Dry Heat (16 page)
She started to speak. But she just glared and fell into my desk chair with a heaviness that belied her slender frame.
“So you were in here rummaging around with Peralta last week because you thought I was holding out on you?”
“I’m still not sure you’re not holding out,” she said, although in a calmer voice. “You’re always trying to claim credit. You write a book report, and Peralta goes ‘ooh, ahhh’ and you’re on TV as this big crime buster.”
“I never sought that out—”
“Oh, spare me,” she said. “If you are telling the truth, and you’ve really been wasting your time with this dead vagrant.” She shook her head as if she were trying to dispense with a bad dream. “I just can’t believe it. Karen just walks up to you?”
“In a parking lot, one night about a month ago.”
“Every cop in town has been trying to find this woman.”
“She found me,” I said.
Kate’s usually tan pallor was now the color of a cranberry. “I can’t believe you,” she said. “Look at you. Look around you.” She swept her arm to take in my bookshelves and historic photos. She stood, walked over, and rapped her knuckles on the bulletin board that held photos from the Pilgrim case. “You live in this dream world. In the real world, I have to go on calls. I can’t just work one case because my friend is the sheriff. So earlier today, I went on a call. A woman had been dumped by her lover. So she went home and drowned her son and daughter, and then tried to kill herself. That’s the real world, Mapstone! Tell me what your history says about that.”
“Oh, Kate,” I said, trying to be the calm one.
She leaned over my desk and shouted, “Tell me! You can’t even see what’s in front of your face!”
“I live in the same world.” I shrugged. “It sucks. But human nature is unchanging. I was reading a newspaper clipping from 1948 about a woman, right here in Phoenix, who tried to murder her children. It sounded like what you’re—”
But she was gone. I was surprised that the glass in the door didn’t shatter when she slammed it.
The big Oldsmobile took me home through the streets of the historic neighborhoods north of downtown. I avoided the seven-lane speedways of Central or Seventh Avenue. Up comfortingly narrow Third Avenue, where the Roosevelt district had been lovingly restored. Stately bungalows and new city condos and apartments sat on streets lined by eighty-year-old Mexican fan palm trees. Margaret Hance Park had a few picnickers and walkers, even on a hot afternoon. You’d never know a freeway pulsed beneath the park. I took in the familiar mountains and skyscrapers that ornamented the park’s vista, and closer, old Kenilworth School with its classic columned entrance to the west and the new postmodern Burton Barr Library to the east. The Mission Revival Mormon Church had been saved from the freeway and now housed a puppet theater. A little farther north, Third crossed McDowell and entered Willo, with its trees and front porches baking sweetly in the 105-degree sun. This was my Phoenix, a lovely sanctuary that also held my personal history, even if the millions in their cookie-cutter subdivision pods never saw it and complained that Phoenix had no soul.
I noticed the car in the rearview mirror, so close I couldn’t even see his front bumper. Then he switched lanes and roared next to me. My stomach tightened. Down came the passenger window, and I could see the face of a thirtyish man in a polo short.
“Get out of the way, you asshole!” he screamed with a bucket-shaped mouth, his face suddenly crimson. Then he sped north on Third and soon disappeared. His back bumper held an American flag sticker with the words,
POWER OF PRIDE
.
I used to like this town. Phoenix was a sunny, dull place with no culture or ambition, but it had a sweetness and a good heart. Now we’ve got malls stuffed with people from Iowa and Wisconsin, low-wage workers in the call centers and landscape outfits and service joints, Indian casinos, mass-produced subdivisions, bigger money than you could imagine in Paradise Valley and North Scottsdale, 250 golf courses. But it’s a big hardboiled place where ordinary guys carry around their rage like an overstuffed wallet and everybody calls someplace else home.
I made it home with the horizon turning white and the wind picking up. A FedEx envelope was leaned up against the stucco wall. Lock the door behind me, feel the blessed air-conditioning, make a sweep of the house…back door locked, courtyard doors secure, closets clear, nobody hiding under Grandfather’s mahogany desk in the study. Out the picture window, the wind began slapping the palm trees insistently. I coughed instinctively, sat on the staircase with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and stared out at the familiar old neighborhood. The envelope showed a return address from the University of California at Berkeley.
