Valley of Lights (2 page)

I popped the siren and the ambulance backed off, leaving me a clear run to the street, but I knew that I was already too late. Phoenix is mostly a city of wide roads and open spaces where a runner or even a walker is something unusual and easy to spot, bat none of that applied in the Deuce. I cruised out into the hot afternoon sun and made a circuit of the block, but Mercado had been swallowed up somewhere in the maze of side-roads and warehouse blocks. There was no point in stopping and asking for witnesses; everyone, I knew, would have been looking somewhere else.

I drove back to the Paradise, calling in a description on the way but not expecting much to come of it. There was one significant detail that put a little hope into the action, however; Mercado was going to find it very hard to disguise the fact that he'd taken a serious beating sometime in the last few days. One side of his face around his eye had been swollen so much that the skin had seemed to be ready to split over his cheekbone. Fast as he was, somebody had been faster.

Morrell and McKay were crouching over the busted grocery sack when I got there, taking samples from the broken jars and knotting them into little plastic bags. As far as I could see, the jars were all of some kind of baby food.

'Jesus,' Morrell said as he scrabbled around in the dirt, 'look at me. My mother thinks I spend all day being a hero.'

Lieutenant Michaels, who was standing over them and watching, said, 'How can babies eat that shit? No wonder they cry all the time.'

'You find anything?' I said, but the lieutenant shook his head.

'Nothing you could recognise. Maybe the lab'll find something.'

'I don't think so,' Morrell said from down at ground-level. 'This is just goo-goo food. None of the jar seals is even broken.'

I looked at the split sack again. It was just a mass of glass shards and colored pulp, like some smashed crystal insect with its insides all oozing out. Chocolate, peach, apple and banana.

'So,' I said, 'we got a mystery?'

'We got a mystery,' the lieutenant agreed.

Travis and Leonard were still taking IDs when I caught up with them in the park, and they didn't exactly look as if they were loving every minute of it. It's dull, haphazard work, but sometimes it can throw up a result; closeness to the freight lines and the Plasma Center and the Salvation Army building gives the area a heavy turnover of transients, and random ID samplings have been known to turn up even outstanding homicide warrants in the past. Leonard was off somewhere on the phone to the headquarters computer room, and Travis was standing by their car chatting easily to the people who were waiting for their cards to be returned. One of them, an Indian girl named Maria whom I'd seen around a few times before, was offering to inlay Travis's belt buckle with turquoise. The three young men with her said that they were going over to the employment office to get their cards endorsed so that they could get jobs in Mesa... picking fruit, anything. Travis was staying quiet and letting them talk; friendly, but not forward.

I asked, but nobody knew any Gilbert Mercado. Nobody had heard anything about a man of his description getting a beating, either. One of the young men started to tell me about an accident he'd seen two days before, a man hit by a state truck and thrown about sixty feet, a hole in his side the size of a thumb and pouring blood. One of the others said, suddenly, 'I had a coat ripped off over at the mission,' as if the grief of it had only now caught up with him. Their good nature was running down into nervousness as Leonard's absence with their documentation lengthened. The boy who'd seen the accident said that if there was nothing doing in Mesa, perhaps he'd move on down to Tucson and try there.

Leonard came back - nothing outstanding - handed them their cards, and thanked them all. 'Hey, Phoenix,' I heard one of them saying as they drifted away, 'isn't that some kind of a bird?'

I gave Travis and Leonard a quick summary of what had happened over at the Paradise, and saw their eyes light up with curiosity. Mercado, I said. He might change his name, but he can't hide the fact that somebody's been using his face for football kicking practice. Then Travis took a call for a noise complaint from Encanto Park, some kids with a stereo system staging their own concert on the bandstand, and as they set off up 15th I resumed my circuit of the district and my efforts to get the Mercado name and description a wider circulation.

I pulled in outside the Salvation Army Center, where half a dozen lost-looking men were hanging around the entrance. Rafael, the one that I wanted, was stretched out in the dust on an unmade sidewalk; the wadded shirt that he was using for a pillow was cleaner than the one that he was wearing. One thing you have to understand about the Deuce, it's informal. I told him what I wanted, told him that I wanted it in the grapevine, and then disappeared from in front of his eyes as I heard a call coming through for a 962, possible 965. Five minutes later I was on somebody's front lawn, looking at a Civic with its front end destroyed; two fire trucks and an ambulance were already in attendance, not to mention the ever-present silent crowd and a few small dogs nosing around the wreck. A woman with head injuries had already been taken out; she was probably going to die, and there was a Vehicular Manslaughter charge on the cards depending on the Hit-and-Run squad's report.

