Arizona Dreams (David Mapstone Mystery 4)

“David…” she began in a softer voice that chilled me.

I shouted her down: “Why did you have Perez kill Davey Crockett?”

“Who?” Malkin said.

“The cripple in the old school bus,” she snarled.

He said, “Oh, my God, what have…”

“Shut up!” she screamed, and waved the barrel of the shotgun. Her finger was inside the trigger guard. There she was, my soccer mom, the non-student who had a non-crush on me, holding that shotgun with the same natural aplomb as Patty Hearst turned Tanya the Symbionese Liberation Army girl. She said, “We had to get those papers back! He was hiding them for Bell. Adam asked nice, and then he didn’t ask nice.”

Lindsey asked, “Was it the same for Alan Cordesman and Louie Bell?”

“Something like that,” she mumbled.

Lindsey said, “It seems like a hell of a price to pay for a parcel of land…”

“You have no idea,” Dana said.

Just then, Malkin put his pistol on the concrete floor. “I can’t do this,” he said. “Dana, it has to stop now.”

She almost swung the gun in his direction, but kept it on us. She said, “Shut up, Jerry!”

“We can’t kill two cops!”

“Baby, we’re about to get everything we wanted!” she said. “Arizona Dreams, the water it has to have…”

I swallowed hard and said, “So that’s it.”

“So that’s it,” Dana said.

“How could you ever think you could get away with it?” Lindsey demanded.

“We will get away with it,” Dana said coldly. She propped the shotgun on a box, keeping it trained on us. I had to settle for keeping the Python on her with aching arms.

I said, “Arizona Dreams never had enough water to meet the legal requirement of a one-hundred-year guaranteed supply. I bet the investors never knew that.”

They just stared. I went on, “Alan Cordesman never knew that, at first. But the Bell property had the water, and you took it. Too bad it’s not legal. The groundwater has to be on the property.”

“That’s the law now,” she said. “The law will change. Among our investors are four state legislators. Arizona has to grow. That law is outdated. We’ll build a pipeline from the Bell land.”

“But you were certified as having a water supply at Arizona Dreams.”

“Yeah, well,” she said. “All that took was a crooked consulting hydrologist named Earl Rice. You met him back there in the water barrel. And then a lot of money for a man I know in the Department of Water Resources. Unlike Earl, he didn’t get cold feet and threaten to betray us. The government is too overwhelmed by growth to pay much attention to every development anyway.”

Lindsey said, “Do you really think you can hold two deputies at gunpoint here in this warehouse at Twenty-Seventh Avenue and Van Buren and not have anyone notice?”

“We won’t be here long,” Dana said. “Now drop your guns and get your hands in the air.”

“You mean here in this huge white building?” Lindsey asked. “That’s nine-nine-nine.”

My neck tingled. Lindsey was giving the radio code for officer needs emergency assistance. I tightened my grip on the Python.

“Are you German or what, bitch?” Dana said. “Drop your guns!”

”That’s not going to happen, Dana,” I said.

She said, “I really thought you’d let this go, David.”