“You gave them the pimp.”
“Sure, but only that he was a guy threatening Tim when I showed up. I told them that’s all I knew. Seems to me, if we’re not pro-active, the bad guys will come to us, and if we don’t solve the case, the good guys could come to us, too, and not in a good way.”
He sighed. “I guess my point is, that I can take this one, if you want to bow out.”
Now he hurt my feelings. It was that petty and selfish on my part.
I said, “No way.”
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
I told him that I was sure.
He strode over to his desk and picked up his hat.
“Then bring your breakfast and saddle up.” He pointed to my desk. “You might want to leave your fancy headgear here.”
17
Up Grand Avenue, we had a fast ride cutting northwest through the checkerboard street grid of Phoenix and Glendale.
“So where are we going?”
“To see a guy I know,” Peralta said.
“A guy you know?”
He nodded. It was going to be that kind of day.
“I want to talk to Larry Zip,” I said.
“Not yet. Read the report. Then I want us to strategize before we interview him.”
With that, he fell into his customary silence. What he was feeling from the contradictory events of the past few days, I wouldn’t hazard a guess. Peralta’s emotions were a deep ocean trench where leviathans stirred.
I distracted myself with the ritual obligation of memory.
I remembered when produce sheds and the remains of icing platforms for refrigerator railcars lined the Santa Fe railroad that ran parallel to the highway. I remembered passenger trains. Farm fields separated Phoenix from what was then the little town of Glendale. In grade school, we rode the train to the Glendale station. I even recalled one or two dilapidated farmhouses sitting right across the tracks.
Now it had all been filled in. Although the railroad was still there, the area around it mostly consisted of tilt-up warehouses, along with anonymous low-slung buildings, most with for-lease signs, and a gigantic Home Depot. Passenger trains were long gone. So, too, was the agricultural bounty that the Salt River Valley growers sent back east by rail. The children and grandchildren of the farmers who owned this land were living in places like San Diego thanks to the profits made selling it for development.
The road soon clogged up and stayed that way for miles. Much of Grand Avenue in the city of Phoenix had been turned into flyovers, back when the planners, such as were allowed here, thought about turning it into a freeway to Las Vegas. Like so many Phoenix dreams, this one didn’t work out.
As a result, when we reached the “boomburbs” of Peoria, Sun City, Sun City West, and Surprise-yes, that’s the town’s name-Grand hit a six-point intersection at least every mile and other stoplights in between. And nearly every light was red. Traffic was miserable. The built landscape was new, cheap, and monotonous-made to speed by in an automobile. Smog smudged the views of the mountains.
Most of these had once been little hamlets on the railroad, but now they were home to hundreds of thousands populating the subdivisions that had been smeared across the broad basin that spread out from the actual Salt River Valley toward the White Tank Mountains and was labeled, incorrectly, “the West Valley.” They came from the suburban Midwest or inland California and most thought life couldn’t be better.
The metropolitan blob was slowly working its way northwest to Wickenburg, a combination quaint former mining town and home to celebrity rehab centers. I loved Wickenburg. It was authentic and charming, everything suburban Phoenix wasn’t. As a young deputy, when I was working my way through my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, I had worked a patrol beat out here. The state had about four-and-a-half million fewer people and the land was empty, majestic, and mysterious. Wickenburg and the other little desert towns huddled to themselves. A lone deputy had many square miles to cover, usually alone, and traffic stops were always risky. So were family fights, where a husband and wife that had been trying to kill each other a few moments before were suddenly united in trying to kill you.
But we weren’t going as far as Wickenburg today. Peralta turned left into the shabby little desert village of Wittman and drove west. After five miles or so and several turns, the last remnants of settlement were gone, the roads turned to dirt, and we were surrounded by desert. The smog hadn’t reached this far north today, so the Vulture Mountains stood out starkly ahead. Go far enough and you’d find the fabled and long-ago played-out Vulture gold mine and who knows what else hiding in the desert. We bounced over the bed of the meandering Hassayampa River, dry this time of year. As a Boy Scout, I had learned the legend that if a person took a drink from the Hassayampa, he would never tell the truth again.
Immediately ahead, the country turned hilly and rugged, good terrain for saguaros. I was glad I brought two frozen bottles of water. But even in the air-conditioned truck cab, they were already half melted. It was only ninety-eight degrees outside. Inside my body, I was sore everywhere from my dive out of the apartment. Even my face hurt.
The bare impersonation of a trail appeared on the right and Peralta took it. Another mile and we reached a rusted metal gate. Peralta honked six times: three short, three long.
“Get down in the seat,” he commanded.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
I did as I was told as he shut off the engine, opened the door, and stepped out. He raised his hands high and his voice boomed. “Don’t you shoot me, you paranoid son of a bitch. We need to talk.”
This didn’t seem promising.
The longest pause came to an end with a shout from the distance, “Go away!”
“I’m coming in if you don’t come out!”
“Is that you, Peralta? Go back to your lettuce field, beaner! I’m done with the law. Got nothing to say.”
Peralta shouted back: “Why aren’t you on your reservation and cleaning toilets at a fucking casino, bow-twanger? Get your redskin butt down here!”
“If I do, it’s only gonna be to kick your wet-back ass!”
“Good luck trying, wagon-burner!”
“Watch me do it, spic!”
“Bring it on, breed!”
It was, needless to say, not faculty-lounge language. And although Peralta was my least politically correct acquaintance, the outburst seemed out of character. Suddenly the yelling stopped. After too long a silence, I reached for the Colt Python and prepared for the worst. But when I rose up, the gate was open and Peralta and another man were shaking hands and embracing.
“Who’s the white eyes?”
“David Mapstone, meet Ed Cartwright.”
The shorter man beside Peralta was stocky in jeans and a Western shirt, with a long mane of lead-colored hair pulled back in a ponytail. His face looked like the Indian in the environmental ad way back, with a tear running down his face from the damage we had done to the land. He was tearless in appraising me. When we shook hands, I noticed the pistol on his belt. He handed me a business card with only his name and a phone number. I gave him one of my new private detective cards. The ones I once carried, with the gold badge, were only for my scrapbook.
I followed the two of them as they walked through the gate along a rutted, dusty trail to an adobe house that sat on a rise maybe a quarter of a mile away. Beside it, in a carport, was a restored Chevy El Dorado with a bumper sticker that read, AMERICAN INDIAN AND PROUD OF IT. The sun was frying my skin and I wished we could have driven the distance.
“Still waiting for the apocalypse, Ed?” Peralta asked.
“Yup.”
“Show Mapstone your bunker.”
That didn’t sound like a good idea but pretty soon we were trekking off into the desert while Peralta stayed behind. The land was lush with sage, prickly pear, thick stands of cholla-jumping cactus-and ancient, towering saguaros with four and five arms. Those saguaros had watched the procession of humanity through this land for hundreds of years. Unlike their brothers in places such as Fountain Hills, they had avoided the bulldozers, at least for now. The silence was surreal and healing, except for the temperature and the fact that I was on high rattlesnake alert, walking heavily so the vibrations of my tread would give the poisonous snakes plenty of time to get out of our way. Cartwright was spry and walked fast. I worked to keep up and the muscles in my legs and back burned with pain.