High Country Nocturne

by Jon Talton

  “Lord, have mercy.”

  I spoke the words to myself and said them conversationally, not exactly as a petition to the almighty but a stress valve letting off. The moment stunned me. My grandmother, a daughter of the frontier who knew much loss in her long life, had used that phrase often and in exactly that tone of voice. Now I said it.

  A few years ago, I realized that if I were in a relaxed situation, especially sitting down, my hands would join in my conversation. This was not wild gesticulation. It was hands and wrists. Grandmother had done the same thing. When I was a little boy, I had thought it was strange. Now I did the same thing all the time.

  The grandparents who raised me were long dead and yet they lived on through me. I considered how I had underestimated Melton. Yes, I had taken the badge out of unreasoning fear, to buy time for Lindsey, even though I didn’t believe a word he said about her. But he had also gotten to me about how “I owed” my hometown.

  Grandfather talked that way. He told me stories of the early pioneers, the heroic acts of dam and canal building that had turned a wilderness into a garden. That’s how he told it. “Never forget that you owe,” he said. “Never forget that you are from Maricopa County, Arizona.”

  Grandfatherisms, I called them. Melton had made a snare for me with those sentiments.

  Even though it was Sunday night, I dressed in a pinstripe blue suit, starched white shirt, and muted red tie. For the first time, I noticed the pattern—tiny diamonds. My new watch, the one Lindsey had given me for Christmas, went across my wrist. I stashed a pair of latex evidence gloves and badge case in my pocket, slipped on the Colt Python and the backup gun. I was a deputy sheriff again.

  The case file from Melton was sitting in the living room. I decided to let it be for a few hours. I would do three more tasks associated with Peralta and then pause, if not stop.

  It was not clear to me that he was safe. The man was very capable on his own—I was not indispensible. For years, he had given the orders and saved the day. But on a case a year ago, I had saved him. Now he had left the cryptic second business card. Whatever trouble he was in required my assistance.

  That’s what I told myself.

  His undercover adventure, predicament, descent into lawlessness, whatever it was, also twined up with the assassin who met me on the front lawn last night. I wasn’t going to get in Kate Vare’s way, as long as she did her job. But the shooter remained at-large and anything I could learn about her connection to Peralta would help.

  It couldn’t be a coincidence that she had come after me after he made off with the diamonds.

  The first task was quickly foiled.

  Find Matt Pennington.

  Lindsey said she had news about this, but before she could tell me more we had begun fighting about the new job with Melton. I sat at the desk and carefully folded Lindsey’s glasses, studying the acetate tortoiseshell frames with round lenses and small earpieces that perfectly fit her thin face.

  “My nerd girl look,” she would say.

  Unfortunately for me, Lindsey’s computer was password-protected.

  I tried every word and number combination I could think of and got through with “Dave” and the date and year of the first time we had sex. That delightful memory, and the fact that she recalled it, was followed by anxiety that I should call Sharon to check on her. I resisted the temptation. I had only been gone for forty-five minutes.

  The computer screen was neither sentimental nor anxious. It brought me to a gray backdrop with a red box demanding “Keystroke Authentication Pattern.”

  She was too clever for me. I gave up. I could at least Google Pennington later. Hell, I might even Bing him. But I needed answers no search engine was going to supply.

  I went outside, the Colt Python in my hand. The air was magically dry and pleasant.

  The darkened carport was clear of assassins, so I climbed in Lindsey’s old Honda Prelude, and drove west.

  Our office on Grand Avenue, a squat adobe that was about all that remained of a once-charming 1920s auto court, looked quiet. The neon sign of a cowboy throwing a lasso, the other survivor of the motel, blinked benignly. Otherwise, the place was surrounded by a twelve-foot steel fence and watched by surveillance cameras.

  I pressed the remote in the car to open the gate, let it close behind me, then got out of the car and went in, unlocking two heavy deadbolts and disarming the alarm.

