High Country Nocturne

Chapter Twenty-one

Ed Cartwright.

FBI Special Agent Ed Cartwright, deep undercover.

Valid PI license. Native American gentleman. Fade into the background.

It had been a setup from the start. But for what?

There were too many FBI agents, I knew that much.

I took the elevator up to the ICU swimming in anger.

But when I stepped out, I saw Sharon. The expression on her face turned me to ice. I started to speak, but no words came out.

“Where have you been?” she said.

“Looking for your husband. What’s going on? How is Lindsey?”

She simply hugged me and I felt my body go numb. I felt her warm breath on my ear as she whispered, “David, I am so sorry.”

Lindsey was dead.

The obscene ease with which the thought came surprised me, as if I had earlier decided to take the stairway in the office tower as high as it would go, break open the locked door, walk across the roof, and step into the air. Lindsey and I had been twinned for so many years, the only surprise was that I hadn’t felt something, an extrasensory squeeze of the heart, something, as I was prattling on with the red-haired detective downstairs.

I didn’t hug Sharon back. My body was slack. Widower, my God. Yes, I would find the strawberry blond assassin and kill her. For that matter, I would find and kill Mike Peralta, too, for thoughtlessly precipitating this catastrophe like the diplomats and generals and plumed emperors had done with the Great War a century before.

Sharon led me into a consultation room where an older woman in blue scrubs was waiting. She had a face that was both kind and had seen it all. Her identification tag read “RN.” I heard the door close.

Then I was sitting there with no memory of my body having moved from the elevator to this chair.

The woman said, “Your wife has a serious fever.”

I let out a heavy breath of relief. Lindsey was alive. How bad could a fever be?

I said, “I want to see her.”

“Talk to me for a minute, Mister Mapstone.”

I regained my fear and stammered, “She’s felt cold to me.”

“I know,” the nurse said. “That’s normal because of the shock and the blood loss.”

When she paused, I forced myself to take out a notebook and a pen. I wrote what she had told me, my shaky hand leaving the first few sentences looking as if they had been written in some strange, ancient alphabet.

“In general, fever is not altogether a bad thing,” she said.

“Is Lindsey okay?” What a foolish, immature question. I asked it anyway.

“No.”

“Sorry,” I said. “So, ‘not altogether a bad thing’…”

“Right. So far as fighting infection goes, it’s better for the body to run a little hot because the ‘bugs’ can’t survive above a certain internal temperature. So maintaining ninety-nine to a hundred-and-one degrees Fahrenheit is considered not out of the question.”

Her voice was calm and businesslike and I was screaming inside with impatience. If it wasn’t out of the question, what was the problem? But there was a problem, of course.

“She had a dirty wound,” the nurse said. “For the past hour, her temperature has been one-hundred-four. That’s dangerously high for an adult.”

I made my hand write. My letters became more intelligible.

“We’re using antibiotics and taking other steps to knock it down.”

I stopped writing and rested my hands on the table. “What if you can’t?”

“I’d rather think that we can. She’s a fighter and we’re helping her. She was healthy and is fairly young. It’s a much better scenario than if she had been elderly or in poor health.”

I wrote again like a dutiful student, which was ironic because as a professor I was suspicious of the ones that wrote down every word I spoke. I was pretty sure they weren’t getting the broader themes and most important points of the lecture, wrestling with them, thinking critically.

I put the pen down. Sharon took my other hand.

The nurse looked at me straight on. “You deserve to know that a very high temperature could be extremely serious, even critical, depending on whether the organism she has is, or is not, susceptible to the antibiotics.”

The hits kept on coming.

“Organism?” I asked.

“Some are resistant big-time.” She shot out some acronyms, some of which I had heard of, some not, none sounding good: MRSA, MERS, VRSA. “We have to rule those out.”

“I want to see her.”

“Not yet. Give us some time. We need to get the cultures back from the lab so we know what’s causing the infection. I’ll come and get you.”

Back in the ICU waiting room, Sharon asked me what she could do. I shook my head.

“Go home and get some rest,” I said.

“Let me stay.”

I didn’t answer.

After a few minutes, she stood, told me she would return in a few hours, and made me promise to call her if Lindsey’s condition changed. She didn’t ask about Mike and I was in no condition to debrief about what I had learned.

After Sharon left, I sat among four other bereft souls in the room, all as incapacitated with worry as me. The room was turbulent with a blaring television and the nearness of death. I thought of Kafka’s words, “The meaning of life is that it stops,” and I hated him for writing them.

After two aimless walks down the hall, I settled back in and slid low in the chair.

It was so wrong not to be totally concentrated on Lindsey. But I couldn’t even get in her room.

I felt like I was drowning.

To save myself, I called a criminal defense lawyer at Gallagher & Kennedy where we’d done work as private investigators. Before I got too far into my problem, Lindsey and national security, she stopped me.

“This is not something to discuss on the phone,” she said, and then sent me to her assistant to make an appointment.

I should have told Melton to go to hell and made this call instead of taking the badge. But maybe Strawberry Death would have broken into the house after we were asleep and killed us both. I was drowning in contingency.

It would be next Monday before I could see the lawyer.

Then I tried to sort other things out, the ones that didn’t involve secrets to the Chinese, dirty wounds, and deadly acronyms. Were she awake, Lindsey would save me from such situations.

What would she say now?

She might say, “What’s it all about, Dave?”

It was about…

Peralta and Cartwright, pulling off the diamond robbery and making it look oh-so-convincing by Ed being winged. They were both in on…what?

Horace Mann of the FBI taking the investigation from Chandler PD with no explanation.

Whoever was in the car in Ash Fork, picking up Peralta and returning to the Interstate.

It was about Amy Morris, the hitwoman who shot you, my love, with her “promise” to Peralta.

Matt Pennington in his anonymous office, a safe hidden behind fake filing cabinets, “suicided” in his bathroom.

The man who had phoned Pennington’s office, who was now expecting me to call him back.

Who was working together and at lethal cross-purposes?

And all this for a million dollars in gaudy diamond jewelry that was now in the Chandler Police evidence room, safe in the rolling bag they arrived in. Except this bag was special, rigged with a hidden compartment.

My understanding of this case is coming in slivers, a sliver at a time, and every time they seem to make a whole, another sliver is taken away.

Except…

Except the value of the jewelry stolen and recovered didn’t jibe with the information from the caller to Pennington’s office, who promised that Matt was getting a million-dollar cut for participating in their heist.

Of a bag with a hidden compartment.

Even this liberal arts major realized that was one hundred percent of the stated value of the stolen property.

In other words, Peralta was involved in a job valued at much more than a million. And that meant that Strawberry Death’s stones weren’t the ones stuck in the trunk of Catalina Ramos’ Toyota. Those diamonds had been left in the rolling suitcase with the GPS tracker, easily found.

The real stones worth killing for were still out there.

“Lord have mercy.”

Out loud, I involuntarily channeled my grandmother again. No one else in the room looked at me.