My old friend from grad school days had come through. The envelope contained five sheets of a typed report, from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from 1975. The pages were black with the now familiar war paint of redacted information. But the report was clear enough. In 1944, a Soviet agent named Georgi Antonov came to Phoenix and set up a cover life as a refugee from Poland. He took a job as a waiter in a local restaurant. His real work was to pass along secrets from the American atomic weapons program at Los Alamos, New Mexico. By 1947, Antonov, who used the code name “Dimitri,” was spying on the nuclear test site in Nevada, always returning to his haven in the small city of Phoenix. A year later, Dimitri was ordered to return to Moscow. He remained in the United States—defecting to an FBI agent in Phoenix. The agent’s name was lost in a horizontal black slash. Dimitri died in 1972, having run a hat shop in Cincinnati for many years.
Dimitri didn’t kill Pilgrim. Dimitri defected to Pilgrim.
I said out loud, “Fuck!”
The wind responded with a loud moan, as if it were sweeping my theories down Cypress Street.
Soon I was caressing the spines of the books, recalling forgotten volumes. Lindsey and I had been reading McCullough’s
John Adams
before our private civilization had been invaded by the Russians. I could pick a hundred flaws in the book, but I had no grudge against popular history, as my colleagues in the professoriat did. McCullough got rich while the rest of us published obscure, unreadable papers—or went to work for the sheriff’s office. My finger lingered on the spine of
Middlemarch
, one of Lindsey’s favorites. I found one of Dan Milton’s books misshelved—with the novels rather than history. It was his insightful look at social change in the 1920s,
Coolidge Jazz
, a book that made me realize how much everything is connected, how nothing happens in isolation. Soon this reverie propelled me into the kitchen, where I made a martini—using Lindsey’s favorite Plymouth gin instead of my Bombay Sapphire—and then I settled in the big leather chair before the picture window. The closest firearm was in another room. I let it be.
The men came in with amazing ease. They were in the room before I could even move out of the chair. Somebody gave a command in Russian, and a tall man with a goatee and sad eyes aimed a clunky yellow plastic gun at me. Panic locked my legs in place. I tried to turn and roll out of the chair but it was too late. The Taser darts hit me straight on. My legs, starting to stand, collapsed as if the bones were suddenly liquefied. My abdomen was consumed in a great spasm. Men’s faces studied me with curiosity. The tall man held a straight razor, the blade rusty and chipped. I felt a wave of bile coming up my throat, then the room closed around me, black.
I usually know when I’m dreaming. Not this time. My eyes opened when the sweat from my forehead dropped into my lashes. The house was silent except for my panting and the soft whoosh of the air-conditioning.
Suddenly three cars materialized on the street. Two sheriff’s cruisers and a shiny black Crown Victoria. It was no dream. I bolted up from the chair, even as a pounding came on the front door.
“Let’s go,” Peralta ordered, looking cool in a cream-colored suit, the coat cut roomy to accommodate his Glock semiautomatic pistol. I stared at him for a long moment to make sure he was real. I started out the door but his meaty hand struck my chest.
“Bring your gun, Mapstone. You’re on the job.”
So I retreated back into the house, retrieved my Python and Speedloaders, locked up, and then followed him. He walked to the Oldsmobile.
“You drive,” he said. “I want to make sure you’re taking good care of county property.”
We sped over to the Piestewa Freeway and turned north, following the two sheriff’s cruisers. The speedometer needle was pushing against ninety, me driving and Peralta saying nothing. A quarter of a century ago, when we were partners, it was no problem to play the silent guy game and barely speak for an entire shift. But this time I was cranky after a few miles.
“If we’re on the job, where are we going?”
“DC Ranch.” One of the silver spoon developments in the McDowell Mountains. We sped on, climbing through Dreamy Draw and the North Phoenix Mountains and quickly reaching the 101 beltway. The big Olds engine seemed barely challenged; my foot had plenty of room between the accelerator pedal and the floor. I tried again.
