High Country Nocturne - [10]

The big trucks left us behind and the road was black with specters of tall trees on either side.

“David,” she said, “he said another thing. He asked me about my gabachoprofesor friend. That would be you.”

“I figured.”

“He said the profesor needed to watch his gabacho ass.” She slipped back into her impersonation of an impersonation. “‘But don’t tell him that Paco said it. Don’t tell him about me at all.’”

I tried to shuffle the deck into order.

Peralta had shot the diamond courier at noon on Friday at Chandler Fashion Center, and then escaped before the police could arrive. By ten p.m., he was abandoning his truck in Ash Fork, where Orville Grainer saw him. Before that, at eight-thirty, he called Sharon on the forgotten landline. He used a play-act that only the two of them would know, yet he conveyed important information. Did he assume she was being tapped? Or was he under duress or otherwise compromised?

“Are you mad at me?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know what to do, David. Things were happening so fast. The FBI didn’t let me go home until after six. I was going to tell you, and then I got the call that his truck had been found and we raced up here.”

I let out a long breath and my anger fell away. I told her about Horace Mann and the business card, about Orville Grainer watching Peralta climb into a sedan. Then I shut up and watched the road for deer. Lack of sleep was starting to slow me down, make me jumpy.

“There’s one more thing,” she said. “When he called, I heard a train in the background. Very distinct.”

We were breaking through the forest and entering Flagstaff, so I took the exit into downtown. It was three thirty Saturday morning and few cars were on the streets. Our FBI escort had disappeared.

At 6,900 feet above sea level and sitting beneath the San Francisco Peaks, Flagstaff in daylight was one of the most scenic places in the Southwest. At this time of night, we had to settle for the appealing little downtown with its pioneer-era brick and masonry buildings. Unlike so many places in Arizona now, it felt authentic.

It had been real to me when I came here as a child with my grandparents. It was cool and beautiful, like a small town out of a storybook. Flag was a real place with gritty jobs in timber and the railroad, along with a little college.

It had trains to delight the young me, all those Santa Fe Railway streamliners that stopped at the handsome depot with its Alpine chalet roof. Not only the young me. Anyone who really knew me understood that I still loved trains and especially the Flagstaff depot.

Now the town had spread out into the pines with subdivisions and shopping strips, a mall, and a Walmart Supercenter. The college had grown into Northern Arizona University. But the city had done a decent job saving downtown from the bulldozers, with the exception of erecting a hideous new city hall that looked like a second-rate suburban office building. Babbitt’s was still here, gone from Babbitt Brothers Trading Company, to Babbitt’s Backcountry Outfitters.

The old business district that ran along and north of Santa Fe Avenue-old Route 66-had been cleaned up. The cheap hotels that catered to railroaders had been spiffed up into offices or boutique lodgings. The smoky risky bars frequented by drunken Indians were gone. Even the seedy Hong Kong Café was now a more upscale cantina.

But the railroad remained. I pulled into the parking lot of the station. The Southwest Chief, the only passenger train left, had come and gone. Although the depot was lit, it was likely locked up until the next train came later this morning. Ours was the only car in the lot.

“David, you really believe he’s on a special assignment…”

Sharon let the sentence hang, not quite a question.

“Don’t you?” I said.

“Mike and I have had our bad times. You know that.”

“You divorced him once.”

She smiled and nodded.

I said, “I still haven’t heard the story of why you two decided to get back together. The daughters are grown and gone.”

“It’s a long story. Maybe on another night drive. But you really believe he’s a good guy, too, right? Still?” Although her voice was gentle, her eyes were black with emotion.

It seemed to be a moment requiring a speech to buck us both up, about Peralta’s unwavering integrity, even when he could also be demanding and domineering and difficult as hell to work for. But the ground started shaking and suddenly intense light came out of the east, followed by six thundering locomotives and a freight train doing at least fifty.

When it was bit quieter, as container cars full of the scrap from de-industrializing America heading for Asia swept past us, I kept my response simple. “I do.”

Then I ran through the scenarios, which were basically two. Either he was working a case for a law-enforcement agency that required him to go deep undercover. Or he was under coercion to steal those diamonds for reasons and persons unknown.

He must have had different license tags on the truck when he got to the mall-there wouldn’t have been time to change them in the immediate aftermath of the shooting and robbery. So something didn’t suddenly happen to cause his trip to the High Country. It was planned.