Concrete Desert

by Jon Talton

  Inside, it was cool, bright, and crowded. Phoenix nearly invented the indoor shopping mall and had elevated it to something like a lifestyle. So here on a Thursday night, away from the empty sidewalks and parks, was humanity’s ocean, retail-style. I wound my way through the food court, past families with twofer prams and saw teenage girl mall rats, full grown on the outside, wearing the briefest short-shorts and deep in conversation with one another. I found refuge in Ruby Tuesday, and waited by the bar.

  At 8:45, a woman in black jeans and a linen shirt leaned on the rail beside me.

  “I’m sorry for the cloak-and-dagger routine,” she said. “But I think you’ll agree it’s justified.”

  It was Susan Knightly. She looked very different from the well-coiffed Susan I had first met. Her shoulder-length strawberry blond hair was concealed under a black Nikon ball cap. We went to a back booth of the bar. I could imagine the calls Peralta would get for me being in a bar with my badge hanging from my belt. I ordered a martini anyway. She ordered a chardonnay.

  “You know about Phaedra?” I asked. She nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you.”

  “I assumed you were busy,” she said. “Let me get right to the point, Dr. Mapstone, or is it Deputy Mapstone?”

  “How about David?”

  “David.” She gave a small smile. “I don’t trust the police in this matter. I don’t really know why I am trusting you, but I guess I’ve got to trust someone, or else go on living this way.”

  “Why don’t you trust the police?”

  “Phaedra told me not to,” she said.

  “When did she tell you this?” I asked.

  “Two weeks ago.”

  Susan looked at me straight on with those green eyes. Her face was a scrimshaw of freckles and soft laugh lines.

  “Phaedra wasn’t kidnapped,” she said. “She was on the run.”

  I felt another kick in the stomach.

  “I am getting so tired of being lied to.”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Susan said. “I promised her. God, I wanted to go to the police every day, but Phaedra made me swear I wouldn’t. And the more that happened, the more I got paranoid.”

  “So when you found me in her apartment…”

  “I was getting her some clothes.”

  “I might have been able to help her.”

  “Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” Susan said in a low, desolate voice, and her eyes filled with tears.

  She looked around the room—tan young men and women clustered close to the bar, lost in an unintelligible jabber—and leaned close to me. “One night in June, it was the twentieth, I got home and got a call from Phaedra. She said someone was trying to kill her, and that she couldn’t work for me anymore. That was all she would tell me then. But she called back in a couple of days, and I made her let me give her some clothes and money.

  “That’s where I got her apartment key, so I could get her some clothes, look after her stuff. Although, God knows, I realize in retrospect that it was foolish of me to go to her apartment. At the time, I guess we figured they were looking for her, and that nobody would think anything about me going to the apartment complex.”

  “You better hope they’re able to discriminate between their red-heads,” I said. “Who is ‘they,’ by the way?”

  “I’m not exactly sure,” Susan said. “It was a dope deal gone wrong. Phaedra’s boyfriend was a pilot who did dope runs from Mexico. He just decided to take a shipment, I guess. Rip off his client. Phaedra got caught in the middle of it.”

  “Bobby Hamid?” I asked.

  “I didn’t hear that name.”

  “Who, then?”

  “She wouldn’t say. She said she overheard things she wasn’t supposed to hear, so they wanted to kill her. She was afraid to tell me too much. She did say they had paid off DEA and the cops, and that if she went to the police, she was as good as dead.”

  “So she hid out for a month?”

  Susan nodded. “She crashed with friends here and there. She never wanted to stay anywhere long; she felt she might be endangering her friends. Sometimes she was afraid she was being followed.”

  “What about her sister or her mother?”

  “I don’t know.” Susan shook her head. “She said she didn’t know whom to trust. She didn’t want to talk about her sister. It always upset her.”

  “And you believed her?”

  “I’ve been followed,” Susan said. “I had my studio broken into last week, but nothing was taken. Probably two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cameras, computers, and equipment—and nothing taken. Just files rifled, that kind of thing. A couple of threatening phone calls, said I needed to mind my own business.”