  Inside, the front office held its usual smell of dust and old linoleum. I turned on the banker’s lamp atop my desk and for a long time merely listened. Everything sounded and looked much the same as when the FBI had arrived with a search warrant Friday afternoon.

  Why was the FBI investigating this case? For that matter, why did they arrive so soon after Peralta’s robbery?

  The walls stubbornly refused to give me answers.

  Next I went into the Danger Room, unlocking the steel door. I compared the assault rifles, sniper rifle, machine guns, shotguns, and pistols in their neat racks and drawers with the firearms inventory from the files. Over time, the bookish David Mapstone had learned all the details and capabilities of each weapon. Nothing was missing.

  Peralta had gone on the diamond run carrying only his .40-caliber Glock sidearm. Not only that, but he had emptied out the weapons locker in his truck.

  I retrieved a shortened M-4 carbine—the technical term was close quarter battle receiver—and extra magazines. Don’t forget a Remington pump shotgun with a belt of shells. No party is complete without one. Rounding out my kit were two pairs of binoculars, one with night-vision capability. I zipped them up in a black duffle bag and set it aside.

  Next, I sat at the small desk in the far end of the small room. It held a laptop connected to the video cameras.

  I quickly spun through forty-eight hours worth of digital information, learning nothing new. At 8:15 a.m. Friday, Peralta came in the gate, parked his pickup, and walked inside. Unfortunately in this case, we lacked cameras watching the interior of the building. Thirty minutes later, he left. At 3:12 p.m., the cameras showed the FBI arriving and, two hours later, leaving. Images of me appeared, walking out and driving away. Otherwise, not a single car pulled to the gate even to turn around.

  Back in the main room, I pulled out Peralta’s plush chair and sank into it, studying his desk. The top was as usual immaculately empty. The FBI had gone through the credenza behind his desk, taking his laptop and the files in the credenza cabinet as evidence.

  “Good luck with that computer,” I said out loud, thinking of how little he used it.

  Then my eyes settled on the dictaphone, still sitting atop the credenza. It was at least twenty years old, the same one he had used when he was sheriff. I suppose the county had so little need for it they let him take it when he left office.

  The feds probably thought it was an objet d’art and left it alone. They were wrong. He used it almost daily, despite Lindsey’s efforts to match him with a voice-recognition app.

  She had considered it a breakthrough when she successfully walked him through setting up a Gmail account. On the other hand, she had also taught him about GPS tracking of cell phones, and how to remove the battery and SIM card to avoid it. That, he had immediately absorbed and put to use on Friday after leaving the mall.

  I pressed the “play” button but immediately stopped the machine. Who knew, the agents who searched the office might have been givers as well as takers, and now were listening on the bug they had left behind. Putting on the spindly headphones, I started the dictaphone again and his deep voice immediately echoed out only for me.

  “Mapstone, it’s Friday morning and I need this letter to go out today.”

  I thought again, Jeez, we need to hire an administrative assistant. If we live through this.

  Over the headphones, I heard, “Date today. To, Mister Dan Patterson, Three-fifty East Encanto Boulevard, Phoenix.
Look up the ZIP Code. Dear Mister Patterson. Thank you for your inquiry about our services. However, we do not handle marital disputes or surveillance. I would recommend these firms that might be of assistance…”

  I listened as he droned on, sounding routine and even bored, not like someone about to steal a million dollars in diamonds. But there was nothing routine about this dictation. My stomach tightened the moment I heard the address. Encanto Boulevard only runs west of Central. On the east side, it becomes Oak Street.

  He finished the letter with “and that’s all for today. Aren’t you happy?” and the machine was silent except for a subtle scratching every fifteen seconds or so.

  I let it run.

  “Mapstone.” Now his voice was different, dead serious. “By the time you find this, things will be pretty crazy. You’re going to hear a lot of things about me. Don’t believe them. The FBI has probably questioned you. I kept you out of this so you wouldn’t have anything to tell them. Also, you and Lindsey would be safer.”

