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As we left Park Central, he was in the cab of his truck, making another call.
Fifteen minutes later, we were northbound on Seventh Street. Lindsey rode on the jump seat of the extended cab, back with the weapons compartment where he kept his heavy metal. Aside from numbered streets to the east and avenues west, the other easy way you knew your way around Phoenix was to look at the mountains. The South Mountains showed you that direction. The Papago Buttes, McDowells, and, on a clear day, Four Peaks stood to the east. West were the White Tanks. We were driving straight toward North Mountain.
Sunnyslope was one of the few places with soul outside the old city, with a real identity that wasn’t subsumed in endless subdivisions. It was located beyond the Arizona Canal and outside the oasis, a desert town, a Hooverville from the Great Depression, and a place that retained its own proud, quirky identity even after it had been annexed into Phoenix in the 1950s. The relatively few natives from there my age and older were “Slopers” first, Phoenicians second. From my perspective, it had some interesting unsolved murders.
The place remained unique even though it had filled in with some of the same fake stucco schlock you found everywhere. A couple of its more notorious biker bars remained. You were aware of being higher than downtown, up against the bare, rocky mountains that shimmered in the sun. If the smog hadn’t smudged the view to the South Mountains, you’d see you were at about the same elevation as Baseline Road in south Phoenix, where the Japanese Flower Gardens once stood. From both places, the landscape rolled down to the dry Salt River.
Peralta slowed as we approached the five-point intersection with Dunlap and Cave Creek Road. The parking lot of a shabby shopping strip looked like a used-car joint selling black Suburban vans.
“What the hell?” I said.
“Calm down, Mapstone.”
He wheeled in and parked.
“Stay here.”
He left the engine and air conditioning running and approached the black Suburbans. Out of one stepped a slender man in khakis and an open-collar shirt. Eric Pham, special agent in charge of the Phoenix FBI. Even the head fed wasn’t wearing a suit. The New Conformity. They shook hands and talked, and then they walked a ways talking more. Pham was gesticulating, as if laying out a map. Peralta nodded and pointed. Pham nodded.
I asked Lindsey for her iPad and switched the map to a satellite image. The dots had converged at a house at the end of Dun
lap, about a mile away. From the photo, it looked like a mid-century modern house. Maybe it was on a little butte; it was hard to tell, but Dunlap rose as it went east before dead-ending at the mountain preserve. That could provide some easy escape routes if they didn’t do this right.
Now a couple of Phoenix PD units arrived, along with the huge mobile command post. My stomach was wishing it didn’t have breakfast getting in the way of contracting into itself. How long before the news vans and choppers arrived, too?
“Why aren’t we doing this ourselves?”
Lindsey put a hand on my shoulder.
“We have to trust him, Dave.”
I leaned my face against her hand, hoping she was right. I knew Peralta still had chits to call in and back channels. But I had a local lawman’s mistrust of the feds. I had seen how these quasi-military operations could go very wrong.
The door opened and his bulk filled the seat.
“Phoenix PD is closing off streets,” he said. “The FBI is preparing to deploy a SWAT team.”
“And you explained to Eric Pham that we developed a break in this case…how?”
He took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. “I have my ways, Mapstone.”
“I bet.”
He slipped the shift into drive and rolled back to Seventh Street.
“Wait!” It was an inane blurt, but it came out anyway. Anything to stop this circus. I knew it was too late, even though I had a bad feeling about going in with so many cops, so much firepower.
“Exactly, Mapstone. Wait. There’s a baby in that house. The SWAT boys can’t send an undercover to the front door with pizza, toss in a flash-bang grenade, and go in blazing. This is going to take time. They’ll have to negotiate these guys to come out. We’ve got other stuff to do in the meantime.”
I looked back with mixed emotions at the gathering army, hoping he was making the right call.
32
The afternoon sun was cooking toward one-hundred by the time I was waiting for Peralta at the Deer Valley Airport in far north Phoenix, on the other side of the mountains. Since the city had turned Sky Harbor exclusively into a commercial aviation hub, this had become the major general aviation airport. It lacked the cachet of the Scottsdale Airpark, but it was one of the largest general aviation airports in the country. It was also probably the place where UNKNOWN had taken off and landed on his mission to drop the bloody baby doll on me.
But he wasn’t unknown now. I had met Artie Dominguez for lunch downtown at Sing Hi. I left the Prelude on Cypress and took light rail downtown. No reason for all my movements to be known. The train was packed as usual. The light-rail system was one of the few elements of progress to arrive in recent years and its popularity made its critics more hysterical in their opposition. I liked it.
It only hurt a little to get out at the stop by the old courthouse. The building was as handsome as ever, although I wouldn’t let myself look up to my office. It was a crime that they had ripped out the old palm trees, grass, and shade trees years ago. Downtown needed more shade. And they had added more parking on the south side, more concrete to help make the summers hotter and last longer. For all this, it was the best-looking building downtown. Across Washington Street, a little band protested against the new sheriff.