  “So what happened to Phaedra? Whoever was after her just caught up?”

  “I don’t know.” She silently drummed slender freckled fingers on the bar. “The last time I talked to Phaedra was a week ago Monday. There was something she wasn’t telling me. She was very agitated. I offered to give her a thousand dollars so she could get out of the state, and she agreed. We were going to meet the next night, here. But she never showed up. Then I read about it in the Republic two days later.”

  I asked her if she would go downtown and give a statement. I guaranteed she would be safe.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said, and rose to go.

  “Susan.” I stood. “If you’re in danger, let me help you.”

  She looked back at me and adjusted the ball cap. “I’m good at taking care of myself, David. I’m not sure I’m ready to trust anybody else just yet. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  ***

  I followed her out of the tavern into the brightness of the mall atrium. The kids were mostly gone, replaced by couples and clusters of young women in black miniskirts and men in tight jeans coming and going from the movie theater. Susan looked around the crowd, then walked over to the railing and surveyed the lower levels of the mall. Turning back to me, she said, “You have brothers and sisters, David?”

  I said I didn’t.

  “Hmm.” She thought about that. “Then you wouldn’t appreciate what—”

  That second, I heard a woman scream and caught a flash of blue metal out of the corner of my eye. Susan’s eyes grew gigantic and she dropped to the floor as the glass wall behind her blew out. I felt shards of glass in my neck and face as I fell sideways and rolled. People flashed by, yelling and screaming.

  I scanned the crowd and saw a muscular man—he couldn’t have been taller than five five—with dark hair, tank top, and a machine gun with a large silencer aimed at me. Julie had talked of a small muscular man following her. I grabbed for the Python as I saw a muzzle flash and heard an odd whack-whack-whack sound. Bullets ricocheted off the polished metal railings. The revolver slid out of its nylon holster, resting heavily in my hand.

  “Down!” I said. “Get down!” People stared dumbly at me. “Police officer!” I rose slowly, the gun held in both hands, quickly scanning for the small muscular man. I caught sight of him maybe twenty-five feet away. He looked at me coolly and raised the machine gun. I couldn’t get a shot—too many people. “Get down on the floor, goddamn it!” I shouted, then aimed and pulled back, aimed again, no clean shot. “Down!” He had me. Shit.

  But nothing happened.

  He cursed and slapped the gun. A jam.

  He turned and ran into the mall. I started after him.

  “Stay here!” I commanded Susan Knightly, who was still on the floor. To an ashen-faced man crouched against a bench, I said, “Call nine one one.”

  “Tell them a plainclothes officer is on the scene and in pursuit of a suspect.” Hopefully, the cops wouldn’t mistakenly shoot me.

  “Hey, need some help?” A burly red-faced man showed me a revolver in his belt. I nearly shot him just out of reflex.

  “No!” I said. “Put that thing away! Do not follow me!”

  I ran after the small man. It was pure adrenaline. Past the atrium and the bars, the ma
ll immediately became deserted. I could hear Peralta from eighteen years ago telling me to calm down, that calmness meant steady judgment—and a good aim. I ran past the glassed and gated stores, watching the guy tear down an escalator. Reaching the top, I proceeded cautiously, waiting for a burst of fire—but he was gone. I padded down the escalator in a crouch, the Python in a two-handed combat grip, my hands only shaking a little. I was alone on the lower level and caught my breath. My cheek was bleeding steadily now from the glass. He could have gone in any of a half dozen directions.

  This is nuts, a voice in my head warned. Wait for the cops.

  Except that he knew why Susan Knightly and I were targets.

  I picked a direction and ran that way, hugging close to a wall, ready to meet my killer around every post or alcove. I went a hundred feet and stopped, listening. I could still hear screaming and shouting from the bar area. Maybe some sirens in the distance. A fan whining somewhere. Empty storefronts and mannequins. A fountain’s rush. My own breathing. A burning in my lungs.

  Footsteps.

