Jon Talton - Camelback Falls

I felt my legs tense and then I was standing up, my right hand raised, my left on the rough black cover of Grandmother’s family Bible. Lindsey gave me a secret smile. The burrito growled loudly in my stomach. In a raw voice, I repeated he oath from Judge Peralta.

“Good morning, Sheriff.”

Lindsey lay between my legs, kissing the inside of my thighs, brushing her soft hair across my awakening skin. Her hair color is just one notch lighter than black, but when the light hits it right you can make out some auburn, too. The light was hitting it right, the intense winter sun flooding joyfully through the tall bedroom window that faced Cypress Street.

“Acting sheriff,” I whispered, my mouth feeling cottony and hung over.

“I’ve never blown the sheriff before.”

“Lindsey!”

“Stop thinking, Dave.” She nibbled, kissed, teased.

“But…”

After a long anticipatory ritual, she took me in her mouth.

She murmured something indecipherable. I moaned and clutched the sheets. Later I would think about my sleepless night, rewinding and playing yet again the events in the Immaculate Heart gym. Peralta festooned with tubes and wires, in a coma. The blood everywhere. Later I would think how, as Lindsey told me, I was lucky the first shot didn’t come through Peralta and hit me. That worry pain in my middle, right below where my ribs met the breastbone, would resume, goaded by the memory of all the other times I had waited helplessly for word from a hospital. And I would stew about the events at midnight out in the living room, which suddenly had launched us all on a trajectory that seemed guaranteed to turn out badly. But that was later.

Lindsey murmured, and I moaned. She knew just how to play me. To hell with my dying friend, the sheriff. We had the deep history now, Lindsey and I. Three years ago I was lucky enough to stop by her cubicle to get help on a case. I had spent too many years entwined in love affairs with overcomplicated, overwrought women. Lindsey wasn’t like all the others, as she said. She loved books. She loved sex. She had turned thirty the month before. But she was an old soul, my dark star, full of kindness and good sense and a brave heart. I had made love at twilight with Lindsey, and it didn’t fill me with dread or sadness.

So I contracted the world to the two of us and stopped thinking. The sheets were getting comfortably old. The room smelled of sex. A wintering cardinal banged into the window, then fluttered away. My hands fluttered ecstatic against her fine dark hair.

Afterward, we held each other more tightly than usual, and we let go with reluctance when the phone reached the third ring.

“Good morning, Sheriff.”

I cleared my throat and said, “I’m only the acting sheriff. Who are you?”

“Communications center, sir. I’m Sergeant Robin Greene,” came the voice on the other end. I waited and she went on. “This is your morning briefing. Sheriff. I am the communications day watch commander.”

I instinctively swung out of the bed. My feet felt swollen and creaky. I looked across the hall to the empty guest bedroom. Pasternak sat in the doorway watching me with his old gray tomcat eyes. Two years ago Peralta had lived in that room, during a time when he and Sharon were close to a rupture and life was getting way too complicated.

“We had a fairly busy night,” Sergeant Greene went on. “We had an unauthorized prisoner release from the Durango Street Jail.”

“What?”

“An inmate was released who shouldn’t have been. He was down the railroad tracks before they even realized it. He’s in for rape, a six-time loser.”

“Good lord,” I said.

“I know, sir. We’ve issued the standard statement to the media.”

“We lose prisoners so often there’s a standard statement’?”

“It’s just procedure, sir. And there was a shooting overnight in District One, in Queen Creek. A six-year-old girl, she was supposed to testify in a murder trial today against a gang member.”

“You’re just a beam of sunshine, Sergeant Greene,” I said. Lindsey looked at me quizzically and pulled the sheets over herself.

“Just the job, sir,” Greene said. “No other county homicides last night. Phoenix had two, and Mesa had one, a drive-by. One chase involving DPS. Highway patrolman attempted to stop a vehicle at 2300 last night outside Buckeye. He initiated pursuit when the vehicle failed to stop. Other agencies joined in, and the suspect finally ran off the Stack as it headed into downtown Phoenix.”

“Jesus,” I said, imagining the tall freeway interchange near down-town where Interstates 10 and 17 came together. “How far down?”

“He fell seventy-five feet, and was unhurt. We have him in Madison Street Jail, sir.”

“Don’t let him go,” I said.

“No, sir,” she said. No humor in Sergeant Greene. “Shall we send your car and driver, Sheriff?”

“What?” Sheriff. The word suddenly sounded so strange. It came from old England. The “shire reeve,” in old England a local government official, not really a law enforcement officer. The Sheriff of Nottingham. Rhode Island counties still called theirs “high sheriffs.” Sergeant Robin Greene waited on the line.

“No,” I said. “I’ll take my own car.”

It was nearly 1:30 that afternoon before I could return to the haven of my office in the old courthouse. Past the retired highway patrolman who was the security guard in the lobby, up the four flights of circular stairway, my feet adding to the wear on the polished 1929 Spanish tile. Past the mostly empty floors, still richly appointed with dark woodwork and deco lighting fixtures. Somehow Phoenix had forgotten to tear down this wonderful old building. At the top of the stairway, I checked my watch again: 1:33. I would wait until two to check on Peralta.

Finally I turned my key, turned on the lights, and was alone in the high-ceilinged room with my books and old cases, just like my life used to be. A black-and-white portrait of Sheriff Carl Hayden, circa 1906, greeted me from the far wall. His hat-brim was straight, like his long, slender lips and his eyes fixed on some long-dead photographer. Phoenix’s population was about 10,000 then. I gave Sheriff Hayden a little salute and stepped in, locking the door behind me. I needed some time alone.

“You did this job and you turned out OK,” I said to the photo. “But I don’t think I’ll get to serve forty-two years in the Senate the way you did.”

I hung up my dark blue suit coat and loosened the red Ferragamo tie Lindsey gave me for Christmas, sartorial armor for my first day as acting sheriff. Sinking into the ancient wooden desk chair, I propped up my feet and nursed the vente skim no-whip mocha I had carried over from Starbucks. Out the high windows I could hear the clatter and hum of downtown. I made myself breathe slower, deeper. It was an effort.

On the desk before me was the Arizona Republic , right where I left it that morning. Two-thirds of the front page was devoted to the Peralta shooting, including a sidebar on me, and the photo of Lindsey and me leaving the hospital wrapped around each other like eighth-graders. Only the expressions on our faces gave away the grimness of what we had come from. My face looked unfamiliar and tired. The story got things about half right, which was typical of the hometown press unless my friend Lorie Pope was doing the reporting. But none of the bylines were familiar. Maybe Lorie was on leave to write a book, an expose of the bullshit of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

I hated the cop bureaucracy that was represented by the crowded sheriff’s administration building a block south. Only the smell of paper overcame the persistent odor of human beings in trouble and the human beings that dealt with them. Now I was in charge of the damned thing. The morning had gone by with a march of meetings, about next year’s departmental budget, about the new HMO for department personnel, about the court-mandated sensitivity training classes for all deputies, about the lawsuit over last year’s patrol car purchase. No wonder we just let prisoners walk away from the jail. We were in meetings all the time. I didn’t say much. Nobody seemed to mind. The low expectations people had for me were obvious.