Then I stopped, dropped to one knee, made my breathing slow down, and lined up the barrel on the back of the woman, the gold and red of her hair shining under the streetlight.
I slowly let out a breath and started the trigger pull.
But then she passed through the cut in the wall.
And three seconds later, I heard the shot.
Chapter Twelve
Lindsey lay face down on the pavement.
The back of her white blouse was red and wet with blood.
I swept the surroundings with my.38 but the woman was gone. Then I knelt beside my wife and gently turned her over.
“Dave…”
“I’m here.”
“Your face is bleeding.”
“I’m fine.”
“Bad time for a walk, huh?” Her lips tried to smile.
I looked around again, but the parking lots across the street were empty and the edges of the wall looked clear of any lurking killer. The half-smoked Gauloise was burning five feet away.
“Don’t leave me.” Her voice sounded groggy.
“No. Never.”
“It hurts. Hurts.”
The entry wound was in the middle of her chest.
I needed a trauma kit.
I needed a trauma team with surgeons.
Her breathing was rapid and shallow. I took her pulse. Weak, thready. Classic shock symptoms. She was bleeding out.
“Stay with me, Lindsey. I love you. Stay awake.”
She stared at me, tried and failed to speak while I shakily dialed 911 on my iPhone, gave our location, my badge number from memory, and called for help.
“My wife has been shot. She’s badly wounded.”
Fire Station Four, with a paramedic unit, was only five blocks away. I heard the sirens from McDowell. It took somewhere between forever and eternity for the first emergency lights to appear on First Avenue.
The memory of Robin dying in my arms was banging in my vision. I couldn’t let it happen again.
Couldn’t.
“Keep breathing, baby. In and out.”
She nodded.
“Hold my hands tight.” She did, but her strength was fading.
Then her eyes closed.
Stripping off the blazer, I carefully rolled her to one side and used it as a makeshift dressing against her back. I wouldn’t let the word enter my mind: useless.
Firefighters and cops were arriving. Red and blue lights bounced off the wall, doors opened and closed, and uniforms approached. I moved aside and let them work, giving a description of the shooter to an officer who broadcast it on her portable radio. A helicopter appeared overhead and blasted us with white light.
More sirens were approaching from the distance.
Chapter Thirteen
St. Joseph’s Hospital, a Level One Trauma Center, was half a mile away.
An hour later, Lindsey was still in surgery. “Critical condition.” That’s all a doctor had told me as I was sent into in a long, largely empty waiting room with a television at one end bolted near the ceiling. A Hispanic family, mother and three small children, sat near it, staring silently.
God didn’t owe me anything. That didn’t stop me from praying for Lindsey.
A man came in to have me sign paperwork as Lindsey’s next of kin. I had her Social Security number memorized. He seemed amazed that we had insurance. I remembered when St. Joe’s was a hospital for the elite. Now most of the patients must have been on Medicaid or nothing.
It wasn’t even connected to the Catholic Church anymore. After an abortion was performed to save the life of the mother, the bishop retaliated by cutting off church ties that went back to 1895. Now the local wags called it Mister Joe’s and the moneyed Anglos had long abandoned it for Mayo. But it still was one of the best hospitals in the Southwest.
After the doctor left, it was quiet except for the television and a page for “Trauma Team Two.” I assumed that “Trauma Team One” was busy with Lindsey.
My face was still burning from the scratches. My left cheek and eye felt swollen from where the woman’s running shoe had connected. I didn’t want to look in a mirror.
I was bargaining with God like a panicky twelve-year-old, staring at nothing, when Phoenix Police Sergeant Kate Vare strode in, wearing a stylish short leather jacket and carrying an expensive leather portfolio.
She sat next to me. The butt of her Glock protruded from the jacket.
How I wished Lindsey had taken her Glock instead of a pack of cigarettes for that walk.
“I’m sorry, Mapstone.”
It was the most human thing she had ever said to me.
Vare and I were once rivals, or at least she saw it that way when I worked for Peralta and she was a cold-case expert for Phoenix P.D. But the new chief had reorganized the department and now she was a night homicide detective. Otherwise, she looked the same: petite, ash-blond hair in a short bob, tightly wound.
Homicide. I pushed that word away. That was only the name of the unit she was assigned to, the kind of detective sent on this type of call, GSW, gunshot wound, victim in critical condition. Assault with a deadly weapon.
GSW to the chest, exit wound, massive blood loss. I knew the score.
My wife was in there dying.
I put my face in my hands but the pain from the scratches and kick roared up like a wildfire. The wound on my wrist where Strawberry Death had bitten me was red and painful but the skin hadn’t been broken. I rose up again.
Vare cleared her throat. “You know we have to do the drill.”
She opened the portfolio and prepared to make notes as I retold my encounter on the lawn with Strawberry Death, disarming her, and chasing her toward Central where Lindsey had the bad luck to turn around and come back our way.
I had already given this information, along with as complete a description of the attacker as I could muster, to a uniformed officer. But this was the drill, as she said.
Then I went through the events of the early morning traffic stop headed into the High Country, the same woman in a DPS uniform drawing down on me and only stopping when the FBI tail vehicle came behind us.
My mind was bouncing in so many directions that for a few seconds I wondered if she really was a DPS officer and a part-time hit woman. Weirder things had happened and Arizona grew weirder by the day. It probably paid well and she had the perfect cover.
“We’ll check to see every DPS patrol officer who was on duty last night and this morning around Camp Verde,” Vare said. “But I don’t think she was a cop.”
“Why?”
“I’ll get to that. Why would this woman be trying to kill you?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea.” I tried to focus. “I’ve never seen her before. Didn’t receive any threatening calls or emails. Nothing I’ve been working on seemed dangerous.”
I added, “She’s done this before.”
Vare cocked an eyebrow.
“She said it would be cleaner if she ‘suicided’ me, as she put it.”
Vare wrote it down.
“We recovered a semi-auto from the shrubs near your house.” She tapped her pen on the legal pad. “It’s a Heckler and Koch Mark 23, chambered for a.45. That’s a Special Forces weapon. It can work with a laser-aiming system and a suppressor. Who the hell did you piss off, Mapstone?”
“Can’t civilians get them?”
“In this state?” She sniffed. “You can get anything. Maybe it can give us some fingerprints. What about Peralta?”
That didn’t take long. I was surprised it hadn’t been her first question.
It was a good question, the question. But I had already decided not to mention that the woman had told me she was there for “her stones,” that she had made Peralta a promise. There were good reasons to be honest, chiefly that it might give me police protection. But the reasons to hedge were more compelling. The first reaction of Vare and the FBI would be that I was involved in the diamond robbery.
I chose Door Number Two.
“I’m more shocked than anybody,” I said. “I also don’t know why the FBI would be working a diamond robbery.”