The Night Detectives

15

We started back to Phoenix at dusk the next day, driving through the desert at night the way people used to do, before advanced automobile cooling systems. Back in the days when only a fool would cross the wilderness without an adequate supply of water.

Before we left, Peralta found a deserted space where he could park and get into the steel storage compartment that sat in the extended cab behind our seats.

It was a gun case.

“Time for heavy metal,” he said, and I didn’t think he was about to break out some Black Sabbath CDs.

Ten minutes later we were speeding east on I-8. I had received a tutorial on a Kel-Tec RFB assault rifle, “a bull pup,” he called it. Barely more than two feet long, it was black and homely. But with the fire-selector capable of semiautomatic and a twenty-round box magazine, it didn’t need to win a beauty contest. I slid it beside me, barrel down, safety on. Peralta slid an assault rifle into the well between his seat and the door. It looked a little like an M-16, but it was matte black with a retracting stock and a rough-edged thing on the barrel that might have been a flash-suppressor or a hand-guard-or not. He didn’t bother to explain besides telling me it was a Colt AR15 Magpul Special.

“A good truck gun,” he said.

My world was still a little blurry from the blast. My stupid question: “Why?”

“I want to have an edge,” he said. “Are you steady enough for this?”

“Yes.”

The question irritated me, but I had no time for that. I had no time for sentimental thoughts about departing from my second hometown as we climbed out of Mission Valley into El Cajon and began the long uphill grind-away from Ocean Beach, away from my other life in this beautiful city and its balm of cooler weather. I opened the glove box, pulled out the gun-cleaning kit, unloaded my Airlite, and began cleaning and oiling it to avoid any trouble from its contact with the pool. My hands shook.

“Sorry you didn’t have any time for fun here,” Peralta said, trying his best to sound sympathetic. “I should have at least set up drinks for you and Isabel, the night detective. To talk over what she found. Anyway, she was cute.”

“You’re trying to set me up? You’re the one who keeps saying Lindsey will come back.”

“You need to get laid, Mapstone. It’d do you a world of good.”

“Like it did you.” I heard my voice, joyless and raw.

Grace, Isabel the detective, Grace’s friend Addison. Oh, I felt old and in a foreign country. The young women’s names sounded either like they belonged to old ladies or unfeminine and strange. I shouldn’t have been so judgmental.

But I was particular in my female names. I liked boomer names like Susan, Amy, and Karen. Pamela: three syllables of sexy. Lisa and Linda were nice. And Patty. I had preferences for Generation X names, too. Heather and Melissa. And Lindsey. And Robin. Addison? No. Leave it to me to start categorizing and analyzing even small things. Maybe it was a good sign. Or maybe I was leaking blood inside my brain from effects of the explosion.

I wanted to take a nap. But then the dreams would come.

This was the first time we had spent alone together since the blast and I briefed Peralta as much as I could. My head hurt despite nearly overdosing on Advil, everything felt slowed down, and concentration was difficult. My shoes, the only casual pair I brought, were still soggy. The one constant thought I could hold was the missing baby.

I did my best to brief him.

He immediately interrupted. “You’re one lucky bastard. The kill zone of a Claymore can be fifty meters. It’s a shaped charge, meant to explode in the direction that it’s pointed. You might have been better off running to the bedroom and getting under the bed. That way you wouldn’t have been directly in front of it.”

“Trust me, there wasn’t anything left of the bedroom, and there was no bed frame.” I started to zone out a little. “Hell, I don’t know. I reacted with instinct. How did they detonate it?”

“Could have been anything nowadays: timer, laser, plus the good old fashioned wires.” One big hand was enough to handle the steering wheel. “We used to set up Claymores to ambush NVA columns. They’d come down a jungle trail and we’d let the gooks get well inside the kill zone. Then we’d set off one at the front of the column and they’d naturally run backwards. That’s when we’d set off the Claymores from the back, going forward.” He laughed malignly.

“Sounds like fun.”

“You don’t know. You weren’t there.” He said this without irony.

“Thank you for your service to the country, sir. Now, may I fucking continue?”

“Sure,” he said. “But how did you realize it was a Claymore?”

“I read about it in a book.”

When my eyes were closed, I started to get dizzy. When I opened them, the car lights from the freeway hurt. Looking off to the shoulder, I was overcome by the fear someone would suddenly step in front of us. So I stared into my lap.

After the explosion, I pulled myself from the pool. My cell phone was ruined, of course. But my gun was fine. It wasn’t needed. No bad guys were there to finish the job. Instead, people were shouting and screaming. I went from apartment to apartment, getting people out, sending them to the street until the fire department could arrive. That seemed to take forever. One man living in my old unit looked badly injured. I found him last, under the remains of a heavy desk that probably saved him, and I stayed with him until the first cop came in the door with a flashlight and a gun.

It was a miracle that the damage wasn’t worse. One person in critical condition, two more suffered less-serious injuries. It helped that the people directly below Tim’s apartment were gone; the same with the residents of the unit directly to the south. No fire followed the explosion and the emergency crews quickly shut off the gas.

I remembered choppers overhead and a bright beam from the sky.

Then, after a cursory checkup by the paramedics, it was all cops, all the time. I never got a chance to have coffee with Sharon. Nor did I have time to order a new cell phone. Instead, I spent the hours telling my story to seven different San Diego cops, including Kimbrough, who was not at all happy to see me. Then ATF showed up and took me downtown to talk more. What sleep I got came from leaning my head against a wall while waiting for the next round of questions.

