Dry Heat (David Mapstone Mystery 3)

Chapter Twenty-three

The phone rang once. Just enough to wake me. No more rings followed, but the ring’s echo seemed to linger in the room. When I picked up the receiver, only a dial tone waited on the line. The clock by the bed said 3:13. I hadn’t been afraid of the dark since I was a little boy. So why was my heart hammering against my chest? Lord Nelson had suffered from panic attacks and night sweats. That was no comfort at the moment. Around me was the familiar old bedroom, where Lindsey and I played, laughed, and read to each other. The nightstand on my side of the bed held a thick volume with a royal blue binding: Woodrow Wilson and the Decline of the Progressive Age, by Daniel J. Milton. Autographed by the author. I knew the inscription by heart: “To David Mapstone, who is gifted with a fine, if fey, mind.” Tonight the fey ruled. I reached beside the book to find the comforting bulk of the Colt Python, and I slid out of bed.

I prowled the house, nude except for the big revolver, conscious of how often I was drawing down lately. “Size matters,” I would have joked to Lindsey. But Lindsey wasn’t there. Pasternak met me outside the bedroom door and followed me, agitated just like me. Only a fool would keep living in this house after his wife had been targeted by the Russian mafia. We didn’t even have an alarm. I stepped into the living room and leaned against the wall, listening. The light flowed blue-white through the picture window. Everything looked normal, the high ceiling, the heavy iron chandelier, stairs that opened onto a walkway that led to the garage apartment, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

Grandfather had built this house only twelve years after Arizona became a state. It had been the physical manifestation of his flourishing dental practice. And the place where he would bring his baby son, named Calvin because Grandmother liked the name, and it was the president’s name. Grandmother, whose first name was Emma, had come to Arizona from Indian Territory in 1910, because her brother was farming near Phoenix. She was black-haired and vivacious. By the time I knew her, her hair was white and the sun had turned her skin into a wrinkly parchment, but she still had the spirits that beguiled Grandfather. They had loved this house.

Cal Mapstone had flown B-17s in World War II, and came home to take his part of the great Arizona boom. But schooled in Grandfather’s ideal of service, he became a physician, attending medical school in Los Angeles. He came back to Phoenix in the ’50s and worked in the VA Hospital. He had married late, by the standards of the day, at age thirty-two. His bride was named Laura and came to Phoenix to be near her father, who was dying at the VA. They married in 1958, and a year later I came along. A year after that, my father and my mother were lost in a small plane on a trip to Colorado. Grandfather always said the plane would have been safe if Cal had been flying. But it had been another pilot. And the baby David came to this house, where he had been raised by his grandparents. Death and loss attended this house tonight.

Tread carefully in the past, Dan Milton told me, more than once. And so when I came back to Phoenix, I knew ghosts would be there to welcome me home. Mostly, they had been a comfort, with only the occasional heartache. But as I leaned against the wall, I realized that all the feelings that had been gathering inside me for the past two months were watered by more than the Russians and a vague sense of restlessness. It was more than a yearning to be a “real” historian. More than the sense it was time to let Phoenix go and move on. It was the terrible truth that adults hide from children, that drives the reflective soul to religion or philosophy. We are born to die. Our time here is so brief. Dan Milton, Judge Peralta, George Weed. Lindsey’s colleagues who went off for a fun night of drinks in Scottsdale and ended up dead. Vince Renzetti, with his fading photos and the awful knowledge that when he died all those memories would die with him. Now I faced the real possibility that Lindsey could be killed. Or I could. This will never be over, Lindsey had said. I wanted to believe that I only wanted to survive to take care of her, my wife who knew some measure of grief and loneliness before we found each other. But, in truth, I was afraid, too.

I made myself walk. Better to walk than to dissolve into self-pitying existentialism. Out the window, the street looked safely deserted. The rain had moved on earlier in the evening, allowing for one of those Phoenix sunsets that make you weak in the knees. This one began with wavy scarlet streaks across the sky, and ended thirty minutes later with an emphatic red and purple vortex on the western horizon, precisely at the foot of Indian School Road. I was a connoisseur of Phoenix sunsets, but I had never seen anything like this. It looked as though if I could drive fast enough, I could enter the expressionist dimension of that sunset moment. Phoenix sunsets inspired such thoughts.

