Then I became aware of my heart, a metronome beating fast and heavy beneath my shirt. My heart pounded faster, insistently, self-consciously. In short order, it was making my hands tremble. My breathing came shorter, and that spot just south of the breastbone was pushing at me painfully. Maybe this was how a heart attack started.
When I heard the hand on the door, I jerked so hard I almost fell out of the chair.
I stood up hopefully. I could have used a long embrace from Lindsey right then, or even a repeat of the same old conversations with the security guard. But as I neared the door, the hand was still trying the lock. Now the jerking had some force behind it. The metal clacked back harshly. I could see a body, darkly dressed, leaning against the frosted glass of the door. But the old Jazz Age wood and hardware refused to give. Then the dark shape on the other side of the frosted glass faded.
I jerked the door open and the hallway before me was empty. I jogged down to the center of the building, where the stairs curved up, but there was no one. Down the other hallway was darkness, a little light reflecting off the glass of the old hanging lamps. Thirty feet down the hall all I could see was a green exit sign. Then a bright rectangle opened beneath the sign and a darkly dressed figure slipped through into the fire stairs.
Chapter Five
The city spreads across 1,400 square miles of the Salt River Valley. Fourteen hundred square miles of asphalt and manicured lawns. Fourteen hundred square miles of shopping malls, freeways, dusty barrios, and exclusive gated communities that tear into the sides of the surrounding mountains. At night, it becomes a breath-taking vision, billions of earth-born stars running out to the horizon. In the daytime, if the smog is light, the perpetual green of palm trees and golf courses and the craggy purple bare buttes give it an otherworldly look, especially to newcomers and Easterners. And that is nearly everybody. To me it is just home, all I knew until I was a teenager. Sometimes I think it is a great city, and I am filled with pride. Other times I am sickened by how much has been lost to the growth machine.
The city is an anti-city. It was built in opposition to the confined, shoulder-rubbing cities of the East, and in opposition to its bastard forebear, Los Angeles, in the West. It was built in opposition to reality-far from any crossroads, seaport, or reliable water source. Dams and canals and air-conditioning changed reality. So Phoenix grew up from a little farm town before World War II into a megalopolis of three million people.
As befits an anti-city. Phoenix’s streets are wide and straight and predictable, running like a checkerboard atop the memories of alfalfa and cotton fields and citrus groves, and, before that, the irrigation canals of a vanished Indian nation. Today it’s warehouses and ranch houses, poolside apartments and single-family detached houses with red tile roofs. It’s single-story and spread out. A personal piece of the West for every family from Ohio and Indiana and New York. Up in the foothills and mountainsides, you find the faux adobe mansions that start at $3 million. But by that time, the streets get curvy and illogical.
The other exception in the street grid is Grand Avenue, which runs sideways through the checkerboard, straight out of downtown headed northwest. Before the interstate, it was the highway to L.A., four lanes of wanderlust set beside the tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad. On Tuesday afternoon, it was six lanes of bumper-to-bumper as commuters headed out to their subdivisions in Glendale, Peoria, and points beyond. I was the new acting sheriff but that got me exactly 30 miles an hour if I was lucky. I didn’t care. I was in no hurry to get to a murder scene, but Kimbrough had demanded my presence. So much for going to the Suns game tonight. I turned up Sue Foley’s “Young Girl Blues” on the CD and poked along.
An hour later, I turned off Grand, bumped across the Santa Fe tracks, and felt the gravel under my tires. Four brand-new sheriff’s Ford Crown Victorias were arrayed off to the side of the road, along with one sun-bleached unit from the city of El Mirage. We were so far from the opulent resorts of Scottsdale we might as well have been on another planet. This looked more like the Third World.
It was a trailer park, if you dared use the latter word, sitting hard against the railroad tracks and hemmed in by the cinder block walls of a warehouse and a water pumping station. A dozen ancient house trailers sat on either side of a dirt-and-gravel cul-de-sac. Around them, as if blown there by innumerable dust storms, were rusting sheets of corrugated tin, unidentifiable hulks that maybe were automobiles once, refrigerator cartons stiffened by the sun, all manner of garbage. A little clot of brown-skinned children watched me warily as I parked.
I was still in my dark suit, and I was driving the BMW 325 convertible that my ex-wife left with me years before. So no wonder a uniformed deputy stopped me with some perturbed “sirs” and “excuse me’s.” He looked about eighteen. But Kimbrough stuck his head out the door to one trailer. “It’s OK. This is Sheriff Mapstone.”
I realized with a guilty jolt that I hadn’t called to check on Peralta’s condition this afternoon. I self-consciously hung my star over my jacket pocket and walked across broken beer bottles to the trailer.
Perhaps it had once been silver with festive blue stripes-trailers for sale or rent? — but had long ago become a bent box of rusting metal and some fading turquoise flashing. The smell hit me halfway to the door: sour, bitter, bent on conquest of all the senses. The smell of a body. I’d smelled worse. You don’t work law enforcement four years in Arizona without getting a deep appreciation for what sun, heat, and confined spaces can do to human flesh. But it had been a long time.
“You OK?” Kimbrough asked, looking maddeningly poised and youthful. He was still wearing the gray tweed suit and highly polished cap-toe dress shoes from this morning’s bureau heads’ meeting. But the suit draped effortlessly on him. with no memory of the tough questions by the brass. He was not much younger than me, but still looked like one of those ads for the United Negro College Fund.
“I’m fine,” I said, trying to growl it, feeling foolish. “What have you got?”
He motioned me to come in.
I tried breathing through my mouth. It did no good. I coughed and fought my gag reflex like hell. Three years ago I had been a college professor, with cares like getting published, fighting the post-structuralisms, and deflecting, gallantly, the come-ons of Heather Jameson in the twentieth century American history seminar that met Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Kimbrough said, “He’s in the room to your right, Sheriff.”
The floor seemed to give a little with an awful linoleum stickiness as I stepped inside. The little room was cramped with too much dirty old furniture, stacks of yellowing newspapers, big plastic bags full of empty aluminum cans and wine jugs. There wasn’t enough space for the orange upholstered chair to overturn. So the chair sat at a cocky angle against a pile of newspapers, and a man was sprawled in it.
He had a large, black hole in his chest.
I looked back at Kimbrough.
“Remember him?”
I shook my head. Between rigor mortis, lividity, and impatient body gasses. the corpse didn’t have what we would consider a face. But even the ghastly fun house mask that stared straight at me held no memories.