J. Jance: Desert Heat

Neighboring coyotes heard the sound long before she did. Only when that first eerie chorus died back could Joanna hear the faint wail of an approaching siren that had set them off.

“Do you hear that, Andy?” she asked. “Hang on. For God’s sake, please hang on.”

But if Andy heard her, it didn’t show. Sadie whined and crawled closer on her belly until her nose touched Joanna’s leg. It was though the dog, too, was in need of comfort. She waited an eternity for Andy to take another shallow breath. But he didn’t. Three miles away, she again caught the faintly pulsing wail of the siren. Followed by another echoing chorus of coyotes. And still Andy didn’t breathe again.

A shiver of despair shot through Joanna’s body, leaving her totally devoid of hope. She rocked back on her heels and screamed her outrage to the universe. “No,” she wailed, flinging her desolation upward toward a moonlit but uncaring sky. “Noooo.”

All up and down the lonely stretches of the Sulphur Springs Valley, howling coyotes took up this new refrain. Somehow the sound of it snapped Joanna out of her unreasoning panic, reminded her of another part of her first-aid training.

Heedless of the blood, she bent over her husband’s inert form. Afraid of hurting him but knowing being too tentative could prove fatal, she placed both hands on his lower rib cage and pressed down sharply. Then, molding her lips to his, she tried to force the life-giving air back into his lungs.

“Don’t leave me,” she whispered between breaths. “Please don’t leave me.”

An ambulance and two Cochise County Sheriff’s vehicles arrived almost simultaneously followed by an officer from the Arizona Highway Patrol. When the arriving officers scrambled toward them down the embankment, Sadie barked frantically. Joanna didn’t want to stop what she was doing, but the only way for the professionals to get close enough to do their work was for Joanna to leave Andy long enough to drag the dog out of the way.

Clutching Sadie by the collar, Joanna led the protesting dog back to the Eagle and shut her inside for safekeeping. Weak with fear and spent with effort, she leaned against the fender of the car and looked down at the group of Emergency Medical Technicians clustered around Andy’s motionless body. Their hurried shouts and frenzied actions gave her some small hope that perhaps they weren’t too late and Andy was still alive.

She was still standing there looking down at them when Ken Galloway found her. “How bad is it?” he asked.

Shaking her head was all the answer Joanna could manage.

Ken took her arm. “Come with me,” he said. “You’re better off not watching.”

Holding her solicitously, Galloway guided her through the growing collection of haphazardly parked vehicles that already littered the area around the bridge. He opened the rider’s side of his still-warm patrol car and eased her into the seat. She was shaking violently. Inside her head chattering teeth rattled uncontrollably.

“My God, Joanna, you must be freezing,” Ken said. “Wait right here.”

He disappeared, returning moments later with two blankets and a cup of coffee. He handed her the coffee then wrapped the blanket around her legs and tossed the other one over her quaking shoulders. Joanna held the coffee in her hands without taking a drink while she stared at the place where people clambered up and down the embankment. From this perspective, the people on the floor of the wash were totally out of sight.

“He stopped breathing,” Joanna explained woodenly to Ken Galloway. “I tried doing CPR, but I don’t know if it worked or not. Go check for me, Ken. Please.”

“You’ll be all right here alone?”

She nodded. Ken strode to the head of the bridge and then disappeared down the bank. He came back a few minutes later, shaking his head.

Joanna’s heart sank. “Is he still alive?”

“Barely. At least they’ve got his heart beating again. You kept him going long enough for them to be able to do that.”

Joanna didn’t know she had been holding her breath until she let it out. “Thank God,” she murmured.

With a grateful sigh she took a first tentative sip of coffee, letting the hot liquid warm her chilled body from inside out. She drank with-out ever taking her eyes off the path that emerged from the wash just at the end of the bridge abutment.

“I can’t believe it,” Ken Galloway was saying, although Joanna was paying little attention. “I saw him right around five when he got off shift. He was fine when he left the office. What the hell happened? Where did all the blood come from? Did he drive off the bridge and run the steering wheel through him?”

“The truck was locked and he was outside it,” Joanna said numbly. “I think somebody shot him.”

“No. You gotta be kidding.”

“I’m not kidding.”

Ken Galloway shook his head. “Jesus, Joanna. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. Sorry as hell.” For a moment Galloway stood there as if vacillating over whether to stay or go. “I’ll go back down and check again,” he said quietly. “If I stay here, I’ll make a damn fool of myself.”

With that, Ken Galloway hurried away. Left alone on the sidelines, Joanna saw people she knew coming and going in an eerie glow of flashing blue and red lights. Even though they saw her and knew she was there, for the most part they ignored her. One or two of them nodded in her direction, but to a man they found themselves tongue-tied and shy in the face of Joanna Brady’s looming personal tragedy. Aghast at the extent of Andrew Brady’s injuries, none of them wanted to be trapped into telling Joanna exactly how bad it really was. Unfortunately, their wary silence was something she recognized all too well.

Joanna had heard that same terrible silence once before in her life. She had been ignored exactly the same way the night of her father’s accident. Sheriff D. H. Lathrop, Hank for short, had been bringing a group of girls back from a camping trip in the Chiricauhuas when he stopped to change a flat tire for a stranded female motorist. He had been struck from be-hind by a drunk driver and had died at the scene with his thirteen-year-old daughter looking on helplessly from the sidelines. Now, fifteen years later, Joanna was once again trapped in similarly ominous silence.

With eyes glued to the top of the path, Joanna was only dimly aware that another vehicle had arrived on the scene. Within minutes, Sheriff Walter V. McFadden himself, Stetson in hand, loomed up beside her out of the darkness.

“Dick Voland called me at home,” he said gruffly. “I can’t believe this. I came as soon as I could, Joanna. How are you?”

“All right,” she whispered.

“And Andy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why the hell didn’t they leave the engine running in this damn thing? It’s colder ‘an blue blazes. Want to come sit in my truck? It’s warmer there.”

Joanna shook her head. “No. I can see better from here. In case… in case…” She didn’t finish the sentence, but Walter McFadden understood what she meant.

“Here. Give me your cup,” he said. “I’ll go get you a refill on that coffee.”

McFadden returned and handed her a second cup of coffee, this one far stronger than the first. Joanna accepted it gratefully. “What happened?” he asked.

Joanna shook her head. “I still don’t know. I found him here. His truck was locked, but I have an extra key. I got in and radioed for help.”

“Somebody told me he’s been shot. How bad?”

Joanna swallowed hard. It was what she herself had suspected, but this was the first official confirmation. “Real bad, I think,” she replied.

“Damn! Could he still talk when you got here? Did he say anything at all? Tell you who did it?”