Desert Noir (9781615952236) (5 page)

And where—perhaps—Earth Doctor plotted his revenge.

The butte behind me blocked out most of the street noise from Van Buren Boulevard, while in front of me the thick streams of traffic along McDowell had begun to thin. I was as alone as I was going to be.

As I waited for the sun to do its sunset thing, I thought about Clarice. Her open-handed friendship had come as a surprise because I'd originally suspected she was too much of a Scottsdale snoot for a blue-collar cop like me. She said
iither
while I said
eether
,
potaato
while I said
potayto.
But she stopped by Desert Investigations at least twice a week bearing gifts of exotic coffee beans, bouquets of flowers from her garden, and baskets of scented potpourri. I expressed bemusement at these unearned gifts, but she had simply explained that she had been overjoyed to find another non-painter who could tell the difference between a gouache and a casein wash. When I had admitted I'd gained my knowledge of art from a long-ago foster parent, she hadn't looked down on me as had so many others. Instead, she'd been intrigued.

For all Clarice's beauty and sophistication, I had detected vulnerability in her eyes and along with it, a surprising lack of the surety that her privileged background should have guaranteed. Once I started noticing the bruises that sometimes marred her face, I'd wondered what childhood damage she'd suffered that bore such strange fruit.

Takes one to know one, doesn't it?

And I wondered once more about her husband. Was Jay Kobe really innocent of Clarice's death? Or was I more impressed by a firm chin and a pair of black-fringed hazel eyes that I wanted to admit?

I decided not to think about Clarice or Jay for a while. Instead, I would just concentrate on the present. Be here now, as the hippies used to say. And in the Here and in the Now, life was growing more beautiful by the minute. As the sun dropped out of the sky and slid behind the Phoenix skyline, streaks of fuschia and gold shot out past rose-tinged cumulus clouds. I waited a few more minutes until the light was just right, then began my daily ritual.

I stood up and spread my arms out in front of me. The dying sun kissed them and the golden hairs along my forearms began to glow with bright colors stolen from the sky.

For a moment I simply stood there, smiling. Then I turned to the east and focused on the flame-touched Pima cornfields and began to chant the “Corn Song” Jimmy taught me.

On Tecalote fields, the corn was growing green.

Growing green.

I came down to the land and I saw.

I saw the tassels waving in the wind.

And I sang for joy.

As I sang the old words, something rustled behind me. Raising my hand towards the zipper on my fanny pack, cursing myself for not having my gun at the ready, I turned slowly, only to see a coyote slip between two creosote bushes. His face—an unusual pale blond—tilted querulously, as if he had been listening to my off-key serenade. Did something deep in his blood recognize the old Pima song? A closer look proved that he was no casual music critic, just a weary hunter commuting home with a limp gopher dangling between his teeth instead of a briefcase.

Oops. Cancel that sexist metaphor. As the coyote trotted nonchalantly past me, I saw the swollen teats hanging from her belly.
Mama,
not Daddy, was headed home to the kiddies.

I stopped my song when the coyote, without even looking, dashed onto McDowell Road at the same time a huge Winnebago came barreling through the gap between the buttes. The driver must have seen her—the setting sun was at his back, after all—but he didn't even slow down. By the time the coyote was halfway to the traffic island the RV was upon her.

I quit breathing and steeled myself for the thump.

But I heard nothing but the whine of snow tires as the overloaded Winnebago rushed past. The coyote had made it to the traffic island where she sat looking at me.

I'd swear she was laughing.

I didn't do much jogging on the way home. My hip ached and I remembered Dr. Elfride's warning: “You can exercise, Lena, just don't get compulsive about it.” 

Hadn't anybody told him Compulsive was my middle name?

