High Country Nocturne

Chapter Five

Back in the car, I slid on my holster. Sharon had brushed out her hair and, with the visor mirror down, was nervously freshening her lipstick. She had been agitated on the entire drive up. Who could blame her?

I asked her about Ash Fork and why Mike might have come up here.

She shook her head. “I have no idea.”

“You still have the cabin in Heber?”

“Yes. The FBI was very interested in that. They’re probably at the place now, hoping he’ll show up. They spent hours at our house today-well, yesterday, now-with a search warrant.”

I drove west on the one-way street, turned a block, then came back on the eastbound one-way that returned us to the Interstate. Grainer was gone and it was difficult to imagine the thriving town he had described.

“Did you expect to find him dead here?” I asked Sharon.

“No.”

My body tensed even before she spoke the next sentence.

“He called me tonight.”

Two obscenities came out of my mouth before I stopped myself.

“I’m sorry, David.”

I asked her what time he called. Around eight-thirty.

“When were you going to tell me?”

She flipped up the mirror and the light went off. Her large brown eyes watched me.

“He said not to tell you anything.”

“Sharon…” I stared at the highway, a stream of semis passing us as I stuck to the speed limit. “I can’t believe it. You know the FBI has your phones tapped. You’ll be implicated in this.”

“They don’t even know about this phone. Years ago, the county installed a second landline at the house as a backup in case of an emergency. Then they forgot about it. After he left the sheriff’s office, I called twice to have them take it out. They never did.”

“What did he say?”

She laughed, a surprising sound in this cockpit of tension.

“When I first met him, before I even knew you, I was this girl from the barrio. A nobody. He was a deputy sheriff, the son of a judge. He had grown up in a fancy house in Arcadia. My family had a four-room, tarpaper shack in Golden Gate, before they bulldozed it for the airport. He’d been to Harvard, for God’s sake, and I barely got out of high school. But I was very vain. I knew men liked me. And he liked me. I didn’t always look like an old lady.”

“You’re very attractive, Sharon. And you’re the most accomplished person I know.”

She waved it away. “I wasn’t digging for a compliment, David. There is a point to the story.”

I shut up and ten miles later she continued.

“He liked me, and we started dating. He was only one generation out of the barrio, but he would tease me. He enjoyed making me mad. One of his things was to impersonate a guy named Paco Sanchez. He made up this character that was a gardener who spoke terrible English but was going to take me away from that cop Peralta I was dating. It made me angry, that he was making fun of me. And it made me laugh.”

“That’s a playfulness I never saw in him.”

“Well, you weren’t a sweet young thing he wanted to get in the sack.”

“Thank God for that. I’m still worried about the FBI listening in on your call tonight.”

“All they would have heard is a call from my old beau Paco.”

“What?”

She laughed again. “He used the same voice as back then. ‘Hey, pretty one. You still with that cop?’”

Her voice switched into a high-pitched, heavily accented Spanglish.

“Don’t think I wasn’t worried about a tap, even though this phone number is lost somewhere in the Maricopa County bureaucracy. So I played along. I asked him how he was. He says, ‘So-so, pretty one. I run with a bad crowd. You know that. Things are kind of siniestro. You be okay?’”

“Scary.”

“Right. I told him I was home and safe and he’d better not let my husband catch him calling me. It was the same game we used to play back in the day when he was being Paco. He told me I might not hear from him for a while but it was going to be okay. In between, he did the old flirting in Spanglish.”

“Smart man,” I said. “But he didn’t give you details?”

“None. I was afraid to be too specific in what I asked.”

The big trucks left us behind and the road was black with specters of tall trees on either side.

“David,” she said, “he said another thing. He asked me about my gabacho profesor friend. That would be you.”

“I figured.”

“He said the profesor needed to watch his gabacho ass.” She slipped back into her impersonation of an impersonation. “‘But don’t tell him that Paco said it. Don’t tell him about me at all.’”

I tried to shuffle the deck into order.

Peralta had shot the diamond courier at noon on Friday at Chandler Fashion Center, and then escaped before the police could arrive. By ten p.m., he was abandoning his truck in Ash Fork, where Orville Grainer saw him. Before that, at eight-thirty, he called Sharon on the forgotten landline. He used a play-act that only the two of them would know, yet he conveyed important information. Did he assume she was being tapped? Or was he under duress or otherwise compromised?

“Are you mad at me?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know what to do, David. Things were happening so fast. The FBI didn’t let me go home until after six. I was going to tell you, and then I got the call that his truck had been found and we raced up here.”

I let out a long breath and my anger fell away. I told her about Horace Mann and the business card, about Orville Grainer watching Peralta climb into a sedan. Then I shut up and watched the road for deer. Lack of sleep was starting to slow me down, make me jumpy.

“There’s one more thing,” she said. “When he called, I heard a train in the background. Very distinct.”

We were breaking through the forest and entering Flagstaff, so I took the exit into downtown. It was three thirty Saturday morning and few cars were on the streets. Our FBI escort had disappeared.

