High Country Nocturne

by Jon Talton

  They made fun of my Colt Python, my “wheel gun,” but if I had shot her with the .357 she wouldn’t have gotten up, ballistic vest or not. Now it was too late.

  My heart was about to gallop out of my chest but I steadied the M-4 and squeezed off another short burst. It stitched up the lawn. But she was already up and moving. I aimed but she dodged. The risk of a stray shot was too great. That wasn’t even my biggest fear. That would be that she was coming to kill me. She was better than me. Way better.

  By the time I could get a good aim, she was in the Chevy. The brake lights glowed red. I dropped to one knee and fired at the back window. It crumpled and the sound of more pebbles broke the silence of the street. My wits returned and I put another round in the left taillight. Then I was running for the Prelude as she sped off. The sidewalk was painted with a blood trail. I had hit her with effect at least once.

  The first time George Washington saw combat, he commented, “I have heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.” I hated to disagree with the Father of Our Country, but there was nothing charming in the whistling I had heard. It was somehow made more sinister by our firefight with suppressors. I checked my sleeve. It had been sliced as with a knife. Fortunately, I wasn’t bleeding.

  She turned south on Fifth Avenue, screeching rubber, by the time I had the Prelude cranked up. I followed with my lights off. She was nearly to McDowell, her lights on, but the telltale rear light shot out. The car swung east onto the thoroughfare.

  I could call 911, but that would eventually bring Kate Vare and questions I didn’t want to answer now that I was in pursuit. So I left the phone in my pocket and jammed the engine up to seventy to make the green light. I flipped on the headlights and slid in a CD of Ornette Coleman. Charlie Haden was on bass. “Change of the Century.” “Lonely Woman.” The improvisation, eccentric chord structures, and dissonances calmed me.

  From the time we began dating, I taught Lindsey jazz and history, how to make and enjoy a dry martini. She taught me about computers and contemporary music, good stuff not pop crap. She taught me about Russian literature. It was a profitable exchange. We laughed a lot. God, I wanted her back.

  The light at Central almost caught me but I made it through on yellow, the Phoenix Art Museum flashing past. Light rail wasn’t operating this late and few cars were on the wide roads. The north-south grid changed from numbered avenues and drives to numbered streets and places.

  I closed the distance with the Chevy to three blocks. Strawberry Death drove straight east, keeping to the speed limit. I did, too. The secret to driving in the city of Phoenix was if you stayed at the speed limit, you would hit all the green lights. There were exceptions—the Piestawa freeway, Forty-fourth Street, a few others—but in general it worked.

  I fingered the tear on the left sleeve of my jacket where a bullet had passed through. A few inches in the other direction and I would be dead in the neighbor’s shrubbery. Why didn’t I think to put on a bulletproof vest?

  In only a few minutes, we had traveled nearly three miles and she turned left on Twenty-fourth Street, another insanely wide highway masquerading as a city street. If she was wounded, it wasn’t serious enough to affect her driving. My fusillade into the rear window apparently hadn’t harmed her further.

  A Phoenix Police SUV slipped past me as we crossed Thomas Road and for a moment I thought he would pull her over for the darkened taillight, the suspiciously missing rear glass. Then I could back him up and this nightmare would be over. But he turned onto a side street. Going to a call.

  When I was a little boy, much of this area had still been citrus groves with creeping subdivisions and good new schools attracting the middle class. You could still buy oranges and grapefruits at roadside stands. Now much of it had turned shabby, lawns gone weedy or left to become dirt, another linear slum in the making.

  The toffs who made it a point of pride never to go south of Camelback, or even Bell Road many miles to the north, called this area “the Sonoran Biltmore,” a slur for the changing demographics.

  The real Biltmore was getting closer. We hit green at Indian School, Campbell and Highland, then the fancy midrise condos, offices, and Ritz-Carlton at Twenty-fourth and Camelback Road loomed up.