  He bolted suddenly from a doorway, turned down an exit corridor, his steps echoing behind him.

  “Deputy sheriff! Stop!” I yelled, close behind him now. “Stop!”

  I raised the revolver and lined up the Colt’s twin sights. Right between the shoulder blades: Bye-bye, asshole.

  I didn’t take the shot. He banged out the fire exit into the night.

  I ran after him and had just reached the exit bar when a voice stopped me from behind.

  “Drop your weapon! Drop your weapon! Do not move!”

  I heard the chilling sound of a round being chambered in a semiautomatic pistol.

  I froze. “I’m a deputy sheriff,” I called, still facing toward the exit door. I let the Python down easy. “The suspect just ran outside here.”

  “Mister, I don’t know who the hell you are,” came a scared young voice. “But I want you facedown on the ground, hands spread straight out! Push your weapon away very slowly!”

  “Let me show you my ID.”

  “Mister, you are five seconds away from eternity.”

  A big drop of sweat trickled down my spine. Or maybe it was blood.

  I almost started to turn around and yell that the son of a bitch was getting away. But I thought better of it. I got facedown on the cold, dirty mall floor and pushed the Python gently away.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I sat in the back of a large, bright fire department ambulance as a fireman in a dark blue T-shirt picked glass out of my neck and cheek. It stung like hell. But the good news was that I was the only casualty of the gunfire. The air-conditioning was running, but I was sweating nonstop. Peralta—wearing a tux—and three Phoenix cops surrounded me, firing questions.

  “What direction did he go in after exiting the mall?”

  “What vehicle did he drive?”

  “Did he have anyone else with him in the parking lot?”

  “Ow.” I winced. “I’ve told you five times, I never got out the door after him because the officer behind me wouldn’t let me go.”

  “He didn’t know who you were,” said a uniformed police captain who had a tuft of hair missing from his cop mustache.

  “I tried to tell him,” I said.

  “How do you know you and this unknown woman were the intended targets?” asked a Phoenix PD deputy chief, a slim, bloodless man wearing a gray herringbone suit that was wildly out of place in the heat. “Dressing like an easterner,” my grandfather would have called it.

  “Well, he looked at me, chambered a round, and pointed the gun. And the first burst came right at the woman who was giving me information on a homicide case.”

  “I don’t know,” the captain said skeptically.

  “Mike, Susan Knightly was in touch with Phaedra just before she died.” Peralta raised his eyebrows, and I related Susan’s conversation. Then I told him about the break-in at my house—and the beating I’d gotten in the carport. He asked a couple of questions and made some notes. He handed back my Python.

  The Phoenix cops weren’t impressed.

  “What were you doing at the mall, Mapstone?” This from a slender detective in a Ralph Lauren shirt with sweat rings under the arms.

  “I was going to the twelve-hour sale at Dillard’s,” I said. “How many times do we have to go over this? Are you out looking for the shooter? Where is Susan, Mike?”

  He shook his head. “She was gone when the first units arrived.”

  “Jesus.”

  The fireman soaked my neck with Betadine. The gauze pads looked as if I were bleeding rusty radiator water.

  “If there was a Susan,” said the deputy chief.

  Peralta said, “Fuck you, Frank. I don’t question the motives of your officers.”

  “My officers, Mike,” the deputy chief said, seething, “don’t get into shoot-outs involving submachine guns at crowded malls in the county’s jurisdiction.”

  “If I can’t get a city APB on this woman,” Peralta said, “I’ll just get Chief Wilson out of bed to discuss the matter. We were supposed to meet for golf first thing in the morning, but I’ll be happy to wake him now.”

  The deputy chief looked long and hard at Peralta. “Okay,” he said. “You are a real prick, Peralta.”

  “But I’m not a city prick.”

  “This guy’s not even a real deputy,” protested Ralph Lauren. He went on talking as if I were one of the IV poles on the stretcher: “I’m still not convinced this shooter wasn’t some disgruntled employee at Metrocenter, or maybe he was pissed because his wife was at one of those nightspots with another man.”

