The Night Detectives (David Mapstone Mystery 7)

I had no doubt.

18

After fifteen minutes of this cheery conversation, we arrived back at the adobe, where Peralta was standing under the shade of the porch, smoking a cigar, and surveying the jagged treeless mountains on the horizon.

“You got another Cuban, Sheriff?”

Peralta produced a cigar and Cartwright ran it under his nose, inhaling like a connoisseur. “You people wouldn’t even have tobacco if it wasn’t for us.”

“Apaches didn’t have tobacco,” Peralta said.

“Well, then we would have killed the Indians that did and taken it. Thanks for the cigar. Now I don’t have to kill you.” He carefully slipped the stogie into his front pocket. “I see the kid here is a revolver man.” He pointed to the Colt Python in the Galco high-ride holster on my belt.

“He doesn’t trust semi-autos, thinks they might jam.” Peralta raised an eyebrow, an act of raucous comedy coming from that face.

“It can happen,” Cartwright said. “May I?”

Every instinct told me to decline, yet I handed the heavy revolver over, butt-first. He opened the cylinder, dropped out the six rounds in his left palm, and dry-fired it against the wall: click, click, click.

“The Combat Magnum. Listen how clean that action is.” His tone was that of a wine connoisseur. “It was the first gun to be bore-sighted with a laser, you know. Finest mechanism you’ll ever find in a revolver. Tight cylinder. Highly accurate.” He handed the gun and ammo back. My pulse pulled off the fast lane. I was fortunate that the house was air conditioned and dark inside, to cool me down and conceal my apprehension.

The living room was furnished with handsome leather chairs and sofas. Books were everywhere: in floor-to-ceiling shelves, on tabletops, and sitting in stacks on the hardwood floor. They were not of the Anarchist’s Cookbook genre. Instead, literature, philosophy, poetry, political science, and, of course, history filled the room. Classics and new, important works. I’ll admit it: I took stock of a person by the presence of books and their titles, and I almost started to let down my guard. I could see no television or newspapers. He might not even know that Peralta was no longer sheriff.

Cartwright returned from the kitchen with bottles of Modelo Especial and we sat.

“What brings you out to my humble outpost, Sheriff?”

“One guy shot and killed earlier in the week with an AK-47.” Peralta took a swig and a puff. “Then my partner here almost bought it with a Claymore.”

Cartwright made a tisk-tisk-tisk kind of sound. “Walk down memory lane, eh? Did you tell him about the way we used Claymores to ambush the slants back in the day?”

Peralta nodded. “Whoever did the shooting with the Kalashnikov was damned good. Pumped ten rounds into the victim sitting in a car. The shooter was in another car. Only one shot failed to hit the target. And this was daylight, right on Grand Avenue down in town.”

“Sounds interesting.”

Peralta waited.

Cartwright sighed. “I’m retired, Sheriff.”

“Bullshit. You know things. You know more than me when it comes to assholes seeking illegal weapons.”

“Is there such a thing as an illegal weapon in Arizona anymore?”

“If there is, you’re selling it,” Peralta said.

So he was an arms dealer.

“Not true,” Cartwright said. “Driv

e back to Wittman or Circle City or Mesa for that matter and you’ll find guys who can fix you up with anything you want.”

Peralta sat back, wreathed in cigar smoke, his expression losing its amiability.

He said quietly, “They can’t fix you up with a Claymore.”

Cartwright spoke softly, too. “I’m not a rat. Never have been.”

Peralta had handled the tribulations of the past several months better than me. Of course, some of them hadn’t affected him quite so personally. Still, I was the one who seemed angrier about his loss of the election and the ugly, racist campaign that preceded it. He had turned philosophical and, if such a word could be applied to him, mellow.