J. Jance - Rattlesnake Crossing

"Sorry, Andy," she said aloud, raising her glass in his memory. "Please forgive me. I didn't know what I was talking about."

Had there been more booze in the house, she might have been tempted to have another drink. As it was, though, she drank only the one, and then she went to bed. She might have tossed and turned some more, but the whiskey, combined with the hard physical labor of moving all those rocks, made further brooding impossible.

She lay down on the bed, put her head on the pillow, pulled the sheet up around her shoulders, and fell sleep. Not sound sleep. Not a deeply restful sleep, but sleep haunted by vague and disturbing nightmares that disappeared as soon as she awoke and tried to recall them.

Considering all she'd been through that day, maybe that was just as well.

The phone awakened her. Groggy from restless sleep, she almost knocked it on the floor before she finally managed to grasp the handset and get it to her ear. "Hello?"

"Joanna, I'm sorry," Angie Kellogg apologized. "I woke you up, didn't I?"

"It's all right," Joanna said, squinting at the clock. It was almost seven; the alarm would have gone off in a minute anyway. "What's up?"

"I'm at Jeff and Marianne's," Angie said. "I'm taking care of Ruth."

Joanna sat up in bed. "Esther isn't in the hospital again, is she?"

"She is," Angie replied. "And it's the most wonderful thing-wonderful and terrible at the same time. Jeff and Marianne got a call from the hospital last night. A heart became available. A little girl in Tucson drowned in her grandparents' pool. That's the terrible part, but for Esther, it's going to be wonderful."

As a wave of impatience washed over her, Joanna clambered out of bed. "If that's what was going on, why didn't Marianne say so when she called?"

"You talked to her then?" Angie asked.

"No, she left a message, but I should have known."

"Known what?" Angie asked.

"That something was going on. When I got the message I decided it was too late to call her back. What time did the hospital call?" Joanna asked.

"Right around midnight," Angie replied. "Marianne called me just as I was closing up at one, and asked if I'd come look after Ruth. I told them I'd be right over."

Helping rehabilitate Angie Kellogg, a former L.A. hooker, had been a joint project assumed by both Joanna Brady and Marianne Maculyea. After escaping virtual imprisonment at the hands of a sadistic hit-man boyfriend, twenty-five-year-old Angie had been totally without resources when she first landed in Bisbee.

Taken under Joanna's and Marianne's protective wings, Angie was making a new life for herself. Bartending for Bobo Jenkins was her first legitimate job. With Jeff Daniels' help, she had purchased her own car-a seventeen-year-old Oldsmobile Omega-which she actually knew how to drive. She owned her own little house, a two-bedroom, in what had once been company housing for Phelps Dodge miners. For topping on the cake, she also had a boyfriend-a real boyfriend-for the first time in her life. Baby-sitting on a moment's notice both for Jeff and Marianne and for Joanna was Angie's way of repaying her benefactors for all they had done for her and for all the many blessings in her new life.

"What can I do to help?" Joanna asked. "Who's going to look after Ruth when you have to go to work?"

"I already talked to Bobo about it," Angie said. Bobo Jenkins was the African-American owner of the Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge in Bisbee's famed Brewery Gulch, where Angie worked as a relief bartender. "He said I could take both today and tomorrow off. And I talked to Dennis. He says he'll come to town early on Friday so he can take over when my shift starts."

Angie had met Dennis Hacker, a British-born naturalist, through a mutual interest in bird-watching. Originally, Angie had been fascinated by his Audubon Society-funded project to reintroduce parrots into their former habitat in the Chiricahua and Peloncillo mountains of southeastern Arizona.

Knowing that the man had spent years living a hermitlike existence, Joanna had been concerned that Hacker's interest in the young woman didn't go far beyond her lush good looks. She had been reassured, however, by the fact that as time passed, Hacker continued to find any number of excuses for driving into Bisbee several times a week from his camp in the Peloncillos. She knew that the possibility of a blossoming romance between Angie and Dennis was anathema to some of the grizzled old-timers who frequented the Blue Moon. Having established what they considered to be squatters' rights around Angie, they regarded the lanky, blond Hacker as an unwelcome interloper, one who might very well carry Angie away with him.

Now, though, Joanna realized that the relationship between Angie and Hacker was verging on serious. "You mean Dennis would do that?" she asked. "He'd come baby-sit a two-year-old in your place?"

"Of course he would," Angie answered confidently. "Why wouldn't he?"

Why indeed? Most men wouldn't volunteer to do that on a bet, Joanna thought. She said, "So you don't need any help from me? With Ruth, I mean."

"Not right now. Marianne left me a list of ladies from the church who'd be willing to help out, but for the time being, I've got it handled."

Joanna glanced at her watch. "Did Marianne say what time they'd be doing the surgery?"

"This morning sometime," Angie responded. "That's all I know."

"I'll head into the office right away," Joanna said. "I'm hoping I’ll be able to slip up to Tucson a little later today. Which hospital?"

"University," Angie said.

Joanna swallowed hard. That was the same hospital in Tucson where Andy had been airlifted after he was shot-the place where he had died the next day. Joanna had never wanted to go back there; had never wanted to set foot in another one of their awful waiting rooms. But still, for Jeff and Marianne-for little Esther-she would. She didn't have any choice.

"I'll be there," she said. "As soon as I can get cut loose from the department."

Ignoring the dogs and without even bothering to go to the kitchen and start coffee, Joanna headed for the bathroom. With everything that had happened in Cochise County in the past two days, there would be plenty to do, plenty to stand in the way of her getting out of the department on time, to say nothing of early.

By a quarter to eight, she was at her desk, mowing through the stack of unanswered messages that had come in the previous afternoon. By five after eight, she had corralled Dick Voland and Frank Montoya into her office for the morning briefing.

"I guess you heard about Clyde Philips," she said as Frank settled into his chair.

Montoya nodded. "If he's dead and his shop's been cleaned out, I don't suppose we'll be buying sniper rifles from him, no matter what."

"When you talked to him, he didn't happen to mention how many of those things he had on hand, did he?"

Frowning, Frank considered a moment before he answered. "Now that you mention it, I believe he told me there were three individual weapons we could choose from, ones he had available for immediate delivery."

"Great," Joanna said. "That's just peachy."

Voland came in holding computer printouts of the previous day's incident reports. "So what all's happening, Dick?" she asked.

"Not too much. S and R's been up and out since six of the A.M.," the chief deputy replied. "Still no sign of Katrina Berridge. The evidence techs are on their way to the crime scene to pick up anything we may have missed last night. Detective Carbajal will meet them there and lead them in. Ernie is going up to Tucson to be on hand for the two autopsies. Dr. Daly has scheduled them back-to-back this morning, one right after the other."

Joanna didn't shirk from most law enforcement duties. One of the precepts of leading by example was that she didn't ask her officers to do things she herself wasn't prepared to do. The lone exception to that was standing by during autopsies. That was one official task she was more than happy to delegate to her detectives.