This job. Dull, it ain't.

Lieutenant Michaels caught up with me during my donut break at Winchell's.

'You know, Alex,' he said, dropping his hat on the table and sitting down across from me, 'that ambulance kid was right.'

'About what?'

'I just heard back from the hospital. You know one of them died as they were being admitted?'

'No kidding. Which one?'

'The black kid. They were transferring him to a gurney, and suddenly he wasn't breathing. Anyway, they've run brain scans on the other two, and they didn't find a thing.'

I was thinking of what Morrell had said;
I started to turn him over... scared the shit out of me, just like he'd died.
'Both the same?' I said.

'They kicked the plug and they spat on the electrodes, but it still came out as flat as a fart. How about that?'

'Any indication why?'

'Narcotics found nothing and there's no sign of any abuse or injury on the bodies. It's just like they were... I don't know, sleeping till doomsday. The TV people wanted to get shots of them, but the chief's playing it safe in case any relatives come out of the woodwork and decide they want to sue.'

'Sue for what?' I said.

'Invasion of privacy, exploiting the disabled, whatever. There's a police artist on it instead.'

'Lightnin' Leslie?' I ventured.

'The same.'

'Everyone he draws looks like one of the Munsters.' Lightnin' Leslie was in traffic division, an amateur artist who'd had one big success and had been coasting on it ever since; his depiction from a rape victim's description had actually led to an arrest. The perpetrator had looked like one of the Munsters. Rumor was that he'd painted a portrait of the Chief so awful that it only came out at private parties when it was known for certain that the Chief was out of town.

'Yeah,' Michaels said. 'They say he's signing his pictures in Braille, these days.'

TWO

I wasn't always with the Phoenix PD. First I was in the Marines for three years, mostly home-base stuff apart from a spell that I spent on the Guard in the US Embassy in Paris. I was homesick for most of my stay there; people don't believe that when I tell them, but it's true. When I came back I left the service and got married to Eloise, the girl that I'd been going out with since we were both fifteen, and I put all of my savings into a workshop franchise converting cars to run on hydrogen gas. We struggled for a year and then the franchise people folded, leaving me with a lot of useless equipment that was all paid off and several big loans that weren't. It was a bad time all around. We lost the house that we were buying and had to move into what the sales people called America's Last Affordable Home, what the government called Manufactured Housing, and what the rest of us would call a trailer park. And we seemed to be arguing most of the time, the way you do when money pressures make you feel as if you're ready to burst at every weak little seam and debt stands like a thick wall between you and any kind of future.

Eloise packed her bags and left me, twice. We both knew that it was more a way of letting off steam than anything serious, because how far could she expect to get when I was the only person in a fifteen hundred-mile radius who knew how to put another cylinder in the car? The first time, she came back at around three in the morning when I was pretending to be asleep and we never even mentioned it afterwards. The second time, she tried to cut in on a Mack truck as she was joining the Interstate and misjudged the distance by about a foot. Her heart stopped three times on the way to the hospital. She was operated on for more than five hours and that's how long it took the medical team to decide that she should have been let to die in the ambulance. But by then they'd kept her ticking for so long that they were afraid of a lawsuit if they should just let her go, so then I had to hire lawyers to put pressure on for them to do exactly that, and while the lawyers and the doctors were arguing she just slipped away on her own anyway. I wasn't even with her, I was in somebody's office somewhere. All I'd succeeded in doing was to add legal fees to the medical bills, which may help to explain why ten years later I was still living in the mobile home.

I'd still dream about her, sometimes. In the dream I'd be standing by her bed like I did when it was all over, and suddenly she'd open her eyes and say something like, Wow, Alex wasn't that
close
? And I'd agree that it was, and then I'd take her home. And then I'd wake up from the dream and go and stand under the shower for a while, and then I'd go out and lose myself in the job.