Hot and tired, I limped my way up Main Street, glad it wasn't a Thursday and another damned Art Walk night when I'd have to drag myself past the gawkers. But I was in luck. Although I could hear the ever-present hum of traffic from nearby Scottsdale Road, all was quiet on the Desert Investigations front. Only one car, a silver Taurus that probably belonged to one of the gallery owners, remained parked in front of the building next to mine. Carriage lamps glimmered in the dusk and a few soft-throated doves cooed lullabies. The best of all possible worlds.

I smiled again, my second smile in less than an hour. Life was good.

But I stopped smiling when the man in the silver Taurus leaned out his window and shot me.

When I woke up, both my shoulder and my head were killing me. And I was surrounded by men.

Looming over me was Captain Kryzinski, his round face so drawn and grim he looked like a dried apple. He hated it when scumbags shot his cops. The fact that I wasn't “his cop” anymore had never really registered. Standing next to him was Dr. Elfride, his lean, monkish face looking most unmonkishly pissed-off. Some tattletale must have told him I'd been jogging. And there was Jimmy, looked more worried than I had ever seen him.

A strong animal odor filled the private hospital room. I lifted my sore head from the pillow and tried to peer over Captain Kryzinski's chunky shoulder. “Somebody let a horse in here?” 

A rustling, then a parting of masculine heads and shoulders as another face appeared above me. “She must be feeling better,” Dusty said. His taut, Clint Eastwood face was out of sync with his edgy voice. “She's stopped whining and started bitching.” 

“That's what's always intrigued me about you, Dusty,” I said sweetly. “You always know the right thing to say to a woman. So why didn't you bother to shower before coming to see me?” 

Kryzinski turned pink as his ridiculous suit. Like so many Eastern transplants to Arizona, he tried too hard to fit in, regularly squeezing his bagel-shaped body into slim-cut Western suits. Most of the detectives in the Violent Crimes Unit found his ludicrous appearance endearing but they still weren't above humming a few bars of “Rhinestone Cowboy” as he waddled down the hall.

“Now, c'mon, Lena, why you talking to Dusty like that?” he frowned. “When we called him and told him you'd been shot, he burned some serious rubber getting down here. Picked himself up another speeding ticket, not that he needs it, him already being a lifetime member of the Speeder's Hall of Fame and all. Now here you are remarking that he didn't slow down long enough to take a shower. Jesus, Lena, show some respect.” 

Dusty turned a wry face to Kryzinski. “Haven't you learned by now not to get embroiled in our domestic disputes?” With that, he strode back to the armchair in the corner and collapsed into it, draping his long, Levi-clad legs across the arm in a pose of the utmost boredom. At least he'd taken off his spurs.

Jimmy choked back a laugh. Then I noticed that he was holding a dozen yellow roses in his hand. How unlike Jimmy, who usually preferred to leave blossoms on their vines. “We've been pretty worried about you, Lena,” he said. “What happened?” 

Kryzinski broke in. “Yeah, that's my question. What happened?

By the time the EMTs got to you, the shooter was long gone. But we're gonna get him, don't you worry, and when we do, I'll personally put his balls on spin cycle.” 

“Make sure you read him his Miranda first.” I winced as my head gave an almighty throb. It hurt almost as bad as my shoulder.

“The perp was some guy in a silver Taurus, but don't ask me for his license number because I was too busy passing out to write the damned thing down. And, no, I didn't see his face, either. It was in shadow, and I think…” I stopped for a moment, trying to remember exactly what I had seen, not what I
thought
I had seen—two entirely different things. “He may have been wearing a mask but there was so much shadow on him I can't be sure. Before I could get a good look, I heard a noise, the gunshot, I guess, and that was it. I don't even remember falling. How long have I been here?” 

Kryzinski looked at his watch, which had a picture of a palo-mino on its face, the horse's tail doing service as the second hand. “About an hour. You lucked out all the way around. One of them gallery owners was stayin' late doing inventory or some other artsy crap and heard the shot. He ran out, saw you layin' there, and screamed so loud the shooter took off. Then he called 911 and when the EMTs came along, he'd already stopped the bleeding. Took his shirt off and pressed it against the wound. Smart, huh? The EMTs say you were semi-conscious and swearing like a Marine by the time you rolled into Emergency.” 