“And what’s at DC Ranch?”
“Yuri.”
I felt an involuntary shiver. I glanced at Peralta, who stared ahead.
“If our intelligence is correct, we’ll find Yuri in the Page-Frellick House. Ever been there?”
“Nope.”
“It’s a custom job that backs up to Thompson Peak. When they built it in ’98, it was priced for $3.7 million, and a retired executive from Canton, Ohio, bought it. I went there once for a Christmas party, bunch of Republican bigwigs. The fireplace was bigger than my first apartment. Anyway, it’s been vacant for a year or so. The economy, you know. So they rented it out…”
“How did we find this out?”
“Your wife, Mapstone. She gets results.”
We got no closer than a command post just off Scottsdale Road. The parkway was blocked, and deputies and city cops were turning away homeowners in their Ferraris and Rolls Royces.
Peralta walked over to a redone bus that held the sheriff’s mobile command center. Beside a large golden badge, lettering proclaimed
MARICOPA COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE
, and in smaller letters below,
MIKE PERALTA, SHERIFF
. My old friend had done OK. I slid my badge onto my belt, borrowed a pair of binoculars, and wandered around. This had been empty desert even when I was an undergraduate. As a kid, I would come out here with Grandfather to hike and target shoot. I remembered the preternatural silence, where even a buzzing fly sounded loud. Now it was the province of the superrich, retired CEOs looking for anonymity and Lasik surgeons from Minneapolis looking for a winter home. The houses dotted the rocky hillsides and perched above dry washes and arroyos. Walls and gates reminded anyone who forgot that this was private property.
For the moment, at least, the sheriff had suspended property rights. The air was full of screeching tires and revving engines as angry residents were turned away. It mixed in with the traffic sounds from Scottsdale Road and the occasional scream of Lear jets taking off from Scottsdale airport. My eye went to a group of men in black uniforms, Kevlar helmets, and vests. They were saddling up on all-terrain vehicles, with exotic-looking weapons slung over their shoulders. Emblems on their backs said FBI. In a moment, they drove single-file across an expanse of sand and rock, then disappeared down a bank into a wash. The ATVs were amazingly silent.
“An FBI team,” Peralta said, reappearing behind me, with his suit coat gone and his shoulder holster prominent. “It’s their operation.”
Eric Pham walked up behind us and nodded. He had covered his starched white shirt with a Kevlar vest bearing the letters FBI.
“I think we’ve got them, David,” he said.
“All we have to do is hope the dust storm doesn’t hit,” I said. So far, the wind was up, whipping us with occasional sand, but the sun was still out and we had at least an hour’s daylight.
“All we have to do,” Peralta said, “is sit here and enjoy the show.”
Even the binoculars didn’t provide a very good view of the house. I saw native stone, a wall of tinted glass, and a roof set at a rakish angle. Then I didn’t see much. The storm came on, cloaking the mountains and then the scattered houses in dusty haze. At this time of day it almost looked like the fog in San Francisco, except for my persistent coughing. Back to the west, Camelback and Mummy mountains were barely visible. I heard some deputies cursing. I made my way quietly into the command post, where two rows of consoles were being monitored by deputies and FBI agents wearing slender headsets. TV screens showed a view of the desert, then the house—apparently the assault team carried cameras so the brass could watch the fun. An agent turned to Pham, Peralta, and a Scottsdale police deputy chief: “Team Blue is in place.” In another minute: “Team Red is in place.”
Barely audibly, Pham said, “Begin operation.”
Peralta turned and walked outside. It didn’t take much to bore him, especially if it was a multi-jurisdictional operation like this one. I decided to follow him. Just as I stepped onto the ground, I heard a muffled “whump.” Turning toward the house, I saw a flash and heard another concussion. From the command center I heard someone call, “Showtime.”
Peralta faced toward the action, his hands behind his back, his powerful shoulders tensed.
