Jon Talton - Cactus Heart

“Those remains are your brothers. But they’re not your mother’s children. Help me solve this!”

“Leave me alone!” He walked faster, his gait turning oddly effeminate. Then he ran, a sad little-old-man run, back toward the gallery.

That’s when the air behind me exploded with a single whip-crack.

Ahead of me a shop window shattered into a thousand shards of plate glass. A woman screamed. James Yarnell gaped at me, his eyes overtaken by terror. I ran and jumped on him, throwing him roughly to the ground behind a little wall that separated the shop fronts from the sidewalk. My handgun was in the bedside table at home and my cell phone was in the car. Some Boy Scout I was: Be prepared, hell.

He was whimpering beneath me. “Are you hit?” I whispered. He shook his head.

Then everything was silent again. Even the traffic over on Scottsdale Road seemed to have disappeared. We were safe behind the wall-unless whoever shot at us was mobile, and coming our way. “We’ve got to move,” I said.

I scuttled down the sidewalk, keeping the wall between us and the street. Come on, I motioned, and James crawled after me. But after about ten feet the low wall ended, and the next protection was a dark breezeway in the next building, an additional, eternal ten feet away.

“What is going on?” James gasped.

“You tell me. Have you received any threats, anything at all?”

“No, no, nothing!”

“Can you run?”

“I don’t know,” he whispered.

“You’ve got to try,” I said viciously. “We can’t stay here.” The streetlights burned down on us, the bright, dry air emphasizing our vulnerability.

James looked at me.

“Ready?”

He nodded. His eyes were wide and bloodshot.

I grabbed him by the arm and hauled him up. My knee and ankle were hurting again, but I felt every muscle in my legs tense and pulse with energy. We bolted to the breezeway, our shoes echoing loudly off the concrete.

I heard that whip-crack sound, louder now, and I knew we were dead. But I was too hyped to be scared. A wooden post shattered just ahead of us. I felt the splinters against my face. I dragged Yarnell and made us keep running. Then I threw us down into the darkness of the breezeway as another shot snapped behind us. The bullet ricocheted violently off the walls, adding in a weird tuning-fork kind of sound.

“Go!” I whispered and pulled him along. We ran through the breezeway and through a gate into an alley.

Turning right, I pounded toward Scottsdale Road. Yarnell fell onto the dirty asphalt. I picked him up and pulled him by his arm and his belt until he was running again. We kept to the backs of the buildings and the sheltering darkness. Then we burst onto Scottsdale Road and the beloved sight of people and traffic.

I needed to get out of the city, so the next day I followed Lorie’s notepad-sheet full of directions to the outskirts of Black Canyon City, a village loosely spread across the foothills along the interstate north of Phoenix. I was on business. Peralta was getting testy, the Yarnell case distracting him from the Harquahala Strangler. That morning, he had presided over a meeting downtown. Two detectives named Kimbrough and Mitchell-I’d worked with them before and we’d established something like mutual respect-would do the traditional cop work on the Max Yarnell murder. They would also handle liaison with Scottsdale PD on the attempt on James Yarnell’s life. I was to focus on the kidnapping of the twins, and find out how, or if, it connected to the other crimes. I was happy to be working back in the past, where you were shot at less frequently. Still, I had the Colt Python.357 magnum on my belt now, the black nylon holster feeling uncomfortable and comforting at the same time.

The directions led me to a sun-beaten, single-wide trailer perched on the edge of a squat mesa. Scrub-covered hills and blown-apart rock formations swept away in every direction. The purple mass of the Bradshaw Mountains piled up to the northwest, and off to the east a ten-story-high rock prism sprouted out of a butte. Down below, Interstate 17 emitted a steady moan and I could smell the exhaust fumes this far away. To the south, the mountains were obscured in a brown soup: Phoenix. I parked the BMW next to a Harley, grabbed a satchel of file folders and stepped out onto the hard ground.

“I got a twelve-gauge and you’re way lost, mister,” a woman’s voice came from the trailer. Another day, another gun aimed at me.

“I’m looking for Zelda Chain,” I called.

“Who the hell are you?”

“David Mapstone. Lorie Pope sent me.”

A screen door flew open and a large, pear-shaped woman, poured into a brown house dress, scrambled out. “Why the hell didn’t you say so, honey? You almost gave me my morning target practice. My, you’re a tall one. No wonder Lorie likes you.”

I knew she was pushing eighty, but her face had a youthful animation. Her hair was long and colorless, falling back over her shoulders. Her eyes were large and full of fun.

“Things have gotten too dangerous,” she said. “That damned city.” She gestured toward Phoenix.

“We have Major League Baseball,” I volunteered.

She gave me a vinegar look. “When I moved out here years ago, it was a half-hour drive before you even got to the outskirts. Now, I hear they’re doing one of these goddamned ‘planned communities’ right across the wash from me.” She gestured across the dry creek bed. “It will have forty thousand people. Hope I’m dead by then.”

She saw me eyeing the Harley. “Don’t worry, honey. That hog doesn’t belong to some big drunken boyfriend who’s going to come home and catch us.” She laughed until she drowned in a phlegmy cough. “That’s my bike. Don’t ride as much as I once did. Fell too damned many times. It’s a credo for life: don’t ride if you’re afraid to lay the bike down.”

Zelda Chain invited me into a living room crowded with books and furniture, and insisted on serving iced tea. It was in a mason jar and smelled of bourbon. She pulled a Marlboro and lit up.

“I always used to joke that I’d end up in a trailer outside Gallup, New Mexico,” she said, dropping across from me on an ancient stuffed sofa. “Hell, I couldn’t even get that far away from Phoenix. But, as Lorie probably told you, I was the librarian at The Republic for forty-seven years. I’m damned proud of that. I retired in 1985. Well, they retired me. Now I don’t even read newspapers anymore. I don’t want to know how awful the world is. Never watched television. I’m tempted to tear out the phone.”

I asked about Hayden Yarnell and the history of the kidnapping, but she leaned back, rearranged her long, dry hair like a shawl over her shoulders and smiled like a young girl. “Lorie tells me you’re a history professor and a deputy sheriff.”

“That’s true.”

“That’s like being a gas company and an Internet company all in one,” she laughed. “I own stock in one like that. Bastards. Never gets above nineteen dollars a share.”

“Kind of like me, I guess.”

She crushed out the cigarette and lit another. “Young people aren’t taught history any more,” she said. “They haven’t been for thirty years or more. It’s one reason the world’s so insane.” She waved the cigarette around like a smoky wand. “My uncle fought in the Spanish-American War,” she went on. “And he lived to see Americans walk on the moon. We don’t have that sense of connection to our past now. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. What did Faulkner say? ‘The past isn’t even past.’ We just have to rediscover every truth the hard way. Such arrogance.”

She stopped and looked at me. “Ah, Mapstone, you are in the clutches of an old lady with too many crotchets and grudges against the world. What did you specialize in, in graduate school?”