I smiled, gratified by my machismo. “So who was my Good Samaritan?” 

Jimmy grinned. “Cliffie.”

Regardless of how much it hurt, I had to laugh. “
Cliffie?
And he actually let himself get dirty?” Cliff Barbianzi owned Damon and Pythias, the gallery next door to Clarice's which specialized in gay art. Cliffie was so well known for his ultra-chic lifestyle that
GQ
magazine had even featured him in a recent article titled “Fashion Plates of the New West
.”

Jimmy's grin broadened. “He got dirt, blood, hair, spit—you name it—all over him. He was a real mess. Oh, and he gave me these flowers for you, took them right out of his front window display since all the flower shops were closed. Told me to tell you he'd have come down here himself but he wanted to wash down the front of our building before you got home. He didn't want you to have to see the, uh, mess.” 

A lump formed in my throat at the thought of the immaculate Cliffie down on his hands and knees scrubbing away my blood. I'd never thought of him as being a particularly close friend but I guess you never know about these things until your blood's splattered all over the sidewalk.

At that point, Dr. Elfride elbowed everyone aside and scowled down at me. “Want to know the damage? Not that I think you give a rat's ass.” 

I swallowed the lump and said, “Make my day.” A snort of laughter from Dusty's corner.

Dr. Elfride's mouth twitched, too. “The bullet passed through the fleshy part of your right shoulder, completely missing the bone, the artery, and most of the muscle mass. The Emergency Room docs picked out the bits of clothing imbedded in the wound and closed you up with six stitches, so you won't have much of a scar at all. The only reason you lost consciousness was because your head hit the sidewalk when you fell. Now, Lena, about what you were doing before the bullets started flyin'. The ER doc told me he took a pedometer off you and it registered twelve-point-three miles. Can it be true that a patient I've told
not
to, I repeat, told
not
to exercise too vigorously, is actually jogging twelve miles a day? In this heat?”

More snorting from the corner.

I shrugged and a tiny demon prodded my shoulder with a pitchfork. “You told me to exercise, that it would be good for my hip.” 

Dr. Elfride opened his mouth, left it open so long that I worried a horsefly from Dusty's direction might wing in, then closed it again. “I give up,” he said, then stalked towards the door. Before he opened it, he glared back.

“You're going to do what you want no matter what I say, so you might as well run the friggin' Phoenix Marathon.” He made sure he slammed the door on his way out.

Kryzinski ignored him. “Bet you a steak dinner at Monti's this is connected to the Kobe killing.” 

I thought about that. On first consideration, such a connection seemed unlikely, but what other reason could there be? The embezzling restaurant manager didn't know he was being investigated, ditto with the possibly fraudulent insurance claimant. And Scottsdale wasn't exactly a major venue for drive-by shootings. Then whodunit? The only truly violent person I'd rubbed up against in the past few weeks had been Jay Kobe, but he was still in jail—or at least he had been at 10 a.m. this morning.

Which begged the question. “Uh, by any chance did Jay Kobe make bail today?” 

Kryzinski's round face flushed in anger. “Damn right he did. His lawyer went down there this afternoon with the bail bondsman and the fuck was back on the street by three. Probably already beat his girlfriend up again, too. These batterers, they can't get enough of that shit. Gets them hard, y'know? But hell, Lena, I'm worried we're in trouble with this case. You need to come down to the station and see what came in from the crime lab this morning. The prosecutor's gettin' worried.” 

So Kobe was on the loose. The last time I'd seen him he'd wanted to punch me out, but still, since I was supposed to be on his side, I thought it doubtful he'd actually take a gun to me. Fists were more his style—he liked that close, interpersonal contact. Feeling pretty pissed at McKinnon for not keeping me up to date about Kobe's whereabouts, I decided to have a talk with him first thing in the morning.