Concrete Desert (David Mapstone Mystery 1)

“Tell me about it.”

“It’s no better in the news business; plus, we’re run by these profit-driven corporate dickheads with their focus groups and readership surveys. We keep making stories shorter and dumber, and we wonder why nobody wants to read newspapers today. At least you know there will always be crime.”

We ordered fish tacos, and I asked Lorie about Bobby Hamid.

“You tell me,” she said. “Surely the Sheriff’s Office intelligence files are piled high with Bobby Hamid information.”

“You can give me a different perspective, as an award-winning reporter writing about organized crime.”

“Yeah, shit,” she snorted, then added, “He’s a major, diversified scumbag. Tied in with new organized crime.”

“Old organized crime-the Mafia-played by a code of sorts. For instance, they wouldn’t murder cops or reporters. New organized crime-the Colombians, the Dominicans, the Samoans, the Russians, guys like Bobby Hamid-they’d just as soon kill you as look at you.” Lorie spoke fast, talked with her hands. She was in her element now.

“Bobby has all sorts of alliances, keeps his hands in different products. Like he’s tied in with the Aryan Brotherhood, distributing drugs in the Arizona State Prison. He uses the Mexican Mafia to terrorize competitors to his porno bookstores. I’ve heard he has his hands in reservation casinos, maybe through the old mob. He’s an operator.”

“Is he tied into flying drugs in from Mexico?”

“If he’s not, somebody close to him is,” Lorie said. “Bobby Hamid is like a Harvard Business School case study. He’s a genius in maximizing the value of different enterprises-only these are illegal enterprises.”

“So why has nobody ever shut him down?”

“Who knows? Another thing about the new organized crime is how diffuse it is. The system is overwhelmed. I know your buddy Peralta has had a hard-on for Bobby for years, but…yeah, as I recall, the county attorney screwed the pooch a couple of years ago on a prosecution and Bobby walked. Had a very high-priced lawyer.”

“Well,” I said, “Bobby Hamid seems to keep turning up on the edges of my life.”

She arched one eyebrow. “Is that why you ended up in a gunfight at Metrocenter last night?”

“You don’t miss a thing, Ms. Pope.”

“I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, Deputy Mapstone.” It was one of our old routines from years ago.

I filled Lorie in from the beginning. I needed someone to talk to, someone I trusted. When I was done, she shook her head slowly and said, “I should have known Julie Riding was involved in this somehow.”

“Ironic, isn’t it?”

“Ironic my ass,” Lorie said, munching on a taco. “So let me get this straight: You go looking for your old girlfriend’s missing sister, who ends up murdered in the desert, a dump arranged to look like the 1959 homicide you’ve been investigating. Little sister-Phaedra? That’s a name-has a drug-mule boyfriend who also gets dead. Now you find out Phaedra was on the run for a month. And somebody with a large gun doesn’t want you to find out why.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“I don’t like it, David,” Lorie said. “Something stinks.”

I asked her what.

“Julie, for one thing,” she said. “Your major source of information is addicted to blow, and now she’s disappeared.”

“I know she’s all screwed up.”

“In my business,” Lorie Pope said, “we say, ‘If

your mother says she loves you, check it out.’”

“In my business, too,” I said, and thought about what Harrison Wolfe had said about never confusing your prejudices with your instincts.

Lorie shook her head. “You’re living quite the historical psycho-drama, aren’t you, Professor?” she asked. “Deputy in the old West-a paladin, if you will-fights for former lady love’s honor.”

“That’s not it,” I replied a bit too testily.

We finished our food in silence, surrounded by the din of the business-lunch crowd talking deals, sports, and gossip. At the next table, a trim middle-aged man was holding forth on the new roster for the Suns, how things had never been right since they traded Barkley. He said he’d played golf with Charles only yesterday. At another table, three women were talking about a shooting in one of their neighborhoods. Then Lorie picked up the tab and we walked back slowly, drifting past the tourist shops-flags, hot peppers, t-shirts, Indian art, Arizona Highways-staying in the shade.