“A million child soldiers in Africa can work it. Want to take a chance that I can’t?”
He studied me through angry but uncertain eyes, his hand still on the butt of his sidearm.
If Cartwright had even started to pull the weapon, I would have pumped several shots into him before anything like judgment could have caught up with the rage I felt. A savage stranger’s voice started speaking. It was coming from my mouth.
“You listen to me, old man.” I spat out the last two words. “I’ve got two young people murdered and a missing baby. Now I’ve got an armed whacko survivalist sitting in front of me who thinks he can get off a shot before I send him to hell. Who knows how many weeks before they find your body? What I don’t have is time to waste finding that baby, and that means you don’t have time.”
“All right, son. Please calm down.”
I swung the barrel to his chest.
“Now you have ten seconds less time.”
He saw my finger was on the trigger and a sheen of sweat appeared across his forehead.
“A dozen Claymores went missing from Fort Huachuca last month,” Cartwright said.
Peralta shook his head. “That’s an intelligence installation. What are anti-personnel mines doing there?”
“The military has this stuff everywhere. Makes it hard as hell to track. Who knows how much walks away from bases and nobody ever knows?”
I wanted to know who took it.
“Word is, soldiers.”
“Active-duty soldiers?”
He nodded. I didn’t lower the weapon.
He swallowed. “White supremacists are in the military. That’s not new. You remember a guy named McVeigh in Oklahoma City. Now there’s more of them. We’ve spent more than a decade at war, and we’re sending home killing machines.” He sighed. “Anyway, the word is, that’s who took the Claymores. I don’t know if it was to sell or to use.”
“What about prostitutes? Are they involved in running high-end whores?
“That’s all I’ve heard, son,” he said. “Do what you please.”
He closed his eyes and in the terrible silence that followed he put his hand in his lap. I lowered the assault rifle.
Peralta said, “Give me that and wait for me at the truck.”
My blood was still up but I did as he asked.
Before I walked out, I heard Cartwright’s voice.
“You have an unusual name, kid. I read a book by somebody with that name once, about the Great Depression.”
“He wrote it,” Peralta said.
“It wasn’t bad,” he said. “But you should have written more about the effect on the tribes.”
He was right. I closed the door behind me.
Half an hour later, we hit solid pavement and Peralta spoke for the first time since he had returned to the pickup truck.
“There was a day when he would have killed you.”
I let my breathing return all the way to normal before speaking.
“Ed? As in Edward? America’s Finest Pimp thought I was the enforcer of some guy named Edward. He was afraid of Edward, and he didn’t strike me as the kind who was afraid of many people. The man he described as Edward’s muscle sounded a hell of a lot like Felix.”
“That’s not this Ed,” Peralta said.
“How do you know? Did you see the ‘tell’ when I told him about Felix? He was lying.”
“He had a loaded AK-47 being held by a crazy man, Mapstone. That’s not a ‘tell’ you can trust.”
“Maybe. His name is still Edward.”
“Ed was a decorated FBI agent before his end-of-the-world fetish got him in trouble and he was fired. Only that’s not the whole story. He’s quietly enjoying his FBI pension and an honorable retirement.”
“So tell me the whole story.”
“Being known as a disgraced, bitter former special agent gives him cred. He deals guns to skinheads and bikers, cartels, Mexican Mafia, whoever pays. Gives ‘em training, if they need it. And any takedowns happen so far down the line that nobody suspects crazy old Ed Cartwright.”
“I never heard of him.”
“You wouldn’t,” Peralta said. “He doesn’t work for the FBI, doesn’t work for Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He reports to higher authorities. Maybe where your wife works, Mapstone. Nobody else in Phoenix law enforcement even knows about him, except as another reclusive old coot living out in Wittman with his guns. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.”
“Why would white supremacists deal with somebody who has brown skin?”
“They must dig the whole Apache noble savage thing.”
My breathing return to normal. It would have helped if Peralta had given me the whole story before we went visiting, to know what his play was. That kind of non-disclosure was like the old Peralta. It would have helped if Cartwright could have done a better job of connecting the Claymore to an apartment in San Diego, a young woman’s fall out of a condo tower, and her boyfriend’s violent death. Was he her boyfriend or husband? I didn’t even know. How nuts was that?
“We’ve got white supremacists in the armed forces,” I said. “I thought that was the least racist institution in America.”
“Not after you break the force in two long wars,” he said. “And drop recruiting standards. And have a black guy as commander in chief, which has brought out all the whackos. You remember the group they arrested in Georgia? Five soldiers were stockpiling weapons. They wanted to poison the apple crop, set off bombs, and overthrow the government? Thank God for stupid criminals.”
“Until some smart criminals show up,” I said. “So I assume Cartwright’s bosses will be on this.”
Peralta shrugged and we rode the rest of the way in silence back through the antic monstrosity of the suburban asteroid belt and into Phoenix. It might have been quicker to take the Loop 101 down to the Papago Freeway but Peralta stuck to surface streets. What were all these people doing out? Driving was the local sport.
Outside the office, he shifted the truck into park and turned to face me.
“Mapstone, I know you’re not yourself, but…”
Peralta’s voice trailed off. He set his jaw and turned forward.
I got out. He drove off.
19
A few minutes later I returned home, eating a Popsicle to cool down and brooding. For the first time in my life, I had come close to being the worst thing possible in law enforcement: a hot dog. Cartwright was Peralta’s play and I should have stayed in the shadows, let him handle it, and listened. I had allowed Cartwright and my anxiety over the baby to strip away my professionalism, send me into a tantrum with a loaded gun. He was going to get the idea that he couldn’t count on me, never a good place to be with Peralta.
But the reality was that Peralta wasn’t getting anywhere and Cartwright was holding back. Now I knew about the stolen Claymores but the connection from there was tenuous. The idea of white supremacist cells in the military was frightening. Some future Gibbon would write about that. For much of America’s history, the nation had frowned on large standing armies. Now it was part of our economic policies and if you didn’t “support the troops,” you were a commie. And how all this tied in to Grace, Tim, and baby David, I did not know.
I was still running out of time. Sure, every law enforcement agency in Southern California would be working this case. But it was on me. That, at least, was how my concussed brain parsed it.
I checked the Amber Alert for the tenth time that day. The baby was still missing. He hadn’t been in the apartment when I went through it. That much I was sure of. I was also certain that this was no child-custody issue but a kidnapping. Soon the FBI would come knocking. I was, after all, not merely a washed-up historian of cold cases. I was an expert on lost children.
But there would be nothing helpful I could tell them. My lost child was the one conceived with Lindsey. The child that never made it past four months in her womb before the miscarriage. Lindsey fled to the job in Washington, insisting that Robin continue to live here. Her only demand of me was that I keep Robin safe, a task at which I had failed. Now they were all gone and a house I had expected to be filled with unaccustomed baby sounds was silent. There was no Amber Alert for our loss.