Jon Talton - Dry Heat

“Well, this FBI badge thing can certainly wait,” I said. “Nothing’s happening anyway. We don’t even know if it’s a homicide.”

“No,” Peralta said, facing me. “You’re going to stay on that case. It’s important.”

“Working from a safe house? OK, you’re the boss.”

“No,” Peralta said again. “You need to get out in the field and find out what the hell happened to that badge and how it ended up with some homeless guy.”

The inside of the SUV was instantly claustrophobic. Peralta said, “I can’t have you coming and going from the safe house. The Russkies might follow you. If they can find these guys out for a drink in Scottsdale, they can sure as hell track that gigantic Oldsmobile you drive. Kimbrough can give you a voucher for a motel or whatever.”

“I’m not leaving Lindsey,” I said.

Peralta ignored me and started giving Kimbrough instructions on securing the departmental computer systems. I looked over at my lover, encased in her flak vest. An intense chill ran around my neck.

“Hey,” I said, louder. “I’m not leaving Lindsey alone.”

Everyone went silent. She held my hand. Her hand was warm and seemed small.

“David,” Kimbrough said, “this is just for a couple of weeks.”

“This is bullshit. You guys worked on this case for months and you never found Yuri. What are two weeks going to change? There is no way I am going two weeks or two hours without knowing she’s safe.”

“Results, Mapstone,” Peralta said. “I want results on your case.”

“My case has been open for more than half a century!” I argued. “It can wait a few more weeks.”

“It’s the murder of a federal agent,” Peralta said, “in my jurisdiction.”

Lindsey said, “I want my husband with me. If they came after me, they might come after him.”

Peralta said quietly, “It’s an order, Mapstone.”

“Then I want to take vacation,” I said. “Now.”

“You don’t get vacation,” Peralta said. “You’re a consultant.”

“I just got back from taking vacation time!”

“Then why do you want another vacation?”

I was getting angrier, rowing into a dangerous estuary with Peralta. It was too late to turn back, and I damned well didn’t want to. I said, “I quit.”

Kimbrough snorted, then fell silent. I saw his eyes in the rearview mirror, looking intently at me, telegraphing caution.

Finally, Peralta said, “You can’t quit.”

“What, and miss all this fun?” I said. “Not to mention the big salary and benefits. The generous vacation time. I quit.”

“You can’t quit, Mapstone,” Peralta said. “That’s an order, too.”

Kimbrough said, “You’re a former sheriff, Mapstone. You have to set an example.”

“I was acting sheriff for a month,” I said. “I’m not leaving Lindsey.”

Peralta turned to face me full on. The pores of his face seemed blackened with rage. Then swiveled and faced forward, I imagined the anger rippling the muscles of his thick neck. Kimbrough drove around the landscaped perimeter of the Scottsdale Princess. Inside the hotel, rich people were fucking, drinking, snorting coke, bragging to their mistresses and minions, sweating out the latest SEC investigation. Fifteen miles away, around downtown, the homeless camps were settling down for the night. Inside the black cabin of the Expedition, the radio once again broadcast a BOLO for Rachel Pearson. I was being sensible, I told myself. No way was I going to be away from Lindsey if she was in danger. And I was being bratty-I had already been away from her two weeks, time when my friend was dying and I could only think of being in the shelter of her arms.

“How about this,” Kimbrough said suddenly. “David goes to the safe house with Lindsey. But he continues to work the FBI badge case, too. We can get him a second car, and a transfer point. The transfer point is a garage that’s secluded, maybe attached to an apartment. So it makes sense for him to be going there. When he leaves the safe house, he makes sure nobody is following him, then drives to the transfer point and gets in his car to drive to the office. When he quits at the end of the day, he drives his car back to the transfer point-again, making sure nobody’s on his tail-changes to the second car, and drives back to Lindsey.”

It sounded OK to me. Peralta didn’t make a sound. The thick roll of flesh at the back of his neck tensed and rippled.

“Xray Two, Xray Two.” We all responded to the dispatcher’s voice. Xray Two was Kimbrough’s call sign.

“Xray Two,” Kimbrough said into the microphone.

“Xray Two,” said a cool female voice, “Chandler PD is responding to the Price Freeway at Ray Road, southbound lanes. A report of a female subject being thrown from a car or jumping from a car.”

Lindsey squeezed my hand until it started to ache.

The dispatcher continued, “Witness on a cell phone says the female subject has MCSO identification. PD and paramedics are en route now.”

Phoenix is less a city than a 1,500-square-mile collection of real estate ventures connected by city streets that have been widened into highways. When people say Phoenix has no soul, they’re really referring to this incoherent sprawlburg. From the mid-1950s until the bubble burst in the great real estate crash of 1990, the developers built skyscrapers along a five-mile length of Central Avenue. All this speculation took place a mile north of the city’s old downtown core, so some projects were called “midtown” and others farther north became “uptown.” The city finally sought to put a sheen of bureaucratic respectability on the mess and called the entire area the Central Corridor.

Take all the skyscrapers and concentrate them, and Phoenix would have as impressive a skyline as any American city outside New York or Chicago. But Phoenix was built by land speculators, not great city planners. So it ended up with a narrow strand of tall buildings running for miles north to south along Central. After 1990, the real estate boys abandoned the corridor for fresh speculative baubles in North Scottsdale and the East Valley. The result was that the heart of the city, after business hours Monday through Friday, became one of the quietest places in the urban West.

There’s a coral-colored, High Modernism condo tower that sits right in the middle of the corridor. Del Webb built it in the mid-1950s, when he was just a small-town Phoenix builder, and for decades it sat quietly as the city grew up around it. The tower flares off in an X-shaped floor plan with balconies and Bauhaus-inspired slab overhangs. It’s right at the foot of Cypress Street, not two blocks from our house. And that’s where Peralta stashed us, on the eighth floor. The place was expensively furnished, with large colorful abstract paintings on the wall. “A friend of the sheriff lets us use this place when he’s in Europe,” Kimbrough had said, Must be nice to have such friends. So after a weekend of deputies bringing over some necessities from home, Lindsey and I had done our best to settle into this odd “safe house.” Other deputies, officers with training in special weapons and tactics, had replaced the retired gentlemen who acted as concierges at the entrance to the building downstairs.

I felt uncomfortable sleeping in a stranger’s bed. Lindsey had bad dreams, She would wake up sure she was hearing the fighter jets that had protected the city in the days after September 11 thI couldn’t hear them. Lindsey was a walking array of high-charged senses. After I settled her down and felt her breathing become regular with sleep, I would swing out of bed and pad over to the huge windows I would watch the sparse traffic on Central, the little blocks of lights in the skyscrapers as the cleaning crews worked. Police choppers darted through the metropolitan sky like large fireflies. On clear nights, I could see the jagged black outline of the Sierra Estrella, for the bedroom faced southwest. For days, a hot wind came up in the late afternoon and forced the smog out.