Stephen Gallagher - Valley of lights

Lieutenant Michaels, who was standing over them and watching, said, 'How can babies eat that shit? No wonder they cry all the time.'

'You find anything?' I said, but the lieutenant shook his head.

'Nothing you could recognise. Maybe the lab'll find something.'

'I don't think so,' Morrell said from down at ground-level. 'This is just goo-goo food. None of the jar seals is even broken.'

I looked at the split sack again. It was just a mass of glass shards and colored pulp, like some smashed crystal insect with its insides all oozing out. Chocolate, peach, apple and banana.

'So,' I said, 'we got a mystery?'

'We got a mystery,' the lieutenant agreed.

Travis and Leonard were still taking IDs when I caught up with them in the park, and they didn't exactly look as if they were loving every minute of it. It's dull, haphazard work, but sometimes it can throw up a result; closeness to the freight lines and the Plasma Center and the Salvation Army building gives the area a heavy turnover of transients, and random ID samplings have been known to turn up even outstanding homicide warrants in the past. Leonard was off somewhere on the phone to the headquarters computer room, and Travis was standing by their car chatting easily to the people who were waiting for their cards to be returned. One of them, an Indian girl named Maria whom I'd seen around a few times before, was offering to inlay Travis's belt buckle with turquoise. The three young men with her said that they were going over to the employment office to get their cards endorsed so that they could get jobs in Mesa… picking fruit, anything. Travis was staying quiet and letting them talk; friendly, but not forward.

I asked, but nobody knew any Gilbert Mercado. Nobody had heard anything about a man of his description getting a beating, either. One of the young men started to tell me about an accident he'd seen two days before, a man hit by a state truck and thrown about sixty feet, a hole in his side the size of a thumb and pouring blood. One of the others said, suddenly, 'I had a coat ripped off over at the mission,' as if the grief of it had only now caught up with him. Their good nature was running down into nervousness as Leonard's absence with their documentation lengthened. The boy who'd seen the accident said that if there was nothing doing in Mesa, perhaps he'd move on down to Tucson and try there.

Leonard came back – nothing outstanding – handed them their cards, and thanked them all. 'Hey, Phoenix,' I heard one of them saying as they drifted away, 'isn't that some kind of a bird?'

I gave Travis and Leonard a quick summary of what had happened over at the Paradise, and saw their eyes light up with curiosity. Mercado, I said. He might change his name, but he can't hide the fact that somebody's been using his face for football kicking practice. Then Travis took a call for a noise complaint from Encanto Park, some kids with a stereo system staging their own concert on the bandstand, and as they set off up 15th I resumed my circuit of the district and my efforts to get the Mercado name and description a wider circulation.

I pulled in outside the Salvation Army Center, where half a dozen lost-looking men were hanging around the entrance. Rafael, the one that I wanted, was stretched out in the dust on an unmade sidewalk; the wadded shirt that he was using for a pillow was cleaner than the one that he was wearing. One thing you have to understand about the Deuce, it's informal. I told him what I wanted, told him that I wanted it in the grapevine, and then disappeared from in front of his eyes as I heard a call coming through for a 962, possible 965. Five minutes later I was on somebody's front lawn, looking at a Civic with its front end destroyed; two fire trucks and an ambulance were already in attendance, not to mention the ever-present silent crowd and a few small dogs nosing around the wreck. A woman with head injuries had already been taken out; she was probably going to die, and there was a Vehicular Manslaughter charge on the cards depending on the Hit-and-Run squad's report.

This job. Dull, it ain't.

Lieutenant Michaels caught up with me during my donut break at Winchell's.

'You know, Alex,' he said, dropping his hat on the table and sitting down across from me, 'that ambulance kid was right.'

'About what?'

'I just heard back from the hospital. You know one of them died as they were being admitted?'

'No kidding. Which one?'

'The black kid. They were transferring him to a gurney, and suddenly he wasn't breathing. Anyway, they've run brain scans on the other two, and they didn't find a thing.'

I was thinking of what Morrell had said; I started to turn him over… scared the shit out of me, just like he'd died. 'Both the same?' I said.

'They kicked the plug and they spat on the electrodes, but it still came out as flat as a fart. How about that?'

'Any indication why?'

'Narcotics found nothing and there's no sign of any abuse or injury on the bodies. It's just like they were… I don't know, sleeping till doomsday. The TV people wanted to get shots of them, but the chief's playing it safe in case any relatives come out of the woodwork and decide they want to sue.'

'Sue for what?' I said.

'Invasion of privacy, exploiting the disabled, whatever. There's a police artist on it instead.'

'Lightnin' Leslie?' I ventured.

'The same.'

'Everyone he draws looks like one of the Munsters.' Lightnin' Leslie was in traffic division, an amateur artist who'd had one big success and had been coasting on it ever since; his depiction from a rape victim's description had actually led to an arrest. The perpetrator had looked like one of the Munsters. Rumor was that he'd painted a portrait of the Chief so awful that it only came out at private parties when it was known for certain that the Chief was out of town.

'Yeah,' Michaels said. 'They say he's signing his pictures in Braille, these days.'

I wasn't always with the Phoenix PD. First I was in the Marines for three years, mostly home-base stuff apart from a spell that I spent on the Guard in the US Embassy in Paris. I was homesick for most of my stay there; people don't believe that when I tell them, but it's true. When I came back I left the service and got married to Eloise, the girl that I'd been going out with since we were both fifteen, and I put all of my savings into a workshop franchise converting cars to run on hydrogen gas. We struggled for a year and then the franchise people folded, leaving me with a lot of useless equipment that was all paid off and several big loans that weren't. It was a bad time all around. We lost the house that we were buying and had to move into what the sales people called America's Last Affordable Home, what the government called Manufactured Housing, and what the rest of us would call a trailer park. And we seemed to be arguing most of the time, the way you do when money pressures make you feel as if you're ready to burst at every weak little seam and debt stands like a thick wall between you and any kind of future.

Eloise packed her bags and left me, twice. We both knew that it was more a way of letting off steam than anything serious, because how far could she expect to get when I was the only person in a fifteen hundred-mile radius who knew how to put another cylinder in the car? The first time, she came back at around three in the morning when I was pretending to be asleep and we never even mentioned it afterwards. The second time, she tried to cut in on a Mack truck as she was joining the Interstate and misjudged the distance by about a foot. Her heart stopped three times on the way to the hospital. She was operated on for more than five hours and that's how long it took the medical team to decide that she should have been let to die in the ambulance. But by then they'd kept her ticking for so long that they were afraid of a lawsuit if they should just let her go, so then I had to hire lawyers to put pressure on for them to do exactly that, and while the lawyers and the doctors were arguing she just slipped away on her own anyway. I wasn't even with her, I was in somebody's office somewhere. All I'd succeeded in doing was to add legal fees to the medical bills, which may help to explain why ten years later I was still living in the mobile home.