Dry Heat (David Mapstone Mystery 3)

***

I had just lugged my bags inside the house on Cypress Street when there was a banging on the front door. I clipped the holstered Python on my belt and walked quietly in the direction of the banging.

It was Peralta in full dress uniform, his star gleaming in the sun.

“Let’s go.”

“Where?” I was tired and annoyed.

He was already halfway to the street, where his familiar black Crown Victoria was idling.

“So what’d you do to piss off the FBI?” he asked, once we were rolling. After I told him a Reader’s Digest version of the past week, he said the Feds were demanding I be taken off the case. He was smiling.

“I thought you said not to worry about Eric Pham.”

“They’re pretty mad,” Peralta said. “You can make people mad, Mapstone.”

“I just have an inquiring mind. John Adams said an inquiring mind is God’s greatest gift.”

Peralta grunted.

In thirty minutes, we were on the far west side of the city, past the old suburb of Maryvale and into the new sprawl of Avondale and Goodyear, heading toward the White Tank Mountains.

“Where are we going?”

“Are you ready to offer a theory?” he demanded.

“Not yet. Where are we going?” The sun sent heat waves off the freeway, the mirages of the auto age. Late April and the newspaper said every day of the month had been above normal temperatures. I angled some air conditioner vents on me and finally started to cool off.

His deep set, lively black eyes looked me over, then returned to the road. He said, “Patience.” That was to my question. He had none. “How does all this connect wi

th your homeless guy?”

I said, “Patience.”

He shifted his bulk in his seat. “We don’t have a lot of time, Mapstone…”

“What?” I said. “My wife is being chased by the Russian mafia and I can’t even see her. I don’t have a clue how our life is going to be from now on. That’s urgency I can understand. This fifty-year-old murder case is-”

“Important,” he said.

Then we were at the gate of Luke Air Force Base, where heavily armed Air Police in camouflage fatigues waved us through the maze of concrete barriers.

“I’ve had my fill of feds today,” I said. Peralta ignored me as we passed the main administration buildings, then anonymous brick maintenance and barracks buildings. Luke was the largest fighter training base in the world-but the subdivisions kept creeping closer, and soon it would be forced to shut down. We eased the car past more guards, barriers, and concertina. Peralta stopped the car and we both were ordered out for a search. As an airman used a mirror on wheels to check the underside of Peralta’s cruiser, we handed over our firearms and signed on a clipboard. The Air Police were young, superbly fit, and unsmiling. Then we were loaded into an olive Humvee-not the luxury civilian kind that had chased me. An Air Police officer in back slid a hood over my head.

“What the hell?” My heart rate shot up instantly.

“Just relax, sir. Please leave the hood in place for security reasons.”

“I’m not relaxed.”

“C’mon, Mapstone.” I heard Peralta’s voice. “Do yourself a favor.”

I felt movement, air coming through the open windows, the distant blast of F-16 jet engines. The fabric of the hood was rough against my face, and it was hot. Things were getting too strange. What secret history had I stumbled onto in the embalmed living room of Vince Renzetti, in the archives at Cal-Berkeley? What unlucky amulet was the lost badge of John Pilgrim? Somehow it fit together: the Russian agent in dusty old Phoenix; the Chicago Outfit, consolidating their crime empire; the young FBI man with a love of trouble and women, who nevertheless was very good at his job. A single shot beside an irrigation canal. A missing badge. And then five decades…

Lindsey would help me make sense of this. Lindsey would shield me from my dark moods and my night fears and the consequences of my inquiring mind. I needed Lindsey right then, right that second.

And when the Humvee stopped and they pulled off the hood, she was there.