It is impossible to speak after your face has been torn apart and a bullet acts out the laws of physics inside your skull. Impossible, when you are already dead.
This is your brain, Mapstone. This is your brain blown out of the back of your head all over the bumper of Sharon’s fancy convertible.
“I’m not armed,” I said, forcing my voice to remain calm, its cadence slow, as I raised my hands. “I am not posing any threat to you. Please take your finger off the trigger.”
She didn’t do as I suggested.
I studied the gun. It was a semi-automatic, black with intimidating lines. I couldn’t identify the maker. It wasn’t the Glock that was standard with police.
A tractor-trailer rig approached on the Interstate, grinding uphill toward Flagstaff. If only the truck driver needed to pull off and came down the cut and somehow broke the spell that had this officer in its grasp. But then the semi was gone and the world around us was quiet. Not a single gambler came or went from the casino.
The nation’s sixth-largest city was only ninety miles south but it might as well have been on a different planet.
I had the tactical solutions of a can of cat food.
When I went through the academy too many years ago, I had learned how to disarm a shooter without having a gun myself. This involved stepping close inside her reach and doing a hard, straight-arm bar to dislodge the weapon. But she was too far away and I had never tried this desperate move in real life.
She seemed to read this thought and took one more step back, then crooked her arm close to her side, the gun still perfectly aimed. If the barrel were an eye, it could have winked at me. I raised my empty hands higher, feeling the slick between the T-shirt and my skin.
“Why are you doing this?” My mouth was so dry it had trouble forming the words.
She cocked her head as if about to answer, then thought better of it.
“I used to be a cop,” I said. “I know how stressful a traffic stop can be.”
The strawberry blond Sphinx stared at me.
“Maybe you read about me. David Mapstone. I solved cold cases for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.”
She said, “I know who you are.”
The way she said it told me she meant more than a name she’d read on my driver’s license.
And my self-possession started to crack.
“Do we know each other? What’s your name?” I couldn’t make out her nametag or badge number.
Then she lowered pistol in the direction of my groin and smiled.
“Where…?” That was as far as she got.
A pair of headlights on high beams. A car coming off the Interstate, headed toward us. I squinted and turned my head aside as the glare grew more intense. The car stopped behind her cruiser and kept its lights on.
More than a few beats passed in silence, her hair a halo in the backlights. I prayed it was another DPS unit and that an officer would talk her down.
She continued to face me. “Friends of yours?”
Now it was my turn to say nothing.
She slipped the gun back into its holster with one clean move and snapped it in place.
The pleasant drawl returned to her voice, as if the past five minutes had never happened. She handed back my license and registration.
“You drive safely, sir.”
Within thirty seconds, she was gone, spewing dirt and rocks. My savior behind the high beams remained.
My tongue tasted dust as wobbly legs conveyed me to the car and I put the Python back in its holster.
One last time, I turned and stared at the headlights.
After a few minutes, once we were back on the highway, I found the same headlights following us a quarter mile behind. I didn’t know who was inside, although I had a good guess. But I was certain they had saved my life.
Sharon looked me over. Sweat was coming through the T-shirt.
“Are you all right, David?”
“Sure.”
“Really?”
“She let me off with a warning.”
And how. I set the cruise control at seventy-five as the Interstate climbed and climbed toward Flagstaff.
Sharon stared at her lap, dark hair curtaining off her face, and said nothing more. This was unusual. Sharon was a master conversationalist. Weren’t all shrinks talkers? And they wanted you to talk. We had much to discuss, in fact. But I didn’t speak either, about what had happened minutes before at the traffic stop, about the telephone call that had brought us here, or everything that had come at us in the previous day. The silence was so profound that my breathing sounded like screams.
I silently replayed the scene by the side of the road. It was late. I had been awakened and forced to drive after a stressful day. The mind plays tricks.
But the finger on the trigger was no illusion.
And I replayed the angry metal click of the woman’s holster. It bothered me for more reasons than the gun in my face.
The old Galco High-Ride holster that held my Python had a strip of leather that wrapped around the frame of the gun. It is called a retention strap, meant to keep an attacker from grabbing the gun and using it on you. I could get to the revolver easily by grasping the handle and moving my hand against the place the retention strap connected to the rest of the holster. It would come loose with a snap and I’d be ready to rock.
But that was old school.
I cursed aloud.
“What it is, David?”
“It’s some inside baseball cop stuff. Probably nothing.”
She didn’t push it. It wasn’t inside baseball. Inside cop world.
Snap.
No.
Most law-enforcement officers didn’t use those retention straps now.
Manufacturers had advanced the security of holsters substantially so that it was much more difficult for the weapon to be taken in a struggle. It helped that the semiautomatic pistols cops carried had smooth butts, no exposed hammer like the Python’s to accommodate.
I stared into the red lights of a truck several car-lengths ahead, then signaled and moved to pass.
Now cops carried holsters classified as Level 2, Level 3, and even Level 4, based on the degree of protection they provided. But almost all had one element in common-to unholster the gun, the officer moved the strap forward. In the more advanced holsters, the pistol must be properly gripped and a lever switched.
None of these regulation holsters made a snap.
“She wasn’t…” I absently let the car slow down against the gravity of the mountain it needed to climb.
“What?” Sharon asked.
I pushed down the accelerator and we surged forward. “I was thinking. Always a surprising thing when I do it.”
She laughed and I kept silent.
I was thinking that perhaps the DPS officer was old school like me and refused to adopt a new holster.
Thinking perhaps she was not a police officer.
She pointed the gun at my crotch and said, “Where…?” Where, what? Where were we going? Where was Peralta?
As the cold sweat stayed with me, another thought came. If I saw her again, it would once more be in darkness and I wouldn’t get a second chance.
Sharon said, “Do you still get panic attacks, David?”
I ignored her and held my iPhone against the steering wheel, shakily texting Lindsey one character, an asterisk. I watched the iPhone screen as the message was delivered.
After a few tense seconds, Lindsey texted back. Another asterisk.
In our personal code, it meant one thing: leave the house immediately. Go.
Chapter Three
The blue and red police lights were visible even before I took the Ash Fork exit off Interstate 40-the vision of Dwight David Eisenhower flowing from Barstow, California, to Wilmington, North Carolina.
We descended onto a two-lane road, crossed a wash, and I pulled the car into a broad, flat lot surrounding what had once been a gas station. All that was left was a rectangular streamline moderne building, long-abandoned, with an office on one end and two garage doors on the other, with a single yellow streetlight burning above.