“That would be a big mistake.” Peralta was up and roughly pushing him to the floor, handcuffing him. His face was pointed in the direction of the socks, which he continued to eye with lust.
“You’re both nothing but civilians! This is kidnapping!”
I walked down the stairs, cradling the M-4.
“That’s actually not true,” I said. “Thanks to your friend Chris Melton, I’m a Maricopa County deputy sheriff with statewide powers of arrest.”
Peralta glanced at me curiously.
I smiled and read Mann his rights.
Chapter Forty-three
We placed Mann in the seat of one of the straight-back chairs. He had stopped talking. That “anything you say can be used against you” part can have that effect. Peralta called Eric Pham.
Maybe twenty minutes passed before the knock at the door.
I looked at Peralta. “What about your motion detectors?”
He didn’t answer. He already had his Glock out.
The house was still dark. I moved to the window to the right of the door and carefully pulled back the drape.
“It’s alright.” I moved to the door. “It’s Cartwright.”
He was somebody who could identify and bypass motion detectors.
I was at the door and turning the knob when Peralta said, “Don’t…”
But it was too late.
Ed Cartwright stood before me with a gun in my face.
Behind him it was snowing.
“Get that expression off your face, David,” he said. “You look like a six-year-old whose kitten just died.”
I hardened my eyes and made my dry mouth form words. “What are you doing, Ed? Put the gun down.”
“Step away from the door,” he said.
I didn’t move.
His sling was gone. His appearance was barely controlled fury.
I felt Peralta next to me.
Cartwright spoke through clenched teeth. “Put your gun down, Mike.”
Peralta calmly drawled, “You know that’s not going to happen, Ed. What the hell are you doing?”
Cartwright kept his weapon up, the barrel straight at my chest.
It finally fell together. Here was the “other” from Eric Pham’s white board. I said, “It was you who called Sharon to the hospital when Lindsey was shot. Did you send the woman who did it?”
“Of course not, David. I was doing you a favor, sending Sharon to help you.”
I didn’t feel grateful. “Then you called me when I was in Pennington’s office. It was you, wanting to set up a meet with him. You must have thought Pennington would know how to contact Peralta. I should have realized it later, the way you changed your voice when Peralta called me back, when we were standing in the parking lot. The ‘Apache Mortgage’ shit.”
“You’re a little slow, son.”
“You were in on this with Mann.”
“No. This was my play. All I had to do was watch the Bureau get tangled up with itself. Overthink and overplan. Try to blame this poor Grayson woman who pissed off her supervisors. But from the first time he talked to me, when I was in the hospital after the shooting at the mall, I knew he was the crook.”
My hands felt heavy and useless at my side. “What does that make you? You’re a lawman, Ed. You’ve served your entire life with honor.”
“You were misinformed,” he said. “The FBI made me into a renegade. The piece-of-shit disgraced Indian. They profited from making me into that man. Now it’s my turn.”
“It’s only fifteen million, before you fence it! That makes no sense.” I was arguing personal finance with an armed man, probably not in the best mood.
“It’s enough,” he said.
Peralta spoke in a calm cadence, “Step away, Mapstone. Ed, lower your weapon or I’ll kill you where you stand. You know I’ll do it.”
He said, “And I’ll kill your boy. If that’s the way you decide to play it.”
Peralta spoke with icy calm. “We go way back, Ed. Don’t make me do this.”
“Don’t make me shoot him,” Cartwright said, indicating me. His finger was inside the trigger guard, on the trigger. My insides were turbulent with dread. I forced it down.
Cartwright kept his eyes on me “You did a good job of disappearing, Mike. Pham doesn’t have a clue where you are. But David did a better job of finding you. Now I’ll take those stones.”
“He’s going to kill us all!” Mann’s voice came behind me.
“Nobody’s going to die,” Cartwright said. “Mann, you’re a disgrace. Me, I’ve got obligations that matter. The diamonds are a means to an end.”
My fear fell away and an icy calm descended. I can’t explain exactly why.
“The fucking diamonds,” I said. “There’s got to be another way.”
“No.” His eyes were black behind the heavy lids.
“They’re right here,” I said. I slowly stooped and picked up the socks, then stood and held one in each hand. “The rough is inside these.”
He briefly studied them. “Step away from the door, David!”
I stepped aside.
Suddenly somebody spat behind Cartwright. That was the sound, at least. His eyes registered surprise and then the pupils went wide as he fell forward, the front of his shirt filling with blood, and he crashed face-first into the floor.
Amy Russell stood at the bottom of the porch steps, another H &K semiautomatic in her hands. She was dressed in black, the only color being her pale face and the halo of strawberry blond hair in a tight bun.
“Down!” I yelled as I dropped the diamonds. I heard a crash as Mann forced his chair to tilt and fall. My holster snapped as I pulled out the Python and went prone on the floor beside Cartwright. Another spit and a bullet sped over my head, fracturing the wall behind me.
I fired. The big Colt made its explosive sound. Peralta shot at the same time, three quick concussions.
I looked into the snow and she was gone.
Chapter Forty-four
Peralta yelled for me to stay put but I was already crossing the porch in two long strides and leaping down the wooden steps, looking for a body on the ground.
She was gone.
A dark shape disrupted the blackness ahead, moving across road.
My ears still ringing from the gunshots, I was already moving, taking one tree, then another, for cover. But no shots came. Snowflakes hit my face and melted.
The road, in my memory from daylight, was a good thirty feet wide. I ducked behind the nearest pine, but only for a few seconds before I advanced in an infantryman’s crouch, adrenalin bearing me forward. The gravel crunched under my boots, then the surface turned to dirt and I dropped and rolled across the broken ground. It was the right move. I heard a snap behind me as a bullet meant for my head hit a tree branch. I saw the muted flash of her suppressor and fired at it.
As the echo of the Python subsided, I didn’t hear any moaning of a wounded woman. So I propelled myself ahead with elbows, forearms, and knees, crawling across pine needles and hard-packed dirt. I carefully held aside a branch so it wouldn’t make noise and shimmied to a fallen tree trunk. I hoped that I wasn’t lying on a nest of hibernating rattlesnakes. For all I knew, the Mogollon Monster was beside me.
Another shot went over my head. How could she be ranging me in this darkness? I hadn’t seen a night-sight on her pistol and she didn’t have a backpack that might be holding one. Yet I had only seen her for a second. The one constant about Amy Russell and me was that I underestimated her.
Then I saw the white cloud of frozen air coming out of my mouth. I stifled a curse and made myself breathe through my nose. That lessened the mist. I stayed behind the log and slowed my breathing with difficulty.
There was a real monster in the woods. To defeat her, I had four rounds left in the revolver and two Speedloaders in my belt. I didn’t have night-vision goggles. I didn’t have the Maglite. I had no gloves and my hands were getting numb with the cold. This would have to do.