Camelback Falls (David Mapstone Mystery 2)

Camelback Falls? I made a quick mental list of everything he had me working on: the unsolved disappearance of the minister’s wife from 1964; a reassessment of a murder investigation from 1982, because the murderer had been granted a new trial; the Web version of my Sheriff’s Office history, which was actually selling well at bookstores in the Valley. I didn’t have a clue about “Camelback Falls.”

Suddenly, the side door opened and I had company.

It was Jack Abernathy, still in uniform, his bulk stretching at the fabric of the tan shirt. His Charley Tuna face reddened and his mouth crooked down.

“Mapstone, what the hell? What are you doing in here?” His voice was raspy and soft, a Texas drawl poking out on certain words.

He’d never liked me. He was old school Sheriff’s Office, where you did your time, kept your mouth shut, and didn’t think too much. I failed on all three counts.

“I had to get something for Sharon Peralta. The sheriff is in surgery now.”

He stared at me. I said in a steady voice, “What are you doing here?”

He started to speak. Then he turned suddenly and stalked out the door. Under his breath I heard, “Fuck you!”

Chapter Three

I left the commandeered sheriff’s cruiser at headquarters to find its way home, and I drove back in Lindsey’s old white Honda Prelude. I flipped the radio over to AM, where all the news stations were reporting on the shooting of Sheriff Peralta, just hours after he was sworn in. One newscaster called it an “assassination attempt.” “Critical condition” was repeated over and over. Then the station cut to a commercial for Waterworks, a chain of waterbed stores that had somehow survived the 1970s. I felt like an ice spike was lodged in my stomach.

The horrid 1980s tower of Good Sam appeared. It looked like a spaceship from a low-budget science-fiction movie. Outside, the TV satellite trucks were stacked into the parking lot and spilling out onto Twelfth Street. Four reporters, spaced apart like saplings with a wardrobe allowance, were doing live feeds. Inside, cops guarded entrances, patrolled hallways, and stood around looking bored and fingering their gunbelts. After being challenged a half dozen times, I finally returned to the little waiting room where I’d left Lindsey and Sharon. All I wanted was for Peralta to be OK.

He wasn’t. He was in a coma.

I sat on a too-comfortable chair as Sharon, now flanked by her daughters, told me what they knew. Two bullets hit Peralta. One entered his back, missed the spine and aorta by no more than an inch, then blew out his chest, fracturing a rib. The second round hit the top of his head. The bullet fragmented, although most of it didn’t enter his skull-“His hard old head,” Sharon laughed and sniffled. Whether that was lucky enough, nobody knew. They did some exploratory surgery. They did a CAT scan. The chief of neurosurgery was called in, along with a half dozen other specialists from around the city. All they could say was that his brain had been shocked, was under pressure from swelling, and it would take time to know how serious his condition was.

Then, feeling foggy and for the first time sore from where Peralta fell on me, I followed Sharon and Lindsey past more deputies to the ICU.

“They don’t know anything” Sharon whispered vehemently, running a hand through her dark hair.

“The doctors?”

“The police,” she said.

“They didn’t make any arrests?” I demanded.

“No suspects, no motive,” Lindsey said. “How could somebody escape from a room with a thousand cops in it?”

Sharon said, “One set of detectives was asking questions about whether it was a hate crime. He’s the first Latino sheriff here. Another bunch asked if it could have been a random shooting, that he wasn’t the target. Nobody has any answers.”

I thought of all the enemies Peralta must have made in his long law enforcement career: drug dealers, skinheads, the Mexican Mafia, the Bloods and Crips, assorted killers and big-time con artists. I kept it to myself.

Then I was looking through a window at the sheriff. Only his hand was recognizable: that meaty brown fist, with the wedding band still on the ring finger. It still looked formidable. Everything else before us was a mound of gown, covers, tubes, electrodes, monitors, meters, and elaborately joined plastic bags with what looked like whole blood and some kind of IV solution. I felt sick and unreal. I put my arms around Sharon and Lindsey, and we just stood there a long time, saying nothing. A nurse in green scrubs came in and fiddled with some kind of electronic device on the IV line. Finally, Sharon said what we had all been thinking.

“I thought he was indestructible.”

***

There was nothing to do but sit and wait. We were on hospital time now, something marked by the comings and goings of people in white lab coats and green scrubs, by the traffic of metal carts holding medicine, linens, trays of hospital food, by snippets of TV shows overheard from open rooms, by the occasional scream or cry for help that escapes the carefully orchestrated calm. I had waited like this when my grandparents died. They had raised me after my parents had been lost in a light-plane crash when I was a baby. I had imagined the wait they had for word on their son and daughter-in-law, off to Colorado in a fragile little Cessna. I had no memory of my parents, and yet I carried billions of DNA messages inside me from them. Those messages made me lousy at waiting in hospitals. At 9 P.M., a nurse ran off the non-family members, and we left the Peralta women with hugs and promises to return immediately if anything changed.

Outside the hospital, it was just Monday night in Phoenix. The night was dry and chill, the temperature hovering in the low 50s. A yellow-white slice of moon was rising above the mountains to the east. Lindsey and I fell against each other, walking out with arms entwined around backs and waists, her head nuzzled into my chest. A couple of cops looked on disapprovingly; we were still in uniform. A nurse coming on duty smiled. I felt a camera flash off to the side. God, I felt tired.

We stopped by a drive-through taqueria and picked up burritos. Then, back at home in the 1928 Monterey Revival house with the picture window on Cypress Street, Lindsey made martinis while I peeled off the bloody uniform. There was even blood on my boots. I took a long, hot shower, feeling the caked blood and dirt come off my skin.

“Are you as OK as you can be, History Shamus?”

She stood at the door as I toweled off. Then she handed me a drink, just the way I like it: Bombay Sapphire, dry, with one olive. She had changed into a gray sweatshirt and jeans, and her straight dark hair, parted in the middle, swept against her shoulder as she cocked her head. Her face, with its economical eyebrows, friendly lips, and fair skin, was never far from that look of ironic insolence that had first attracted me. When she wore her oval-shaped tortoise-shell glasses, as she was doing now, she looked impossibly sexy. But as we had cleaved together the past two years, I had learned more of the subtle tones of her expressions. Tonight, it conveyed safety, “we-ness,” as she would say. She could soothe me with just her presence. I let the gin warm my throat before I tried to answer.

***