  Camelback turned red and I slipped onto a residential side street behind the glassy Esplanade office tower. The low-slung houses here once had views of the mountains. Then a future governor, developer Fife Symington, built towers terribly out of scale with their surroundings and this street began a slow decline. Symington later got in trouble with the law but he’d made his money and wrecked a neighborhood. So very Phoenix.

  For me, the street provided a sanctuary as I turned off the lights and did a one-eighty, then slid slowly back toward Twenty-fourth.

  The light was green now and the Chevy was a block ahead, passing Biltmore Fashion Park. Where the hell was she going?

  Less than half a mile on, I got the answer: She turned right into the entrance to the Arizona Biltmore. I saw that the guardhouse was unmanned and flipped off the headlights again. The Chevy drove on. We were enveloped in shadowy trees, perfectly manicured lawns, and very expensive real estate.

  The hotel was some distance from the street. Many people thought it was the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, but the architect was actually his former student Albert Chase McArthur. Either way, the resort was a jewel. Fancy houses surrounded it, too. The Chevy took a right on Biltmore Estates Drive, a parkway that wound a lazy half-circle around the golf course and was lined by expansive older mansions. Plenty of diamonds here. Historic diamonds. Conflict diamonds. Legitimate diamonds.

  What the hell was Strawberry Death doing here?

  A few years ago, some of the local leaders had convened a series of salons to discuss big ideas for Phoenix’s future. They had been held at a developer’s house on this street and I had been invited as the token historian. Not much had been accomplished other than good booze and company. This particular house had hosted Ronald and Nancy Reagan as guests in the 1950s.

  We drove past that place and the Chevy slid into a circular drive of another property. I coasted to a halt, car lights still off. I was unable to see through the landscaping but soon lights started coming on in the house. Making note of the address, I turned around and left, amazed that this fifteen-year-old Honda Prelude hadn’t attracted attention.

  A mile south, back in the Sonoran Biltmore, I pulled into the parking lot of a tumbledown shopping strip and tried to figure out my next move. The answer came with a tap on the driver’s window. It was a skinny young man in a hoodie, an Anglo. I almost shot him.

  “Do you have any cash to spare?”

  “No.”

  “Is there anything I could do to earn it?”

  I looked him over. He couldn’t have been more than twenty years old but he was getting by hustling on the streets.

  “Get in the car,” I said. As he walked around, I stowed the carbine in the back seat.

  He sat in the passenger side and used his hands to slick back his onion head of dark hair.

  “Are you a cop?” He zeroed in on the Python in its holster on my belt.

  I shook my head. “Do I look like a cop?”

  He studied me. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you’re a cop.”

  He pulled up his hoodie and shirt. “I ain’t wearing no wire. I’m not the police. I used to be a student.”

  “Why did you quit?”

  “The money ran out,” he said. “I got to like the meth way too much. Let’s drive somewhere private.”

  “We can do this here. How much?”

  “Twenty-five bucks to suck your cock, forty if you want me to swallow. It’s better than you’ll get from your wife.”

  I doubted that. As I wrote on a notepad, he shivered in the seat. I peeled off four twenties and held them out.
r />   I said, “You have a phone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can have the money if you call this number and read these words, only these words, and then hang up.” I flipped on the dome light.

  The number went to Silent Witness, which was less likely to have advanced tracing equipment than calling 911 directly. His time on the phone would be short, but long enough to say that he had spotted the woman who shot the deputy’s wife Saturday night, the one on television, and she’s at this address right now.

  He read the note, moving his lips. “Seriously?”

  I ran my fingers over the twenties. “Easy money. Then you get lost and forget you ever saw me.”

  He reached for the bills but I pulled them away. “After you make the call.”

  The boy pulled out a cell phone and started to dial.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  I returned to the hospital and settled into an empty ICU waiting room, dozing intermittently. Lindsey’s doctors woke me a little before seven to say that the fever had broken.

