Camelback Falls (David Mapstone Mystery 2)

The figure came closer. Leo O’Keefe shook his head and said, “Oh, dear God, will this never end?”

He looked over his shoulder at the city lights, then back at me. “Nixon contacted me six months ago. He wanted to go to Chief Peralta, tell what really happened in Guadalupe. How the cops were on the take, how they stole the drugs. How those convicts were really in with them.”

“Why did he have a change of heart?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “He said he’d fallen in love with a woman, she was a Christian, and he’d been doing a lot of thinking about his past. About what the River Hogs did to me. Whatever the reason, he came out to the prison, and we met several times. He wanted to help me make a case for a pardon from the governor. But somebody found out in the Sheriff’s Office, and Dean got scared.”

“Twenty-one years ago,” I said. “Did someone talk to you after you were arrested? Somebody who told you what to say?”

“God, yes,” he said, and named the name.

“That’s what Beth said. She’s come back from Denver to testify.”

Leo shook his head. “I always forget she’s changed her name,” he said. “It makes her mad when I call her Marybeth.”

“But you killed a man, Leo. We can’t undo that.”

His body language was calm. He just stood there, a figure in half-darkness, rooted to the mountainside. He said, “I know that. Does it make any difference that he tried to kill me? He was sent by the River Hogs to take me out. They didn’t trust me to shut up. But I used to work in the peanut mills, in the summers, back in Oklahoma. Hauling around those bags. I was stronger than I looked. He made a stupid move, and I let him fall on his knife.”

“I hadn’t heard that.”

“I’ve only been trying to tell it for twenty years.”

That was the last sound I heard before the gunbarrel exploded.

A flash came from the direction of my left shoulder, and Leo was lifted off the ground and deposited in the rocks five feet away. My first instinct was to hit the ground. My second was to run to the little man who sprawled unnaturally on his back. Neither move was particularly smart. But there I was, kneeling before Leo O’Keefe. He looked like a broken mannequin. A dark liquid trailed out the side of his mouth. In the reflected light I could see deep creases cut into his face, and how his ponytail was gray. He was younger than me. I cradled his shoulders helplessly, letting the burrs and rocks cut into my knees. He stared up at me and tried to speak.

“Nice job, Sheriff. You got your man.”

I stayed on my knees, trying to keep Leo’s airway open. But I could clearly see a face when I turned toward the house.

“Too bad you’ll be fatally wounded in the capture,” Bill Davidson said.

In the light reflected from the city he still looked like the Marlboro man. Tall, slender, rugged-getting more handsome every year he got older. He wore a Western-cut white shirt and nicely aged denim. In his right hand was the blued barrel of a revolver. In his left was a semiautomatic.

“So that’s how it still works?” I said. “Do what you want. Plant the evidence to back it up.”

He shrugged. “There’s nobody to blame for this but David Mapstone,” he said. “You could have stopped this at any time. God, I made you sheriff. And that damned idiot Abernathy went along with it. But, yeah, that’s how things play out now. I shot O’Keefe with this weapon.” He hefted the semiautomatic. “And I’ll leave that with you. I’ll shoot you with this revolver, which I’ll leave with Leo.” His teeth shone in the light. “You’ll have a grand funeral, Sheriff.”

I said, “Nobody will believe it. I’d never carry a semiautomatic.” That seemed to throw him off stride, but he moved closer. My Python was in my belt, an impossible six inches away from my right hand. I stood slowly.

“Don’t you fucking move!” he ordered, his deep voice quavering. “Why couldn’t you let this go? This was nothing to you.”

“Just that someone tried to murder my friend.” The Python weighed heavily on my waist.

“He could have let it go, too,” Davidson said. “Peralta didn’t have to reopen this. That scumbag Nixon stirred it all up again.”

“The past has a way of coming around,” I said. “Like that night in Guadalupe. You told me you were off duty, with a sick child. What you didn’t tell me was that you came downtown later, plainclothes, to threaten Beth and Leo to lie about the dirty cops they saw.”

“Dirty cops,” he snorted. “Do you know what a joke you were as a cop, Mapstone?”

“I never rated the River Hogs,” I said.

“Damned straight,” he said, without irony. “We kept the fucking peace out in the county. I never took a vow of poverty.”

“It was that simple?”

“Let me tell you something, it was the simplest thing in the world. One night, Nixon and I were working undercover. We busted these two scumbag drug dealers out in Apache Junction. They’ve got like a trunkful of pot in their trailer. And the phone rings. It was one of their fucking customers. Nixon and I just looked at each other, and we knew what we were going to do. We didn’t bust them. We sold them the drugs.”