“Oh, please. Spare me the false humility, too. The famous David Mapstone is the genius who solved the disappearance of Rebecca Stokes from the 1950s, who discovered the bodies of the Yarnell twins who were kidnapped in the Depression. What else? Oh, yes, the David Mapstone who uncovered the scandal in the sheriff’s office from the 1970s and helped free an innocent man.”
“He was killed,” I said quietly, stopping so a man in pink pants and a long yellow prospector’s beard could pull his two shopping carts laboriously across the potholed street.
“You’re famous, Mapstone. I read about you in the newspaper. I see you on TV, even if you don’t watch. I’m just a police officer who plays by the rules and works as a professional. I work on real cold cases-crimes from 1982, say, or 1990, where real people are waiting for some word of what happened to a loved one. I can’t just deliver some bullshit scam graduate history seminar. Like I really have time to waste on this wild goose chase.”
She went on, growing more animated. “I worked to get where I am. I didn’t go off for fifteen years to teach college and then come back so my buddy the sheriff could get me a job.”
“Good for you, Kate,” I wished I could get out of the car. The top being down helped relieve the oppressiveness of the talk, but the sun was starting to broil us. We bumped across the Southern Pacific tracks. Off on one corner, as far from the technology economy as I could imagine, sat unattended stacks of shrink-wrapped computer screens. Maybe for recycling? Maybe “fell off the truck”?
She said, “The point is, I’m working with you because I have to, not because I want to.” She readjusted her sunglasses and stared straight ahead. “And I hate this old car.”
I pushed against the seat to ease my stress-made backache. “Gosh, Kate, I’m crushed. You’re so charming, even flirty, if I may say, that all this comes as a surprise to me.”
“Fuck you.”
I tried to ignore her. A good night’s sleep had helped me set aside the sadness of the past two weeks. Good night’s sleep, my ass-I got laid. The universal antidote to heartbreak, loss, anxiety, frustration, second thoughts, and fears of mortality. Anyway, Kate was right: I had a good gig. I had come home to Phoenix and found a sweet little niche for someone burdened by something as useless as a Ph.D. in history. In fact, my life was rich with blessings: Lindsey, a good marriage, a nice house in the Willo Historic District far from lookalike subdivisions, good health-I was still in good shape, even if I was undeniably in middle age. Lots of people would think my life was a fantasy come true. Looking around at all the suffering souls on these streets was reminder enough of that.
I slid the big car slowly up to a group of men wearing layers of filthy old clothes. I showed them the photo and they asked for money. I showed them my badge and they went away. Another man, his face frozen in a desperate contortion and baked red-brown by the sun, swore he remembered a guy named Weed, an old guy who claimed he had come from a rich family in New York. No, he didn’t know his full name. A prostitute walked up in a short, dusty dress and asked us if we wanted a partner for a threesome. A patrol car gave us the once-over and drove away. We crossed the railroad main line a dozen times, going back and forth. So it went for an hour. Most police work was even more boring than this.
“Pull in there,” Kate said, pointing to a shady area under the overpass, “if you won’t put the damned top up. I need to check my messages.” She pulled a cell phone out. “Jesus, I can’t even see the phone display in this glare.”
I was sweating, too, so I drove slowly toward the shade, north from Lincoln, right onto what looked like an access road beside the overpass. It was really old South Seventh Avenue, which once crossed the railroad at grade, and was frequently blocked by trains. After the overpass was built, it was blocked off at the tracks, making a street that went nowhere. We hadn’t checked back here for a lead on Weed or whatever the hell his name was.
The area under the overpass was still seedy with industrial castoffs. I pulled back as far as the road went, letting my eyes adjust and feeling the temperature drop instantly when the sun went away. I slipped the car into park and looked at the lovely old mission-style building of Union Station, a hundred yards to the east and across the tracks. My grandmother had taken me there as a boy to see passenger trains like the Sunset Limited, the Imperial, and the Golden State. Now they were all history. The tracks were empty, torn out or sprouting weeds. It made me sad.
My eyes adjusted to the dark and I realized we had landed in a little colony of some kind. Groups of men watched us from a distance, men whose clothes and skin had all been turned the same color of brown-black by the sun. I counted a dozen I could see. We had landed in their world, cut off from the street grid, shaded from the sun. I couldn’t believe we were welcome.
Just outside my peripheral vision, I saw movement. I turned to see three men walking toward us from a squat building under the concrete pilings. They were younger, moving without the beaten down arthritic shuffle of the transients a block over. They weren’t walking past. They were walking toward us. Something in their expressions…
“What are you doing?” Kate closed her phone.
“I was a Boy Scout,” I said, pulling my Colt Python.357 magnum revolver from the locked console compartment and concealing it between my legs. “‘Be Prepared.’”
“You got the time?” asked a muscular black man in a white sleeveless T-shirt coming to my side of the car. I told him the time. He said, “Nice car.” I agreed it was. His buddies surrounded us. I couldn’t see each of them at once. I felt my heart rate take off.
“So what you want down here?” he asked. I kept my hands in my lap, covering the butt of the Python. He went on, “Score some crack? Never seen you before.”
His buddy said, “Lots of white folks come in from the suburbs to buy crack from the brothers, but we never seen you here before.”
Another voice, high-pitched, said, “Maybe they just lost.”
“Lost, my ass!” came a call from the gloomy periphery of the street.
The leader, Muscle Man, thought about that, looking at us intently. “You lost, we give you directions. But you got to pay the toll.”
The high-pitched voice behind me said, “Pay the toll to the troll.” Everybody laughed except Muscle Man. Even I laughed.
Kate flashed her badge. “Get lost, asshole. We’re busy.”
“Sure, Officer,” Muscle Man said. He walked in a small circle, breathing in and out deeply. He came to face us again. “You heard her, let’s get lost.”
“Maybe I don’t want to get lost.” This from the Tenor. I turned my head enough to take him in. He was the biggest of the bunch, a giant with walnut-colored skin, wearing a very long lime green T-shirt and long-short pants. He also sported a sideways green ball cap atop what looked to my unhip eyes like a skullcap. His sneakers were smaller than destroyers. In other words, he looked like every suburban kid at the mall. He walked over to Kate’s side of the car.
I let my eyes again take in our surroundings. The street around us was really not much more than an alley. Old warehouses rose up on either side of us. Traffic rolled over us on the overpass. In the distance I could hear jets taking off from Sky Harbor. A train whistle came from the west. We might as well have been a hundred miles from any help.
“You hear?” said Muscle Man. “We don’t want to get lost.”
“Maybe we’ll take this car, understand what I’m sayin’,” said the thin man.