  My face felt strange. I was smiling.

  After being allowed ten minutes beside my sleeping beauty, I found Sharon waiting outside and told her the news. She gave me a hug and sent me home for rest. That was one thing I was not allowed at the moment.

  Outside, clouds had come in and it smelled like rain. People were smiling. Rain had that effect in Phoenix.

  Home. The first thing I did was to make sure any evidence from early this morning was gone. I picked up Strawberry Death’s shell casings. They went with a .32 caliber pistol. The neighbor’s shrubbery appeared in decent shape.

  Inside, I scanned the Arizona Republic. It had a story about how the Sheriff’s Office was missing a number of weapons issued by the federal government through a surplus military gear program. As a result, the feds were cutting off MSCO from future deliveries. There was also a follow-up story on a federal probe of the Sheriff’s Office for racial profiling. My new boss.

  By now, a Phoenix Police SWAT team would be interrupting the morning walks of the people along Biltmore Estates Drive. Maybe they would already have the woman in custody or dead. I showered and waited for a call from Vare.

  In another suit, starched white shirt, and Salvatore Ferragamo tie from Lindsey, I returned to the Prelude and drove to the address Melton had given me. Exhaustion weighed on my limbs but I couldn’t stop.

  It was deep in Arcadia, a district in Phoenix that ran against Scottsdale and contained some of the most beautiful properties in the city. It still benefited from the flood irrigation that remained after the groves were bulldozed. The older houses were long rambling ranches surrounded by mature trees. Camelback Mountain presided over the oasis of orange, lemon, and grapefruit trees, cottonwoods, willows, and sycamores, towering oleander hedges.

  You can still drive north on Arcadia Drive at night, turn onto Valle Vista Road clinging to the edge of the mountain and see the vast carpet of city lights below you. Lindsey and I would go up there and make out like high-school kids. Not far away is the Camelback Falls mansion, where I once worked a case after Peralta had been shot and was in a coma.

  But Arcadia was changing. New owners were tearing down the older houses and putting up tall McMansions, tearing out trees and foliage that had thrived for decades and throwing down haphazard desert landscaping and concrete for more cars. It added to the heat island. It wasn’t authentic. If you asked me, it was a crappy investment of water to throw down gravel here so developers could add artificial lakes and golf courses out on the fringes. But nobody asked me. Why was everything lovely and historic in my city at risk, all the time?

  The only comfort from this vandalism was that the ongoing real-estate bust was keeping the destruction at a slow-mo pace.

  I turned north, with the head of Camelback directly before me. It was formed a few million years before the rest of the mountain but wasn’t showing its age. Another turn put me on a street with a long row of ficus trees, two stories tall and meticulously trimmed to make a privacy hedge. Amid them was a gate. I pressed the button on the call box, gave my name, and watched it slowly swing open. The car passed through the copse of trees and oleanders before opening up on a three-story French chalet surrounded by at least two acres of grounds. From the street, you would never know it was here. Which was, of course, the idea.

  The house was white—of course, it would be white—with gabled windows on the top floor and three tall chimneys. It was built to look old. A turret completed the facade on one end. With the overcast, I could see lights on in every room, warm, welcoming, giving money to Arizona Public Service.

  It was sprinkling when I walked up three low steps to a double front door. I would have preferred to remain outside and feel the rain, smell it, and smell the reaction of the land. But I pressed the doorbell. A Latina housekeeper led me inside and said she would fetch “Miss Diane.”

  The foyer was overpoweringly white—walls, tile floor with black diamonds embedded, baby grand piano, marble table topped by a vase of white lilies, multiple arched entrances and a staircase circling overhead. Color was added by tasteful antique chairs, a dark cabinet, black wrought-iron candelabra, oxidizing copper sculpture, and a light-brown fireplace with a mirror on the mantle.

  It was a long way from Cypress Street. But the room felt both overcrowded and sterile.

