San Francisco PD…I let the cell phone be.
At an intersection overgrown with weeds, the Russian pivoted on his heels and turned left. I was close enough that I could hear the broken glass and rocks grinding under his shoes. The panic attack was long gone. All my nerve endings were back in service and focused on the moment. I took a chance and sprinted up an alley that ran behind a brick warehouse. Alley cats and other critters scattered in my wake as I really put on the gas. My hamstrings and calves burned in protest. I pounded across chuckholes and broken concrete, then slowed to a walk and consciously made myself breathe normally. Trying, this time, to recover a little of my long-ago training. I was conscious of the whiteness of the fog moving high above.
Then I had the Python out and in his face. This time the nice little move had been mine, cutting him off as he started up the new street. I dropped into a combat stance, both hands on the revolver.
“Move and I’ll blow you to the fucking moon.”
The Russian stared open-mouthed, his hands in front of him as if he had just struck an absurd pose. Even in the streetlight, his hair was almost surreally yellow, and his skin was pink. His swimming-pool blue eyes orbited under yellow slashes of eyebrows. His mouth was small, but his lips were delicate. This was definitely the guy from Encanto Park. Presumably the one who followed me in the Hummer, who lured me away from Lindsey while his crew tried to get into the condo.
We just stared at each other. Finally, I was able to generate enough saliva to get my tongue to order him onto the ground.
“Deputy, you’re making a mistake,” the Russian said in English. Indeed, it was the best imitation of a Mississippi accent I could imagine.
“I’m FBI,” the Russian said. “I’m on the job.”
My brain heard that but I stayed in the combat stance. I let him reach slowly into his coat and produce an oversized black wallet. Inside were credentials, and a badge that looked very much like the one we pulled from the pool in Maryvale.
“Good forgery,” I said.
“No, listen…” he fumbled. I could see sweat shining on his pink forehead. Being on the business end of the Python will do that. “I work for Eric Pham,” he blurted.
“Why?” It was all I could think to say.
“He just wanted me to keep an eye on you. That’s it!”
“You were at the park,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And you followed me, in a black Hummer?”
“What? That wasn’t me, man. You think the Bureau would spring for a Humvee?”
“You’re sure? You didn’t follow me out on the freeway?”
“I know what I did. I broke off contact after you left the park.”
I kept the gun on him but snatched the badge case and examined it under the light. The credentials had all the holograph stuff shining through that I had seen on Pham’s men in Maryvale. This ID said the blond man was Special Agent Danny Maddox. I relaxed my stance and handed back the badge case. I holstered the Python and cursed.
“He just wanted to keep you out of trouble,” Maddox said.
It was just another way to say he wanted someone spying on me. I was learning fast why local cops mistrusted the feds.
Maddox and I shared a cab downtown. He was just a guy doing his job. Then I walked alone past the shining shop windows of the stores around Union Square, still mad as hell-at Pham, at Peralta, at everybody. I ended up in a bar called John’s, where the menus proclaimed some tie between the place and the Maltese Falcon. I let the bartender make me a martini, then another. More than ever, 1 didn’t want to be on this case. More than ever, I wanted to find Lindsey and run away. Maybe to Portland, where Dan Milton spent happy years. She didn’t like the rain as much as I did.
An envelope was waiting for me back at the hotel. Inside was a sheet of fax paper, with my name and address in the upper right corner of the page. As I unfolded it, I saw it was blank except for a prominent smudge close to the center. Exactly the shape that lipsticked lips would make if they kissed the paper. Exactly the shape of Lindsey’s sensual lips. Exactly off center, from a woman who mistrusted symmetry. That was all-not a word written. The margins, where a sending fax number might appear, only held a series of dashes and asterisks. But my lover had found me nevertheless. I touched the kiss, folded the paper into my jacket, and went upstairs.
Chapter Twenty-one
They met me just beyond the security checkpoint at the Gold-water Terminal at Sky Harbor. While other people were greeted by expectant friends, smiling lovers, or goo-gooing children, I was welcomed back home by two FBI agents. They were generically good-looking-he had been the dark-haired high school quarterback, she the blond cheerleader who had also led the honor society. All they wanted from me was a quiet walk to the car. I kept my firearm. We were all conspicuously armed. A half dozen white-shirted TSA guards were chatting amiably with each other, occasionally glancing in our direction.
Then we were speeding along the freeways and surface streets, heading north. The jacaranda and palo verde trees were blooming, but the cityscape was unavoidably Phoenix, all seven-lane streets, suburban setbacks, and soulless commercial buildings. Big-box drugstores and gas stations seemingly on every corner. The signs of our strange local economy: check cashing outlets, bankruptcy lawyers, used cars and mortgage refinance companies, in English and Spanish. Piestewa Peak angled out of the smog, a dark mass in the brownish air. The sun radiated heat through the windows, and soon I was covered with a sheen of sweat. We weren’t going downtown, and I felt a jolt of unease, as if Yuri’s mobsters had forged those complicated Bureau credentials and the agents in the front seat were really Ivan and Ludmilla instead of Biff and Muffy. But the real estate became steadily nicer, and then we were winding into the lush preserve of the Arizona Biltmore. It was too pricey a joint to use for killing one history professor.
Five minutes later, they deposited me in a large suite with an expansive view of the golf course and the red- rock head of Camelback Mountain. But to get that view, I had to look past the crowd of feds seated and standing as if they were a theater tableau frozen by my entrance. Unlike well-suited Biff and Muffy, this bunch was outfitted in a kind of overdone resort casual, as if they had all suddenly been ordered to serve search warrants at Tommy Bahama. Of course they looked utterly conformist, decidedly un-casual. They were all looking at me. Eric Pham gave me a prim, sad shake of the head.
I said, “I’m glad to see my tax dollars at work.”
“Shut up, Mapstone.” This from a female voice. The woman attached to it was somewhere around fifty, with a round face and frosted short hair. She introduced herself as Assistant Director Davies, beckoned me to sit, and for maybe a minute we all just watched each other. The feds’ faces eyed me like junkyard dogs ready to pounce on a cat burglar. We were in one of the new suites, heavy on Indian art and Southwest colors. But it still had the deco touches of the old hotel, the creation of a Frank Lloyd Wright disciple and for decades the province of visiting bigs. Go down in the lobby, and you can see the photos of the Biltmore when it was alone in the pristine desert, miles from the city and nestled against untouched mountains. Now it was about in the center of the metropolitan area. I was pretty well gone in this reverie when they started firing questions, semiautomatic.
“What were you doing in California?”
“Who authorized you to contact Pilgrim’s son?”
“Why did you talk to Vincent Renzetti?”
“What did you tell them?”
“…a detailed report on your actions…”
I let them run down and finally said, “But I thought ‘alliances are the way to get things done in the New Economy.’”
“What is he talking about?” Davies demanded. Pham stared into the deep piles of the cream-colored
