Free Arizona Dreams by Jon Talton Page B

touching the window. The glass was cold. I was cold, and felt fifty pounds heavier from the gathering oppression.
    I started talking. “The last time I saw an ice pick used that way was on the Willo home tour. It was stuck in the ear of a man who was lying naked in his bedroom. He owned some check-cashing outlets. Apparently clean—you told me this. Maybe somebody was trying to muscle in, take protection money.”
    Peralta was swinging slowly in the chair, a heavy pendulum of fate. He said nothing.
    â€œI don’t know how that gets us to Louis Bell,” I said. “And so ballsy, taking him out in a crowded casino. That’s sending a message, right?”
    Peralta was looking at the ceiling. I went on, “All I know about Louis is that he honored his brother’s last request, to be buried on his own land. This is Arizona, property rights as God and all that. Harry’s property was way the hell out beyond the White Tank Mountains. It’s good for nothing, unless you want to wait fifty years for Phoenix and LA to grow together. Otherwise, Harry was retired. He lived in a trailer near Hyder. The autopsy came back clean, I guess. So we have two desert rat brothers, and now one gets an ice pick in the ear. I was trying to stay out of this, remember? Follow orders and write a book.”
    The room was large and without sound again. The floor made weird ghosts of the light coming from recessed positions in the ceiling. I didn’t meet his eyes. The bank of television monitors on the other wall got my attention—whoever sat here could watch everything from the blackjack dealer’s hands to the parking lot. Maybe one of them would reveal who scrambled Louis Bell’s brains. I was growing angry with Peralta for the silent treatment, and at myself for feeling like a kid who was in trouble. What the hell did I do wrong? What was it about his moods that bred paranoia?
    â€œYou know about the woman named Dana,” I said. “I don’t need to go into that again.”
    I sat on a hard leather loveseat. Maybe the furniture was intended to make whoever sat there uncomfortable, be he employee facing dismissal or unruly customer. I knew the routine. I could feel the anger radiating off him. He didn’t like surprises, especially ones that embroiled the Sheriff’s Office in other jurisdictions, especially when he might not be able to run the show, as would happen with the feds. Soon he would explode—his rages were always frightening, even if you had lived through a dozen of them, even if you knew the generosity he was capable of in other circumstances. My stomach was tight. My mind was bouncing around the room, down to the slot machines, glancing off the corpse of Louis Bell, and ricocheting back to the glass office. I wondered what Sharon would say. I missed her. They had been married for thirty years, and now she was his “ex-wife.” That construction was still foreign. For all the years I knew them it was Mike and Sharon, never just Mike. She had been his awkward young shadow when Peralta and I were first partners. Even then, I like to flatter myself that I could detect a spark, a curiosity. Then she had gone back to school, eventually earning her Ph.D. in psychology. Later she would become the famous radio psychologist, the best-selling author. That seemed like a long time ago. Now she was in San Francisco in a new life. And I was cooped up in this glass cell with her ex-husband.
    I said, “It doesn’t seem to me that this is our problem. The guy in Willo is a Phoenix PD case. This one is tribal cops and the FBI…”
    I was talking to myself. Talking myself out of the obvious. All the ways human beings hurt each other in Maricopa County, Arizona, and I’m just the egghead who paws through the old records, clears out the old cases. So what if I’m bracketed by homicide by ice picks. What’s the connection between Alan Cordesman,