J. Jance: Fatal Error

“Morning, Oma,” he said with a cheerful grin. “How’s it going today?”

Jose’s friendly overture, made in public, sent a clear message to those around them that whatever problem he’d had with Ali before was over-at least on his part. She understood that he was enough of a ringleader that if he buried the hatchet, the others would follow suit.

But that didn’t mean it was completely over. That day, when they went to the shooting range, Ali made sure she had the slot next to Jose’s. When target practice was over, she had beaten him six ways to Sunday. She knew it. He knew it. Neither said a word. They signed off on their respective targets and handed them over to the range instructor.

On her way to the next class, Ali wondered if the antagonism between them had really been put to rest.

All things considered, Ali thought, it doesn’t seem likely.

Barstow, California

In an unreasoning rage, Brenda Riley slammed out of the Denny’s parking lot with her tires squealing. Her speeding BMW left behind a rooster tail of gravel as she roared into traffic. She missed the entrance to the 101 and decided to stick it out on surface roads rather than taking a freeway. Somewhere along Grand Avenue she finally caught sight of a drive-in liquor store. She stopped at the drive-up window and filled her purse with a collection of three-ounce bottles of tequila-a little hair of the dog.

Ali Reynolds wanted Brenda to stop drinking? Big deal. Who had appointed Ali Reynolds as the ruler of the universe? What business was it of hers? What right did she have to go around pointing fingers? Brenda Riley would stop drinking when she got around to it-and only when she was good and ready.

Then since her mother’s credit card was still working, Brenda decided to take the scenic road back home. She stopped for lunch in Wickenburg and ended up having to spend the night when an alert bartender in the Hassayampa River Inn took away her car keys. For Brenda, having her car keys confiscated twice in as many days was something of a record.

On Saturday morning, Brenda was up bright and early-well, ten o’clock, which was bright and early for her. She ate half a bagel and some cream cheese from the breakfast buffet at the hotel and was on the road as soon as she got her car keys back. She was doing just fine until she made pit stops in Kingman and again in Needles. By the time she was outside Barstow, she was feeling no pain. That was when she drifted off the highway. Without even noticing the rumble strips, she slammed into a bridge abutment and rolled over several times into a dry riverbed.

Brenda was knocked unconscious. Her seat belt kept her from being ejected from the vehicle, but the sudden force exerted by the belt broke her collarbone in two places. By the time rescuers reached her, she had regained consciousness and was screaming at the top of her lungs. Her nose was broken, as was a bone in her right wrist. There were several cuts on her body as well, some from flying debris from the windshield but others from glass from numerous broken booze bottles, most of them empty, that had gone flying around the passenger compartment of the battered BMW as it finally rolled to a stop.

One of the early first responders was a San Bernardino deputy sheriff who noticed the all-pervading odor of tequila and took charge. He summoned an ambulance. Once Brenda was loaded into it, he followed the ambulance to Barstow Community Hospital, where he saw to it that the doctors caring for the patient also administered a blood alcohol test, which came back at more than three times the legal limit. That was enough to maintain the deputy’s interest and make his paperwork easier. It was also enough for the alert ER doc to admit her to the hospital for treatment of her injuries as well as medically supervised detox.

Afterward, Brenda Riley would recall little about her three-day bout with DTs. The acronym DT stands for “delirium tremens,” and Brenda was delirious most of the time. Even with IV drips of medication and fluids, the nightmares were horrendous. When the lights in the room were on, they hurt her eyes, but when she turned them off, invisible bugs scrambled all over her body. And she shook constantly. She trembled, as though in the grip of a terrible chill.

During her stay at Barstow Community Hospital, Brenda Riley wasn’t under arrest; she was under sedation. She wasn’t held incommunicado, but there was no phone in her room. Besides, when she finally started coming back to her senses, she had no idea who she should call. She sure as hell wasn’t going to call her mother or Ali Reynolds.

Finally, on day four, the doctor came around and pronounced her fit enough to sign release forms. Once he did so, however, there was a deputy waiting outside her room with an arrest warrant in hand along with a pair of handcuffs. Brenda left the hospital in the back of a squad car, once again dressed in what was left of the still-bloodied clothing she’d been wearing when she was taken from her wrecked BMW-her totaled BMW, her former BMW.

It didn’t matter how the press found out about any of it, but they did. There were reporters stationed outside the sally port to the jail, snapping photos of her as the patrol car with her inside it drove into the jail complex.

Sometime during that hot, uncomfortable ride from the hospital to the county jail with her hands cuffed firmly behind her back Brenda Riley finally figured out that maybe Ali Reynolds was right after all. Maybe she really did need to do something about her drinking.

First the cops booked her. They took her mug shot. They took her fingerprints. They dressed her in orange jail coveralls and hauled her before a judge, where her bail was set at five thousand dollars. That was when they took her into a room and told her she could make one phone call. It was the worst phone call of Brenda’s life. She had to call her mother, collect, and ask to be bailed out of jail.

Yes, it was high time she, Brenda Riley, did something about her drinking.

Peoria, Arizona

Back in Peoria that Friday, Ali Reynolds knew nothing of Brenda’s misadventures in going home. At noon Ali went back to her dorm room to check her cell for messages. Ali understood that the major purpose of academy training was to give recruits the tools they would need to use once they were sworn officers operating out on the street. Weapons training and physical training were necessary, life-and-death components of that process. The rules of evidence and suspect handling procedures would mean the difference between a conviction or a miscarriage of justice.

Drills on the parade ground were designed to instill discipline and a sense of professional pride. That sense of professionalism was, in a very real sense, the foundation of the thin blue line. Still, some of the rules rankled. There was a blanket prohibition against carrying cell phones during academy classes, to say nothing of using them. In the first three weeks, instructors had confiscated two telephones and kept them for several days as punishment and also as an object lesson for other members of the class.

Ali had definitely gotten the message. She had taken to returning to her room for a few minutes at lunchtime to make and take calls. That Friday, there was only one text message awaiting her. B. said that he had landed in Phoenix, picked up his vehicle, was on his way to Sedona, and would see her at dinner. That was all Ali really wanted to know.

On her way back to class, Ali encountered one of her fellow recruits, Donnatelle Craig, out in the hallway. Donnatelle was an African-American woman, a single mother, who hailed from Yuma. She was standing in front of the door to her room, weeping, and struggling through her tears to insert her room key into the lock.