At 6,900 feet above sea level and sitting beneath the San Francisco Peaks, Flagstaff in daylight was one of the most scenic places in the Southwest. At this time of night, we had to settle for the appealing little downtown with its pioneer-era brick and masonry buildings. Unlike so many places in Arizona now, it felt authentic.

It had been real to me when I came here as a child with my grandparents. It was cool and beautiful, like a small town out of a storybook. Flag was a real place with gritty jobs in timber and the railroad, along with a little college.

It had trains to delight the young me, all those Santa Fe Railway streamliners that stopped at the handsome depot with its Alpine chalet roof. Not only the young me. Anyone who really knew me understood that I still loved trains and especially the Flagstaff depot.

Now the town had spread out into the pines with subdivisions and shopping strips, a mall, and a Walmart Supercenter. The college had grown into Northern Arizona University. But the city had done a decent job saving downtown from the bulldozers, with the exception of erecting a hideous new city hall that looked like a second-rate suburban office building. Babbitt’s was still here, gone from Babbitt Brothers Trading Company, to Babbitt’s Backcountry Outfitters.

The old business district that ran along and north of Santa Fe Avenue-old Route 66-had been cleaned up. The cheap hotels that catered to railroaders had been spiffed up into offices or boutique lodgings. The smoky risky bars frequented by drunken Indians were gone. Even the seedy Hong Kong Café was now a more upscale cantina.

But the railroad remained. I pulled into the parking lot of the station. The Southwest Chief, the only passenger train left, had come and gone. Although the depot was lit, it was likely locked up until the next train came later this morning. Ours was the only car in the lot.

“David, you really believe he’s on a special assignment…”

Sharon let the sentence hang, not quite a question.

“Don’t you?” I said.

“Mike and I have had our bad times. You know that.”

“You divorced him once.”

She smiled and nodded.

I said, “I still haven’t heard the story of why you two decided to get back together. The daughters are grown and gone.”

“It’s a long story. Maybe on another night drive. But you really believe he’s a good guy, too, right? Still?” Although her voice was gentle, her eyes were black with emotion.

It seemed to be a moment requiring a speech to buck us both up, about Peralta’s unwavering integrity, even when he could also be demanding and domineering and difficult as hell to work for. But the ground started shaking and suddenly intense light came out of the east, followed by six thundering locomotives and a freight train doing at least fifty.

When it was bit quieter, as container cars full of the scrap from de-industrializing America heading for Asia swept past us, I kept my response simple. “I do.”

Then I ran through the scenarios, which were basically two. Either he was working a case for a law-enforcement agency that required him to go deep undercover. Or he was under coercion to steal those diamonds for reasons and persons unknown.

He must have had different license tags on the truck when he got to the mall-there wouldn’t have been time to change them in the immediate aftermath of the shooting and robbery. So something didn’t suddenly happen to cause his trip to the High Country. It was planned.

For whatever reason, the media still didn’t know that the diamond thief was former Maricopa County Sheriff Peralta. He was one of the better-known people in the state. Merely walking into a mini-mart to use the restroom would be taking a chance. That this information hadn’t been released made me think he was on assignment.

But one he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me about.

Then there was the empty gun case. That made no sense under either scenario.

Finally, I told her about the woman who had stopped us earlier, what really happened behind the car as her finger was on the trigger of the semiautomatic pistol, and my doubts that she was really a DPS officer.

“Then,” she said, “ don’t you think you should do as Mike wrote on the card, and as he said when he was playing Paco? Let it alone. Let it play out.”

“Aren’t you worried?”

She put her hand on my wrist. “I’ve never been more worried in my life.”

“Me, too. What about his diabetes?”

“All his insulin is gone. So is his blood-sugar meter.”

“So he planned this.” The thought gave me no comfort.

Then I checked the rearview mirror and saw it-a pay telephone across the street.

The mile-long train was still loudly passing through as I whipped the convertible around, turned onto Santa Fe Avenue, made an illegal U-turn, and stopped in front of this artifact of twentieth-century communications technology. I was even old enough to remember phone booths. This was a simple hooded stand that held the phone.

I put on the flashers and stepped out. It had gotten colder. The hard plastic receiver was freezing, battered, would not pass a health-code inspection-but it carried a dial tone. I slipped it back in the cradle and looked around.

The slip of paper was slid into the top of the phone casing, sheltered from the wind by the minimalist stand. It was actually a business card. My business card. They got around. And to think I had wondered if I would even need them when I became Peralta’s partner. I turned it over and read the familiar draftsman printing:

FIND MATT PENNINGTON

I pocketed it and stepped off the curb as a Flagstaff cop cruised slowly past. By the time I slid into the driver’s seat, he had picked up a call and sped off silent code three, emergency lights but no siren.

I showed Sharon the card. “Ever hear him mention this name?”

“No. It doesn’t sound familiar at all.”

My phone vibrated. A message from Lindsey with three numbers.

It was time to get back to Phoenix.

Ninety minutes later and a mile lower, we passed through the enormous freeway interchange on the north end of the metropolitan area. Sharon was asleep. Some civic wrecker had climbed onto an overpass and written in black capital letters: OMENVILLE.