J. Jance - Minor in possession

"And that was the beginning of Joey's interest in snakes and lizards. He pored over books, begged us to take him to zoos and museums. He wanted to be a herpetologist when he grew up. A herpetologist or a writer. He caught Ringo that same year, up near our summer cabin in Pinetop. The snake was just a baby then. Joey dragged it home in a quart jar. I didn't find out until years later that it's illegal to keep snakes in captivity, but by the time I figured it out, it was too late. I didn't live there anymore. It was no longer any of my concern. Marsha said he could keep it."

"I see," I said.

"Do you?" she demanded, her voice rising until it verged on shrill. "I'm not so sure I do. Marsha got everything-JoJo, Joey, the house, although they have a different house now-with another child they needed a bigger one-and the cabin in Pinetop."

To say nothing of the snake, I thought. I said, "Where did she come from?"

"Marsha? She was my babysitter once." There was no concealing the bitterness in her answer. "I had begged JoJo to let me go back to the university and get my degree. Marsha lived two houses up from us in Paradise Valley. She was still in high school when they started screwing around behind my back. It took me three years to figure out what was going on. I'm a slow learner."

"Nice guy," I said. "Like father, like son."

"I've wondered sometimes if Joey didn't know about it before I did. I asked him once. Of course he denied it, but that's about when he started going haywire. By the time I got the divorce, even if I had gotten custody, I'm not sure it would have made any difference. I think by then the damage with Joey was already done. Besides, by then I had too many problems of my own." Close to tears, she stopped, swallowing hard.

"Giving up isn't a crime," I said.

She smiled gratefully. "Thank you for saying that, Mr. Beaumont. Maybe it isn't, although I've blamed myself for years. I tried to get him back later, after I got through school and was back on my feet financially and emotionally, but whenever he came to stay with me, he lied and stole and cheated. At first I chalked it up to genetics. Later on I told myself it was because of the drugs. It would kill me if I had to think that it was my fault."

I tossed her the nearest, handiest platitude. "I'm sure it wasn't."

"Maybe not. I hope not," she added.

Rhonda Attwood sat quietly for a moment before continuing. "So that's how it happened. I locked Joey out of my heart so he couldn't hurt me any more, the same way I locked out his father. And now, I don't have anything else to lose. Nothing."

"And with nothing left to lose, you're forming a one-woman posse, is that it?"

"Why not?"

"Because it's illegal for one thing and dangerous for another."

"I don't have any faith in the criminal justice system, Mr. Beaumont. They let my son off, and they'll let his killers off the same way. That's why I came to you for help."

"You haven't been listening, dammit. I can't help you. You need to go to the detective on the case. The one from Prescott. Talk to her."

"A lady detective?"

"Her name's Delcia Reyes-Gonzales. She's with the Yavapai County Sheriff's Department up in Prescott. She seems to know her stuff. I ought to talk to her myself and let her know where I am."

Abruptly, Rhonda Attwood stood up. "Let's go, then," she said.

"Go where?"

"I'll take you there, to Prescott. We'll talk to the detective together, if that's what you want."

"Now?"

"Yes. Why not? They say the phones here could be out of order all the rest of the night. I want to get moving on this."

That wasn't exactly what I'd had in mind, but it did give me a way to get out of Wickenburg. "Tell me one thing," I said. "What exactly do you intend to do once you catch up with these characters, the drug suppliers or whoever the people are you think are responsible for Joey's death? What are you going to do then? You said earlier that you planned to ‘take them out.' You didn't really mean that, did you?"

"Didn't I?" she returned.

It wasn't a reassuring answer. In fact, it was a downright crazy answer. Nice middle-aged ladies don't go up against big-time drug dealers, at least sane middle-aged ladies don't. Fortunately, I'm not a psychologist, and it wasn't my job to talk her out of it.

Still, crazy or not, Rhonda Attwood had wheels and she was offering me a one-way immediate departure ticket out of Wickenburg, Arizona. Maybe in Prescott I could rent another car and still get to Phoenix before morning to see old Mr. Fixit, Ralph Ames.

"So let's go," I said. "What are we waiting for?"

I knew at the time that I was misleading her some, offering an implied alliance that I had no intention of honoring, but I let her draw her own conclusions. If anyone asked me later, I'd tell them that I had just gone along for the ride. Literally.

It turned out not to be such a wonderful bargain.

Happy to escape my one-night sentence at the flea-bitten Joshua Tree Motel, I left the room key on the table, locked the door behind us, and followed Rhonda Attwood outside to her Fiat for what turned out to be one of the most hair-raising rides in a lifetime of hair-raising rides.

To begin with, my six-foot-three body was never intended to fit inside a 128 Spider. At first I thought I'd have to spend the entire trip sitting with my head cocked to one side. Fortunately, once the car was moving, the convertible's canvas top ballooned up enough that I was able to put my head into the bubble created by air movement. That way I could sit up straight, but it also cut my line of vision down to a few feet in front of the car and an acute angled view of what was directly outside the rider's window.

Highway 89 climbs abruptly up from the desert floor, winding around the flank of a mountain locals call Yarnell Hill. That's what they call it, but believe me, it's a full-fledged mountain.

Rhonda Attwood drove with the heater turned on high and the driver's window wide open. Wind whipping through her hair, she pushed the aging Fiat like a veteran sports-car-rally driver, coaxing more speed and life out of that old beater than she should have been able to.

My left shoulder was jammed against hers. There was only one spot in the V-shaped foot well big enough to hold my feet, and they promptly went to sleep. I felt like a horse with blinders on, for all I could see was the vast darkness falling away from the side of the car and the fast-dwindling lights of Wickenburg and Congress Junction twinkling fitfully in the valley far below.

Every time Rhonda swung around a bend in the road, the Fiat clung like a bug to the white line on the far outside edge. Vainly groping for a steadying handhold, I wondered what would happen if the wheels slipped off the blacktop. How far would the car plunge down the pitch-black side of the mountain before it came to rest on solid rock? Or maybe in the branches of some scruffy desert tree.

Twice, with no warning to me, we came around hairpin curves only to have Rhonda set the car on its nose because traffic was flagged down to only one lane. Looking out the driver's window as we crept past, I caught glimpses of muddy slides where stove-sized boulders-three-man-rocks they call them in the landscape business-had broken loose from the steep embankment and washed down onto the roadway to block the inside lane.

I don't like backseat drivers, and I most particularly don't like being one, especially when I'm hitching a free ride in somebody else's vehicle. At one point I mentioned offhandedly that the Yavapai County Sheriff's Department was most likely a twenty-four-hour operation and that they'd still be there once we arrived in Prescott, no matter how long we took making the drive. Rhonda didn't acknowledge the comment one way or the other, and she didn't ease her foot off the gas pedal, either.