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He jerked his arm away violently and pushed her. “You told me you were through sleeping around, Julie. My health is at stake. And our security.”
She looked at him sullenly. “I didn’t.”
“What else does he know? What did you tell him?”
“Nothing.”
He said very quietly, “Lying bitch.” And he shot her, the automatic filling the room with a high-pitched, eardrum-bursting blast.
He immediately pointed the gun at me, before I could draw or go to Julie. She was against the wall, sliding down. Blood trickled out around the solar plexus, darkening the center of her light blue blouse. She was staring at me in surprise, moving her mouth silently.
“Don’t do it, Mapstone,” he yelled. Then: “Tell me what she told you…when she fucked you.”
I just stared at him with a fool’s courage.
He stiffened and then exhaled. “Tell me, and I’ll let you go. I mean, I’ll just tie you up. That way, I can have time to get away. I’ll let you live.”
“That’s probably what you told Phaedra, too,” I said.
“What do you want from me!” he screamed.
“You’re the one with the gun pointed at me,” I said.
He screwed up his face and lowered the gun a bit. “Let me get my money, and I’ll let you live,” he said. “I need a partner. You’re a smart man.”
“And you are a stupid man,” I said. “The money’s gone. We found the storage locker and Phaedra’s car.”
His eyes widened. “What the hell are you saying?” He let his elbow drop.
I drew the Colt.
“No!”
The room exploded and something tore into my left shoulder.
I lined up the sights, squeezed the smooth trigger action of the Python, felt the big gun leap in my hand, squeezed it again, and Townsend was instantly blown backward in a cloud of noise and smoke and blood. He collapsed heavily int
o a lamp, two large holes in his chest, a look of shock and disbelief in eyes that were already dead. The little automatic clattered harmlessly to the floor.
I holstered the Python and knelt before Julie. She was breathing very shallowly and her eyes followed me. The bluest eyes I ever saw. She had lost a lot of blood. Her skin was an ashen color. I started to rise to call for help, but she put her hands on my arms tightly. Tears were running down her face.
“Oh, David,” she whispered. “I’m a mess.”
My left shoulder was numb. My eardrums were ringing. And I was crying, too. I can’t say exactly why.
She pulled herself into me and I held her. “Cold, it’s so cold,” she said. “David, I’m so cold.”
Chapter Thirty-five
Lindsey and I are not beach people. She does not tan. I become bored too easily. But the gentle San Diego sun feels so good on my shoulder, on the nickel-sized scar just below my collarbone. We lie on a clean, little-used beach I know in the Sunset Cliffs neighborhood, our legs entangling. She is rereading Anna Karenina. I am halfway through John Keegan’s history of the way battles and war shaped America. It is a good book, and I can almost hold it in my left hand now without pain. The Pacific is the color of Lindsey’s eyes, and it is beginning to show the cold restlessness that warns summer is almost over.
The vastness of the ocean reminds me of that night in Sedona, of one of the last things I remembered before passing out. I was found by Deputy Taylor, who summoned help. They carried me out of the cabin to a waiting ambulance, in which I’d be driven to a clearing to meet a medevac helicopter. And the stars-my God, the stars. Billions and billions, uncountable, unimaginable. Pain and shock do strange things. I remember thinking of all the centuries and all the history those pinpoints of light represented. The suns of unimagined civilizations perhaps? Light that had originated when the Declaration of Independence was signed, that had been someone’s day and night when Caesar was subduing Gaul. I remember thinking how, back in college, Julie loved for me to drive her into the desert to see the stars. The next thing, I was lying in a hospital bed, groggy. Lindsey was holding my hand tightly, and Peralta was snoring softly in a chair at the foot of the bed.
The next day, Peralta told me what he thought I should know: Townsend was dead, of course. His DNA matched him to Phaedra Riding’s murder. The case was closed, “which is more than I can say for the Harquahala murders,” Peralta said ruefully. I would have to appear before a board of inquiry, but Peralta assured me it had been a “clean kill.” What a strange phrase. I had gone forty years without taking a human life. I wished I could have gone a lifetime.
Sam Larkin confessed to killing Rebecca Stokes. He still claimed it was an accident. His association with Dennis Copeland, a cop killer, would be harder to portray as accidental. Lorie Pope wrote a great Sunday story on the case-hell, I even looked okay without my beard in the photograph. Peralta didn’t charge McConnico, who abruptly announced he was retiring from politics.
“Maybe the next governor is Mike Peralta,” I said.
