Camelback Falls

Chapter Six

Peralta and I could work an entire shift and never say five words. That was just the way he was. It drove rookies crazy. They were already intimidated by his size and stage presence, that way he seemed to fill up a room just by walking in. And when he didn’t say anything, they might spend an entire shift trying to get a conversation started. Not me. Three years before, when I ran my first training shift, I realized he was most comfortable sitting in the heart of a long silence. It was also good for police work: listening and watching, while others revealed themselves. It was my first eureka moment with him.

That seemed a long time ago. He was a sergeant now, but we rode together this night as part of a county plan to double up deputies and save gasoline. Last month, it had been a ban on driving more than fifty miles during a shift. Energy crisis. Inflation. It was always something. Riding with the sergeant kept me off the most routine calls. But it didn’t matter this shift. We were bored as hell.

So much of police work is bone-achingly dull. Especially a shift like we were having, where even a minor accident or a low-grade burglary report would have been a welcome break. Instead, we cruised slowly through the unincorporated roads that ran off the dry riverbed, several miles of cinder block buildings, high cyclone fences strung with concertina wire, and some of the nastiest bars and massage parlors in the Valley. Neither Tempe nor Scottsdale wanted the land. So it stayed under county jurisdiction. But today even Ace’s Tavern and Terry’s Swedish Massage Institute (“real coeds”) were quiet.

Peralta drove. He had new mirrored sunglasses that totally obscured his eyes. It unnerved people who looked at him, and I knew that secretly pleased him. From the passenger seat, I watched the streets without appearing to watch. That, I had learned early on the job, was part of the demeanor of a veteran. To rubberneck or glance to-and-fro marked you as a rookie, or, worse, a hotdog. And I listened to the radio without appearing to listen. That yielded little. A burglary report out by Williams Air Force Base. An auto accident west of Phoenix.

Peralta finally said, “Mapstone…” But he never finished the sentence.

“Nine-nine-nine! Nine-nine-nine!” A shout burst out of the radio speaker.

First I thought it was garble. Did we really hear that? Then, all nerve endings and stomach acid.

“Fuck,” Peralta said, turning up the speaker. The code for officer needs emergency assistance was “999.” It was the doomsday call for any street cop.

“Unit identify yourself and your 10–20,” came back a cool female voice. The dispatcher wanted his location. But all we heard was the empty air. Sweat congealed under my uniform shirt.

I didn’t recognize the voice, but we probably had two dozen patrol units scattered around the east county, not including the lake patrol. The inside of the car suddenly seemed unbearably hot. Peralta impatiently fiddled with the radio’s squelch control, but we still heard nothing.

“Who the hell was that?” he demanded, to no one in particular.

The voice was so distorted by panic and static it could have been anybody. I said, “Nixon has some rookie with him.” A rookie would commit that kind of unforgivable breach of radio protocol: failing to identify your unit first.

Peralta grunted and picked up the microphone. But the department had a procedure for everything, and the dispatcher was already ahead of him. She ordered all east-side units to switch to channel two and give their locations, to see who was missing. Dean Nixon called in safely from Chandler. I had slandered a rookie without cause, not for the last time. I gave our “10–20” but it was changing rapidly.

Peralta wheeled the big Chrysler south and gunned the V-8 police high-performance special. We shot out of the riverbed and flew at 80mph through Tempe. Hayden Road turned into McClintock. The sun slipped behind Hayden Butte and we were in half twilight.

“What?” I said.

Peralta compressed his lips violently, taking away half the real estate between his nose and his chin.

“It’s Matson and Bullock,” he said. “I bet you.”

“Reserves?”

“Matson’s a reserve deputy but Bullock is full-time. Usually works the day shift at the jail.”

In Peralta’s shorthand, that meant he was an old-timer, close to retirement.

He sensed what I was thinking, an eerie quality he had. He said, “We were shorthanded this shift. But I stuck ’em down in Guadalupe. Nothing ever happens there on a weeknight but a family fight.”

“You sure about that?” I cracked, partly to ease my tension. Peralta retreated behind his mirrored shades. He got on channel one and tried to raise them. No response came back but a testy dispatcher telling him to keep the channel clear for emergency traffic.

We hit Baseline Road and turned west, into the radiant pink sunset. We swept through south Tempe, where new subdivisions were chewing up the old farmland at an alarming rate.

