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“We didn’t seal the building soon enough,” I said. “There was too much chaos. I’m not sure they got the guy.”
“Maybe it’s not a guy,” she said.
Chaos. It was like the thunderstorms in the Arizona high country that begin slowly but can suddenly turn nasty. A tense surprise moved through the crowd around us after Peralta fell. Only after seeing the blood was there something like a collective gasp. I regained my wits with only a mouthful of panic and, as gently as I could with such a big man, I rolled Peralta over on his back, and made sure his airway was open and he was breathing. He was, but he stared emptily and only made a long, exhaling sound, his powerful hand grasping my shirt shyly.
Then Lindsey was there, shielding us, sweeping her arm toward the shooter with her baby Glock 9mm semiautomatic, “ready to rock ’n’ roll,” as she puts it. But no more shots came. I heard her directing other deputies, heard them running across the old wooden floor toward where the gunfire originated. Somewhere above us. As word spread through the crowded gymnasium, civilians tried to get out while cops tried to take charge or get information. Finally the music stopped. Fragments of the crowd swelled around us, nearly stepping on us, until some Phoenix cops set up a perimeter to keep people back. They let Sharon through after a fuss. TV lights flared behind me. Somebody said the paramedics had arrived.
At Good Sam, I saw the dazzling red fire department ambulance was empty, its rear doors still open. Peralta was already deep inside the vast brightness of the trauma center. City cops and deputies milled around officiously. We parked in a space for emergency vehicles and walked quickly to the automatic doors.
“Gurney!” shouted a red-haired nurse as I walked in. I tried to step aside for this next victim, but the nurse was headed straight for me.
“He’s OK,” Lindsey said, holding out her hand as if to direct traffic. “He’s just a mess.” She smiled back at me, her twilight blue eyes calm.
“Chief Peralta,” I said, then caught myself. “The sheriff. Where is he?”
Just then Sharon strode past the nurse and hugged me tightly, despite the blood all over my uniform. Lindsey looked at me and flashed something in lover’s code.
“You’re OK?” Sharon demanded, her voice metallic and a notch louder. I nodded. Her eyes were rimmed red but she wasn’t crying.
“Where are the girls?” I asked.
“They left to take the Judge home before the party,” she said. “Thank God they weren’t there when it happened.”
Sharon Peralta holds a doctorate from UCLA and she’s a best-selling author. She’s made more money the past year than I’ll see in my lifetime. She’s the most popular radio psychologist on the West Coast, dispensing exquisitely nuanced advice from nine to noon every weekday for the latte-and-whole-grain crowd. But walking toward me she looked just as scared and awkward and at sea as the twenty-five-year-old cop’s wife she had been the first time I met her. It lasted just a minute.
“They won’t even let me in,” she said. “He’s in emergency surgery.” We moved by instinct into an otherwise deserted waiting room. Sharon sat on a greenish sofa, me and Lindsey on either side.
“Oh, David, I thought I didn’t have to worry about this anymore. I just thought he’d be a politician now. All those years when he’d go to work and I never knew if he’d…”
We all silently stared at the wall. Sharon said, “God, I still remember that night in Guadalupe, back in 1979, when you and he were patrol deputies. You remember?”
I nodded, recalling a bad shooting years ago. Peralta was a hero. I was scared shitless. If he was, it never showed. I said, “He came out of that just fine, Sharon, and he’s going to now.”
“Oh, David,” she said dul
ly, “you don’t have to baby me…” She let the sentence trail off, then something bright and fierce crossed her face. “David, his insulin.”
I didn’t make the leap with her. She said, “He’ll have to have his insulin.”
I patted her hand. “Sharon, it’s a hospital, they have everything right here.”
“David, he’s got to have it. It’s his prescription. Please. It’s in his office refrigerator. Please do this for me.” She took a heavy gold key off a ring and handed it out. “This is to his office.”
I started to say something, but Lindsey put a hand on my shoulder.
“We’ll be here, Dave,” she said, looking at me full-on with those incredible blue eyes. “Don’t be long.”
I gave in to the irrational requests of the terrified and took the key.
***
A few minutes later, I used the side entrance to the Sheriff’s Office headquarters building on Madison Street downtown. I avoided the clots of employees, all awaiting the same news I did. I took the shortcut down an empty corridor where an unmarked door was the back entrance into Peralta’s office.
The outgoing sheriff had just moved out of his office that morning, and the county, in the inscrutable wisdom of large bureaucracies, was waiting two weeks to give the place new carpeting, drapes, and paint. So here I was in the familiar room where Chief Deputy Peralta held court all these years. The big desktop was bare and the credenza behind it was piled two feet high with reports. The county seal and Arizona state flag sat photogenically in one corner. An entire wall held photos from Peralta’s career. A framed map of the county took up another wall, the yellow urban mass spread ever more into the desert. It was a room where Peralta would sit with his boots up on the desk and philosophize about crime and punishment. Or bark at me, and not affectionately, about the progress on a case. It looked reassuring and familiar, and the events of the past hour were just outside the door.
I squatted before the small refrigerator, and fished past a couple dozen caffeine-free Diet Cokes. I pulled out the insulin bottles and tucked them in my pocket. Peralta had never admitted to me that he had diabetes, and when Sharon told me a couple of years ago I was surprised to realize this invincible man, who seemed incapable of mere human emotions like fear or sentimentality, was as vulnerable as any of us.
I closed up the refrigerator, and as I stood, my eye went to Peralta’s beaten-up Franklin Planner, resting precariously on a pile of files. It was open to today, and of course he’d made no notation of the most important event of his career. On the facing page was only one item to do. It read: “Mapstone-Camelback Falls.”
