar before the real-estate crash. With his federal law-enforcement pedigree, he won consulting work for the homebuilders and the rock products association—the trade group that lobbied for the asphalt, concrete, and aggregate producers—doing what, I didn’t know. I did know they were two of the most politically powerful entities in the state.

  Then he ran for sheriff. An “impossible bid,” the pundits had said. “Mike Peralta will be sheriff as long as he wants the job and then he can be governor.” That was what they had said.

  But Melton found his issue and his timing with illegal immigration, something Peralta was supposedly “soft” on, even though the Sheriff’s Office had no authority over federal enforcement of immigration laws.

  It was a dirty campaign, with Melton’s surrogates playing to Anglo fears and emphasizing that the sheriff was “soft” because he was “a Mexican himself.” “What part of illegal doesn’t he understand?” one bumper sticker read, with Peralta’s face on it.

  Melton beat Peralta by ten thousand votes in the Republican primary where the turnout was twenty percent. The county’s population was four million.

  And now he sat across from me.

  “I know this is awkward,” he said.