Stephen Gallagher - Valley of lights

I said to the clerk, 'Did you move anything when you came in before?'

His face was that of an animal that had just been stunned prior to slaughtering. Perhaps he thought I'd read his mind; he probably didn't realise that he'd already given himself away.

'No,' he finally managed. 'I didn't move a thing.' And then; 'Is it drugs?'

'I don't know. How do I phone out from here?'

'I have to connect you at the board,' he said, almost gratefully, and promptly disappeared.

I eased the receiver out from under the man in the grey summer suit, and replaced it. He didn't react. I gently hauled him upright, and his breathing became better; I was also able to reach into his jacket now and take out his wallet, which proved to be empty apart from half a dozen credit cards which were all in different names and some of which were as much as two years out of date. Putting the wallet back – and fighting the gag reaction at the closeup odor – I noted that his skin was pale and almost translucent-looking, the way skin can go if it's kept in a cast or under a bandage for too long. It reminded me of worm flesh.

The phone gave a single ring, and I picked it up. 'Okay,' the desk monkey said, 'just go ahead and dial,' so I did.

'And don't listen,' I said as it was ringing out at the other end of the line, and I heard him hurriedly hang up before I got through.

I requested ambulances, and also for a message to be passed along to the narcotics bureau. Something like this, I didn't see how it could be anything other than a drugs-related matter, although I'd no idea what kind of jag could produce this kind of total inertia. The three of them looked wasted, as if they'd been like this for ages; the black kid even looked as if he'd lost weight inside his clothes.

And that was something else, I thought as I went outside to wait in air that was a little fresher. The three of them made a weird set; the only thing that they appeared to have in common was that they had nothing in common. A middle-class businessman, a sharp young black, and a white manual worker, probably unskilled. I had that cop buzz going in my mind, the feeling that I get sometimes when I think I've seen everything and then I run up against something new.

The narcs got there before anybody else, screaming into the court in their confiscated white Porsche and doing a sliding stop on the gravel. They hopped out, leaving the doors wide open; Morrell and McKay, I knew them both slightly. To look at them you'd guess that, if they hadn't grown up to be drug cops, they'd probably have become users instead. Morrell wore an ear-ring, and was first inside; McKay stopped long enough to tell me that their sniffer dog had gobbled up the merchandise in the last dealer's apartment that they'd searched, had ruined their case against the man, and had put itself out of action for more than a week. Lieutenant Michaels, my shift commander, arrived in his unmarked white St Regis a couple of minutes after that, and as I was bringing him up to date the first of the ambulances finally made it and the forecourt really began to look busy. Lieutenant Michaels went inside, and I went over to the crowd of about six that had gathered and said, 'Okay, go about your business, this isn't a zoo,' and everybody moved back maybe a foot. The desk monkey pushed his way through with the registration card for the unit; Gilbert Mercado, the signature read. He'd paid up once a week, in advance, and in cash.

Five weeks.

Morrell and Lieutenant Michaels had to come out so that the paramedics could get in with a stretcher. The lieutenant was shaking his head and saying, 'I never saw anybody so stoned.'

'Stoned?' Morrell said. He was looking considerably paler than when he'd gone in. 'Those guys are practically comatose. I started to turn one of them over and he just stopped breathing. Scared the shit out of me, just like he'd died. Then when I rolled him on his back, he started up again. What could do that to someone?'

'You're supposed to tell us.'

Morrell looked around at the logjam of official vehicles that was now blocking the court, and said, 'Well, as soon as the circus here gets out of the way, me and McKay are going to wait inside for the tenant.'

'You better,' one of the paramedics said as he emerged with the front end of the stretcher. I could see straight away that they'd taken the man from the bed first, because his tennis shoes were the first part of him to emerge. 'Because these birds are all done singin.'

That's what always gets me about paramedics; they turn up as jaunty as anything even at the worst carnage, and the whole subtext of their manner is that Your bad news is our good business.

Morrell said, 'That's your expert opinion, doctor?' Laying heavy on the doctor.

'I know brain-dead when I see it,' the paramedic said, unfazed. 'I'd a thought even a detective would recognise his own kind.'

They were only going to be able to get two of them in the one ambulance, but there was another on call. If that came in the next couple of minutes then the court was going to get even more crowded. Lieutenant Michaels came over and said, 'You want to leave it with me now, Alex?'

'Sure,' I said. I'd been there for more than half an hour already, and I had a squad to check on.

I was almost at the corner with the rusted Pepsi machine when I heard the desk monkey shout from behind me, 'Hey, that's him! That's Mercado!' I looked up and found myself face-to-face with a small Mexican-looking guy who was just coming around the corner the other way. He was wearing an army surplus green T shirt and a baseball cap, and he was carrying a brown paper sack of groceries. He seemed strong and compact, someone who probably took regular exercise; he spent maybe a second looking at my uniform and then at the scene behind me, and then he simply dropped the sack and ran. He was out of sight even before the sack had hit the ground.

Me, I can't move so fast. I've got strength, but I'm not light on my feet. Mercado was like a bullet. He was out of the court and into the street before I was even halfway to my car, and I knew that if I didn't get wheels under me then I had no chance of ever catching him. I was in the car and rolling, making the tight turn towards the street; and then in the next moment I was standing hard on the brakes as the second ambulance swung in and blocked my way, and we narrowly missed tangling radiators as we stopped nose-to-nose with less than a foot to spare.

I popped the siren and the ambulance backed off, leaving me a clear run to the street, but I knew that I was already too late. Phoenix is mostly a city of wide roads and open spaces where a runner or even a walker is something unusual and easy to spot, bat none of that applied in the Deuce. I cruised out into the hot afternoon sun and made a circuit of the block, but Mercado had been swallowed up somewhere in the maze of side-roads and warehouse blocks. There was no point in stopping and asking for witnesses; everyone, I knew, would have been looking somewhere else.

I drove back to the Paradise, calling in a description on the way but not expecting much to come of it. There was one significant detail that put a little hope into the action, however; Mercado was going to find it very hard to disguise the fact that he'd taken a serious beating sometime in the last few days. One side of his face around his eye had been swollen so much that the skin had seemed to be ready to split over his cheekbone. Fast as he was, somebody had been faster.

Morrell and McKay were crouching over the busted grocery sack when I got there, taking samples from the broken jars and knotting them into little plastic bags. As far as I could see, the jars were all of some kind of baby food.

'Jesus,' Morrell said as he scrabbled around in the dirt, 'look at me. My mother thinks I spend all day being a hero.'