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We descended onto a two-lane road, crossed a wash, and I pulled the car into a broad, flat lot surrounding what had once been a gas station. All that was left was a rectangular streamline moderne building, long-abandoned, with an office on one end and two garage doors on the other, with a single yellow streetlight burning above.
I pulled in behind a Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department cruiser with its light bar flashing. Nobody seemed to notice us. The cops were on the other side of yellow crime-scene tape, milling around a pickup truck illuminated by multiple spotlights.
It was a new Ford F-150, extended cab.
Mike Peralta’s truck.
“David.” Sharon touched my hand. The poor lighting couldn’t conceal the agony in her eyes. “If he’s…”
She stopped, squeezed my hand hard.
“It’s going to be fine.” I gently disentangled her hand, took off my gun, slid on my leather jacket, and stepped out into the chill. The wind was coming hard from the west and the air smelled of pines.
My stomach was tight, but after the encounter with the woman in the DPS uniform, I was focused and calm. Thanks to some fluke of brain chemistry, I usually excel in these situations. Panic only hits me later, when I am safe and alone.
But I had no confidence that it would be fine, as I had assured Sharon. He might have come up here and blown his brains out. He might have been murdered. His body might be in the truck awaiting me.
Another black SUV rolled past us down the street, turned around, and came back to a halt at the far end of the lot. It didn’t take a Ph.D. to guess this had been the vehicle tailing us, which had chosen to come down the off-ramp at the right moment to save our lives. The SUV’s lights went out, but no one got out.
As I drew close, gusts caused the yellow tape to make a snapping sound. A voice ordered me to stop. Two burly deputies and a woman wearing an FBI windbreaker came toward me, hands on their weapons.
Everybody was gun-happy tonight.
I said who I was. They told me to wait.
The woman walked toward the truck and I studied the deputies. Both wore Level 2 holsters. They saw me looking at their guns and both changed their stances as if in a dance move. I looked away.
You could tell who was from Phoenix. A dozen feds were in dark windbreakers with yellow “FBI” emblazoned front and back, and they all looked uncomfortable and cold, hands in pockets, some stamping their feet like old beat cops. The Yavapai County deputies wore heavier jackets. A DPS officer looked me over and I looked away.
A man wearing only a suit, crisp white shirt, and burgundy tie approached me. He looked perfectly at ease in the thirty-degree weather and steady wind. He was substantial, not an ounce of flab, all muscles and sinews and teeth. His face was most striking, long and heavy jawed, milk-chocolate skin with a shading of fine gray. It was a face to carve into a monument.
“You’re David Mapstone?”
I said that I was, and he thrust his credentials directly in my face, waiting for me to read them. Federal Bureau of Investigation. They were issued to Horace Mann.
He was the namesake of the nineteenth-century father of universal public education in America. This Mann immediately began to school me.
“I’m the special agent in charge in Phoenix.”
My breath came out as white mist. “Eric Pham is the SAC.”
“Not anymore.” He lifted the crime-scene tape and nodded for me to follow him.
I wasn’t going to argue. It was two a.m. and I was surrounded by suspicious minds. I wasn’t here to plead Peralta’s case or change anybody’s mind about what should have been the unthinkable.
Our feet crunched on the old concrete of the gas station pad. Mann stared ahead. “We called over a locksmith from Flagstaff and we used pry bars. We tried to drill into it. Nothing can open it, short of explosives.”
I took a long breath when I saw that the inside of the F-150 contained no body of my friend, no blood.
The FBI agent who called had told the truth. The reason they wanted me was for the key to the truck’s weapons locker.
And perhaps to see if I made any suspicious stops on the way that might lead them to Peralta.
Behind the front seats, rising from the floor of the cab extension, was the steel case that held Peralta’s armory for the road. I handed Mann the key.
“Stand here.” He placed me ten feet away from the action, but I could see him reach inside, turn the key, and raise the lid. He spoke quietly to other agents standing nearby but the frustration cutting into his expression was easy to read.
“Come here.”