“You think they’ll screw it up, don’t you?” I said, trying to ease my own anxiety, tamp down my hope that Lindsey and I might be reunited soon.
“What I think doesn’t matter, Mapstone.”
“What about what you know?”
He faced me, one black eyebrow barely raised.
“The Pilgrim case,” I said. “You know more than you’re telling me.”
He studied me with a slow orbit of his eyes. “The Kate Vare thing? Don’t be paranoid, Mapstone. She was convinced you were holding out on her about some vagrant chick you interviewed. She was raising a stink with Chief Wilson and the county supervisors, so it seemed easy enough to let her check the files in your office. Don’t worry, we didn’t disturb your precious library of history books.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“What then?” he asked, his voice suddenly impatient.
I was about to launch into it when we heard an unmistakable crackle from the direction of the house, then expletives from the command center. Peralta hurried back in, and I followed him enough to stand in the doorway.
“…taking fire…one suspect is down. He’s down in the kitchen. An officer is down. Officer down…”
“How many do we think are in there?” I asked, and was ignored. Over my shoulder, the sound of automatic weapons fire had become steady. But these were short bursts, apparently from both sides. We were dealing with trained, disciplined scumbags inside that three-million-dollar pile of rocks.
Then the only sounds were wind and traffic.
“Building is secure. Building is secure. We have one officer down and four suspects down. Send in medics.”
Two ambulances were flagged through the roadblock, escorted by a Scottsdale PD unit. The tightness in my gut started to let up a little.
Someone shouted, “One of ’em’s unaccounted for. Hang on…”
Then, after a few centuries: “Yuri. Yuri’s not among the suspects.”
I stepped back outside, as if propelled by the Russian’s dark magic. My hand clutched the butt of the Colt Python, as if Yuri would suddenly appear from around the corner of the bus and kill us all. It didn’t seem impossible. The dust storm was full upon us now, the wind coming in hard horizontal bursts. The timeless logic of the desert trying to reclaim its own. The mountains were no more than a quarter mile away, but I could only see murky oblivion in that direction. I closed my eyes against the flying particles and prepared to step inside the command center. But a bulk came the other way, nearly knocking me down. Peralta.
“Let’s go,” he said, a rare wild look in his eyes.
“What?”
He spun me and pushed me like I weighed ninety pounds. Behind me, “Goddamn it, David, let’s go!”
I ran to the car. Peralta was right behind me, but he had retrieved a shotgun from one of the cruisers.
“Go!” he ordered. I assumed he meant to the house, so I blew past a befuddled deputy and aimed the Oldsmobile up Thompson Peak Parkway, then into a side road and quickly climbed into the foothills. Getting closer, I saw the ambulances and sheriff’s cruisers pull around to a wide driveway where a gazillion-car garage was built into the rocky face of the hillside. Medics were talking to one of the ninja tactical guys.
Then everything changed.
One of the tasteful desert-toned garage doors disintegrated. Pieces were still midair when the grillwork of a Hummer exploded out of the garage.
“Get off the road,” Peralta said, almost to himself.
But I was already ahead of him. Old cop intuition, which was hardwired in me by training and by four years on the street, had come alive like some forgotten tribal knowledge. I braked hard and slammed the gearshift to “R.” The Olds responded with a primal “clunk” deep in the rear end—no digital pulses from twenty-first-century auto technology here—but the car moved backwards at once. I quickly slid into the hard desert ground, uprooting a stand of prickly pear and brittle-bush.
“Oh, hell,” Peralta said. I looked toward the house and an FBI ATV and its rider were crashing to the ground on a trajectory from the Hummer. Next it slammed across the top of the sheriff’s cruiser, whose hood gave way under the Hummer’s jacked-up tires. The cruiser’s windshield shattered and the tires blew out. By then the Hummer was on the road and flying past us. It was the same black Hummer from that day in Roosevelt.
“Follow him,” Peralta commanded.
“What?”
“Goddamn it, David, go!”
I eased the Olds out of the scrub and onto the asphalt. Then I punched the accelerator into the floor.
