High Country Nocturne (David Mapstone Mystery 8)

My phone vibrated. A message from Lindsey with three numbers.

It was time to get back to Phoenix.

Ninety minutes later and a mile lower, we passed through the enormous freeway interchange on the north end of the metropolitan area. Sharon was asleep. Some civic wrecker had climbed onto an overpass and written in black capital letters: OMENVILLE.

Chapter Six

The Westin was the one of the new swanky hotels in downtown Phoenix, occupying the lower floors of the bland Freeport-McMoRan building. The glass-sheeted box had been finished as the Great Recession blew up.

In the go-go years before the crash, one in three jobs had been connected to real estate. It was the only conversation at my gym in the basement of Central Park Square. Even the woman who cut my hair was flipping houses. For me, it was like Joe Kennedy’s anecdote about shoeshine boys trading stock tips in 1929. Anybody could see it coming if they cared to look.

The result in Phoenix had been a straight-up Depression. Now it had mellowed into a prolonged recession, whatever the boosters said. Phoenix had seen nothing like it since the bad years of the 1890s. The perpetual-motion growth machine had broken down.

Thousands of people were still underwater on their mortgages, owing more than the houses were worth. Thousands more had simply walked away. Entire subdivisions within the “master planned communities” of suburbia had been empty. Then Wall Street had moved in and bought the houses as rentals. Even this didn’t stop the economy’s bleeding and many of the rental houses, already built on the cheap, turned shabby fast. Wall Street flipped the properties to new slumlords. Talented young people and empty-nest baby boomers with means were moving to cities with real downtowns, pl

aces like Seattle and Portland. Fewer retirees had the money to move to Phoenix and brag about not having to shovel sunshine.

Phoenix embodied Eric Hoffer’s remark, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

But the Westin’s lobby looked modishly elegant, if empty, when I walked in at six a.m. The friendly young woman at the registration desk said hello and I responded as if I belonged there and went to the elevators.

When I stepped out on the eighth floor, the hallway was empty. The space was quiet. Not even a sound of a couple making early-morning love. I walked to the room number Lindsey had texted and knocked.

The door opened two inches, the security latch in place.

“House gigolo,” I said.

“Please come in. I called hours ago.”

Then she was in my arms and for that moment the world was right and safe. I felt the contours of her body through the plush white robe she wore.

I felt the hard plastic inside one part of the robe, “Is that a baby Glock in your pocket or are you glad to see me?”

“Both.”

I kissed her and un-mussed her pin-straight dark hair. My eyes stayed on the simple diamond of her wedding ring.

Diamonds.

So much trouble.

“You look exhausted, History Shamus.”

“Staying up all night doesn’t have the appeal that it did when I was fourteen years old.”

She led me into the room. It was a good deal nicer than a Holiday Inn, with expensive furniture and floor-to-ceiling windows looking north onto Central Avenue.

Phoenix is on the farther edge of the Mountain Time zone, so it was still dark outside. The view showed tired city lights but one of the first light-rail trains of the day was heading up the street. It was a view we didn’t get from our house in the historic districts.

Neither of the queen-sized beds had been slept in. I slid off my jacket and collapsed onto one of the beds. Lindsey curled up next to me and I told her everything that had happened.

She was skeptical about my traffic-stop reaction, which irritated me.

“I’m not making it up.”

“I know. But your tale…I’m sorry. Your description of the night has a dream quality to it. You were under tremendous strain. You were tired.”

“That woman was going to shoot me.”