Dry Heat (David Mapstone Mystery 3)

“How’d you get a deputy to find French cigarettes for you?”

“I asked nicely,” she said. “Now I’m on the road to hell.”

“I found the name of the homeless guy,” I said, eager to share my triumph. “George Weed. A preacher knew him. Then I found he had a county hospital card from the 1980s. But he was hardly in the system at all.”

“He couldn’t escape my History Shamus,” she said softly, a small smile.

“It doesn’t tell us how an FBI badge ended up sewn into his coat,” I said. “But it’s a start.” After a long silence, I said, “You’re working out, at least.”

“I’m going nuts, Dave.” A long plume of smoke left her lips, on the way to the open window.

I had seen Lindsey smoke twice under pressure. Then she could stop again. It was a neat trick for a vice. I didn’t smoke cigarettes, but I knew that wasn’t because of moral greatness. It just wasn’t one of the itches I couldn’t scratch. Otherwise, my vices were my virtues. So I saved my judgments for major historical questions and tastes in different Mexican cuisines. Hell, I didn’t know what I was missing-the sensual cigarette after sex, humanity’s dance with death captured in a strange looking paper-wrapped consumer product, fire harnessed for our pleasure. We were all going to die-that was reinforced again by the fate of Dan Milton the health nut.

I took her hand, pulled her up, and walked her into the living room for another vice, a fine martini.

“I know you’re bored,” I said, once we were settled on a long, deep sofa that gave a magnificent view of the city and the Sierra Estrella.

“I’m shit,” she said, her voice darkened with anger. “I’m a piece of shit.”

“Because you’re here?”

“Rachel’s dead.” She gulped her drink and lit another Gauloise. “I’m the one who told her she should loosen up and come to the party that night.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said, too hastily perhaps. Her eyes drilled into me. I shut up and we watched a muted sunset accumulate over the mountains.

“I keep imagining what she must have been thinking going down that freeway,” she continued. “She was a gentle nerd girl, not some hero type. But in a nanosecond, there she is, being dragged into a car by people who are capable of anything.”

Lindsey studied the blue smoke drifting away to the window, and said in a low voice, “They were going to rape her. Then they were going to torture her.”

“There’s no point-” I began.

“You know what happens in the world,” she said, a hard edge in her voice. “They were going to rape her. And if they didn’t kill her, they’d sell her into slavery. You know that goes on. She’d end up drugged in some…place…in Russia or the Middle East, where an American girl is a prize. Then in a few years, she’s worse than dead.”

I sipped my drink and stroked her hand. It took me a minute to notice the tears filling her eyes.

“I miss my garden,” she sobbed. “I miss seeing you in your library, and us reading to each other in bed. I miss our old life.” I put my arm around her and pulled her close, feeling the warmth of her body through the thin fabric of the workout togs. I once favored fair-haired women just this side of voluptuousness. But Lindsey was dark-haired, long-limbed, and undeniably leggy. Her breasts were handful sized and perfectly shaped, which I could feel rubbing pleasantly against me. With my free hand, I took her cigarette and deposited it in an ashtray. She whispered, “Oh, baby, I’m afraid I’ve gotten us into something really bad.”

Lindsey rarely called me “baby.” She never called me “honey,” much less “hon.” Mostly, she called me Dave, as she had since we first met, and sometimes, with affection, she called me History Shamus. I called her Lindsey. My wife was kind and wise, smarter than her husband in most ways. She did not have a college degree, having escaped from her family to the military when she was eighteen and the PC revolution was taking off. I had enough degrees for the whole family.

Lindsey managed her demons with a discipline that made it seem effortless. But I knew her better than most people. She had been born in 1968 to hippie parents, had been forced to raise herself, had seen her mother destruct under schizophrenia. This made her afraid to have children, which was OK with me-I didn’t handle noise and chaos well. But she didn’t believe me, knowing I was an only child, the last of my line. It was one of our few uncomfortable topics.

We rarely fought, and when we did one or both of us were tired or scared. We had built a good life, our “old life.” It revolved around the house my grandparents had built before the Depression, a house Lindsey loved even more than I did. We didn’t have the money to keep up with the exquisite restorations going on up and down Cypress Street. But Grandfather’s house had good bones and wore well.

Our old life was walks in the neighborhood, on the narrow palm-lined streets with the sunset bursting across the horizon, the enchanted metropolitan twilight of the New West. We might stop by Cheuvront for a glass of wine, or the Thursday night event at the Phoenix Art Museum. I had learned to ride a bike on these streets-spent all my young years there. The ghosts were mostly benign.

Lindsey had taken over Grandmother’s gardens and brought them to new glories. I worked intermittently on a history of the great Central Arizona Project, which brought water from the Colorado River to the desert of Phoenix, and I taught a class at Phoenix College every fall. We cooked on the chiminea in the backyard and celebrated with cocktails in the courtyard that filtered out the sun on even the worst days of August.

My old friend Lorie Pope, who wrote for the Republic and knew me in my restless years, had remarked more than once on the change in me. “I never imagined you living such a domestic life, David,” she had said. I didn’t take it as a criticism.

I pulled Lindsey close and kissed the top of her head. I said, “You didn’t get us into anything. You were just doing your job.”

I added, “Peralta can fix this.” I wasn’t sure if I really believed it. “It might take more than two weeks.” That was closer to reality. What we did for a living was inherently dangerous, and all over the world-Colombia, Sicily, Bosnia-cops were killed as a political statement or a business expense. A New Economy of borderless evil. Another manifestation of Dan Milton’s new dark age.

I felt an involuntary shudder. The absentminded professor lost in his reveries of archival research jolted back to reality. Lindsey held me closer as the sun slipped behind the mountains.

She said, “I know these people. This will never be over.”

Chapter Twelve