Into the study, I found nothing but the small light indicating Lindsey’s printer was plugged in. The enclosed courtyard in back needed sweeping, but otherwise looked benign. The house was silent except for the familiar creaks and plumbing noises. I walked halfway up the stairs and sat, perusing book titles and petting the cat. That’s when I saw it.

Out the window, on the street, just beyond the low hedge of the house next door. A glow. A cigarette glow. I closed my eyes tightly, not believing it at first. But the glow came again, unmistakably.

I made myself descend the stairs silently, as if any errant step would instantly be heard outside. In the bedroom, I pulled on some sweats and running shoes. I needed to be ready for anything. Still carrying the gun, I went to the bedroom window, which had a better view of the western end of the street. But the glow was gone. I stood in the dark, with the curtain barely pulled back, watching. A long minute went by, and I thought I had talked myself into seeing things. Then, just beyond the black bulk of the hedge, an orange tip flamed again. Someone was standing there, smoking. At 3:30 in the morning.

I reached for the phone and started to dial 9-1-1. I only got to the “9” and stopped. What if it was my neighbor, outside smoking. Only she was seventy and didn’t smoke. I placed my hand on the phone. The worst that can happen is the cops find a vagrant sitting by the curb. Or a Russian hit team ready to take me out. I picked up the phone. I set it back on the nightstand.

“I can’t live in fear,” I said aloud, walking to the back of the house.

I let myself out the back door, crossed the yard, and then unlocked the gate that led into the alley. It was so dark it took a few minutes for my eyes to adjust. But then I was able to make good time down the gravel that led to Fifth Avenue. Once on the sidewalk, I quickly doubled back to Cypress Street. Somewhere in the distance I heard the rhythmic whisper-clack of a lawn sprinkler, the timer ignoring the recent rain; a train whistle coming from the Santa Fe line by Grand Avenue. I moved into the lawns, close to the fronts of the houses, and walked back toward the source of the glow. The grass gave way under my tread, but I moved quietly enough. The air was cool and dry, just the hint of a breeze from the High Country. As I got closer, I discerned the form of a man sitting on a motorcycle, watching my house. I had the cell phone in my pocket. But I held the Python in my hand.

“Don’t even breathe,” I said, making a show of cocking the Colt, an unnecessary piece of theater to actually firing a double-action revolver. But the decisive click of metal on metal carried its own important information.

“Dr. Mapstone, what are you doing out at this hour?”

It was Bobby Hamid.

His feline eyes glittered from the light of the street lamp. His casual posture on the motorcycle barely changed. He was wearing a supple leather jacket that on anyone else would have invited touching. A black knit top and black jeans completed the ensemble. I let the gun’s hammer down and slid it into my waistband.

“No sleep tonight, Dr. Mapstone?” he said. “Virgil called sleep the brother of death. That has always stayed with me.”

I didn’t know whether to be worried or angry or relieved. “What if I told you the police are on their way?”

“This is a public street,” he said. He took a drag from a small cigar, producing the glow I had seen from the house. “And I am talking with my friend, the history professor.”

“I always wanted to have a gangster as a friend.” I sighed.

“Oh, David, those are old wives’ tales from the cop shop-one of those wonderful Americanisms, ‘cop shop.’ Sheriff Peralta doesn’t understand me.”

“He understands your connection to half the meth operations in the Southwest,” I said. “Along with assorted murder and mayhem.”

“And you know,” he said amiably “that I have never been convicted, despite Sheriff Peralta’s best bigoted efforts. These may be bad times for men with Middle Eastern backgrounds living in America, but as you know, Dr. Mapstone, I am a naturalized citizen, an Episcopalian, and a venture capitalist. All quite legitimate. I never even bought Enron stock.”

I didn’t laugh. “What are you doing here, Bobby?”

He adjusted one of his rich locks of hair. “Looking after you. It’

s no secret the Russians are after Miss Lindsey. You must be missing her. And who wouldn’t? So beautiful, with that watchful, poetic quality to her. I can see her, before she found you, of course, as the smart girl surrounded by good-looking but stupid men. Thus her armor of irony and sarcasm…”

He watched me and paused.

“I don’t quite understand why you are being so reckless,” he went on. “Yuri’s brigade-they call their cells brigades, so many are former Red Army officers-Yuri’s brigade is known for its ruthlessness.”

I let my eyes sweep the street. “For a venture capitalist, you know a hell of a lot about Yuri.”