A fleet of thunderheads over the South Mountains was set ablaze by the fading sun. The sunset seemed to electrify the prism edges of the Bank One Center, tallest building in downtown, until the tower was defined by the bright straight lines of reflection from the west. Airliners took off from Sky Harbor, two by two, flashing in the last of the sunlight as they made their turns. Gradually, the sky gave way to an infinite, India ink blue-black, silhouetting the palm trees against the incandescent twilight.
Under this vault of big sky, I was a puny human sitting on his front porch, in front of the 1924 stucco house with the big picture window. The porch was dark and the house behind it was dark. I was in a dark way, not feeling quite human, aware of the comforting bulk of the submachine gun on my lap. The grass needed cutting and mail had gathered inside the door. Lindsey’s old Honda Prelude-the bumper sticker read KEEP HONKING. I’M RELOADING-needed washing. Otherwise, the house looked much as we had left it more than two weeks before. Just to make sure, Lindsey’s old gray tabby, Pasternak, prowled every room. That left me to assess the damage of a large highway patrol trooper hitting me from behind at speed, sandwiching me in between him and the pavement. The knees of a pair of Tommy Hilfiger chinos were a lost cause, and beneath them David Mapstone’s knees weren’t doing much better. The small of my back felt on fire, with devilish little arsonists spreading the blaze to each vertebra. My earlobes hurt-go figure that out.
I thought about whether I had really put Lindsey at risk. Whether I had been protective or selfish in demanding to be with her after the Scottsdale shooting. “Protective,” my heart said, for this was apparently an open-ended threat, and our friends in law enforcement had proven remarkably inept in dealing with it. My head stayed silent in the debate, preferring to concentrate on its headache.
All these SWAT cops in their paramilitary attire, what did this mean for the health of American civil society? Like surveillance cameras everywhere, pre-employment drug tests, and other subtle assaults on the Constitution. Was it this way with the Roman Republic, the gradual loss of liberty under the guise of continual warfare? Cicero, eloquent, impotent…(Yes, David, distract yourself with a Big Thought.)
A pickup truck roared down the street. It was one of those two-story-tall four-by-fours, and he was doing at least sixty. My finger went automatically to the gun trigger. He raced by, heading to Seventh Avenue, no more able to stop for a pedestrian or a wayward child than a supertanker. People drove with such rage in my town. Maybe it was true everywhere now. I wondered: was this the way we would live now, Lindsey and me? Under constant threat, mistaking any speeding blockhead for Yuri or his agents.
Patrick Blair. Patrick Fucking Blair. Some personal history here: Lindsey and I split up once. It was after we’d been seeing each other for a year, and under pressure of circumstances and personal griefs, we just stopped seeing each other. There was no grand announcement. But jealousy is a powerful, primal thing, and I knew at the time Lindsey was working with a handsome young detective named Patrick Blair. We had never talked about those two months apart. And my hands weren’t clean, either. But that’s another personal history story. .
My eyes were on a big man lumbering west on Cypress, crossing Third Avenue. He was walking with a pronounced limp.
“Just sittin’ on the porch with an automatic weapon, eh?” Peralta emerged from the heavy twilight. He was wearing brown uniform pants with oversize cargo pockets, and an MCSO polo shirt. The cargo pockets were so full they made him look a bit like a cavalryman wearing jodhpurs. He was holding something to his face.
“I thought you were schmoozing campaign donors in Carefree?”
He sat heavily in the other chair. “Stopped to help some deputies,” he said. “Haven’t been in a fight like that for quite a while.” He was holding a cold pack to his left cheek, mashing the flesh against his temple. “Dirtbag was already arrested, and he broke out the window of a patrol car and took off. So they ran him down a little off Bell Road, and he’s fighting like a son of a bitch. Bites a deputy. Hits me square in the face, I mean nails me. So I had to change and get cleaned up. Another one of your misunderstood homeless guys. .”
He adjusted the cold pack and looked at me. “Did you tell her you love her this morning?”
“What?”
“Did you tell her you love her?”
“Of course.”
“We do dangerous work, Mapstone. You, me, the same as these deputies this afternoon who had a prisoner fight them. I live with that burden for an entire department. Some days good men and women aren’t going to come back.”
“When the hell did you decide to become compassionate?” I was still feeling less than human. I stared out at the street, where the houses were starting to light up with a merry hospitality I didn’t feel.
Peralta refused to take easy bait. Instead, he ordered me to fix drinks. So I set aside the gun and went into the kitchen. In five minutes I returned with a shaker and glasses, and filled a Gibson for Peralta and a martini for me. He had moved only enough to produce two cigars, his favorite Anniversario Padrons. He clipped one and handed it to me. We each lit a cigar in silence, watching the flame become a corona around the tip. I am only an occasional cigar smoker, mostly with the sheriff. We last smoked cigars after his father’s funeral, smoked and sat in silence in Peralta’s study.
Now I let the smoke waft across my palate, and my muscles relaxed notch by notch. Peralta lifted his glass and gently clinked mine.
“
“Patrick Blair is protecting my wife,” I said finally, instantly feeling adolescent and small.
He grunted. “Why, don’t you trust her?”
“Fuck you.”
He sighed and sipped. “David, sometimes you can be a real asshole. You probably don’t even know when you’re doing it.”
Fair enough, I thought. I sipped the gin, feeling the cold liquid burn my throat. All my aches felt instantly better.
“Separation is good for a marriage,” he ventured.
“Is that the way it is for you and Sharon?”
He ignored me. “You act like I’m all-powerful, like I can control and fix everything. .”
“That’s an impression you strive to convey,” I snarled, angry from two weeks of hiding, two weeks of a toy investigation into the fate of an FBI badge. I was still nursing wounds from his angry lecture after Kate’s press conference.
“Get it straight,” he hit right back. “Yuri, the Russian mafia, the shooting in Scottsdale, Rachel Pearson’s kidnapping-that’s all new. I can’t snap my fingers and fix it.” He let an inch of fine ash fall off the tip of his cigar.
“So what you’re telling me is that I may never see my wife again, and nobody can change that, and you don’t give a shit.”
Frustration was talking. And a little booze. Once again, though, he declined to escalate the war I was trying so hard to start. And, deep down, I knew I was safe bitching. Peralta’s temper was like a nuclear weapon. You couldn’t detonate it by hammering on it. You had to know the physics. You had to have the codes. So we drank and smoked, wrapped in a smoky haze as the neighborhood surrendered to full darkness.
By the start of the second drink, he asked about George Weed.
“The rummy, as you call him? I thought he didn’t matter.”
“You’re being an asshole again, Mapstone.”
So I drank, too fast, and told him what I knew. George Weed was sixty-six years old when he died. He’d been born in 1938. He had a Social Security number. All this came from a county hospital card he held in the early 1980s, when he was being treated for stomach ulcers. He was a native Phoenician. His birth certificate said his parents were Aimee Jones Weed, sixteen years old, and Homer Weed, twenty-five, whose occupation was listed as “laborer.” In between birth and his death in the green swimming pool, Weed worked as an elevator operator and a janitor. He rented an apartment for years just north of downtown. The apartment was now a vacant lot. He had been on the streets for years, at least a decade. The Reverend Card had watched him for three summers, said he was “paranoid.” Peralta asked, “Any family?”
“No one has claimed the body,” I said. “We’ve run his photo on TV and the Sheriff’s Office Web site. As far as the old county hospital card, I couldn’t find any corresponding records listing next of kin.”
I knew what that meant: soon the sheriff’s chain gang would take George Weed and put him in the potter’s
