J. Jance: Desert Heat

Walter McFadden shook his head. “That wouldn’t have been right,” he returned. “Every man’s got a God-given right to make a fool of himself if he wants to, but there must have been a reason. Did I do something to piss him off? Did I make him mad?”

“If you did,” Joanna answered, “Andy never told me about it.”

A plane went by overhead. Joanna sat for-ward and scanned the nighttime sky, hoping to catch sight of the medevac helicopter’s navigation lights.

“Do you see it up there?” McFadden asked

“No. Can you? Call, I mean, and check…”

McFadden shook his head. “Even if they knew, Joanna, they wouldn’t tell me one way or the other. Not over the air.”

She nodded, knowing it was true.

The speeding truck was nearing St. David and Benson now, the halfway point of the trip to Tucson. McFadden radioed ahead to warn local officers in each little burg that a speeding vehicle was on its way through. McFadden raced through both hamlets with his truck’s blue lights flashing, barely slowing for Ben-son’s single stoplight. Once they made it up onto the I-10 freeway outside Benson, Joanna finally found the courage to ask the one question that was uppermost in her mind.

“Do they live?” she asked, her voice tight and little more than a hoarse whisper. “Beg your pardon?”

“When people are shot that way-gutshot the way Andy is-do they live?”

In the reflected light from the dashboard she watched the grim set of Walter McFadden’s lean jaw before he answered. “Not usually,” he said. “Especially when they don’t get treated right away and lose a lot of blood. But then again, you can never tell.”

“That’s why whoever did it locked the doors, isn’t it,” Joanna said. “So he couldn’t radio for help, so they couldn’t get to him in time. ”

McFadden shot her an appraising look. “Could be,” he agreed. Then after a pause, he added, “Miracles do happen.”

“But not that often,” Joanna returned. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be miracles.”

At that grim prospect, she hunched herself into the far corner of the seat, crying softly and trying to keep Walter McFadden from hearing. Finally, though, she straightened up and wiped her eyes. Tucson was close now. Where once there had been only a faint glow on the horizon, there were now individual pinpoints of light. “Do you know how to get to the hospital?” Joanna asked.

“Yes,” Walter McFadden answered. “I’ve been there a time or two before.”

An hour and twenty minutes after leaving High Lonesome Road Walter McFadden’s Toyota 4 X 4 pulled into the Emergency Room portico at University Health Sciences Center more than one hundred miles away. A helicopter was parked on the landing pad nearby.

“You go on inside,” Walter said. “I’ll find a parking place and then come in, too.”

One of the EMTs, Rudy Gonzales, met Joanna at the door. “This way,” he said quietly. “The clerk you’re supposed to talk to is over here. They’re prepping Andy for surgery right now.”

Rudy led her through a maze of cubicles to where a stern-faced older woman waited in front of a computer terminal. “Here she is,”

Rudy said. “This is Joanna Brady, Deputy Brady’s wife.”

Joanna took a seat. The last few miles of the ride between Bisbee and Tucson had given her a chance to marshal her resources. She answered the clerk’s rapid-fire questions in a quick, businesslike fashion. When handed a sheaf of forms, she worked her way through them, signing each with an insurance agent’s swift efficiency.

“Good,” the clerk said, taking the papers and glancing through them. “You can go on tip to the surgery waiting room if you like.”

Walter McFadden appeared behind her. He took off his hat and nodded politely to the clerk who pointedly ignored him.

“One of the forms is missing,” Joanna said.

Annoyed, the clerk peered at her over the tops of her half-rimmed reading glasses. Clearly, she didn’t like having someone else finding fault with her procedures. “Really? Which one?”

“The organ donor consent form,” Joanna answered firmly. “His heart’s already stopped once. I want to go ahead and sign the form now, just in case.”

The clerk frowned. “That’s not a very positive attitude, Mrs. Brady,” she sniffed disapprovingly. “Our surgeons are very skillful here, you know.”

“I’m sure they are, but I still want to sign it, if you don’t mind.”

The clerk disappeared into a back room and returned eventually with the proper form. Joanna scrawled her signature, and Walter McFadden witnessed it.

“Will I be able to see him before the surgery?” Joanna asked.

“I doubt that,” the clerk replied coldly. “ doubt that very much.”

Actually, as far as the clerk was concerned, if it had been left up to her, the very fact that Joanna Brady had insisted on signing the prior-consent organ-donor form would have cinched it. No way would she have allowed that woman to see her husband now, not in a million years.

Women who were that disloyal didn’t deserve to have husbands in the first place.

Joanna was surprised when, without the slightest hesitation, and without having to check the building directory, Walter Mc-Fadden led the way to the elevators and unerringly pressed the button to the correct surgical floor.

“Carol had surgery here, too,” he explained. “That’s how come I know my way around.”

“You don’t have to wait with me,” Joanna said. “I’ll be all right.”

“No,” Walter McFadden returned. “These waiting rooms are tough, especially in the middle of the night. I’m not going to leave you here alone.”

“Thank you,” she said.

‘The surgical floor waiting room was bleak and impersonal with suitably uncomfortable modern furniture and a collection of outdated, dog-eared magazines. McFadden gathered up the scattered pieces of a newspaper, then he sat down with them on one of the couches, placed his Stetson on one knee, and settled in to read and wait. Joanna hurried to a telephone at the far end of the room.

Ten o’clock Arizona time was midnight in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and she woke her in-laws out of a sound sleep. “We’ll be there just as soon as we can,” Jim Bob Brady told her once he had assimilated the bad news. “Eva Lou is already packing our bags. We’ll be on our way just as soon as she’s done.”

The next call was to Joanna’s mother. “I finally got that child of yours in bed,” Eleanor Lathrop grumbled. “She’s almost as stubborn as you are. I don’t know what in the world she was thinking of, sneaking out into the desert at night like that all by herself. And it seems to me that the least you could have done is to stop by here and let me know you were going before you took off for Tucson.”

“There wasn’t enough time, Mother,” Joanna returned evenly. “I wanted to be here at the hospital before they took Andy into surgery

“Well, it just doesn’t seem fair that I’m always the last one to know what’s going on.”

Joanna Brady had spent a lifetime fielding her mother’s chronic complaints. “At least you know now, Mother, and I need your help. Would you please call Milo and let him know I won’t be into work in the morning. And let Reverend Maculyea know as well. I’m too worn out to talk to anyone else.”

“All right. I can do that. I suppose I’d better pack Jennifer up and bring her to Tucson in the morning.”

“No,” Joanna replied. “That won’t be necessary. Sheriff McFadden already offered. He’ll bring my suitcase along as well. I don’t have any idea how long I’ll be here.”

Eleanor Lathrop hadn’t much wanted her husband to be sheriff, but even less had she wanted Walter McFadden to take over in the aftermath of Hank Lathrop’s tragic death.