High Country Nocturne (David Mapstone Mystery 8)

“Go. Go.”

Halfway down the corridor, I turned back to him.

“Where would a person go in this town to hire a hit on somebody?”

He rolled his eyes. “Anywhere. Depends on whether you want it done right, and don’t want to get caught in a sting by law enforcement.”

“Can you be specific?”

“No.” He lowered his voice beneath the sounds of Chuck Berry. “If I had that answer, I might take out my baby sitter. Hey…”

As “Johnny B. Goode” ran on, he gripped my shoulder. “Be careful with that name I gave you. Word is he’s close to the cartels.”

As I walked back through the store, the fat man was where I had left him. Only his tombstone eyes moved, tracking me.

Jerry, for show, followed me to the door, shouting. “Beat the shit out of me. Go ahead and watch the claim I file against the county! This is an honest business. I don’t know anything about any goddamned computers…”

“Okay, Jerry…”

“Tell me I’m clean, you bastard! I want to hear it.”

“You’re clean. It was a misunderstanding. Thank you for your cooperation.”

He was still yelling from the door when I got in the Prelude.

It was better not to linger. I drove to the corner, pulled into another asphalt lagoon. Say what you will about Phoenix but you can always find another parking lot.

There, in the lonely dark, my heart started hammering and I could hear the blood pulsing through vulnerable arteries and veins in my neck and temples. I could hear my breathing, hot and dry. Taking my hands off the steering wheel, I watched them tremble.

All this foolishness over what for me was a garden-variety panic attack.

I hesitated to even use the expression, for they were truly debilitating for most people. I was very high functioning. Panic skirmish? Anxiety Cold War? They never kept me home under the covers.

Still, it put a name on the periods of high melancholy and anxiety that had struck me periodically since I was nineteen, the day after my grandfather died. I didn’t know what they were for years. They were one of my eccentricities I kept to myself.

Then, one day I read an article about panic attacks and the symptoms seemed to fit. I felt better when I learned that Lord Nelson and Sigmund Freud probably suffered from them, too. The knowledge didn’t make them go away. Lindsey did.

Now, alone in the car, I scanned the lot for trouble. Finding none, “Rockin’ Robin” replayed in my mind. It would be there for days.

Robin loved me, or so Lindsey had said. Robin was not the falling-in-love type.

I tried to unspool the snarl that had drawn Robin and me together. Danger, need, passion, electricity. It was all that and more. Beware the cunning and treachery of memory, especially concerning lovers.

Would I have left Lindsey for Robin? Never. But how could I know all the contingencies, all the counterfactual history? Lindsey might have left me for one of her lovers in D.C.

All that was in the past. In the present, I might lose Lindsey after all. The thought paralyzed me.

My head was hammered by pain. It was from the very real damage the hitwoman had done to my face, but also from the fear that I would lose both of them, Lindsey and Robin. Especially that Lindsey would never wake up again. Cliché but true, she was the great love of my life. And, yes, fear that I would lose Mike Peralta, too.

“Quit feeling sorry for yourself.”

There, I was talking to myself.

This would be an opportune time for Strawberry Bitch to take me out.

I distracted myself by imagining the criticism I would face for such a statement in the faculty lounge.

When a hitman does his job, he’s praised for being independent, assertive, and effective, but when a woman does the exact same thing you call her a “bitch.”