“Relax,” she said, kissing me and gently easing my head down against the lip of the tub. “After legs, this is a breeze.”
I barely felt the pressure against my neck, but I could hear the sound of blade against beard like it was on loudspeaker. “You have nice, taut skin,” she said. “Did you ever think about growing a beard?”
“I had one when I was teaching.”
“I love beards. But they take a lot of work to keep neat.”
I didn’t say anything. I just gave in to the experience: the pressure of her stroke, the muted grating-ripping sound of the stubble falling before the sharpness of the blade.
“My first lover had a beard,” she said. “His name was Will.”
I could hear a train whistle out the window, long and mournful.
“I really loved him. We were both smoke jumpers. We thought we were invincible. I guess everybody does when they’re young. Anyway, we had this romantic notion of living out in some national forest for the rest of our lives.”
She swept on fresh shaving cream, the soft bristles of the barber’s brush the very opposite sensation of the blade. I closed my eyes. I felt her fine hair brush my cheek as she leaned down to resume shaving me.
“We went on a fire in northern California. It was outside Susanville. Just a little lightning strike that got out of hand. I went down a ridge with some fusees-those are ignition flares-to start a backfire. And when I turned around there was just this wave of fire rolling down the mountainside. It looked like it was ten stories tall. There wasn’t any time to run, to do anything. I pulled out my Shake ‘N Bake-they issued us these little individual tents made of aluminum, but we didn’t really believe they’d work. And I got under it and just drove myself into the ground. God, I can still taste those pine needles.”
I didn’t open my eyes. I just listened to the alto melody of her voice, felt the confident rhythm of the razor in her hand.
“Well, the fire jumped over me. It was an amazing feeling of being in the stomach of this thing, but I was alive. I couldn’t believe it. But when I went back up the hill, I found Will.”
She stopped shaving and I opened my eyes.
“He had fireproof boots.” She spoke more slowly now. “And that’s about all there was.”
She had the razor poised in front of me, and then there was a drop of water on the blade. Just big enough for a tear.
32
Monday. Exactly a month had passed since I had fallen into the elevator shaft of the Triple A Storage Warehouse. The Yarnell twins had been identified. But otherwise, as my friend Lorie might say, police were baffled. I didn’t care. I had shaved a beautiful woman’s legs with a straight razor.
The phone was ringing as I walked down the hall to my office. I unlocked the door, bounded to the desk and grabbed the receiver.
“Mapstone.” It was Hawkins: “It’s all over. You got something to write on?”
Twenty minutes later, I pulled into an old gas station, where Buckeye Road crossed Nineteenth Avenue. Buckeye was the old highway west. Today it was populated with the ruins of small motels, coffee shops, and filling stations, most encoded with gang graffiti. Some forlorn street vendors operated from vacant gashes of land where a crack house had been bulldozed. Bleak concrete warehouses intruded every few blocks. It was a rough neighborhood.
Peralta was sitting with Hawkins in an unmarked car. Both of them were wearing flak jackets. I parked the BMW and climbed in the back seat of the cop car.
“Hey, Mapstone,” Hawkins greeted me like his best friend in the world. “Just thought you’d want to be in on the bust.”
“Bust?”
“The guy who did Max Yarnell,” Peralta said, sounding subdued.
I sat back on the slick vinyl of the seat. “How do we know?”
“Confidential informant,” Hawkins said. “You guys at the S.O. ought to try it on the Strangler case.”
“Eat shit,” Peralta growled. “Suspect is Hector Gonzalez, age twenty. Has a long record for burglary and assault. He was in county jail Wednesday night for beating up his girlfriend. He started talking shit in jail, and the informant heard him talk about killing somebody named Yarnell.”
Hawkins crowed, “A burglar, Mapstone. ‘Yarnell curse,’ my ass.”
Peralta went on, “He’s apparently crashing with some friends at one of these scummy little motels that has been turned into apartments. It’s about two blocks west of here.”
“In the city of Phoenix,” Hawkins added.
Peralta passed back a jail mugshot of a young man with exotic eyes and a sullen, small mouth.
Hawkins smiled. “When the cavalry comes, we’re going after him.” He eyed me. “Stay back and don’t get in the way.”
Peralta winked and handed me a vest. I strapped it on and wished I had brought Speedloaders for the Python. I was supposed to stay back. Six rounds should be enough.
The cavalry came in the form of four more unmarked police cars. We formed up in the lot, listened to some redundant instructions from Hawkins, then drove leisurely two blocks to where Hector Gonzales, age twenty, was supposedly waiting for us.
Behind a faded neon sign that proclaimed “Thunderbird Auto Court” stood two long, low brick buildings overlooking a concrete parking lot that had been patched too many times. We bumped over cracked pavement and deep chug holes, coming to a halt in front of a door labeled 1-A. Instantly, half a dozen cops in flak jackets jogged to the sides of the door and headed around to the rear of the building. Peralta and Hawkins took up positions right by the door, guns drawn. I stayed behind the car, maybe ten feet away, and knelt down behind the fender.
We were too late. A dozen young Hispanic men dashed out of the back and scattered across Buckeye, bringing shrieks of tires and car horns from the traffic. Hawkins rose and kicked in the door, shouting commands in English and Spanish. He was knocked backward suddenly and landed face up on the pavement just as the roar of a shotgun blast reached my ears. I hit the ground and drew the magnum. A spray of machine-gun fire erupted out of the room, echoing weirdly under the eaves of the little motel. Then there was silence.
From under the car, I saw Hawkins roll to the side and then be pulled away by other cops.
“I’m fine, goddamnit!” he rasped. They had him off to the side of the door, sitting upright in the dirt. He had a tight little pattern of birdshot in the middle of his vest. I leaned in the car door, grabbed the microphone and gave the radio code for “officer down, needs assistance.”
Then it was over, just as suddenly as it started. I heard some voices calling out in Spanish, then some guns were tossed out. Two guys who looked no older than fourteen swaggered out, all cheap machismo. They were dragged to the ground and handcuffed by the cops. Peralta planted a knee in one suspect’s back and his Glock at the base of his head. Neither kid looked like Gonzales.
“Secure. Code four,” a male voice called from the motel room.
I got on my feet, dusted myself off and walked over to Hawkins. He had the air knocked out of him, at the least. I pulled the flak vest off, and he moved his head in a little circle, looking around. The shot hadn’t penetrated the vest, but raising his T-shirt, I could see an ugly purple bruise on his chest from the impact of the round. Like mom always said, never go out without your bulletproof vest.
“We get the little bastard?” he demanded in a slurry voice.
“Not yet.”
“What do you mean not yet?” He focused on me. “I told you to stay out of the way.”
I leaned him against the wall again and stood.
I walked south along the building to work a charley horse out of my calf. Behind me, I could hear sirens coming down Buckeye. In about three minutes, half the cops in the district would be here, along with paramedics, firefighters, and the TV stations.
The Thunderbird Auto Court was still and silent now. But I could feel eyes watching us from behind the dirty window screens. One partly opened door was carefully closed again. The place was oppressive in its layers of age and dirt and despair. Then I passed a little carport marked by a large pool of ancient grease and Hector Gonzales was standing just inside.