High Country Nocturne - [35]

I listened as he droned on, sounding routine and even bored, not like someone about to steal a million dollars in diamonds. But there was nothing routine about this dictation. My stomach tightened the moment I heard the address. Encanto Boulevard only runs west of Central. On the east side, it becomes Oak Street.

He finished the letter with “and that’s all for today. Aren’t you happy?” and the machine was silent except for a subtle scratching every fifteen seconds or so.

I let it run.

“Mapstone.” Now his voice was different, dead serious. “By the time you find this, things will be pretty crazy. You’re going to hear a lot of things about me. Don’t believe them. The FBI has probably questioned you. I kept you out of this so you wouldn’t have anything to tell them. Also, you and Lindsey would be safer.”

The machine scratched and seemed to hesitate. I hit it, the universal fix for all things mechanical, and Peralta continued.

“Don’t trust anyone. If things go according to plan, I’ll be back in the office Monday morning. If they don’t…” After a pause, the voice said, “If they don’t, find a man named Matt Pennington and he’ll know how to contact me.” He gave Pennington’s number and address. “There’s no time to tell you more and it’s better that you don’t know. Run frosty, Mapstone.”

After more silence, I whispered. “Easy for you to say.”

Things had obviously gone wrong as early as Friday evening, hence he had left the note to me on the business card in Flagstaff.

I would find Matt Pennington. First, I decided to play a hunch.

Ready to leave, I thought about turning off the neon sign, but didn’t. Robin had insisted that Peralta restore this little remnant of old Phoenix, when the blue highways ran past miles of neon-lighted motels. We could keep paying the electric bill for this little bit of whimsy on what was now an otherwise dismal stretch of roadway.

With the extra firepower now inside the Prelude, I drove out Grand. It was the only major street that cut at a southeast-northwest angle through the monotonous grid of Phoenix.

Once, Grand had been the highway from Phoenix to Los Angeles. Railroad tracks still ran beside it. Now Grand would take me to Indian School Road where I turned west again.

Indian School was another bleak six-lane Phoenix raceway across flat land bordered by pawn shops, payday loan offices, tattoo parlors, strip joints, empty buildings with for-lease signs out front, and even an outfit in a defunct Wendy’s that promised money in exchange for your auto title. Little shrines decorated the joyless landscape, commemorating the loss of loved ones in a traffic mishap. Off on the curvilinear side streets were the cinderblock houses of Maryvale.

This was Phoenix’s first mass-produced single-family-home development, John F. Long’s American Dream in ranch houses built atop former fields of cotton, alfalfa, lettuce, and beets. It was the opposite of Willo, but in the 1960s it was new, with all-electric kitchens and backyard pools.

Builders such as John Hall, Ralph Staggs, and Elliott Whitehouse copied Maryvale on various scales all over the Valley. Del Webb built Sun City. They drew an Anglo middle class and retirees from Back East and growth paid for itself. That’s what the city leaders said.

The last of that generation, Whitehouse, had died only a year ago.

Some areas fared better than others. In Maryvale, the Anglos moved out and the poor Hispanics moved in. Many of them were followed by successive waves of illegal immigrants that staffed the hotels, restaurants, and lawn services. It was suburbia aging badly, a linear slum.

People called it Scaryvale.

I found what I was looking for south of Indian School on Fifty-First Avenue, a shopping strip hard against the bank of the Grand Canal. The canal itself looked nothing like its namesake in Venice or the massive channel in China.

Carrying water from the Salt River Project dams and reservoirs in the mountains east of the city, this canal was bounded on both sides by a maintenance road, forty-five feet or so across total. It was the oldest in the system, one of the first Hohokam canals cleaned out by Jack Swilling in the 1870s. Like the Arizona Canal to the north, it extended all the way to the Agua Fria River.

Shady cottonwoods once bordered this Grand Canal, but the mighty SRP had cut most of them down by the time I was born. In some nicer areas, people hiked along the maintenance roads, but most who drove across the canals daily never noticed, never thought about the miracle of being able to turn on the tap without worry.

The shopping strip, thrown up in the eighties, was two-thirds empty. Its anchor tenant, if you wanted to call it that, was called El TobacCorner, a nice little Spanglish mash-up name. A red sign bordered by blue flashed “open.”

But I didn’t turn in yet. I drove across the canal and continued on for almost a mile, checking the rearview mirror. Without signaling, I accelerated and spun left into a residential street, wound around past falling-apart homes, and rolled slowly back out to the main thoroughfare. Nobody seemed to be following me.