High Country Nocturne

Chapter Forty

I took the long skywalk to the parking garage, pulled the black duffel bag of weapons out of the Honda Prelude, and found Sharon’s car. I resisted the temptation to open the trunk. Out of the corner of my eye was a black SUV. So I tossed the duffel into the passenger’s side and settled into the driver’s seat. The fine German engineering cradled my hindquarters and made me realize how old everything in the Prelude was, right down to the seats.

When I pulled onto Third Avenue going south, the SUV was right behind me. But I made it a point to put down the ragtop so it was obvious Sharon was not behind the wheel. Here was a test about whether Mann’s FBI watchers took me seriously. Sure enough, by the time I had gone five blocks, the SUV turned left. Somebody had given an order.

Somebody might have a tracking device on the car anyway.

At the house, I changed into black jeans, black turtleneck, and Timberland boots. I moved quickly. That was a very expensive car sitting in my driveway.

Back in the convertible, I adjusted my cell so its GPS was working. My dark device was now trackable. Then I put the top up and drove, crossing over to Third Street and taking the ramp down to the Papago Freeway, which ran though Midtown under a park. Crossing all the lanes of traffic, I made it to the Loop 202 exit and went straight east on the Red Mountain Freeway, past the north end of Tempe, Town Lake, Sun Devil Stadium, lots of shopping schlock, and getting off at Country Club Drive in Mesa. I turned left, crossed the Salt River, and the road became the Beeline Highway.

The rain had scrubbed away the smog and the day was spectacular. Ahead of me towered Four Peaks and the Mazatzal Mountains. Ahead of me were the High Country and the town of Payson.

At the top of the hour, I listened to the radio news. Fresh developments on the Saturday night shooting of a deputy’s wife. The suspect was Amy Lisa Russell, a former Mountie. You could go on the station’s Web site to see her photo. Police were “tight-lipped” about a motive.

The motive that would satisfy a prosecutor was the stones.

Vare had invested hours in badgering the truth out of RCMP headquarters in Ottawa. Canada is a major producer of diamonds. While Amy Russell was chief of security at the Ekati mine, she compiled an impressive record of installing ever-better anti-theft technology and detaining employees who tried to sneak out little bits of rough.

It was only months after Russell resigned that mine officials realized that over a year between fifteen million and twenty million dollars in gem-quality rough had gone missing. The thefts happened a little at a time, but they added up impressively. Further investigation showed that the new security measures had proved essential to cloaking the drip-drip-drip heist. Only then was Russell seen as the obvious suspect and the RCMP was called in.

But she was missing, last known address in Vancouver.

I didn’t know how her stones ended up as FBI evidence. Or how Horace Mann figured in. Was he working with her and the Russians? Or Pamela Grayson really was Suspect Number One. Maybe Mann was innocent.

As to Amy Russell’s motive that would satisfy curious fellow humans…perhaps even she didn’t know. If I were a hot-shit Mountie, I wouldn’t throw away my career for diamonds. But then I hadn’t suffered through finding my family massacred. I didn’t feel this supernatural pull of the stones that locked onto so many, made them willing to steal, kill, take every risk. Changed them. And who the hell knows why anybody does anything?

The next few hours might tell.

My phone rang. Kate Vare.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Lindsey woke up,” I said.

“That’s good,” she said. “I want to interview her.”

“Tomorrow. She’s in a lot of pain. They only let me talk to her for a few minutes before she fell asleep. She didn’t remember the shooting. Where are you?”

“Pennington’s office. We got in the safe. He had fifteen million in cash, twenty million in euro bearer bonds, some diamonds.”

After a long pause, she added, “He had a list of numbers. I’m guessing they’re offshore bank accounts.”

“I bet you find one for an FBI agent named Pamela Grayson. Or Horace Mann.”

“That will require bringing in the FBI, but yes.” She sounded very happy.

Then I told her what I had learned about Pennington’s actual job.

She didn’t answer.

I said, “So contact your DEA friend. They’re not going to like losing their own.”

She gave a heavy sigh. “This is a hell of a mess.”

The desert lowlands fell away as I passed the abortion of Fountain Hills-I remembered when it was a lovely saguaro forest-then the rugged enchantment of Red Mountain and the Indian casino and the cottonwood-lined Verde River at Fort McDowell.

The car climbed effortlessly through millions of years of geology. Fantastic shapes appeared beside the highway. Cones and ribs, spires and mesas, crags that looked like human faces and nearly vertical walls. Steep climbs reached thresholds, followed by wide expanses and then more steep hills, ravines, and tight passages.

It was all here to see, the way time had pitted one element against the other to create our fleeting moment. Broken ground was cut by dry washes and arroyos. As I drove, precipitous cliffs and sharp drops and fold upon fold of rough mountains constantly remade the vista. Cactuses gave way to scrubby trees and grasslands fighting for their share of water. Overhead, the sky was enormous and deep blue.

I was lousy company on an Arizona road trip. Lindsey loved for us to drive around the state, armed with a detailed atlas and books on roadside history, geology, and Audubon guides. Yes, when it came to pleasure, she often liked physical books. But she was younger. I knew what was lost, what this country was like before six-and-a-half million people moved here. Fountain Hills was only one example. I became especially surly in Sedona, which I remembered as an empty place without a single traffic light. Alone, I was little better. The Beeline had been re-engineered into a divided-highway marvel. But that only allowed more people to profane the desert.

Around me was the Tonto Basin, land of many stories and much history. Zane Grey had written a novel of the same name. This had long been ranching country, once the whites had wrested it from the Apache. There were a few old mines, but they didn’t have the riches of the territory to the west, around Prescott and Jerome, so they quickly played out. It had also been a hiding place for outlaws and rough territory that a lawman entered at his peril.

The Tonto National Forest began a few miles back and, for now, kept out the developers. The Bush Highway connected. To the south was Punkin Center. As a boy, I had loved stopping at the little store there. It was like something out of a cowboy movie. Ahead, the former cavalry watering hole of Sunflower was gone in a few seconds

Up here, if you looked past the divided highway, it was still possible to catch glimpses of the majesty of the land, the lonely, sublime American West and Arizona High Country. Here were fleeting vistas-once they were so abundant-without a single thing made by humans.

When Theodore Roosevelt had come to the Grand Canyon more than a century before, he had said, “Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.”

Now some grifters wanted to develop land right outside the Grand Canyon National Park boundary. How long before they privatized the park itself?

I had no time to dwell on the land or the past. The present demanded my entire attention.

Traffic was very light. A few hotdogs in big pickups blew past at ninety. If anyone was deliberately following me, he was very good.

Peralta had intended for me, and by extension, Lindsey, to have nothing to do with this operation. But, as Trotsky said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

Now I was at war.

If my hunches proved wrong, this war would be lost.

I thought about a book I had recently read on the Donner Party, trapped in the Sierra Nevada in 1846, reduced to cannibalism. The author had argued that many of the people made decisions that seemed rational at the time, until it was too late and winter caught them early. Then they had to forge on, no matter.

One of the sentences stayed with me: “The trap clicks behind.”

When did the trap click behind me? Somewhere on this highway? Or much, much earlier?

I touched the car window. It was cold. Now all I could do was forge on.