I never meant for police work to become my life, but that seems to be the way that it went. I don't know much else. I do know that I'm dull company - I've seen the eyes of enough strangers glazing over at parties as I've talked to them about the service - but what can you do? You're who you are.

I didn't connect my dream to my interest in the events at the Paradise Motel. At least, not at that stage.

At the end of the shift I changed out of my uniform and drove home to the trailer park. I may have made it sound lowlife, but it wasn't. It was a quiet little walled acre out in the east of the city where leveed canals run parallel to the roads and the sense of desert living is still strong. The rent was low and there weren't more than a handful of people on the site who were below retirement age, but this only contrasted with the way I spent my days. A recent bonus was that of living right next door to a good-looking young widow whose nine-year-old daughter seemed determined to get the two of us into bed together. I don't know what they teach them in the schools these days. Or perhaps they get it from TV.

It was starting to get dark as I drove home that evening, a dusty pink moon sitting low in a blue-metalled sky. I always like the effect of the lines of red tail-lights around that hour, a kind of rustbucket romance that briefly turns ordinary traffic into some kind of carnival; but what I was thinking about tonight was those three ill-matched bodies lying brain-dead in a motel room but somehow still breathing - just - and about Gilbert Mercado, the champion sprinter with the punchbag face and an armful of baby foods.

He was feeding the corpses, obviously. Somehow keeping them alive at only the most basic level. But why?

Loretta's Renegade wasn't there, and I wondered if she'd be out for the evening. It wasn't so much that her daughter's vigorous campaigning was starting to get to me; the truth was that I was glad to have help. As I said, I don't exactly sparkle in company. I went inside, let up the blinds, and turned on the TV to catch
Eyewitness News
. My sitting room was cool enough for me not to have to switch on the air conditioning, but I left open the door to my covered porch to let any breeze blow through.

A big earthquake in southern Italy; Chicano students at the ASU picketing along with striking citrus farm workers in the valley; two Phoenix hospitals running trials with marijuana as part of their therapy for cancer patients, while down in Pinal County the EPS and the Sheriff's office were celebrating a million-dollar bust over the self-same substance after fourteen months of investigation. And coming up next, the anchorman promised as the inlay behind his shoulder carried a shot of the County General, the medical mystery that has detectives and doctors baffled.

Detectives and doctors. Ho mention of any sergeants in there, I noted.

It was during the commercial break that I heard Loretta's jeep making the turn in alongside the house, and even before the engine died I heard Georgina run up the three steps to their door. She's only a small child and healthily skinny, but she makes more noise than an elephant charge when she runs. The break ended, and the coverage started; a couple of minutes in, I heard a tap on the porch screen. I shouted that it was open.

Loretta came in, glancing at the TV as if she was wary of interrupting anything important. At that moment they were flashing up Lightnin' Leslie's rather freehand interpretations of the one deceased and two surviving subjects, none of which looked like any of the faces that I'd seen earlier in the day. As they cut to a shot of the Paradise, I said to Loretta, 'You heard about this?'

'If it's about the three coma people, I heard it on the radio. Did it happen in your area?'

'I was the one who found them.'

'Ugh, creepy.' She sat down on the edge of the couch to hear the rest. 'Just censor the details a little when Georgie puts the pressure on, will you?'

They went on into an interview with Lieutenant Michaels - he hadn't said anything to me about
that
- but my chances of hearing what he had to say took a sudden dive when Georgie came hammering up the porch steps and bounced into the room. Her arrival broke the peace with a similar effect to that of a small hand grenade.

'Hi, Alex,' she said, 'were you the one who found the zombies?'

'I found some sick people, that's all,' I said, mindful of Loretta's warning. 'Zombies get up and walk, but the ones I found weren't going anywhere.'

'Were they in coffins? Or just sort of standing around?'

'How, listen, kid,' Loretta cut in, 'you can either button up or die young. Choice?'

Georgie chose to button up. The internal pressure made her almost pop-eyed. I said, 'It was nothing, Georgie, honest. No coffins, no zombies. All I did was call out an ambulance.'

'I bet,' Georgie said, her tone conveying that she didn't believe a word of it and that I was keeping the really interesting details for grown-up talk.