Five minutes after a “999” call we still didn’t know who was involved or where they were. I said aloud, “How fucked up is this?”

But Peralta seemed to know. He switched frequencies and broadcast his theory. Indeed, Matson and Bullock, in unit 4-L-20, had not checked in. Peralta demanded to know their last location.

“56^th Street and Guadalupe Road,” the dispatcher said, obviously reading from a log. “Stated they were at the convenience store.”

“Send all responding units to that location,” Peralta ordered. He re-holstered the microphone and switched on the toggles for the emergency lights. The speedometer needle passed 90.

“Why don’t we wait for the cavalry,” I said, realizing how close to Guadalupe we were.

Peralta said, “Too many cops will just get in the way.”

I nervously fingered the Speedloaders on my belt. Peralta had been in a dozen firefights, and he’d been in Vietnam. In three years on the job, I’d never done more than draw down on an occasional burglar.

The radio was alive now. The dispatcher repeated the address. But I knew exactly where it was. Guadalupe was a little closet of a town notched between Phoenix and Tempe, walled off by Interstate 10. It had been settled by Yaqui Indians displaced by the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s, and it still looked like a poor Mexican village. Right across the line from Tempe’s burgeoning suburban neighborhoods was this little huddle of whitewashed adobe buildings and dirt streets. And right now it was about to get scary.

The furrows of a cotton field swept past off the side of the road. The South Mountains loomed ahead. “It’s probably a fake call,” Peralta said. But his brow was creased. He didn’t believe it. He had the cop’s sixth sense, better than any of us.

We turned onto 56th Street off Baseline and rolled in the last half mile with no lights, not even headlights. The sense of speed, darkness, and the bulk of the cruiser made everything seem like it was past tense. I saw people run inside small houses.

In the distance, the orange ball of the Union 76 gas sign glowed reassuringly. We bumped into a gravel parking lot, empty except for a sun-bleached Pinto that probably belonged to the clerk.

“Fuck,” Peralta said. “Put us rolling 10-6.” I told the dispatcher we were on the scene. No other sheriff’s car was in sight.

“Go in and ask the clerk,” he said, and I opened the door. But his hand suddenly caught my arm.

I turned back in the car and my eyes followed his gaze.

We both spoke in unison: “Holy shit.”

Five minutes later in the twilight and we wouldn’t have seen it. It was an alley, maybe 500 feet to the south, past a cinder block wall, an abandoned adobe house, and some mangled old cottonwood trees. I could clearly see the rear bumper and trunk of a sheriff’s patrol car. Two pairs of boots lay in the dirt, the soles facing toward us. They were attached to bodies wearing uniforms, splayed out on their backs on either side of the car. Then I saw movement and two men were over one of the bodies. They were going through his pockets.

I unsnapped my holster and drew my service revolver. Peralta floored the Chrysler and we shot across the street, into the gravel alley, past the adobe house and the cinder block wall. A scene quickly materialized: a patrol car parked directly behind a ratty blue Chevy, two deputies faceup on the dirt, two other men standing over them and carrying automatic weapons.

Peralta slammed the gearshift into park. I pulled up my door handle. The windshield disappeared. Sharp glass fragments sprayed my face like chunks of hard, hot ice. My ears rang from the noise of the shots. Then there was nothing between me and a bulky, sunburned man with long yellow hair and filthy jeans. He was cradling an M-16.

I sighted him down the barrel of my service revolver, raising it as fast as I could. My hand shook violently. Sweat ran off my wrist. I was still stuck in the car, now absurdly exposed. He aimed at me, tensed, and I knew I had lost the race.

Then the air exploded and his middle turned into a dark red mess. He jolted back in the air as if slapped by a giant hand, then collapsed on the ground. Peralta walked toward him, a big man in a tan uniform, still holding out the shotgun for lethal business. I rolled out onto the dirt, keeping my head down.

Under the car, I saw jeans and black biker boots run toward us from the front of the other cruiser. An angry screaming, a sharp string of gunfire. Then another low boom from the direction of Peralta.

I forced myself off the ground, and we were alone. Peralta and me and four dead men. A layer of gunsmoke lingered as a chest-level cloud, ghostly in the fading light. It almost seemed tinged red with blood turned aerosol by the buckshot.

For the longest time the night grew around us and was utterly silent. Then I heard calls for help in Spanish, and finally the sounds of sirens, growing louder.

That’s how I remembered it.