Camelback Falls (David Mapstone Mystery 2)

I felt my legs tense and then I was standing up, my right hand raised, my left on the rough black cover of Grandmother’s family Bible. Lindsey gave me a secret smile. The burrito growled loudly in my stomach. In a raw voice, I repeated he oath from Judge Peralta.

Chapter Four

“Good morning, Sheriff.”

Lindsey lay between my legs, kissing the inside of my thighs, brushing her soft hair across my awakening skin. Her hair color is just one notch lighter than black, but when the light hits it right you can make out some auburn, too. The light was hitting it right, the intense winter sun flooding joyfully through the tall bedroom window that faced Cypress Street.

“Acting sheriff,” I whispered, my mouth feeling cottony and hung over.

“I’ve never blown the sheriff before.”

“Lindsey!”

“Stop thinking, Dave.” She nibbled, kissed, teased.

“But…”

After a long anticipatory ritual, she took me in her mouth.

She murmured something indecipherable. I moaned and clutched the sheets. Later I would think about my sleepless night, rewinding and playing yet again the events in the Immaculate Heart gym. Peralta festooned with tubes and wires, in a coma. The blood everywhere. Later I would think how, as Lindsey told me, I was lucky the first shot didn’t come through Peralta and hit me. That worry pain in my middle, right below where my ribs met the breastbone, would resume, goaded by the memory of all the other times I had waited helplessly for word from a hospital. And I would stew about the events at midnight out in the living room, which suddenly had launched us all on a trajectory that seemed guaranteed to turn out badly. But that was later.

Lindsey murmured, and I moaned. She knew just how to play me. To hell with my dying friend, the sheriff. We had the deep history now, Lindsey and I. Three years ago I was lucky enough to stop by her cubicle to get help on a case. I had spent too many years entwined in love affairs with overcomplicated, overwrought women. Lindsey wasn’t like all the others, as she said. She loved books. She loved sex. She had turned thirty the month before. But she was an old soul, my dark star, full of kindness and good sense and a brave heart. I had made love at twilight with Lindsey, and it didn’t fill me with dread or sadness.

So I contracted the world to the two of us and stopped thinking. The sheets were getting comfortably old. The room smelled of sex. A wintering cardinal banged into the window, then fluttered away. My hands fluttered ecstatic against her fine dark hair.

Afterward, we held each other more tightly than usual, and we let go with reluctance when the phone reached the third ring.

“Good morning, Sheriff.”

I cleared my throat and said, “I’m only the acting sheriff. Who are you?”

“Communications center, sir. I’m Sergeant Robin Greene,” came the voice on the other end. I waited and she went on. “This is your morning briefing. Sheriff. I am the communications day watch commander.”

I instinctively swung out of the bed. My feet felt swollen and creaky. I looked across the hall to the empty guest bedroom. Pasternak sat in the doorway watching me with his old gray tomcat eyes. Two years ago Peralta

had lived in that room, during a time when he and Sharon were close to a rupture and life was getting way too complicated.

“We had a fairly busy night,” Sergeant Greene went on. “We had an unauthorized prisoner release from the Durango Street Jail.”

“What?”

“An inmate was released who shouldn’t have been. He was down the railroad tracks before they even realized it. He’s in for rape, a six-time loser.”

“Good lord,” I said.

“I know, sir. We’ve issued the standard statement to the media.”

“We lose prisoners so often there’s a standard statement’?”

“It’s just procedure, sir. And there was a shooting overnight in District One, in Queen Creek. A six-year-old girl, she was supposed to testify in a murder trial today against a gang member.”

“You’re just a beam of sunshine, Sergeant Greene,” I said. Lindsey looked at me quizzically and pulled the sheets over herself.

“Just the job, sir,” Greene said. “No other county homicides last night. Phoenix had two, and Mesa had one, a drive-by. One chase involving DPS. Highway patrolman attempted to stop a vehicle at 2300 last night outside Buckeye. He initiated pursuit when the vehicle failed to stop. Other agencies joined in, and the suspect finally ran off the Stack as it headed into downtown Phoenix.”

“Jesus,” I said, imagining the tall freeway interchange near down-town where Interstates 10 and 17 came together. “How far down?”

“He fell seventy-five feet, and was unhurt. We have him in Madison Street Jail, sir.”