  The machine scratched and seemed to hesitate. I hit it, the universal fix for all things mechanical, and Peralta continued.

  “Don’t trust anyone. If things go according to plan, I’ll be back in the office Monday morning. If they don’t…” After a pause, the voice said, “If they don’t, find a man named Matt Pennington and he’ll know how to contact me.” He gave Pennington’s number and address. “There’s no time to tell you more and it’s better that you don’t know. Run frosty, Mapstone.”

  After more silence, I whispered. “Easy for you to say.”

  Things had obviously gone wrong as early as Friday evening, hence he had left the note to me on the business card in Flagstaff.

  I would find Matt Pennington. First, I decided to play a hunch.

  Ready to leave, I thought about turning off the neon sign, but didn’t. Robin had insisted that Peralta restore this little remnant of old Phoenix, when the blue highways ran past miles of neon-lighted motels. We could keep paying the electric bill for this little bit of whimsy on what was now an otherwise dismal stretch of roadway.

  With the extra firepower now inside the Prelude, I drove out Grand. It was the only major street that cut at a southeast-northwest angle through the monotonous grid of Phoenix.

  Once, Grand had been the highway from Phoenix to Los Angeles. Railroad tracks still ran beside it. Now Grand would take me to Indian School Road where I turned west again.

  Indian School was another bleak six-lane Phoenix raceway across flat land bordered by pawn shops, payday loan offices, tattoo parlors, strip joints, empty buildings with for-lease signs out front, and even an outfit in a defunct Wendy’s that promised money in exchange for your auto title. Little shrines decorated the joyless landscape, commemorating the loss of loved ones in a traffic mishap. Off on the curvilinear side streets were the cinderblock houses of Maryvale.

  This was Phoenix’s first mass-produced single-family-home development, John F. Long’s American Dream in ranch houses built atop former fields of cotton, alfalfa, lettuce, and beets. It was the opposite of Willo, but in the 1960s it was new, with all-electric kitchens and backyard pools.

  Builders such as John Hall, Ralph Staggs, and Elliott Whitehouse copied Maryvale on various scales all over the Valley. Del Webb built Sun City. They drew an Anglo middle class and retirees from Back East and growth paid for itself. That’s what the city leaders said.

  The last of that generation, Whitehouse, had died only a year ago.

  Some areas fared better than others. In Maryvale, the Anglos moved out and the poor Hispanics moved in. Many of them were followed by successive waves of illegal immigrants that staffed the hotels, restaurants, and lawn services. It was suburbia aging badly, a linear slum.

  People called it Scaryvale.

  I found what I was looking for south of Indian School on Fifty-First Avenue, a shopping strip hard against the bank of the Grand Canal. The canal itself looked nothing like its namesake in Venice or the massive channel in China.

  Carrying water from the Salt River Project dams and reservoirs in the mountains east of the city, this canal was bounded on both sides by a maintenance road, forty-five feet or so across total. It was the oldest in the system, one of the first Hohokam canals cleaned out by Jack Swilling in the 1870s. Like the Arizona Canal to the north, it extended all the way to the Agua Fria River.

  Shady cottonwoods once bordered this Grand Canal, but the mighty SRP had cut most of them down by the time I was born. In some nicer areas, people hiked along the maintenance roads, but most who drove across the canals daily never noticed, never thought about the miracle of being able to turn on the tap without worry.

  The shopping strip, thrown up in the eighties, was two-thirds empty. Its anchor tenant, if you wanted to call it that, was called El TobacCorner, a nice little Spanglish mash-up name. A red sign bordered by blue flashed “open.”

  But I didn’t turn in yet. I drove across the canal and continued on for almost a mile, checking the rearview mirror. Without signaling, I accelerated and spun left into a residential street, wound around past falling-apart homes, and rolled slowly back out to the main thoroughfare. Nobody seemed to be following me.

