Concrete Desert

Chapter Thirty-three

“She has these breaks,” Greg Townsend said. Julie was on the floor, grasping my trouser leg, sobbing uncontrollably. “I don’t know if the drugs do this to her or if it’s more.” He was damned chatty for a man who had a pistol trained on me.

“I’ll have that gun,” he said, indicating the Python. He took a step toward me, thought better of getting too close, and backed up a step. “Put it on the floor.”

About five feet separated me from Townsend and the small black automatic he was holding. And that became my world, a small, hard place to live.

“The gun!” he said sharply.

“I don’t think so,” I said. Old training is supposed to kick in at such times. I don’t know if that was what happened. I just remembered Peralta’s first axiom: “Never give up your gun.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Nobody gets my gun,” I said, trying not to let my voice shake. “You’re going to kill me anyway, so I may as well take you down with me.”

Now his hand shook a little, and he took a step backward. “I’ve got the drop on you, pig. You’re not taking me anywhere. I’m telling you for the last time, drop your gun!”

“You have the drop on me with a small-caliber weapon. You can shoot it and kill me. But I’ll still be able to pull out this very large-caliber revolver and put three or four hollow points into your sorry ass.” It was bravado I didn’t even believe, but I was committed now. No turning back. If my heart had beat any faster, it would have exploded.

He said, “Why the fuck are you here, Mapstone? I thought we were rid of you.”

“You never should have brought me into this in the first place.”

“That was her.” He indicated Julie. “She can be quite clever when she’s lucid.”

“And what about you? Back from the dead?”

He smiled. “It worked. As far as that prick Bobby knows, I’m dead and his money is long gone.”

“That’s not showing much gratitude for a man who seems to have set you up pretty damned well,” I said.

“Entrepreneurship is the American dream,” Townsend said. “I was tired of working for someone else. And when you work for Bobby, the run is great, but it always ends. I knew it was coming to an end. I handled the high-end shipments, the big money, and the risks were just too great. Bobby would have given me up to DEA and written it off as a tax deduction. But with a million dollars in seed money and the right clients, I’d turn old Bobby over to the feds and take his business.”

“So who died in your place?”

He looked annoyed. “Some drifter Julie picked up down in town. We had a few drinks, found out he had no one to miss him, and in general, he did have my body type.” Townsend laughed. “Julie told him we wanted him to join a threesome.”

“You took a chance that the cops would assume it was you.”

“Cops get busy like everybody else,” he said. “I wanted to make this easy for them. After I had the money stashed away, I set up our drifter to look like me. I knew the cops had intelligence linking me to Bobby Hamid, so they’d assume it was a drug execution. Then I had this place, secluded, but I could watch the comings and goings down below. First the cops. Then Bobby’s people, twice. It was like ‘hide in plain sight.’ They never knew I was here.”

“It almost worked,” I said. “But when you start murdering people, it’s hard to make things go right.”

He looked at me.

“Phaedra. She had someone who would miss her and find out what happened. And that was me.”

“Very commendable, Professor Mapstone,” Townsend said. “And you are going to get the chance to join her, if you believe in the oppressive bullshit doctrines of Christianity and Western civilization.”

“Well then, we’ll both head that way.” I put my hand on the Python’s grip.

“I didn’t hurt her,” said Julie, who sat back on the floor between us, rocking back and forth, running her fingers through her hair. “I just needed the money.”

“Shut up, Julie,” he said sharply, watching her and then me.

“You shut up!” she screamed. “You told me this morning you loved me and that we’d finally get married.”

“Bitch,” he said.

I said, “I guess I should have known from the start that she was yours.”

“Oh, and how’s that?”

“She had bad taste in men,” I said. “And it didn’t add up that you and Phaedra got together through the personals. That would be a risk for someone in your, uh, profession. You met Phaedra because you were already involved with her big sister. That must have been complicated.”

“You can’t stop, can you?” Townsend said, gripping the gun tighter. “You just have to know what happened.”

“And why.”

“Is that the historian in you, or the cop?” he sneered. “A famous man said, ‘History is mostly bunk.’”

“Henry Ford,” I said. “He also admired Adolf Hitler.”

Townsend shook his head, smiled, and indicated Julie. “We first met on the party circuit in Phoenix. Julie was with some dickhead lawyer who liked to get her fucked up on cocaine. We hit it off. You can understand, I’m sure. You two were an item in college, right? But Phaedra was, like, in bloom. First time I saw her, I knew I had to do whatever it took.”

“Like concealing the fact that you were a drug mule.”

“It’s a big business, Mapstone, and I made more money in a week than you’ll make in a lifetime.”

“But not enough to ensure ‘happily ever after’ with Phaedra.”

“Julie wouldn’t leave it alone, wouldn’t stay away. One morning, she caught me and Phaedra in bed and tried to kill us both with a butcher knife. It was bad news. Phaedra left and went back to Phoenix.”

“So why couldn’t you leave her out of it? If she didn’t know you were into drugs, why did she have to know that you were going to rip off Bobby Hamid for a million dollars?”

“My fault,” he said breezily. “I wanted Phaedra in my life. She had a real hold on me sexually. But Julie was my lover and my business partner. I needed them both.”

I arched an eyebrow.

“Julie was a pipeline for some very high-powered people in North Phoenix and Scottsdale society. You think those people come home and have a martini? Cocaine is the drug of choice, and Julie-from her days as a piece of expensive eye candy-knew the right people. If I was going to supplant Bobby Hamid, I had to have Julie.”

“So,” I said, “you got Phaedra to come back for the weekend. I guess Julie was supposed to be gone. She came back unexpectedly, and you quarreled. She threatened to go to Bobby Hamid about your plans, and Phaedra overheard. So Phaedra took off, and you had to go find her. Am I close?”

“Very close, Professor Mapstone,” Townsend said. “I am impressed. If you must know, there was also something specific that Phaedra knew-a place I use to store things-and I couldn’t take a chance with her knowing that.”