High Country Nocturne (David Mapstone Mystery 8)

Hardly anyone lived in the neighborhood from those days. One friend from grade school went into the Diplomatic Service and was posted to Budapest, another was a lobbyist in California. Yet another was living in London. So many had left town.

Willo was one of the safest neighborhoods in the metropolitan area. If I didn’t live here, if I hadn’t brought trouble, there would barely have been a violent crime in years.

There was no time for those thoughts. No time to appreciate the distinctive character of each house or mourn about the idiots who had put in desert landscaping where this had always been the oasis. No time, for now, to worry about Lindsey. All my senses had to be on high alert.

It was Sunday night in the heart of the city and few cars passed me on Fifth Avenue. A couple walked their dog. No assassins were hiding behind oleander hedges in the service alleys. Overhead, high thin clouds lingered, turned pink by the reflected city lights. A slight breeze tousled my hair.

At home, I armed the alarm and took a long shower, locking the bathroom door and setting two guns and my iPhone on the vanity. I let the needles of hot water pummel my battered face, let the room fill with steam.

I dried off and approached the dreaded mirror. Even after using several cold packs at the hospital, the tissue around my right eye was colorful and swollen, plenty of purple, red, and orange like an Arizona sunset. It hurt in colors, too, all in the red zone. My left cheek bore the slashes of the killer’s fingernails. I popped four Advils.

The little meteor strike of skin was four inches above my right nipple, the remains of the only time I had been shot. It had come on the first case Peralta gave me to clean up. I lost enough blood to pass out and they airlifted me from Sedona to St. Joe’s. I was lucky my lung didn’t collapse. When I woke up, Lindsey was there. We weren’t even married. Sometimes when we were in bed, she would lightly worry the scar with her fingertip, trying to erase it. Fragments of the bullet were still inside me.

“Lord, have mercy.”

I spoke the words to myself and said them conversationally, not exactly as a petition to the almighty but a stress valve letting off. The moment stunned me. My grandmother, a daughter of the frontier who knew much loss in her long life, had used that phrase often and in exactly that tone of voice. Now I said it.

A few years ago, I realized that if I were in a relaxed situation, especially sitting down, my hands would join in my conversation. This was not wild gesticulation. It was hands and wrists. Grandmother had done the same thing. When I was a little boy, I had thought it was strange. Now I did the same thing all the time.

The grandparents who raised me were long dead and yet they lived on through me. I considered how I had underestimated Melton. Yes, I had taken the badge out of unreasoning fear, to buy time for Lindsey, even though I didn’t believe a word he said about her. But he had also gotten to me about how “I owed” my hometown.

Grandfather talked that way. He told me stories of the early pioneers, the heroic acts of dam and canal building that had turned a wilderness into a garden. That’s how he told it. “Never forget that you owe,” he said. “Never forget that you are from Maricopa County, Arizona.”

Grandfatherisms, I called them. Melton had made a snare for me with those sentiments.

Even though it was Sunday night, I dressed in a pinstripe blue suit, starched white shirt, and muted red tie. For the first time, I noticed the pattern—tiny diamonds. My new watch, the one Lindsey had given me for Christmas, went across my wrist. I stashed a pair of latex evidence gloves and badge case in my pocket, slipped on the Colt Python and the backup gun. I was a deputy sheriff again.

The case file from Melton was sitting in the living room. I decided to let it be for a few hours. I would do three more tasks associated with Peralta and then pause, if not stop.

It was not clear to me that he was safe. The man was very capable on his own—I was not indispensible. For years, he had given the orders and saved the day. But on a case a year ago, I had saved him. Now he had left the cryptic second business card. Whatever trouble he was in required my assistance.

That’s what I told myself.

His undercover adventure, predicament, descent into lawlessness, whatever it was, also twined up with the assassin who met me on the front lawn last night. I wasn’t going to get in Kate Vare’s way, as long as she did her job. But the shooter remained at-large and anything I could learn about her connection to Peralta would help.

It couldn’t be a coincidence that she had come after me after he made off with the diamonds.

The first task was quickly foiled.

Find Matt Pennington.

Lindsey said she had news about this, but before she could tell me more we had begun fighting about the new job with Melton. I sat at the desk and carefully folded Lindsey’s glasses, studying the acetate tortoiseshell frames with round lenses and small earpieces that perfectly fit her thin face.

“My nerd girl look,” she would say.

Unfortunately for me, Lindsey’s computer was password-protected.

I tried every word and number combination I could think of and got through with “Dave” and the date and year of the first time we had sex. That delightful memory, and the fact that she recalled it, was followed by anxiety that I should call Sharon to check on her. I resisted the temptation. I had only been gone for forty-five minutes.

The computer screen was neither sentimental nor anxious. It brought me to a gray backdrop with a red box demanding “Keystroke Authentication Pattern.”

She was too clever for me. I gave up. I could at least Google Pennington later. Hell, I might even Bing him. But I needed answers no search engine was going to supply.

I went outside, the Colt Python in my hand. The air was magically dry and pleasant.

The darkened carport was clear of assassins, so I climbed in Lindsey’s old Honda Prelude, and drove west.

Our office on Grand Avenue, a squat adobe that was about all that remained of a once-charming 1920s auto court, looked quiet. The neon sign of a cowboy throwing a lasso, the other survivor of the motel, blinked benignly. Otherwise, the place was surrounded by a twelve-foot steel fence and watched by surveillance cameras.