Cactus Heart - [27]

“Well, then you’re more employable than me,” I said. “I’d like to think I bring something special to all this, but mostly I think Peralta had pity on me and gave me a job.”

“You seem pretty impressive to me,” she said, and a flush of visceral pleasure coursed through me. “So what’s he like? The famous Chief Peralta.”

I shook my head. “Beats me.”

We each had two martinis. Then I walked her to her truck, parked in a garage across from the new city hall at Third Avenue and Washington. I was feeling good and yet virtuous. That was until she turned at her truck door and gave me a hug.

“Thanks for the talk,” she said in a voice as soft as the red-brown hair that brushed across my face. “I’m enjoying getting to know you.”

“My pleasure,” I said. I watched her start up the big SUV and head down the ramp, then I walked to the stairway awash in lust and guilt. It wasn’t a particularly bad feeling.

The street was empty and the only sound was a distant train whistle, something that always reminded me of when I was a kid listening through the bedroom window late at night to the Santa Fe trains coming down from the main line at Williams Junction.

Sound is a funny thing here. It gets trapped in the dry air and bounced around between the mountains. So I didn’t hear the old white van until it was right up on me. It crept down Fourth Avenue on the lane closest to the sidewalk, exactly matching my pace. A Ford Econoline, like ten thousand others in the city. I glanced inside and was barred by heavily tinted black windows. How many times had Peralta told me to carry a gun? Now I just looked like a guy in a suit, working late, a good target. Where the hell were those PPD bicycle patrols? I got to Jefferson and the nearest car was a pair of headlights half a mile away. The lights from the Madison Street Jail looked down like the windows of a medieval castle. Otherwise, we were all alone.

I crossed behind the van and checked the license plate. It was covered with mud and the light was out. A sudden wild gush of panic came up my legs and into my belly. I fought it down with breathing. Slow and steady. I walked easy and straight across the street, moving east down Jefferson now. Another block and I could get in the sheriff’s administration building with my bar-coded ID.

The van turned on Jefferson and paced me again. Now I was on the driver’s side, but the windows were still opaque. I didn’t want to keep looking over. I started running scenarios in my head. Wondering how much of the self-defense training I got from Peralta twenty years ago was still second nature. I knew one thing: nobody was going to get me inside a van.

“Excuse me.”

The window was down now and a face peered out.

“Can you tell me where the sheriff’s office is?”

He was just a guy: white, thirties, doughy face, balding into a comb-over, his eyes buried in heavy lids. I stopped and looked.

“Can you tell me where the sheriff’s office is?” he asked again.

“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “It’s down there at Second and Madison. Park on Madison and check in with the deputy at the front counter.”

“Thank you.” His eyes became merry slits. “Aren’t you David Mapstone?

“I am. Have we met?”

He looked at me for a moment and the window went back up. Then the van accelerated around the corner and I was alone again on the street. Just then, two bicycle cops rode by. The female officer looked like Steffi Graf.

16

Little-known fact: Mike Peralta is a fabulous cook. It makes it easy to be adopted by the Peraltas for family holidays like Thanksgiving. This year, he served the finest turkey and dressing I’d ever eaten-and I had to admit that include Grandmother’s sublime cornbread dressing from my childhood. Of course, the meal didn’t stop there. We had the usual array of Thanksgiving vegetables and side dishes, all fresh and delicately spiced. Plus there were Peralta’s trademark carnitas, just in case our metabolism dared to process any of these excesses. And liberal amounts of quality liquor: he favored Gibsons, followed by an undiscovered Sonoma pinot noir Sharon had picked up and, after dinner, a port whose taste stayed on my tongue like a good memory. I only thought about Lindsey every few minutes.

The two daughters were home from law school. Jamie was at Stanford and Jennifer was at Cal-Berkeley. They were luminously beautiful and very smart, and since I’ve known both since they were babies, seeing them now made me feel strangely old. I didn’t feel forty years old-I felt like I was my early twenties. Time is a real bastard. But spirits were high and the conversation tripped from football to life in the Bay Area to the big expansion the Heard Museum was planning to some catching up on everybody’s life. These people were as close to family as I had, and I was grateful for the holiday spell of belonging and well-being.

Peralta and I weren’t allowed to discuss work, and that was fine. I had little new to report on the Yarnell case. Now we were just waiting for the DNA results, and that would be the end of it. Gretchen would go on to greater things and I would go back to my Philip Marlowe office in the old courthouse, writing a history of the Sheriff’s Office and taking whatever forgotten workaday mysteries Peralta cared to pass my way.