Jon Talton - Dry Heat

I let my eyes again take in our surroundings. The street around us was really not much more than an alley. Old warehouses rose up on either side of us. Traffic rolled over us on the overpass. In the distance I could hear jets taking off from Sky Harbor. A train whistle came from the west. We might as well have been a hundred miles from any help.

“You hear?” said Muscle Man. “We don’t want to get lost.”

“Maybe we’ll take this car, understand what I’m sayin’,” said the thin man.

It was a curious expression, “understand what I’m sayin’.” Was it born of unempowered people desperate to be heard, accustomed to the powerful classes failing to “understand”? That would be a fine politically correct paper to present at the Modern Language Association-my amused subconscious was actually thinking this. My conscious felt the heavy butt of the handgun against my concealing hands as the thin man walked up beside my door and leaned a dirty arm on it. He had large black freckles on his face, large, expressive eyes. His hands were scarred and sinewy.

“Maybe we’ll take her badge,” said the Tenor. “Badge like that bring some good money on the street. Shit, maybe we’ll take her.” He slouched against Kate’s side of the car, giggling “Pay the toll to the troll.”

Someone from the shadows repeated, “Pay the toll to the trolls.”

Another voice from the gloom: “Kill him and rape the bitch!”

This is how it was going to go down: the Muscle Man was on my side of the car, joined by the thin guy with freckles. On Kate’s side, the giant Tenor, his hat cockeyed. The chorus surrounded us at a distance, the monochrome street people watching the little drama, maybe ready to join in if we appeared weak enough.

I was watching the hands of the three surrounding the car. Nobody seemed armed, but I couldn’t really tell. I kept my hands in my lap, feeling a huge lump of panic in my middle.

A little bit of long-ago training bubbled up. I turned the ignition and put my hand on the gearshift. “’Bye, trolls,” I said.

But in that instant, Muscle Man dove at me. I wasn’t fast enough. Strong, rough fingers closed around my throat. I almost blacked out right there, but turned my head a little sideways, sucked in some air, and drove my arms up viciously to break his grip. He fell back. I heard an ugly murmur from the shadows, and before I could get out of the damned seat Freckles came at me. I slammed the heel of my hand into his nose and he snapped back, falling on his ass. But Muscle Man dove over the door, grabbing for the gun. He had all the leverage of a strong, standing man fighting a man who was pinned down in a car seat. I could feel myself losing the fight. Didn’t want to imagine the consequences. Couldn’t.

But I fought dirty. When he reached for the pistol, I grabbed one of his fingers with both my hands and torqued it in a direction nature didn’t intend. I felt the finger snap, heard the bone and cartilage separate. He screamed, lurched back, and fell out of the car, landing on his back. I rose right up after him, leaped out of the car-without even opening the door. I had a foot on his chest and the big Python in his face. Freckles was also in my field of fire, raised up on his elbows staring at me, blood streaming out of his nose.

Kate was being pulled from the car by the big guy. She had received a nasty blow to one eye, and I could see him reaching for her holster, with her desperately trying to keep his hands away. High-voltage panic shot up my spine.

There was no time for negotiation. I kicked Muscle Man in the nose to stun him, took a chance on Freckles staying down, and ran to the other side of the car for a clear shot. I got within five feet, dropped into a combat stance and leveled the Colt Python at the chest of the big Tenor. I did some quick arithmetic: six.357 hollow-point bullets, three targets, shaky hands, and my Speedloader reloading magazines were in the glovebox. And all that assumed nobody from the shadows decided to get a piece of us.

I was not articulate: “Die, asshole.”

He stared at me, stared at the gun. A large drop of sweat materialized on his forehead and ran to his eye.

He sighed. “Fuck.”

He let go, and Kate used her suddenly free arm to deliver a nasty haymaker. He sprawled on the asphalt, holding his face. I noticed Freckles was on his feet, thinking about intervening. When I moved my gunsights to his chest, he took off to the south toward Lincoln. I could see Kate tense, ready to give chase.

“Let him go,” I said. “We can find him through his buddies here.”

The Tenor looked at me mournfully. Kate had a wild look and had retrieved her semiautomatic and handcuffs.

“Face down on the ground,” I ordered, keeping my finger on the Colt’s finely machined trigger.

I looked around: the street was empty. Everyone was gone. I said merrily, “Toll booth is closed.”

But Kate mouthed something silently, looking at me. If I had been a lip reader, I would say she called me a bastard. And she said, “You’ll pay.”

“Dave, I continue to be amazed…” Lindsey paused to watch Luis Gonzalez slam a single past the second baseman. She cheered like a banshee, took a sip of beer, and continued. “I am continually amazed that a bookworm like you gets into such trouble.”

It was Saturday night and we had our usual nosebleed seats at Chase Field, our way to take in the Diamondbacks-unless Peralta was treating and we could enjoy his season tickets two rows above the home dugout. One of the surprises about getting to know Lindsey was to see her evolution into a rabid baseball fan. This night the D-Backs were six runs ahead of the Braves headed into the eighth inning, a margin comfortable enough even for a fatalistic fan like me.

“You haven’t been a street cop since you were in your early twenties.” Lindsey continued, a carefully kept scorecard on her lap. “So how come you get in a confrontation with some drug dealers and you know how to save your bacon?”

“Luck,” I said. “And truck knowledge.”

Lindsey said, “Truck what?”

“Truck knowledge,” I said. “It’s the stuff you know so deep that you can get hit by a truck and still remember. Like good training at the Sheriff’s Academy. You learn moves that kick in even if you’re tempted to panic. That’s truck knowledge.”

“I like that.”

“It was a phrase I learned from Dr. Milton.”

“He must have been a character,” she said. “I wish I could have had a chance to meet him.” She put a hand on my leg. “But your scrapes with the wild side of Phoenix scare the hell out of me. You need to stick to the library; History Shamus.”

I could still feel a stranger’s rough fingers digging into my neck. Rolling my head from side to side only exaggerated the soreness. Lindsey was right, of course. We had been lucky as hell. The confrontation beneath the overpass could have turned out very differently, very unhappily. Somehow I had a gene in me that let me remember my training, and fight back when I was scared-even though most people living comfortable, middle-class lives would have been terrified into paralysis. And I had been lucky.

I sat back high above home plate, surrounded by 30,000 friendly strangers, and felt glad to be alive. Phoenix had come a long way from the dusty little farm town that my great-grandparents discovered when they came to Arizona before statehood. In good ways, with big-city amenities like the beautiful downtown ballpark, with its retractable roof, air-conditioning, and right-field swimming pool. And bad: with the rough characters like the kind Kate Vare and I encountered the day before.

They were in Peralta’s jail now, wearing stripes and eating green baloney. But a fleeting hope that they might somehow be connected to the old FBI badge-what with the one scumbag’s comment about taking and selling Kate’s badge-had led to nothing. They were ordinary drug dealers and low-life generalists seeking whatever criminal opportunity presented itself. So we were still nowhere on the investigation. The medical examiner was behind on autopsies and cranky, so we didn’t even know if the old guy in the pool was a homicide. My request to see the FBI file on John Pilgrim’s death was somewhere in the outer rings of bureaucratic perdition. There was nothing to do but turn off our pagers and cell phones and go to a baseball game.