'What did we decide?' Loretta said sternly, and Georgina made a hurricane withdrawal.

The item was winding up now with a description of Gilbert Mercado but, thankfully, no picture. No drugs were found anywhere in the room, no traces in the bodies. Over in the next house I could hear Georgie playing her recorder, almost certainly for my benefit. She was a nice kid, but someday somebody was going to have to break the news to her that she had a tin ear for music. Loretta held a straight face for a while, but then snorted with laughter and had to look down and cover her eyes in embarrassment. As the news gave way to an ad for fast-working tablets for diarrhoea - no chalky taste, no large doses - I went over and turned off the set.

'What was the radio coverage like?' I asked Loretta as I turned to her again. She was blowing her nose on a tissue after wiping her eyes; in the distant background, Georgie was still murdering
Amazing Grace
.

'The usual,' Loretta managed after a moment. 'Two minutes of news followed by an hour of crackpot phonecalls with every wild theory you ever heard of coming around again. Is this going to be big for you, or what?'

'It isn't even going to be a police case, from what I can make out. Why?'

'So,' she said carefully, 'does that mean you're planning to follow it up in your own time?'

'I'm not going to be following it up at all.'

'Well, in that case, I'm under orders from Georgie to ask if you'd like to spend the day with us on Wednesday. That is your day off, isn't it?'

Across the way, I heard Georgie's recorder stop dead in the middle of a bar.

'Love to,' I said. 'Anywhere special?'

'I'll provide the picnic if you'll provide the venue. You know the town better than I do and, I'll be honest, coping with the Katzenjammer Kid over there seems to have ruined my decision-making capability.'

Was it my imagination, or could I hear the Katzenjammer Kid jumping around next door and shouting
Yay! Yay!
? I said, 'I'll think of something.'

Loretta got up to go, but now her face was serious. She lowered her voice, so that it wouldn't carry.

'Listen, Alex,' she said. 'We both like you a lot. But if this gets to be an embarrassment, you can tell me and... we'll stop it there. All right?'

'It hasn't happened yet,' I said.

Neither of us moved, but there was either some understanding going back and forth there or I was seriously misreading the signals. Bless the kid, I didn't think I could have come this far without her; I'd have had Loretta stunned and poleaxed with my one-note personality just like all the others, smiling a fixed smile and casting shifty glances around for the nearest exit. We'd come through all that, past the point where first impressions mattered more than anything else. I hadn't got a clue what I was going to say next; Loretta was about to speak, but then Georgie broke the silence again as only Georgie could.

'Have you seen the
time
?' She yelled from the doorway, and then clattered away again.

'You have to go somewhere?' I asked Loretta.

'Would you believe disco classes? For nine year olds? And they're not cheap, Alex, believe me.'

'I believe it.'

'But all the other girls go, so...'

'Yeah, I know,' I said as I held the screen door open for her. 'It used to be ballet.'

'Not any more,' she said. 'Not enough pizzazz in the accessories.'

I heard them going out again in the jeep, five minutes later. I didn't know the exact nature of Loretta's financial problems, but I did know from the odd remark she'd dropped that her late husband had been somewhere around my own league as a business genius. She was training now as a window dresser in one of the big mall stores somewhere over in Scottsdale; her supervisor was a nineteen-year-old kid who was, from all accounts, a complete and utter jerk who thought it was quite a joke to have an older woman as an assistant. We'd had a few barbecues in the summer, and I'd taken her out twice while Georgie stayed home with a sitter. She stood five-five and was dark-haired with blue eyes; it was an unusual combination, and the first thing that had struck me about her.

I turned the TV on again and ran through the channels, but I couldn't find anything to hold my attention. Everywhere seemed to be running cop shows except for Trinity, where a middle-aged pansy with a fluffball haircut was talking about snatching the land out of the devil's hands.

So then I took out the trash, keeping a wary eye open for Mrs Moynahan and her notebook full of real and imaginary misdemeanors observed about the site, and all the time my mind was running around and around in the same circle. Mercado and the zombies, the zombies and Mercado.

Then I sat and tried to think of somewhere that a nine-year-old might like to visit on the coming Wednesday, but still it was the same.

I'd told Loretta that I wasn't going to be doing anything about this on my own time.

And I wasn't, of course.