High Country Nocturne (David Mapstone Mystery 8)

Another ten feet and she would reach the dark sanctuary of the empty carport and beyond it a rickety fence with a gate to the backyard.

I could have painted her with the laser, ordered her to freeze.

No.

My mouth silently formed the word, “police.” And then, noiselessly, “halt.” I aimed for her chest, took in a breath, let it out slowly, and smoothly squeezed the trigger.

Three rounds came out fast as a lightning strike.

Sure, I wanted to empty the magazine into her, but that would have risked stray rounds going through the houses of neighbors. This rifle was good to five hundred meters. So I did one pull, fired a short burst.

With the suppressor, the carbine made a sound like pebbles falling.

The impact threw her backward like a discarded doll. She landed on her back in the grass and didn’t move.

I picked up the spent cartridge cases and slipped them in my pocket. I would place them in the carport to support my story for the police: I fired protecting my home from an armed burglar.

Then I heard a sound that was half gasp and half muffled scream. I wondered if the neighbors were enjoying middle-of-the-night sex.

In that instant of absent-mindedness, flashes came from the woman on the ground. Was she using a flashlight?

No.

The arms and leaves of the bougainvillea shattered. Something heavy and fast sped past my cheek. Something pulled quickly on my sleeve.

It all happened in silence, except for a slight spitting sound, the snap of shrubbery, and the smashing of bullets on the wall behind me.

The heap on the lawn had rolled over and was firing at me, using a silencer.

I fell to the ground, tried to make myself part of it, remembered everything I had read about the infantryman and the dirt below him.

She was wearing ballistic armor. The sound I had heard was her recovering from my bullets hitting her vest but only knocking the air out of her.

They made fun of my Colt Python, my “wheel gun,” but if I had shot her with the .357 she wouldn’t have gotten up, ballistic vest or not. Now it was too late.

My heart was about to gallop out of my chest but I steadied the M-4 and squeezed off another short burst. It stitched up the lawn. But she was already up and moving. I aimed but she dodged. The risk of a stray shot was too great. That wasn’t even my biggest fear. That would be that she was coming to kill me. She was better than me. Way better.

By the time I could get a good aim, she was in the Chevy. The brake lights glowed red. I dropped to one knee and fired at the back window. It crumpled and the sound of more pebbles broke the silence of the street. My wits returned and I put another round in the left taillight. Then I was running for the Prelude as she sped off. The sidewalk was painted with a blood trail. I had hit her with effect at least once.

The first time George Washington saw combat, he commented, “I have heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.” I hated to disagree with the Father of Our Country, but there was nothing charming in the whistling I had heard. It was somehow made more sinister by our firefight with suppressors. I checked my sleeve. It had been sliced as with a knife. Fortunately, I wasn’t bleeding.

She turned south on Fifth Avenue, screeching rubber, by the time I had the Prelude cranked up. I followed with my lights off. She was nearly to McDowell, her lights on, but the telltale rear light shot out. The car swung east onto the thoroughfare.

I could call 911, but that would eventually bring Kate Vare and questions I didn’t want to answer now that I was in pursuit. So I left the phone in my pocket and jammed the engine up to seventy to make the green light. I flipped on the headlights and slid in a CD of Ornette Coleman. Charlie Haden was on bass. “Change of the Century.” “Lonely Woman.” The improvisation, eccentric chord structures, and dissonances calmed me.

From the time we began dating, I taught Lindsey jazz and history, how to make and enjoy a dry martini. She taught me about computers and contemporary music, good stuff not pop crap. She taught me about Russian literature. It was a profitable exchange. We laughed a lot. God, I wanted her back.

The light at Central almost caught me but I made it through on yellow, the Phoenix Art Museum flashing past. Light rail wasn’t operating this late and few cars were on the wide roads. The north-south grid changed from numbered avenues and drives to numbered streets and places.

I closed the distance with the Chevy to three blocks. Strawberry Death drove straight east, keeping to the speed limit. I did, too. The secret to driving in the city of Phoenix was if you stayed at the speed limit, you would hit all the green lights. There were exceptions—the Piestawa freeway, Forty-fourth Street, a few others—but in general it worked.

I fingered the tear on the left sleeve of my jacket where a bullet had passed through. A few inches in the other direction and I would be dead in the neighbor’s shrubbery. Why didn’t I think to put on a bulletproof vest?

In only a few minutes, we had traveled nearly three miles and she turned left on Twenty-fourth Street, another insanely wide highway masquerading as a city street. If she was wounded, it wasn’t serious enough to affect her driving. My fusillade into the rear window apparently hadn’t harmed her further.

A Phoenix Police SUV slipped past me as we crossed Thomas Road and for a moment I thought he would pull her over for the darkened taillight, the suspiciously missing rear glass. Then I could back him up and this nightmare would be over. But he turned onto a side street. Going to a call.

When I was a little boy, much of this area had still been citrus groves with creeping subdivisions and good new schools attracting the middle class. You could still buy oranges and grapefruits at roadside stands. Now much of it had turned shabby, lawns gone weedy or left to become dirt, another linear slum in the making.