J. Jance - Left for Dead

“Shhh,” Renteria said, pulling her to him. “He’s not dead, but he’s been shot and wounded. It’s serious, Teresa. I won’t lie to you and say he’s going to be fine, because the EMTs told me it’s bad. He’s being transported to the trauma center at Physicians Medical Center in Tucson.”

When those last few hopeful words penetrated Teresa Reyes’s consciousness, she fought her way out of the numbing fog of despair and clung to them with grim desperation. “You mean he’s really not dead?” she asked.

“He’s still alive,” Renteria allowed. “At least he was when they airlifted him out.”

Teresa knew that airlifting was expensive, that it was used in only the most desperate cases, but the welcome news filled her heart with a thin thread of hope. “Why not University Medical Center?” she asked. UMC was the premier trauma center in Tucson.

“The EMTs told me that for this kind of injury, Physicians is the best bet,” the sheriff said. Then he pointed toward a patrol car easing its way down the driveway toward the mobile home.

“Do you know Deputy Carson?” Renteria asked. “Jimmy.”

Teresa nodded. “I’ve seen him around town, but I don’t really know him.”

“I asked him to come stay with you until you can get things organized. Then he’ll drive you to the hospital. Under the circumstances, I don’t want you driving yourself.”

“You’re right,” Teresa agreed. “And thank you.”

Once the sheriff left her alone, Teresa stood in the entryway, frozen into a block of indecision. What should she do? Wake the girls? Bring them along to the hospital? Or should she leave them here, sound asleep, while she alone dealt with the crisis? She considered calling her mother, but Maria Delgado lived in Nogales. After her recent cataract surgery, she was no longer comfortable driving anywhere other than her immediate neighborhood, and she didn’t venture out at night at all. In addition to vision problems, Maria Delgado was frail. Not only did she have a debilitating heart condition, she also suffered from osteoporosis. Yes, she loved the girls dearly and could look after Lucy and Carinda as long as they were sound asleep, but she didn’t have the upper-body strength to wrestle Carinda in and out of her crib, and she didn’t have the energy to chase after the two lively preschoolers once they were awake.

There was only one option. In preparation for having the baby, Teresa had already packed a bag to take to the hospital. She grabbed a diaper bag and stuffed it with enough items to get Lucy and Carinda through the morning. Motioning Deputy Carson into the house, she handed him the bags and asked him to get Carinda’s car seat and Lucy’s booster out of the back of her minivan and put them in the back of his patrol car. With any luck, the girls would never remember that they’d been hauled out of their beds in the middle of the night. While Carson loaded the car, Teresa lugged the two sleeping girls out to the waiting vehicle and buckled them in. The deputy had started the engine. His car was warm. The girls stirred a little and were quiet.

The gate at the end of the driveway was closed. Jimmy started to get out to open it. “I will,” Teresa said. She held it open while Jimmy drove through. Had Teresa looked to the right just then, she might have seen a car parked at the far end of the cul-de-sac with its lights doused and its engine running. Teresa’s mind was elsewhere, however. Hurriedly, she closed the gate, fastened it, and climbed back into the patrol car. Then she sat quietly while Carson maneuvered the winding road that led back to the highway.

“What happened?” she asked when they turned onto the blacktop, where the deputy switched on his emergency lights and hit the gas.

“Didn’t Sheriff Renteria tell you?”

“Some,” she said. “But I was so upset, I wasn’t really listening.”

“Jose was out on patrol by himself,” Carson said. “Down by the Kino Ridge golf course. He called Dispatch, saying he was doing a routine traffic stop. After that, his radio went silent. Dispatch sent someone looking for him at his last reported location. They found him shot and bleeding at the bottom of a ravine.”

“Do they have any idea who did it?” Teresa asked.

Carson shrugged. “We sent out a Blue Alert, but we have no leads. It’s early, though.”

Blue Alerts were for injured cops what Amber Alerts were for kids. They went out to other police jurisdictions when an officer had been assaulted and the perpetrator was at large.

“What about his dashboard camera?”

“Smashed and then taken. Along with the rest of the system,” Carson said.

“So there’s no film of what happened?”

“The memory stick was in the camera, and that’s gone,” Carson said.

“What about Jose?”

“The EMTs transported him by ambulance back to the parking lot at Kino Ridge. There, an air ambulance picked him up and took him to Tucson.”

Teresa spent the rest of the drive to the hospital in prayerful silence. Three years earlier she had made an eerily similar trip. That one had taken her from the rented home she had shared with her first husband, Danny, on Tucson’s far west side to the trauma unit at UMC. That night a uniformed cop from the Tucson PD had knocked on her door to tell her that Danny Sanchez had been shot in a drive-by in South Tucson.

On the way to the hospital that time, she remembered what her mother had tried to tell her about Danny when she first started dating him: that he was bad news. Even though Danny came from a decent family-his father, Oscar, raised quarter horses in the San Rafael Valley-the boy was trouble.

The problem, of course, was that bad boys were always more exciting and interesting than the good ones. In the beginning Teresa had found it easy to ignore all of her mother’s warnings. Besides, she wasn’t worried. Danny promised her that once they had kids, he’d settle down, quit hanging around with his bad-boy buddies, and stop using drugs.

When Lucy was born, Teresa had fully expected those promises would be kept, but they weren’t-none of them. She soon found herself hassling Danny about everything: quitting drugs, ditching his friends, and getting a real job. The more she nagged, the worse things got. When they ran behind on the bills or needed money for groceries, Danny’s mother-far more than his father-was there with a checkbook, ready and willing to bail out her mama’s-boy only son.

Teresa hadn’t wanted to be bailed out. What she’d wanted was for Danny to grow up. She wanted the two of them to have a real life together, functioning as a real family, without always having to be beholden to his parents, especially to Olga. Teresa had already figured out that Olga’s purse strings were iron-clad apron strings.

By the time Lucy turned two, Teresa was pregnant again, and she and Danny were fighting more and more. Finally, she gave him an ultimatum. Either he grow up and get a job, or she was taking Lucy and leaving. She had been screaming at him when he stormed out of the house and drove away.

It was later that night when the cop knocked on her door. Still in a rage, Danny had gone to some of his favorite South Tucson hangouts, where he and his friends had done some serious drinking. Just before closing time, there was an altercation that went from inside a bar to outside. Out in the parking lot, one of the guys from the fight got in his car and drove away. A few minutes later, he came back, driving past where Danny and his friends were gathered. The driver’s window rolled down. Danny was shot at point-blank range without the vehicle ever coming to a stop.

At the time, the car Danny was driving was registered in his mother’s name. The address on his license was Olga Sanchez’s Tucson address. For that reason, Danny’s parents were the first to be notified of the shooting. They had been at the hospital for some time before Olga thought to send someone to let Teresa know what had happened. The cop who had rung her doorbell that night had been kind enough to take Teresa and Lucy to the hospital.