  The parking lot of El TobacCorner was nearly empty. One dirty pickup truck and a tricked-out Honda lowrider sat directly in front, beneath the digital sign that urged passersby to “Have a Smoky Day.” Otherwise, half an acre of asphalt was badly in need of business.

  I parked in the first row away from the shopping strip, facing toward the road.

  Shadows approached and I tensed, reaching for the Python.

  Dogs. A pack of five mutts trotted past the Prelude and kept going east. With the combination of people losing their homes in the recession and the immigrants moving out, or deeper into the shadows, Phoenix had a serious stray dog problem.

  Another night in paradise.

  A bell by the double glass doors and an electronic beep somewhere in the back announced my arrival. I was the only customer.

  Del Shannon was singing “My Little Runaway” on the sound system. The shop was brightly lit and the first thing you noticed were walls covered with large colorful posters advertising Zig-Zag, Marlboros, Kool menthols, and brands I didn’t know. I doubted they carried Lindsey’s brand. Only on a second look did I notice a drop ceiling dating from the Carter administration with yellow stains from water leaks.

  The shop was laid out like an “L,” with rows of waist-high, glass-fronted display cases running on either side of the long end and tall cases and a cash register closer to me. A four-sided, vertical plastic case held Zippo lighters with all manner of artwork. One showed a figure with a skull head drinking a glass of wine.

  Behind the cases, the walls had been drilled to hold clear racks showing more product—individual packs of cigarettes, e-cigs, rolling papers, gum, and chewing tobacco.

  That last made me think momentarily of Orville Grainer up in Ash Fork.

  But only momentarily.

  A big man sat on a stool ten feet away at the long end of the “L.” Beside him was a comic book. He was ethnically ambiguous, at least thirty, at least three hundred pounds, and dressed like a baby. In other words, the giant, sagging T-shirt and long-short pants gave the effect of a four-year-old with short legs and long torso. The look was completed with a cholo cap turned sideways and a riot of aggressive tattoos on each arm and one climbing up one side of his neck.

  These ubiquitous outfits accompanied a society where most of the men, at least, seemed to postpone adulthood indefinitely. I thought about photos of working men and even criminals fifty years ago, how they would be in suits and ties. When Americans read books besides Harry Potter. But there was no time to linger on that thought.

  The big head cocked and he spoke over Del Shannon. “Lookin’ at something?”

  I thought about responding to his growly question. He looked like a clo
wn. I was looking at a clown. His intention in all the “body art” couldn’t have been to make people look away. Then I remembered Lon Cheney’s observation that “there’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.”

  I looked away and approached a woman sitting in a low chair behind the register.

  She was Anglo and might have been fifty, with gray hair that looked like a bathroom rug, a dead-fish complexion, mean porcine eyes, and a sleeveless size twenty-five housedress decorated with sunflowers. Only her head and shoulders were visible. Her hands were beneath the waist-level nook that held the register.

  “Yeah?” An Okie twang.

  That was customer service.

  “Is Jerry here?”

  “No.” She pulled out a burrito and took a large, messy bite.

  “His pickup truck is parked out front.”

  The pig eyes met mine, the Platters came on with “Only You,” and we stared at each other while she chewed. Phoenix used to have a big cohort of Okies, Texans, and Arkansans, but they had been lost in subsequent waves of immigration. I kept my peripheral vision open to movement from the man on the stool.

  “What’s up, Belma?”

  Jerry McGuizzo emerged from the back, stopping when he saw me. His face was as flat as a dinner plate and it didn’t look happy to see me.

  He looked me over and whistled. “You look like shit, Mapstone. The old lady give you that shiner? How come you’re dressed so funny?”

  “We need to talk.”

  He suddenly laughed like I was the funniest guy on the west side, pulled out the kind of plastic comb I owned when I was ten, and ran it through what little hair he had. He used his left hand, the one with two stumps where complete fingers had once been. Then his hands went into his pants pockets.