  “Hello,” I said to nobody in particular. “Did IQs fall dramatically among city cops during the years I was gone from law enforcement?”

  Three pairs of eyes squinted at me.

  “The point, gentlemen, is that this woman came forward to give new information on the murder of Phaedra Riding.” I faced Ralph Lauren and spoke very slowly, “Mur-der, murder.

  “Somebody was trying to keep Susan Knightly from talking. And he damned near succeeded. She said she didn’t trust the cops in this case, and this won’t exactly bolster her confidence. The thing we’d better be thinking is that somebody was willing to blow away damn near a whole shopping mall full of people to keep her from talking to us.” I looked at Ralph again. “I’m sorry, Detective. Talking to me.”

  Afterward, Peralta walked me back to the Blazer, both of us bathed in the blue-and-red wash of emergency lights and the harsh whiteness of TV cameras kept at a distance.

  “You okay?” Peralta asked.

  “I suppose,” I said. “It’s been a few years since somebody pointed a gun at me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this assault in your carport?”

  “I guess I was ashamed,” I said. “You were my self-defense instructor, remember?”

  Peralta grunted, pulled a cigar from his tux, then smelled it and clipped it. He slowly shook his head and said, “What the hell have you gotten yourself into, Mapstone?”

  We walked on, and he lit the cigar until the end flamed.

  “Now do you believe me about Phaedra not being connected to the Harquahala murders?”

  The cigar tip glowed. “I don’t know what I believe,” Peralta said. “I think we need to let the task force detectives do their job.”

  My head ached. “God, you are a stubborn SOB.”

  “Look, David, I’m feeling some heat here. The FBI’s gotten involved in these serial killings. The county attorney’s going crazy. It’s only a matter of time before the media blow this thing out. I hear what you’re saying about Phaedra and the drug angle, but she was also found in the vicinity of the other Harquahala victims. How do you know she didn’t just answer the wrong personal ad?”

  I sighed and unlocked the Blazer door. “How was San Diego?”

  “Sharon wants to buy a condo facing the bay,” he said glumly. “We’re never going to get out of debt.”

 
***

  Gen. Omar Bradley did algebra problems to relax. I was never any good at math, so I drove. East on Dunlap into Sunnyslope. Count Basie in the CD player. Why had I never learned to do anything useful, like play jazz piano? South on Seventh Avenue, past sleeping neighborhoods of large, well-landscaped houses. The guy on the phone was right: Nobody would miss me. Hell, the cops didn’t even believe me. Left turn on Glendale Avenue, through the thinning traffic of a late Thursday night. Eyes checking the rearview mirror more than usual. Did he follow Susan to the mall? Or did he follow me?

  Across the Arizona Canal and up Lincoln Drive into the foothills of Paradise Valley. The lights gave way a bit as the city neighborhoods were replaced by acre lots and privacy walls. A black Saab whisked past me at eighty and disappeared into the distance. My stomach reflexively tightened. Phaedra landed in the middle of a drug rip-off. By Greg Townsend? So they kill them both? It had the terrible thoroughness of drug-related homicides. South on Tatum Boulevard, saguaro cactus and palm trees flashing in the headlights. Basie cooking. Camelback Mountain looming gigantic, straight ahead, a necklace of lights around its base that predated the prohibition on building on the mountains.

  Except—why was Greg Townsend so calm when I showed up at his house? Why was he even at his house if he had ripped off a dope dealer and was hiding out? And why did he call me in the first place? Could it be as simple as Peralta was hinting? That Phaedra ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time—with the wrong man? Just like we thought about Rebecca Stokes. No, no.

  I made a U-turn and headed back to Lincoln, then took Twenty-fourth Street back toward downtown. I needed the view and it didn’t disappoint me: a vast sea of lights stretching west and south to the horizon. Off in the distance, the dark form of South Mountain and the Estrellas contained the brightness. TV towers on the South Mountains blinked red. City of American refugees, fast money and fresh starts. City of uneasy memories. City of lost sisters. My city.