Jon Talton - The Night Detectives

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.

Before we reached another hill, he led me around a lush palo verde tree. Beyond was a well-concealed cut that was obviously man-made. It led down until it was below ground level and zigzagged. It reminded me of the way trenches had been constructed on the Western Front in World War I. They zigzagged so an enemy soldier couldn’t stand above the trench and take out an entire company with his rifle. We were on the verge of the hundred-year mark of that cataclysm that changed the world, but few Americans paid any attention to the past.

Cartwright broke my reverie. “Peralta and I were in ‘Nam together. The sheriff’s a good man in a shitty situation.”

I agreed that he was.

We zagged to a stop. Cartwright hefted away a tumbleweed and unlocked a door that blended perfectly with the tan soil.

“This was an old mine,” he said. “There’s probably hundreds of them out here.”

Now I was really worried about rattlers. But beyond the door, I could see only bright lights and a clean concrete floor.

Getting inside required another sharp turn beyond the entrance. Nobody could open the door and start shooting at the occupant of Cartwright’s keep. We walked down a long flight of concrete stairs and made an abrupt turn into a short hall. He unlocked another door, metal and heavy, and closed it behind us.

We entered a space that looked about twenty feet long and wide enough for two men to stand comfortably. The ceiling was a foot above my head. On both sides, shelves rose six feet high holding meals-ready-to-eat, canned food, water, first-aid supplies, and ammunition. Boxes and boxes of ammunition for several calibers of firearms.

Beyond this supply area, the shelter opened up and held a bed, two chairs, and a desk with exotic radio equipment and other electronics. A well-stocked gun cabinet took up one wall. An American flag was posted to another. It was a forty-eight-star flag, the way it would have looked after Arizona was admitted to the union in 1912. Beside it were highly detailed U.S. Geological Survey maps of the area. The map fiend in me wanted to study them, but I felt mildly claustrophobic and unsure of my host.

“Ventilates to the outside,” he said. “But I’ve got filters against fallout and biological attacks. I can air-condition it, if I need to. Got two generators and plenty of fuel farther back into the mine. Redundancy on everything. There’s an emergency exit that comes out half a mile on the other side. I built it all myself.”

He was plainly proud of it and I suppose there were worse retirement hobbies as long as he didn’t wander down Tegner Street in Wickenburg and start mowing people down with one of the M-16s in that gun cabinet. The place was surprisingly free of dust and noticeably cooler than the outside, but I could feel myself only a few internal degrees from heat exhaustion.

I tried to be convivial, in an end-of-the world way, complementing his bunker. He seemed amiable enough, for an armed survivalist vet who might suddenly snap and kill me, stuffing my remains somewhere back in the old mine as varmint treats.

“Were you military, son?”

“No.”

I could have let him judge me in silence, but I made an effort to keep the conversation going. Get people to talk about themselves, as Grandmother always advised.

“So this is where you ride out doomsday?”

“You bet your life. We came within an ass-hair of blowing up the world in 1983. The Soviets picked up a launch signal from the continental U.S. Their computer system said it was an incoming American missile. It was a glitch, but they didn’t know this. They always expected an American first strike, and their strategy was launch on warning, so our missiles would hit empty silos.”

He jabbed a finger my way. “If it hadn’t been for a Russian colonel who suspected it was a false alarm and refused to send on the alert, they would have fired every ICBM they had over the pole at us and adios, baby. Hardly anybody knows how close we came.”

“Stanislav Petrov,” I said. That was the Soviet lieutenant colonel who perhaps saved us all.

“Very good. Don’t think it won’t happen again. All those missiles are still sitting there, waiting to be used. Damned Russians are building an underground city that’s as big as Washington. You look on the Internet. Israel and Iran. North Korea. China’s got miles of tunnels to hold their nuclear forces. Hell, we’re even allies with Hanoi now against China. Makes you wonder why anybody even wants to live.”