His glare hardened. I was one of the few people who dared mess with him.
He said, “I went to first and second grade here, before they had to close the school. My father went to high school here. Who knows how much longer it will be around before your yuppie friends gentrify the neighborhood?”
He added, “And holding the reception here is not a bad way to shore up my support with the Latino voters.” He arched his eyebrow, a gesture of enormous humor for him. “I’m just a simple boy from the barrio.”
“You’re about as simple as quantum physics,” I said. I nodded toward the people waiting behind me. “You have lots of VIPs who want to congratulate you, Sheriff,”
He ignored me. “See, Mapstone, I know you. You can’t revise your past with me like some professor’s resume. You always should have stayed in law enforcement. So you took a fifteen-year detour as a teacher? Now you’re back in Arizona, back home at the S.O. Where you always should have stayed. Even if you’re a pain in the ass sometimes and you read too much. Admit it, Mapstone, you’re happy here.”
He was right. The “black dog moods,” as Churchill called them, came less often. I was teaching myself that tomorrow’s misfortune wasn’t an inevitable byproduct of today’s happiness. Lindsey made me feel terrifically lucky. The turn of a new millennium had come and gone benignly, as had my twenty-fifth high school reunion. I was even feeling better about Phoenix, a place that could break your heart if you grew to love it.
The noise picked up, with a mariachi band and the sheriff’s office bagpipers engaging in a merry duel.
“But we need to make some changes in the department,” he said.
“People may not like it. And I’m serious when I say I expect you to step up when asked.”
“Yeah, security at Bashas’,” I said “I can also help carry groceries. I know you’ll make all the right changes for the department, Sheriff.”
“I’m a lawman, Mapstone,” he said. “I’m no politician.”
“Well, you did pretty well, then. Getting 70 percent of the vote.”
“Oh, hell, I’d just have to break in somebody new as sheriff if I didn’t do it myself.”
I shook my head, awash with affection for this impossible, stubborn, lionhearted man, and I couldn’t suppress a wide smile.
“What the hell are you so giggly about?”
“You,” I said. “Never mind.”
He let go of my arm. “Come by my office tomorrow. I really do need to talk to you about something.”
“A new case?”
He gave his head a half nod, half shake. “Come by. You’ll find out.”
I nodded, then my eyes went to a small, intense flash in the air above Peralta’s left shoulder, and I remember thinking he’d be freshly annoyed that I wasn’t looking him in the eye. Only later would I recall two distinct, terrible cracks sounding above the clutter. Suddenly Peralta fell into me heavily and we both crashed backward hard on the floor.
I felt the quick panic of having the air knocked out of me. Something wet shot into my eyes. My back screamed in pain from the weight that quickly sandwiched it with the floor. A woman gasped and called for God’s help. As my mind refocused and my lungs refilled, I feared Peralta had suffered a heart attack. Then I saw the blood all over us.
Chapter Two
Lindsey commandeered a patrol car and we sped the mile up Seventh Street to Good Samaritan Hospital. The digital clock on the dash said the trip took four minutes. To my internal clockworks, it felt like about a decade.
“I didn’t even hear the shots,” she said over the siren. “I got there as soon as I could.”
I touched her leg. The buildings and traffic flew by, but in my mind was the image of Peralta bloody and unconscious. Maybe he was dead and the paramedics just had to go through their little show.
“Could you see a shooter?” she asked, slowing suddenly. A minivan meandered through a red light, oblivious to the lights and siren of our onrushing sheriff’s cruiser.
“A flash, maybe. That’s all.” It occurred to me she was trying to distract me, focus me on the job rather than the heap of shallowly breathing, traumatized flesh that was my friend. Did I look distraught? I kept my voice steady.
“We didn’t seal the building soon enough,” I said. “There was too much chaos. I’m not sure they got the guy.”
“Maybe it’s not a guy,” she said.
Chaos. It was like the thunderstorms in the Arizona high country that begin slowly but can suddenly turn nasty. A tense surprise moved through the crowd around us after Peralta fell. Only after seeing the blood was there something like a collective gasp. I regained my wits with only a mouthful of panic and, as gently as I could with such a big man, I rolled Peralta over on his back, and made sure his airway was open and he was breathing. He was, but he stared emptily and only made a long, exhaling sound, his powerful hand grasping my shirt shyly.
Then Lindsey was there, shielding us, sweeping her arm toward the shooter with her baby Glock 9mm semiautomatic, “ready to rock ’n’ roll,” as she puts it. But no more shots came. I heard her directing other deputies, heard them running across the old wooden floor toward where the gunfire originated. Somewhere above us. As word spread through the crowded gymnasium, civilians tried to get out while cops tried to take charge or get information. Finally the music stopped. Fragments of the crowd swelled around us, nearly stepping on us, until some Phoenix cops set up a perimeter to keep people back. They let Sharon through after a fuss. TV lights flared behind me. Somebody said the paramedics had arrived.
At Good Sam, I saw the dazzling red fire department ambulance was empty, its rear doors still open. Peralta was already deep inside the vast brightness of the trauma center. City cops and deputies milled around officiously. We parked in a space for emergency vehicles and walked quickly to the automatic doors.
“Gurney!” shouted a red-haired nurse as I walked in. I tried to step aside for this next victim, but the nurse was headed straight for me.
“He’s OK,” Lindsey said, holding out her hand as if to direct traffic. “He’s just a mess.” She smiled back at me, her twilight blue eyes calm.
“Chief Peralta,” I said, then caught myself. “The sheriff. Where is he?”
Just then Sharon strode past the nurse and hugged me tightly, despite the blood all over my uniform. Lindsey looked at me and flashed something in lover’s code.
“You’re OK?” Sharon demanded, her voice metallic and a notch louder. I nodded. Her eyes were rimmed red but she wasn’t crying.
“Where are the girls?” I asked.
“They left to take the Judge home before the party,” she said. “Thank God they weren’t there when it happened.”
Sharon Peralta holds a doctorate from UCLA and she’s a best-selling author. She’s made more money the past year than I’ll see in my lifetime. She’s the most popular radio psychologist on the West Coast, dispensing exquisitely nuanced advice from nine to noon every weekday for the latte-and-whole-grain crowd. But walking toward me she looked just as scared and awkward and at sea as the twenty-five-year-old cop’s wife she had been the first time I met her. It lasted just a minute.
“They won’t even let me in,” she said. “He’s in emergency surgery.” We moved by instinct into an otherwise deserted waiting room. Sharon sat on a greenish sofa, me and Lindsey on either side.
“Oh, David, I thought I didn’t have to worry about this anymore. I just thought he’d be a politician now. All those years when he’d go to work and I never knew if he’d…”
We all silently stared at the wall. Sharon said, “God, I still remember that night in Guadalupe, back in 1979, when you and he were patrol deputies. You remember?”
I nodded, recalling a bad shooting years ago. Peralta was a hero. I was scared shitless. If he was, it never showed. I said, “He came out of that just fine, Sharon, and he’s going to now.”
“Oh, David,” she said dully, “you don’t have to baby me…” She let the sentence trail off, then something bright and fierce crossed her face. “David, his insulin.”