Outside the hospital, it was just Monday night in Phoenix. The night was dry and chill, the temperature hovering in the low 50s. A yellow-white slice of moon was rising above the mountains to the east. Lindsey and I fell against each other, walking out with arms entwined around backs and waists, her head nuzzled into my chest. A couple of cops looked on disapprovingly; we were still in uniform. A nurse coming on duty smiled. I felt a camera flash off to the side. God, I felt tired.
We stopped by a drive-through taqueria and picked up burritos. Then, back at home in the 1928 Monterey Revival house with the picture window on Cypress Street, Lindsey made martinis while I peeled off the bloody uniform. There was even blood on my boots. I took a long, hot shower, feeling the caked blood and dirt come off my skin.
“Are you as OK as you can be, History Shamus?”
She stood at the door as I toweled off. Then she handed me a drink, just the way I like it: Bombay Sapphire, dry, with one olive. She had changed into a gray sweatshirt and jeans, and her straight dark hair, parted in the middle, swept against her shoulder as she cocked her head. Her face, with its economical eyebrows, friendly lips, and fair skin, was never far from that look of ironic insolence that had first attracted me. When she wore her oval-shaped tortoise-shell glasses, as she was doing now, she looked impossibly sexy. But as we had cleaved together the past two years, I had learned more of the subtle tones of her expressions. Tonight, it conveyed safety, “we-ness,” as she would say. She could soothe me with just her presence. I let the gin warm my throat before I tried to answer.
***
At ten minutes before midnight there was banging on the door. We were in bed, and I peeked out the front window to see half a dozen people clustered on the porch. Uniforms. Suits. One was Sharon Peralta. Beneath the porchlight was the unmistakably rigid carriage of Judge Peralta. I felt a chill creep up my feet.
“Oh my God,” I said. “He must have…”
In a minute, they were arrayed around the living room. Kimbrough was there and made introductions: The woman in the pastel blue dress was Kathleen Markham, the chairwoman of the board of county supervisors. The fifty-something man in the blazer and polo shirt was the county manager, Dan Pickett. Sharon took my hand and looked at me through tears. A younger woman in a black pants suit, Lauren somebody, was with the county recorder. A couple of young deputies stood in the background. The judge, in a suit, moved naturally to the imposing leather chair that had been my grandfather’s and eased himself down. Kimbrough looked like hell in the face, creased and ashen, but he had changed into a tailored navy suit and natty bow tie. I didn’t want anyone to speak. I didn’t want to know.
Finally, Kimbrough said, “We have a situation.”
“What?”
“How is he?” Lindsey said. “How is Peralta?”
“Oh, David,” Sharon said, sighing. “He’s the same. I realize what you must have thought. No, he’s stable.”
I sat cautiously on an ottoman. “What then?”
“David.” It was Judge Peralta. His voice had its usual tone of deep but disengaged gravity. Did I just imagine the layer of exhaustion in it?
“We are here to ask you to be acting sheriff.”
I heard Lindsey inhale sharply. I said, “Are you nuts?” I added, “Sorry, sir.” I looked around. All of them were staring intently at me.
“We have a crisis, Mapstone,” Kimbrough said. “Somebody who is still out there tried to kill the sheriff today. The sheriff may be out for a month. Or he may be…” He looked at Sharon and stopped.
“My point,” he said, “is that the department is at a critical time. We don’t know what brought on this attack. I have guards with the county supervisors. And we have to name an acting sheriff.”
“What about the old sheriff?”
“He has declined,” said Markham “He is already in Washington. He left right after the swearing in. And the timing just isn’t right for him to stay on.”
I was shaking my head. “What about the brass? Any one of them is qualified to be acting sheriff.”
Kimbrough coughed and cleared his throat. “The senior bureau heads are all competing for the chief deputy job, Mapstone. It’s politically delicate.”
I just stared at him, not wanting to understand.
Kathleen Markham said. “The top officials in the sheriff’s department are all ambitious men. Among the county supervisors, Bill Davidson has his supporters and Jack Abernathy has his. Even Mr. Kimbrough here has his backers.” Kimbrough shifted uncomfortably. “We didn’t have to be concerned with that when the obvious leader of the department was Peralta. Now, nobody wants to make a move that could be misinterpreted.”
“That’s not my problem.”
“Mapstone,” Markham said, “the brass all recommended you. It was the one thing they could agree on.” My mind rewound the scene in Peralta’s office with Jack Abernathy cursing me under his breath. That was the esteem the brass held me in. And I thought again, What did Peralta mean by the notation “Camelback Falls”?
Lindsey put a hand on my shoulder. I looked into the high ceiling of the living room, scanned the tall bookshelves and the ornate iron railing of the staircase, anything to avoid these faces.
“I am not qualified. And I don’t even see how this is legal. The elected sheriff is alive. He is going to recover.”
“At which point you will return power to him,” said Markham. “But this is not only legal but necessary. Tonight we adopted a resolution.” She waved her hand at the woman from the recorder’s office, who passed me a legal-size page with thick black paragraphs and a seal cut into the paper. “It names you as acting sheriff of Maricopa County.” She looked at Judge Peralta. “And we have a distinguished retired state appeals court judge to handle the swearing in.”
I sat there listening, feeling an ache growing in my neck and back where Peralta had lurched into me and we had fallen to the floor. Pain and numbness and reality. I wanted to run from the room and lock myself away, just like I was ten years old.
“David,” Kimbrough said. “You are the right person for this. You are a sheriff’s academy graduate, the media know who you are, you’re a smart guy, and you’re disinterested. You’re the one person everybody could agree on.”
“Please stand, David.” Judge Peralta lifted himself painfully out of Grandfather’s chair. The effort shifted the knot on his red rep tie off to one side. “You know this is what my son would want.”
Now he wasn’t fighting fair.
The judge looked at Lindsey. “Do you have a Bible, Miss Adams?” She retrieved one from the tall bookshelves by the stairs, and he positioned her to hold it before me.
I felt my legs tense and then I was standing up, my right hand raised, my left on the rough black cover of Grandmother’s family Bible. Lindsey gave me a secret smile. The burrito growled loudly in my stomach. In a raw voice, I repeated he oath from Judge Peralta.
Chapter Four
“Good morning, Sheriff.”
Lindsey lay between my legs, kissing the inside of my thighs, brushing her soft hair across my awakening skin. Her hair color is just one notch lighter than black, but when the light hits it right you can make out some auburn, too. The light was hitting it right, the intense winter sun flooding joyfully through the tall bedroom window that faced Cypress Street.
“Acting sheriff,” I whispered, my mouth feeling cottony and hung over.
“I’ve never blown the sheriff before.”
“Lindsey!”
“Stop thinking, Dave.” She nibbled, kissed, teased.
“But…”
After a long anticipatory ritual, she took me in her mouth.
She murmured something indecipherable. I moaned and clutched the sheets. Later I would think about my sleepless night, rewinding and playing yet again the events in the Immaculate Heart gym. Peralta festooned with tubes and wires, in a coma. The blood everywhere. Later I would think how, as Lindsey told me, I was lucky the first shot didn’t come through Peralta and hit me. That worry pain in my middle, right below where my ribs met the breastbone, would resume, goaded by the memory of all the other times I had waited helplessly for word from a hospital. And I would stew about the events at midnight out in the living room, which suddenly had launched us all on a trajectory that seemed guaranteed to turn out badly. But that was later.