  I heard footsteps on the grand staircase, caught a flash of legs, and forced myself not to look up.

  Soon a young woman appeared. She was twenty or so, athletically put together. The first thing you noticed was the long tawny hair, then the long tanned legs set off in a casual short dress. Her eyes were a rich brown. She came close enough that I could study her long lashes.

  “Well, well.” Her smile was powerful enough to light the house, her teeth the color of polished porcelain. “Aren’t you dressed up? You don’t look familiar. Diane’s had so many lawyers through here since Daddy died that I know them all.”

  “I’m not a lawyer.”

  “I didn’t think so. You don’t have that transactional look. You’re very tall.”

  She placed her hands on my shoulders. “You’re a little old to be Diane’s new distraction but I suppose you’ll do. Yes, you will do. She usually likes them young, after she snagged Daddy, of course. Maybe she’s turning over a new leaf. I find young men boring.”

  She was inside my comfort zone. I took a step back and she stepped with me, as if we were dancing. Later, I thought how she was close enough to try to disarm me or run a blade into my stomach, but I put down my defenses because she was pretty and the surroundings moneyed.

  She kept her hands on my shoulders long past appropriate and looked at me smoothly.

  “Who did that to your eye? You don’t look like a brawler.”

  “I’m not, usually. Who are you?”

  “Zephyr.” She tossed her hair, which glistened in the bright room.

  “The west wind.”

  Her lips curled up. “You know your mythology. I like you.”

  I knew more about trains. The Denver Zephyr had been a premier passenger train before America decided it wanted to throw away its great rail patrimony. They stayed on life support with Amtrak, which operated the California Zephyr. Lindsey and I had ridden it through the Rockies.

  This Zephyr started to say more when a new voice came behind us.

  “Zephyr, dear, leave the gentleman alone. He and I have to talk.”

  She finally removed her hands. “Of course, Mother. Have fun. He’s good looking and I bet he knows it.”

  Now I was being played. Women her age had rarely found me attractive, not even when I was twenty.

  Zephyr sauntered through an archway and disappeared.

  “She’s very mischievous. Do you have kids?”

  “No.” I introduced myself and showed her my badge and identification.

 
; She gave me a firm handshake. “I’m Diane Whitehouse.”

  Diane Whitehouse was petite with thick dark hair cut to her jawline and parted on the left. She wore black Prada jeans, a simple white sweater, and diamond studs in her ears. She appeared to be about my age, with big eyes behind the black plastic-framed glasses that were fashionable again.

  Her forehead was defined by natural wrinkles. I respected that. Being rich in this town almost mandated a trip to one of the pricey plastic surgeons in Scottsdale, “Silicone Valley.” A large solitary diamond sat on a ring, the only other piece of jewelry she wore.

  She was also the widow of Elliott Whitehouse, the last of the old generation of local residential builders, who had died last year.

  I had never met the man but he made his fortune laying down suburban tract houses all over the Valley. When I was young, his corny flag-draped billboards promised, “You don’t have to be president to live in a Whitehouse.”

  I was surprised he had chosen to remain here after selling Whitehouse Homes and retiring. The usual playbook was to leave the city for coastal California or the San Juan Islands. Of course, this was probably only one of his homes.

  Like so many of its custom-designed cousins that ran from here across to Paradise Valley and up into the slopes of the McDowell Mountains, this one managed to appear expensive and trashy at the same time.

  Diane led me through one of the arches into a study lined with light-brown built-in bookshelves, interspersed with a marble fireplace, a large mirror, and French doors leading to a terrace. All of this except the mirror was colored butterscotch. A heavy black wrought-iron chandelier hung from a snowy ceiling. The room had too much furniture. She invited me to sit on a sofa and settled across from me in a chair, crossing very slender legs.

  “This rain is so depressing.”

  “I love it,” I said.

  She nodded like a scientist whose experiment had produced something unexpected. “You must be a native.”

  “Fourth generation.”