High Country Nocturne (David Mapstone Mystery 8)

He pulled out a notepad and scribbled, tore off a sheet of paper in the paperless county office, and placed it on the desk.

“She found the wallet. Go talk to her. That’s all I’ll say. You can approach it with fresh eyes.” He pulled a box out of his cargo pants and handed it over. Business cards. “Do you have a check?”

“A check?”

“So I can get you in the system for direct deposit.”

I pulled one out of my wallet and gave it to him. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer—and get paid for the trouble.

He stood and started to leave. “I’ll hook you up with an IT person so we can get you access to the MCSO computers. A few things have changed since you left. Got a Homeland Security grant to upgrade the system.” He smiled. “Good hunting, David.”

As the door closed, I slipped some business cards in my pocket and remembered the person who had first taught me the Sheriff’s Office computer system, a young deputy named Lindsey Faith Adams.

This was the first time in a couple of hours that I had really thought of her. It made me wonder if this was a natural recharge mechanism or if something was missing inside me. Or, worse that a cold, detached spectator was living in my soul.

“Lie down with the devil,” Lindsey had said.

And wake up in hell.

Chapter Twenty-seven

A century earlier, the Great War was raging. It swept away four empires, sixteen million lives, the first great era of globalization, and it changed everything. The belief of constant progress in the West was forever destroyed. A foolish, harsh peace set up an even deadlier world war twenty years later.

We live in the shadow of the Great War still, even if most people don’t realize it. Right down to the vernacular: no man’s land. Trench coats. Blotto. Brass Hats. Shell shock. Push up the daisies.

It was the last war fought by poets.

In Flanders fields the poppies grow…

Dulcet est. Decorum Est.

Kipling, who lost a son in the wa

r, echoed the book of Ecclesiastes, providing the words engraved in the ubiquitous British monuments: Their name liveth forevermore.

He also captured the cynicism of the later war-poets and the Lost Generation:

If any question why we died

Tell them, because our fathers lied.

My grandfather was too old to be drafted and already married. Grandmother told me much about the war when I was a child, especially how she blamed it on “Kaiser Bill.” Newer scholarship would dispute it but I doubt that would change her mind. She was ahead of her time in blaming Woodrow Wilson for the flawed peace. Some revisionists argue that the United States should not have entered the Great War at all.

Arizona was only two years past statehood when war broke out in Europe. Phoenix’s population was about fifteen thousand. The cotton farmers made big money from the war. Frank Luke, born in Phoenix, became the state’s first ace and the first airman from anywhere in America to win the Medal of Honor. He died in action in 1918. He was twenty-one years old.

Their name liveth forevermore, but Kipling has been out of fashion for decades and is mainly remembered as an apologist for British imperialism.

I meditated on these events as I crouched behind a neighbor’s bougainvillea with a clear view of our house. In my hands was the close-quarters battle receiver M-4 carbine with a night scope. To that I had added a titanium suppressor so I could work with as little noise as possible. I locked and loaded a thirty-round magazine and clicked the fire selector to semi-auto.

It was two a.m. Tuesday.

Earlier, walking back to the car beneath CityScape, the parking garage had been empty of people. Too empty. No one was following me, right? I couldn’t be sure. I was glad to drive out of that vast concrete crypt.

It was too late to visit the address Melton had given me. So I went to Durant’s and sat at the dark, comfy bar, let them fix me a martini and steak. It was the first real meal I had eaten since Saturday night.

Sharon called to tell me nothing had changed in Lindsey’s condition except that they had ruled out the worst viruses. The fever persisted.

As the Beefeater burned my throat, there was no risk of being that cold, detached spectator. The world is full of imponderables but that never stopped me from stewing, especially as some of the doctors’ warnings and comments came back. How the surgery had removed torn flesh and bone. How another round on the operating table might be required to drain the wound, to “revise” it for clean edges to promote healing…