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The elevator moved upstairs slowly. It was sized for two or three hospital beds, but the three of us just seemed to move involuntarily into one corner. The cables and gears churned quietly. The panel glowed with a single button depressed to the correct floor. And then we were there. The doors opened with a heavy jerk. I forced myself to walk quickly down the hall, half-lit now for night running. Across the polished floor tiles: Step on a crack…My stomach felt that hard thumb of pain again. My panic attack, if Beth was to be believed. To have come through all this just to…
“Mapstone.”
Peralta lay in his bed, halfway raised, his large dark eyes wonderfully open. His skin was too pale and his lips were badly chapped. But he looked at us. We bunched up in the doorway, afraid to walk farther.
“Mapstone,” he repeated, his voice reedy and soft. “Where the hell have you been?”
Sharon was sitting in a chair beside the head of the bed. She looked up at us and began to tear up. “He woke up two hours ago. Just woke up.” She swallowed hard. “I’m taught to discount miracles. I’ll take this one.”
I stepped forward and put a hand on his big shoulder. “Good to have you back,” I said.
He shook his head. “You got beat up, Mapstone.”
“I hurt ’em back,” I said.
His eyes followed me. “Did you get the bad guys?” he asked.
“Almost,” I said. “We’re about to get them all.”
“You know about Camelback Falls, the River Hogs?” he whispered insistently.
“David, let him rest. .” Sharon prodded.
I pleaded with her with my eyes. I glanced back at Kimbrough, then Lindsey. Then I pulled up a chair and let him talk.
He filled in some gaps for us. Told us what we needed to know. I could hear Kimbrough scratching some notes on his pad.
Peralta closed his eyes for a second, then gave in to some coughing-also a wonderful relief to hear. He looked at me again, and this time his voice had some of the old steel in it.
“Well,” he said. “Don’t get too used to that title, Sheriff Mapstone.”
I smiled so wide my face convulsed in a dozen points of pain. It felt great.
Chapter Thirty-three
I watched the sunset that night, a prisoner of the glass of the federal building, and it was a tragedy. It had rained while we were in Denver and then cleared. The sky was scrubbed clean. The twilight spreading out from the west deserved the full wonder that came from standing in endless space and breathing wild dry Western air. But the view through the window would do. At least once a month, Lindsey and I tried to take in a sunset from the Compass Room at the top of the Hyatt, just to remind ourselves that for all of Phoenix’s flaws, we lived in a place of daily miracles.
It was already full dark when Kimbrough delivered us to Cypress Street. Off on Seventh Avenue, some moron was gunning his car, trying to find someone to impress. But Willo was dark, quiet, and safe. The house was safe. The cat was glad to see us. And a note was sandwiched in the windshield wiper of Lindsey’s Prelude.
That’s why an hour later I turned off Camelback Road onto Arcadia Lane and followed the street as it wound its way up the mountain. I parked in a dirt turnoff, shut off the lights, and stepped out. The night was cool and dry, magical in the way that only 14 percent humidity can do. Around me at discreet distances, multi-million-dollar homes sparkled like miniature galaxies glimpsed through enchanted telescopes. I’d never own one of those houses on a professor’s paycheck, much less on a deputy sheriff’s.
Jonathan Ledger had done all right. His glass-and-marble dream-house still clung to the side of the mountain. Some ornamental lights marked off the gate and the path down to the house, but otherwise the place looked like it hadn’t been lived in since Reagan was president. A Realtor’s sign. Another sign warned of alarms. I thought of Yeats’ poem, but ignored the sign. I lifted a heavy iron latch on the gate, swung it open, and stepped inside.
Past the gate, the mountainside desert encased me in silence. The path was paved and led downhill at a steep angle. I walked as silently as I could, past some overgrown stands of jumping cactus and creosote bush. Civilization was never far away: breaking the surface of the sandy soil were some metal conduits, leading down to the house.
/> The place was bigger than it looked from the road. It hugged the side of the mountain and cascaded down in two levels. Rock-encrusted walls disappeared into Camelback’s soil. An interior courtyard was guarded by a black, wrought-iron gate. Around on the side facing the city, I got a sense of the place. It was mostly glass, framed by stone and what looked like redwood timbers. It was dark inside-the owners were who-knows-where in the global economy. But I swore I could make out the smooth surfaces of the interior fountain, Camelback Falls.
“I didn’t think you’d come.”
The voice came from behind me, and then a figure stepped out onto a flat promontory beside the glassed wall. He was small and slender. I could just make out the light reflected in his eyes.
The voice continued, a pleasant tenor without an accent. “That night, when I called you. I was sure everything was ruined, and you’d think I shot the sheriff and was trying to kill you.”
“What really happened?” I asked. I felt as if I had stumbled upon the unicorn. I was afraid to step forward.
“I had to get out,” he said. “I had to try to escape. They would have killed me otherwise. Nixon got word to me that I was going to be killed. I didn’t have a choice. Have you talked to Nixon?”
“He’s dead,” I said. I felt a touch of vertigo, standing on the slope, a nice slide of 1,000 feet through rock and cactus just a step away. I saw Dean Nixon’s face so clearly. But it was the face of a nineteen-year-old, stupid and hopeful and untouched by the world.
