“That’s what Beth said. She’s come back from Denver to testify.”
Leo shook his head. “I always forget she’s changed her name,” he said. “It makes her mad when I call her Marybeth.”
“But you killed a man, Leo. We can’t undo that.”
His body language was calm. He just stood there, a figure in half-darkness, rooted to the mountainside. He said, “I know that. Does it make any difference that he tried to kill me? He was sent by the River Hogs to take me out. They didn’t trust me to shut up. But I used to work in the peanut mills, in the summers, back in Oklahoma. Hauling around those bags. I was stronger than I looked. He made a stupid move, and I let him fall on his knife.”
“I hadn’t heard that.”
“I’ve only been trying to tell it for twenty years.”
That was the last sound I heard before the gunbarrel exploded.
A flash came from the direction of my left shoulder, and Leo was lifted off the ground and deposited in the rocks five feet away. My first instinct was to hit the ground. My second was to run to the little man who sprawled unnaturally on his back. Neither move was particularly smart. But there I was, kneeling before Leo O’Keefe. He looked like a broken mannequin. A dark liquid trailed out the side of his mouth. In the reflected light I could see deep creases cut into his face, and how his ponytail was gray. He was younger than me. I cradled his shoulders helplessly, letting the burrs and rocks cut into my knees. He stared up at me and tried to speak.
“Nice job, Sheriff. You got your man.”
I stayed on my knees, trying to keep Leo’s airway open. But I could clearly see a face when I turned toward the house.
“Too bad you’ll be fatally wounded in the capture,” Bill Davidson said.
In the light reflected from the city he still looked like the Marlboro man. Tall, slender, rugged-getting more handsome every year he got older. He wore a Western-cut white shirt and nicely aged denim. In his right hand was the blued barrel of a revolver. In his left was a semiautomatic.
“So that’s how it still works?” I said. “Do what you want. Plant the evidence to back it up.”
He shrugged. “There’s nobody to blame for this but David Mapstone,” he said. “You could have stopped this at any time. God, I made you sheriff. And that damned idiot Abernathy went along with it. But, yeah, that’s how things play out now. I shot O’Keefe with this weapon.” He hefted the semiautomatic. “And I’ll leave that with you. I’ll shoot you with this revolver, which I’ll leave with Leo.” His teeth shone in the light. “You’ll have a grand funeral, Sheriff.”
I said, “Nobody will believe it. I’d never carry a semiautomatic.” That seemed to throw him off stride, but he moved closer. My Python was in my belt, an impossible six inches away from my right hand. I stood slowly.
“Don’t you fucking move!” he ordered, his deep voice quavering. “Why couldn’t you let this go? This was nothing to you.”
“Just that someone tried to murder my friend.” The Python weighed heavily on my waist.
“He could have let it go, too,” Davidson said. “Peralta didn’t have to reopen this. That scumbag Nixon stirred it all up again.”
“The past has a way of coming around,” I said. “Like that night in Guadalupe. You told me you were off duty, with a sick child. What you didn’t tell me was that you came downtown later, plainclothes, to threaten Beth and Leo to lie about the dirty cops they saw.”
“Dirty cops,” he snorted. “Do you know what a joke you were as a cop, Mapstone?”
“I never rated the River Hogs,” I said.
“Damned straight,” he said, without irony. “We kept the fucking peace out in the county. I never took a vow of poverty.”
“It was that simple?”
“Let me tell you something, it was the simplest thing in the world. One night, Nixon and I were working undercover. We busted these two scumbag drug dealers out in Apache Junction. They’ve got like a trunkful of pot in their trailer. And the phone rings. It was one of their fucking customers. Nixon and I just looked at each other, and we knew what we were going to do. We didn’t bust them. We sold them the drugs.”
“And that was the River Hogs?”
“That was my River Hogs,” Davidson said. “The bunch of guys who went drinking down in the riverbed off duty, they might get a piece of the action if they could be trusted. If they got it.”
“Like Matson and Bullock got it,” I said.
“They were idiots,” Davidson said. “Nixon let ’em in. Not me. But I had to come in and clean it up in the end.” He waved the semiautomatic at me. “Nixon was nuts. He was high half the time. He was off playing stud at that rich doctor’s sex parties.”
“What about Peralta? How’d you buy him off?”
Davidson laughed like an executioner who liked his work. “Peralta wouldn’t be bought. The son-of-a-bitch. I offered him a stake. He threw it in my face. So I made sure we recorded his badge number when we were handing out the bonuses, just in case he decided to take it to Internal Affairs.”
“He didn’t?”
“How the hell should I know? After the shooting, everything changed. We stopped the parties. Nixon and I kept running a few scams, just for pocket change. But I shut up those two kids. Peralta was off climbing the ladder. Everything would have been fine if that fuck Dick Nixon hadn’t decided, twenty years later, to grow a conscience.”
“It’s a bitch when that happens,” I said quietly. “And if you have to ruin the lives of two kids…”
“I can’t solve all the problems in the world,” he said. “I have to look after me and my own. You expect me to do it on a deputy’s paycheck?” He waved one of the guns at the lights of the mansions on the mountainside. “Look at these fuckers, living this way. They do it because we protect their asses from the bad guys. Protect and serve.”
“Davidson, you’re one of the bad guys.”
“Goodbye, Sheriff,” he said. “You understand why I’ve got to end this here.”
“Don’t move!” A shout from below.
They looked like mutant fireflies, those little red laser beams on Davidson’s chest. He looked down at them calmly.
“Don’t move a fucking muscle!” Kimbrough shouted, easing himself up the ridge, his gun drawn. “We’ve got SWAT snipers who will take you out before you even inhale!” The red lightning bugs wiggled on Davidson’s chest. It was the distraction I needed to pull out my big Colt.
Davidson’s handsome, lined face broke into a crazy smile. “Shit,” he said, waving his arms dreamily, holding out the pistols. “I captured an escaped convict! That’s Leo O’Keefe, right there. He shot Peralta. He was going to shoot the sheriff here. I stopped him.”
Kimbrough was at my side, his dark Glock leveled at Davidson’s chest. Davidson started toward us, then stopped. We held our ground. Davidson seemed suddenly disoriented. He looked at the lasers on his chest, then glanced out at the city.
“I’m going to be the chief deputy,” he said, tears running down his rugged face. “Shit.”
Suddenly a low roar came over the mountain and descended toward us, then it turned into a bone-rattling windstorm and we were lit up like judgment day. Davidson stared at the helicopter, fifty feet above us. I stepped forward and hammered him under his chin, dropping him to the ground. I grabbed the revolver and Kimbrough wrestled away the semiautomatic. He looked at us as if he were awakening from a dream.
“You’ve got to kill me, Mapstone,” he yelled, his face death-white in the spotlight of the chopper. “You can’t send a cop to prison.” He reached for my gun. “Goddamn it! You owe me that!”
I pushed him back down and stepped back. Then I felt the dark shapes of the SWAT officers swarming around us. One of them roughly handcuffed Davidson and hauled him to his feet.
“Take him to jail,” I said.
A long convoy of emergency vehicles trickled back down the mountain. The chopper sailed off toward downtown. I sat off to myself and watched, a solitary figure on a cold, dark boulder. Behind me, the house was dark. The ghosts of Jonathan Ledger and Dean Nixon watched us in worldly silence. When I felt a hand on my
