The Night Detectives - [8]

Neither of us said a word as the suburbs fell away and the truck turned onto Arizona Highway 85 for the short but dangerous connection to Interstate 8. The state was gradually widening what had been a two-lane highway, but people still drove like maniacs and fatalities remained common. Today, the road was nearly empty. If only my head were that way. Jagged bare mountains rose up on either side. I remembered from Boy Scout days that one was called Spring Mountain. I also recalled it was about 355 miles from Phoenix to San Diego. I adjusted the vents again to get the most out of the truck’s air conditioning.

When he caught I-8 at Gila Bend, I made my first attempt to breach the battlements of his stubborn personality.

“What about the lawyer Felix mentioned?”

“I called him. He never heard of any of those names.”

I asked him if he had given the lawyer a description and he shot me a cutting glance. I thought about Felix sitting there yesterday, so straight and self-possessed in his expensive suit, French cuffs, tattoo, and prosthetic leg. He was not someone to forget.

“So tell me what again we’re doing?”

“Driving to San Diego.”

Five more miles brought a passing Union Pacific freight train and flat desert.

“You know what I mean.” The mocha was finally cool enough to drink.

He declined to answer, so I settled into the seat and watched for more trains. We rode high and mighty along the highway, a steady eighty miles per hour, dwarfed only by semis.

The retiree tract houses and fields of Yuma trickled out to greet us, hotter than hell, and ugly. We went through a McDonald’s drive-through and ate on the road like two street cops as we crossed the Colorado River and entered California.

I tried again. “Why did you give a false report to the police, saying Smith, or whatever the hell his name is, was never in our office?”

“It was easier.” And that was all he said between mouthfuls of a Quarter Pounder with cheese. Peralta was the most by-the-book hard-ass peace officer I had ever known. I told him this.

“Don’t be so quick to judge, Mapstone.” Bite, chew, swallow, steer with one hand. “And don’t get grease on that arm rest. As I recall, you did a little selective application of the law after Robin was murdered.”

That was true, but I wasn’t going to let him get me into that dark alley.

“I’m talking about now. We don’t owe this guy anything.”

“You wanted to break the law yesterday by tampering with evidence.”

He was right. I wanted to see the number Felix had called from our parking lot. I was a long way from being a Boy Scout.

Peralta shrugged his big shoulders. “He put us on retainer for ten grand. Our obligation is to the client, and that includes privacy.”

Sand dunes loomed up on the south. I knew that a plank road was built here in 1915. I didn’t know anything about being a private investigator. Listening to our conversation made me question myself again about joining him in the rough little building on Grand Avenue. Robin had suggested it. She expected to live to see it. I violently shook my head.

“You have a headache?”

“No.” I ate the Big Mac and daintily wiped my fingers to protect his fake leather or whatever the hell it was on the armrest. “What would you as sheriff have done to a PI who pulled the stunt you did?”

“Probably prosecute him.”

“But now you’re applying situational ethics.”

“Don’t be using your fancy academic language on me, Mapstone.” The burger was gone and now his right hand was grabbing French fries. Peralta always ate one fast-food course at a time. “I’m just a simple boy from the barrio.”

I cut him off. “You went to Harvard.” He knew very well what I meant. I gave up for the moment.

We were now in the Colorado Desert, a very different place from the lush Sonoran Desert that surrounded Phoenix and Tucson: no saguaros or any of the other hundreds of plant and animal species of my home country. It was sun-blasted moonscape, a sea of tranquility: long vistas, distant mountain ranges, few colors beyond off-white, ochre, and brown-and in this spot it declined into a sink that was below sea level.

We finished lunch at eighty-five miles per hour. I policed all the containers and napkins, and then the flat, green fields of the Imperial Valley surrounded us, all irrigated, quite irrationally, by a canal running from the Colorado River. If not for the geology of the Colorado’s delta, the Sea of Cortez would go all the way north to Indio. It was an amazing thing to contemplate. North of us was the Salton Sea, accidentally created in 1905 when the Colorado, as it would do before being nearly killed by dams, flooded into crude irrigation canals dug to divert water into what had been the dry Salton Sink. The “sea” became a major bird destination, created its own ecosystem. Now it was dying, helped by the Imperial Valley’s toxic runoff. I read the other day that the noxious air from a massive fish kill drifted as far as Los Angeles.

We stopped to relieve ourselves in El Centro. No offense to the local chamber of commerce, but that seemed all it was good for, even though the town now had a Starbucks. The air was hot and hazy and smelled of agricultural chemicals.