Cactus Heart - страница 2

“Chief Peralta,” he said. “And the history professor, Dr. Mapstone.”

Peralta put on his cop face, something that had its own frightening aspect, all beefy jowls and black eyes perched atop a two-hundred-fifty-pound frame. “Come to blow up the building, Bobby? Fight the jihad for your Arab brothers?”

Bobby Hamid chuckled. “Always the bigot, Chief Peralta.” He seemed like a man chatting at a cocktail party as the spectators passed on either side of us, laden with food and Coyote memorabilia. He was moussed, manicured, and did not look like a hockey fan, even in Phoenix. “As you well know, I am a Persian who is now an American citizen, and as Dr. David Mapstone knows,” he smiled mockingly at me, “Persians are the inheritors of a great and ancient civilization, and we have a very complicated history with the Arabs.”

“Fuck,” Peralta said under his breath and stalked away. I followed him.

Behind me I heard Bobby: “Call me sometime, Dr. Mapstone. We must discuss history.”

The first time I had met Bobby had been in an interrogation room when we were trying to link him to a pair of murders, a kidnapping, and a million dollars in drug money. He and his lawyer had dismissed us like a bothersome business annoyance. Now the whole thing encouraged Peralta to buy himself an extra beer.

After the game, though, Peralta was almost celebratory as we spilled out onto the street and walked west on Washington Street toward the county government complex, where we could park for free. The night was as good as it gets in the desert: cool, dry, and magical. We spread out, me and Peralta up ahead smoking cigars and talking work-the Harquahala Strangler killings still went on and he said he felt further from an arrest than when they began three years before. Lindsey and Sharon Peralta walked a quarter of a block behind us.

I had known Mike and Sharon for twenty years, long before he was chief deputy in one of the nation’s largest counties and she was the most popular radio psychologist on the West Coast. But it was harder for Lindsey. Peralta always seemed awkward around her, always the boss, uncomfortable that I was dating one of his deputies, even if she was the best computer braino in the department. And Sharon, with her nonjudgmental judgmentalism, disapproved that Lindsey was ten years younger than I.

At the corner of First Street and Washington, we waited at the light for Sharon and Lindsey to catch up. I looked back at Lindsey fondly. Walking long-legged and insolent with her black jeans, black, shoulder-length hair and tiny gold nose stud: my young-old soul, my dark star. Peralta looked back with me, and I could tell he was about to say something. Then I looked ahead again to see, over Peralta’s shoulder, a man with a large brick in his hand. The man was walking nonchalantly out from an alley toward a black Mercedes idling in traffic at the light.

The man with the brick was an Anglo, maybe around twenty, with an odd-looking blond buzz cut and wearing heavy black boots and a ratty Suns T-shirt. He had that lean, hard-muscled look that is created in the weight rooms of state prisons. At first I didn’t put it together, but Peralta’s face tensed and he pushed past me. Just then the man heaved the brick into the passenger window of the Benz, and two more figures ran out from the alley.

A lot of things happened at once. The car window shattered and a woman screamed with a surprised, high-pitched keening. I could see two young women in the car, which jerked forward maybe two feet and stopped again. The guy with the buzz cut reached in the passenger side and pulled a blond woman halfway out, hitting her several times in the head.

“Get out of the car, you bitches!” he shouted.

Another man, a Latino with extravagant tattoos on both arms, was on the other side of the car, yanking open the driver’s side door, while a third man, his skin gleaming black against a white T-shirt, brandished an Uzi machine pistol. I think a car honked. The light changed and the rest of the traffic sped away. Peralta had his gun out.