High Country Nocturne (David Mapstone Mystery 8)

The desert lowlands fell away as I passed the abortion of Fountain Hills—I remembered when it was a lovely saguaro forest—then the rugged enchantment of Red Mountain and the Indian casino and the cottonwood-lined Verde River at Fort McDowell.

The car climbed effortlessly through millions of years of geology. Fantastic shapes appeared beside the highway. Cones and ribs, spires and mesas, crags that looked like human faces and nearly vertical walls. Steep climbs reached thresholds, followed by wide expanses and then more steep hills, ravines, and tight passages.

It was all here to see, the way time had pitted one element against the other to create our fleeting moment. Broken ground was cut by dry washes and arroyos. As I drove, precipitous cliffs and sharp drops and fold upon fold of rough mountains constantly remade the vista. Cactuses gave way to scrubby trees and grasslands fighting for their share of water. Overhead, the sky was enormous and deep blue.

I was lousy company on an Arizona road trip. Lindsey loved for us to drive around the state, armed with a detailed atlas and books on roadside history, geology, and Audubon guides. Yes, when it came to pleasure, she often liked physical books. But she was younger. I knew what was lost, what this country was like before six-and-a-half million people moved here. Fountain Hills was only one example. I became especially surly in Sedona, which I remembered as an empty place without a single traffic light. Alone, I was little better. The Beeline had been re-engineered into a divided-highway marvel. But that only allowed more people to profane the desert.

Around me was the Tonto Basin, land of many stories and much history. Zane Grey had written a novel of the same name. This had long been ranching country, once the whites had wrested it from the Apache. There were a few old mines, but they didn’t have the riches of the territory to the west, around Prescott and Jerome, so they quickly played out. It had also been a hiding place for outlaws and rough territory that a lawman entered at his peril.

The Tonto National Forest began a few miles back and, for now, kept out the developers. The Bush Highway connected. To the south was Punkin Center. As a boy, I had loved stopping at the little store there. It was like something out of a cowboy movie. Ahead, the former cavalry watering hole of Sunflower was gone in a few seconds

Up here, if you looked past the divided highway, it was still possible to catch glimpses of the majesty of the land, the lonely, sublime American West and Arizona High Country. Here were fleeting vistas—once they were so abundant—without a single thing made by humans.

When Theodore Roosevelt had come to the Grand Canyon more than a century before, he had said, “Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.”

Now some grifters wanted to develop land right outside the Grand Canyon National Park boundary. How long before they privatized the park itself?

I had no time to dwell on the land or the past. The present demanded my entire attention.

Traffic was very light. A few hotdogs in big pickups blew past at ninety. If anyone was deliberately following me, he was very good.

Peralta had intended for me, and by extension, Lindsey, to have nothing to do with this operation. But, as Trotsky said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

Now I was at war.

If my hunches proved wrong, this war would be lost.

I thought about a book I had recently read on the Donner Party, trapped in the Sierra Nevada in 1846, reduced to cannibalism. The author had argued that many of the people made decisions that seemed rational at the time, until it was too late and winter caught them early. Then they had to forge on, no matter.

One of the sentences stayed with me: “The trap clicks behind.”

When did the trap click behind me? Somewhere on this highway? Or much, much earlier?

I touched the car window. It was cold. Now all I could do was forge on.

Chapter Forty-one

The highway made one last upward leap and I entered the forest and then Payson. When I was a boy, this had been a trifling place with maybe a thousand residents. I remembered log trucks rumbling by. The town, with its storied cowboys and saloons, had only recently been opened to the outside world, the highway being paved in 1959.

Now logging was long gone, the population was fifteen times larger, and Phoenicians used it to flee the bludgeon of the summer heat. This had not made it better.

The forest looked sickly. Climate change and the bark beetle were slowly killing it. To the north was the largest virgin stand of Ponderosa pines in the world. How many times I had gone camping there with the Boy Scouts and later as an adult. Now I wondered if it would still exist in a couple of generations.

Mammoth wildfires were common now, another difference fro

m when I was young. Land swaps in the National Forest had allowed subdivisions to be built in the pines. Almost every year, millions of dollars were spent to keep these tract houses from burning down.

A few years ago, the state’s worst fire up to that time erupted to the east. It began after a woman had a fight with her boss, or was he her boyfriend? She stalked off into the woods in shorts and flip-flops with only a towel, cigarettes, and a lighter. When she became lost, she used the lighter to set a signal fire, or so she said. By the time the fire was out, more than 730 square miles had been reduced to ashes.

The ground was also perfectly dry. January in the High Country used to mean snow. The mountain snowpack melted in the spring and filled the reservoirs for Phoenix’s water supply. But we were getting less snow, had been for several years. I could only lose friends in Arizona by starting a conversation about climate change. Even Peralta didn’t believe it was real.

Amid the grotesqueries, freak shows, and fears, however, the Mogollon Rim still kept watch.

Newcomers had to learn to pronounce it correctly, MUG-EE-on, like they learned Gila was HEE-la and the iconic cactus was a Sa-WAR-oh. Or they didn’t learn.

The escarpment dropped as much as four thousand feet straight down from the Colorado Plateau. From here, in the late afternoon light, the Kaibab limestone gleamed alabaster. Above it, clouds were moving in.

Seeing it again, inhaling the tart smell of the pines, reminded me of my Boy Scout days. Camp Geronimo was north of here, at the foot of the Rim. My troop, which met at the Luke-Greenway American Legion Post near downtown, went there every summer. After dinner by the campfire, the scoutmasters would tell us stories of the Mogollon Monster, Arizona’s version of Bigfoot. Then they would lead us on night hikes. Even with our flashlights, it was the blackest dark I had ever experienced.