High Country Nocturne (David Mapstone Mystery 8)

I stood against the wall behind the liquor store and waited. Situational awareness: No one seemed to be following me. The alley was empty.

The back door to Johnnie’s was white and battered, with a slit of a window guarded by bars. A sign was pasted to the center, black with orange letters, the kind you could buy at a hardware store: “Construction workers only.”

I rapped six times slowly.

A piece of paper peeled back from the slit, as if I were trying to get into a speakeasy. I held open my badge case until I heard a lock turn and the door opened long enough for me to step inside.

A big man with an assault rifle and ballistic vest told me to turn around and put my hands in the air to be searched. The lanyard around his neck showed an FBI identification.

“That won’t be necessary.”

It was Eric Pham.

“Anchorage is hell this time of year,” I said. “But with climate change, it will get better up there.”

He didn’t laugh. He had no sense of humor in the best of times. But in the best of times, he also dressed like a fed with a fussy streak. If it was a hundred ten degrees, he wore a suit, dimple perfectly centered in his tie, gold-and-blue FBI pin properly centered on his lapel. Today, he inhabited jeans and a baggy gray sweatshirt. It made him look much younger and not in a good way.

He and his team were also perfectly concealed. The FBI had recently built a huge new Phoenix field office, but it was way up north by Deer Valley Airport. The Bureau had been located in Midtown all my life, but even it had become another hustle in the sprawl engine tearing the city apart. Now this was the last place anyone would look for the feds.

“You weren’t supposed to be part of this.” He glared at me.

“Peralta made me a part.” I could glare, too. “He left the business card that said, ‘find Matt Pennington.’ Then this hitwoman…”

“We don’t know she’s a hitwoman or even a part of this operation.”

My temples started throbbing. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“Walk across the street to the ICU and tell that to my wife. Oh, you can’t because she’s in a coma after the hitwoman shot her and nearly killed her…”

“Calm down, Doctor Mapstone.”

So I was a doctor again.

I was about to go from zero to asshole in 3.6 seconds so I forced my temper down.

The room was dim, lit by a few overhead fluorescent lights long past their prime. The dingy tables from the restaurant had been set up with computers,

two and three screens each, with four agents at work. All wore hoodies or T-shirts. They looked me over and went back to their screens.

Other than the computers, it looked nothing like an FBI control center from the movies of television. No expensively designed techno-wonder. A white board stood at one end of the room. Someone had sketched boxes with lettering inside:

PERALTA

RUSSIANS

SUSPECT AGENT

PENNINGTON

OTHER?

Lines connected some of the boxes. It didn’t seem very helpful.

Pham said, “Our asset tells me you found Pennington dead, a suicide.”

The asset being Ed Cartwright. Pham wouldn’t say his name even among this trusted group.

I said, “That’s what it was made to look like. The woman…”