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Farther north, back in the 1980s, somebody had promised to build the tallest building in the country. That site was still bare. Absentee owners were banking it on their asset sheets for someday, even as decades went by. This was the heart of the nation’s sixth-largest city, but these parcels might as well have been World War II Dresden after the debris from carpet-bombing had been carted away. I had read that forty-three percent of the city of Phoenix was empty land. What were a few art projects on vacant lots against that?
Hardly anyone knew what had been lost, first by the skyscraper rush, then by the mass abandonment. But these blocks had once held hundreds of bungalows and adobes of the same kind that were now protected and coveted in districts such as Willo. These had been neighborhoods people cared about.
Back in the 1940s, most of Central had been lined with queen palms and handsome haciendas, irrigation ditches, and citrus groves. When I was young, most of these had been replaced with shops and businesses, but it was a vibrant street. “Cruising Central” was an essential tradition on Friday and Saturday nights until the police banned it.
Now the most influential people rarely if ever saw the torn heart of the city, much less gave a damn. It was the only place I felt at home. I drove the streets and the history of the place formed the effortless backbeat in my mind, memory stitching together memory. I was helpless against it.
Half a mile later, I reached Indian School Road and he called again.
“Go into the park and wait.”
Steele Indian School Park stood on part of the grounds of the old Phoenix Indian School. The choice acres facing Central had been given to a big developer and, naturally, sat empty. The rest, meant to be a grand central park for the city, wasn’t much. The imposing brick entrance signs were the most impressive features. Otherwise, it lacked the shade trees of old Encanto Park and the city never seemed to have the money or vision to make it into anything beyond sun-blasted grass with a couple of historic buildings saved from the Indian school and plenty of hot concrete sidewalks.
Today, it was nearly empty. A Hispanic family was having a picnic under an awning. I put the car into park and munched on a Jack Taco, waiting, watching. No other cars came or went. He could see me from the parking lot of the VA hospital to the east. Note to self: keep some binoculars in the car. Lindsey’s Prelude smelled of fast food. My watch ticked around to five minutes, then ten, fifteen, twenty.
At twenty-one minutes, he called again and ran me around. My efforts to start a conversation were immediately cut off. I followed the instructions and drove east on Indian School to Sixteenth Street, south a mile to Thomas, and then back west into the core. Traffic remained light. If someone was following me, he was doing a very good job staying hidden. I thought about pulling off into a sidestreet, backing into an alley, and seeing if I could catch him behind me. But it was too big a chance. I stayed with his itinerary.
Another call: “Go to the McDonald’s on Central. Pull into the parking lot facing east. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
This next leg took me about five more minutes, back the way I had come before, a few blocks north of the punch card building. I drove to the east end of the long lot and waited. Ironically, the FBI offices were in my view to the northeast. Otherwise, it was acres of empty blight, adorned here and there with a dead palm tree looking like a giant burned matchstick. During the 2000s boom, before the biggest-ever collapse of Phoenix’s only real industry, real-estate speculation, t
hese lots facing Central were supposed to become twin, sixty-story condo towers. I don’t think anybody ever believed it would really happen. It didn’t.
As I drank cold water, the airplane came in low from the east, a small, single-engine private craft. It was flying very low. Dangerously low. Immediately before it passed to my right, it jettisoned something. That something fell straight down and landed in a plume of dust on one of the empty lots. I didn’t need a phone call to make me speed a block to the landing zone. If I had that pair of binoculars, I might have gotten a tail number, but probably not. The airplane pulled up and disappeared into the sun.
I slammed the gearshift into park and sprinted into the empty lot. It was a stupid thing to do, but I was powered by a panicky instinct, adrenaline, and dread. Dust was still in the air as I approached a parcel little more than a foot long wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. Something red was leaking through. My chest felt as if all its bones had suddenly collapsed.
That stopped me enough to return to the car for the evidence gloves that I had always kept there from my time as a deputy. I got the gloves and scanned the side streets: nothing. Then I saw him: a man was walking toward the parcel. He was tall and thin with stringy hair the color of urine.
“Stop!”
He ignored me. He looked like a homeless man, but I had my hand on the revolver as I walked back across the empty ground.
We faced off.
“My stuff!”
Was he really a street person or a watcher? I decided on the former.
“This is police business.”
He looked at my PI credentials, not too closely thank goodness, and shuffled quickly toward Central.
I watched him go, then pocketed the wallet and pulled on the gloves. Call the police, call the FBI—this was what my interior voice was saying. I ignored it, dropped to my haunches, pulled out a small knife, and cut the twine. It might be another bomb, came the interior governor that had saved me so often in the past. I ignored that too, and carefully unwrapped the parcel.
It held a baby doll, covered in blood. It looked as if a plastic bag of stage blood had been inserted into the package so it would burst on impact.
“Hey!”
I looked up and the homeless man was fifty yards away, a maniacal look on his face. “You see me comin’ on the street, it’s lights out!”
I waved. My stomach felt as if it was going to climb out of my throat. Yeats was running through my brain, I have walked and prayed for this young child…
The doll’s plastic smile mocked me as I pulled it out of the blood, seeing if the package contained a note. But there was none. The sun beat down on me as I realized the real baby was dead. An entire family wiped out on my watch. It was always going to turn out this way. The baby was going to die. Why did I think it could turn out otherwise? You can’t bargain with kidnappers.
There had always been a chance to save the baby? Hadn’t there? That we could rescue this child while the bad guys kept it alive and either bargained with us or prepared to sell it on the adoption black market? Hadn’t there been a chance?
No.