I was fortunate for a law passed after 9/11, giving retired police officers in good standing the power to carry a concealed firearm in any state. Otherwise, things could have gotten very disagreeable. Somehow Peralta had pulled some levers before he left office and I was able to “retire” with a combined fifteen years service to the Sheriff’s Office. The pension was shit, so don’t judge me as a greedy public employee. But the conceal-carry benefit probably kept me out of jail.

The cops and feds didn’t think I did it-“it” being called a “possible act of domestic terrorism” on the television crawler I saw while waiting in one of the fed’s offices. But they didn’t like that I was in San Diego as a private investigator and that my client was dead. I wondered if they’d force us to stay in town for further questions. Instead, it was a wonder that we weren’t escorted to the city limits. I thought momentarily of my unread George Kennan biography and how he had been declared persona non grata by Stalin, his ambassadorship to Moscow cut short. I was persona non grata in San Diego at the moment and for better reason.

An Amber Alert was issued for the missing baby. Detectives had called Tim’s parents in Riverside and assembled more information: a photograph of the now-orphaned infant and his name.

His name was David.

“I should have gone with you,” Peralta said.

“You couldn’t have moved as fast as I did.”

“I wouldn’t have mistaken a Claymore for a big bar of soap.”

He had me there. I went on and tried to tell him everything, step by step.

“Did you tell them about the pimp?”

I said yes.

“Did they believe you?”

“They did when I gave them the Glock I took off him.”

I had no doubt that America’s Finest Pimp was now sitting in one of America’s Finest Interrogation Rooms, but I didn’t make him for the killer. He had been too unnerved by my arrival and my assumed connection to the unnerving Edward to return to the apartment. Anyway, the pimp didn’t strike me as the throat-slashing kind and certainly not as a bomb maker. But I didn’t even know his name. The cops told me nothing. There was no professional courtesy to give to a private investigator.

When the de-brief had exhausted me, I asked Peralta a question. Did it pass the smell test? The rich guy leaving a thousand dollars on the nightstand for Grace, and then her setting up a business based on that kind of sum? Not a twenty-five-dollar blowjob from a hooker on Van Buren, but hundreds, even thousands of dollars.

“Sex is big business,” he said. “Don’t forget Eliot Spitzer. Didn’t he pay four or five grand every time? I’ve seen plenty of investigations into high-end prostitution. We took down a county supervisor while you were away teaching, for putting hookers on his county credit card. The single-girl-on-her-own part of it is unusual, but she eventually got caught by a pimp. That sounds real.”

I put away the gun-cleaning kit, reloaded my revolver, and slid it back into my pocket.

“If you’d gotten gun oil on the carpet, I would have killed you,” he said.

I ignored him. “Why would a man pay for sex, especially when there’s so much free stuff around? Especially why would a rich man do it?”

“Tiger Woods spent something like four million bucks a year on prostitutes.”

“Your mind is an amazing thing,” I said, repeating a phrase he usually applied to me. Having my brain rocked like a Jell-O salad had addled my mind at the moment.

His big shoulders shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a golfer.”

“Do you spend four million…? Never mind.” I really did not want to know.

Even in my driest spell, in my twenties when young women weren’t drawn to a guy who read books and talked about history, I didn’t contemplate going to a prostitute.

“Sharon could tell you the psychology,” he said. “With a young woman and older man, it’s called the Lolita Complex, I think. Some men are drawn specifically to prostitutes. Rich men want the privacy that the right prostitute can provide. Most of these guys are married, remember, and they don’t want their wives to divorce them and take half of their wealth in a community property state. Politicians are willing to take the risk. A prostitute never says no, never has a headache, and she’ll do kinky stuff the missus might not do.”

“And it’s a huge human trafficking problem.”

“That, too.”

Back in El Centro and the heat, we went through the Wendy’s drive-thru and pulled to an empty part of the parking lot to eat.

“So,” Peralta said, “what didn’t you tell the police?”

He had parked the truck so we could see anybody coming into the lot and escape through two different driveways. His caution was good.

“Fuck!”

My concussed brain coughed up something essential.

“I forgot the flash drive. I forgot to give them the flash drive.”

Peralta was silent.

“I’ve got to get it to them.”

“Anything else?”

Yes, there was. I unpacked another chamber of my addled brain and told him about the writing on the wall: our names written in blood. Of course this critical piece of evidence didn’t survive the blast.

He paused mid-bite. “How would the suspect know about us?”

“I gave Tim our card.”

Peralta was silent and it was a long time, for him at least, before he resumed eating. About fifty seconds.

Many things about this case were unknown, but one was becoming clearer. The killers weren’t only after our clients. They might be after us. I stroked the ugly little rifle beside me, glad that Peralta was into this kind of heavy metal.

“What should I do about the flash drive?”

“Keep it,” he said. “Let’s see who’s on it.”

We finished our meal and stopped at a truck stop, where I bought a cheap cell phone to get me by until I could order an iPhone. Then we returned to the Interstate, one of America’s great accomplishments of the past century. Today the nation refused to do great things but that didn’t keep people from crowing about our “exceptionalism.” I had bigger problems than the fate of nations, but I let Peralta mind the rearview mirror.

Who knew how many killers roamed the anonymous Interstates of America tonight? How many truck-stop prostitutes would disappear tonight, meeting terrifying deaths, mourned by none? Except for the infrequent tractor-trailer rig, I-8 was mostly empty and carbon dark, as though the moonless night was trying to steal the beams our headlights threw ahead. Above was a vault of stars that most urban humans rarely saw in person. In my grandparents’ generation, it had merely been the night sky. Against it, my problems seemed very small. We were only here for nanoseconds of cosmic time. Inside the cab of Peralta’s super-truck, there was no song of the wind or moan of the engine, no sense that our onrushing feet rested only a few inches above the pitiless land.