I sighted him down the barrel of my service revolver, raising it as fast as I could. My hand shook violently. Sweat ran off my wrist. I was still stuck in the car, now absurdly exposed. He aimed at me, tensed, and I knew I had lost the race.
Then the air exploded and his middle turned into a dark red mess. He jolted back in the air as if slapped by a giant hand, then collapsed on the ground. Peralta walked toward him, a big man in a tan uniform, still holding out the shotgun for lethal business. I rolled out onto the dirt, keeping my head down.
Under the car, I saw jeans and black biker boots run toward us from the front of the other cruiser. An angry screaming, a sharp string of gunfire. Then another low boom from the direction of Peralta.
I forced myself off the ground, and we were alone. Peralta and me and four dead men. A layer of gunsmoke lingered as a chest-level cloud, ghostly in the fading light. It almost seemed tinged red with blood turned aerosol by the buckshot.
For the longest time the night grew around us and was utterly silent. Then I heard calls for help in Spanish, and finally the sounds of sirens, growing louder.
That’s how I remembered it.
Chapter Seven
Lindsey wrinkled her nose as if something smelled bad. “The seventies,” she said. “Yuck.”
“I thought you liked the music,” I challenged. A light band of freckles spread across her nose. You’d miss it in most lights. Her tiny gold nose stud gleamed in her left nostril. She was out of uniform, wearing black jeans and an oversized gray sweater.
“I like the music, sometimes, because it’s campy and fun. I also like Sleater-Kinney and Beethoven, Dave. I’m unpredictable.”
“I love that.”
She studied her shot glass, bent down close to the table, and sipped off the golden meniscus of Glenlivit, her winter drink. “But the seventies seems pretty gross.” She arched her eyebrow. “You baby boomers.”
“Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, baby.”
She brushed back a strand of dark hair that had fallen over her right eye. “I bet you had a pair of polyester pants.”
“I’ll deny it. But I also had a pair of platform shoes. Made me six-foot-eight.”
“It’s all coming back in style.” She curled her lips slyly.
“OK, I agree. Yuck.”
We sat at a back table in the My Florist Cafe, a neighborhood bar that had taken over a former flower shop on McDowell. The Willo Historic District started to the north, where a neighborhood of 1920s houses somehow had survived Phoenix’s destructive ways. Below McDowell Road, lovely old neighborhoods had been obliterated by an underground freeway in the 1980s and for years it looked like the victim of a small-scale nuclear war. Now the area was slowly coming back. New upscale apartments and condos were going up next to Margaret Hance Park. The bungalows in the palm-lined streets around Kenilworth School were being rehabbed. Even the stark coppery box of the city library-everybody called it “The Toaster”-was looking more appealing.
I was just grateful for a place to relax close to home. I was working on my second martini, feeling light and calm for the first time all day, retelling the twenty-one-year-old story of the Guadalupe shootout. It was the easy unwinding when we told each other of our day. We never made it to the Suns game.
Lindsey said, “And you were how old when this happened?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Twenty-three.” She looked me over. “I bet you were hot stuff, History Shamus.”
“Nobody thought so,” I said.
“I doubt that, Dave. But if the shootout ended with the dirtballs getting killed, how does that tie into the shootings of Peralta and Nixon?”
I said, “It wasn’t over yet.”
I again walked her back twenty years and through what happened next. With the second suspect down, I pulled myself off the gravel and checked the two deputies on the ground for pulses. They were both faceup dead. Then I looked toward this old blue Chevy, still idling directly ahead of the sheriff’s cruiser, and a head bobbed above the seat and disappeared. I drew down and ordered them out. Peralta came up on the other side of the car and chambered a new round in the shotgun. Then Nixon and his partner rolled in. A woman’s voice begged us not to kill them.
They slowly crawled out of the backseat. The woman looked like the girl next door, if you stuck the girl next door right in the middle of a multiple homicide: surfer-girl blond hair, straight and parted in the middle, prom-queen face. Her companion was a small man with very long black hair. They were younger than me. She started crying and talking. I told her to shut up, Mirandized her, and pushed her down into the gravel and burrs. I cuffed her to await a search from a female deputy. Then the guy. Peralta had him on his knees, the shotgun not six inches from his face. I cuffed him and pushed him face-down next to her, ordered him to shut up, too.
“You guys didn’t just beat confessions out of suspects back then?” Lindsey smiled darkly.
“We were very professional,” I said. “I didn’t want them to get shot in all the confusion and adrenaline. Cops get nervous trigger fingers when two of their colleagues have just been shot down like dogs.”
Lindsey finished her scotch. “These two in the backseat. They were involved?”