J Jance - Queen of the Night

“Thank you,” she said. “You really are a remarkable man.”

Jack smiled at her. “Words to warm a man’s heart,” he said.

“But how did you manage to pull this off? Did someone find it for you?”

“Don’t expect me to tell you all my secrets,” he said. “I may want to surprise you again sometime.”

Smiling, she leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes. The nap they had both missed this afternoon was starting to catch up with her. Truth be told, it was catching up with Jack as well, but he hummed a few bars of their special song, “Solamente Una Vez,” to keep himself awake.

Everyone else knew the song as something schmaltzy about the Thousand Guitars, but a young dark-eyed singer with a local mariachi band had translated it for them that night after they had stood before the justice of the peace: “Only once in a lifetime does the light of love fall across your garden path.”

And tonight the garden is the desert, Jack Tennant thought. And the light of love will be a full moon.

So while Abby slept, Jack drove. She snored a little, but he was far too much of a gentleman to tell her that.

It’s one of our little secrets, he thought to himself. He was incredibly grateful that, at their supposedly advanced ages, there was still enough room in their lives to have secrets. And fun. For a moment, and it was only a moment, Jack felt a fleeting bit of wistfulness for poor Irene, because she hadn’t lived long enough to find that out. Even if she had lived long enough, he suspected Irene never would have figured out the fun part.

That was another place where Abby had Irene beaten six ways to Sunday.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 6:00 p.m.

81º Fahrenheit

Jonathan was working his way through his second take-out burger when Jack Tennant backed his Lexus out of the garage. Then, with him holding the passenger door open, a woman came out through the garage and let him take her hand as she got into the car.

Just seeing her made Jonathan’s heart leap to his throat. The last time he had spoken to his mother in person had been the afternoon he graduated from Wheaton. Both his parents had been there. It was the last time Jonathan had seen them together. He had known even then that his father had a side dish, but with a nag for a wife, who could blame him?

He had been standing there having his picture taken with Esther when his mother came up to him, smiling. “I’m so proud of you,” she had said. “I thought this day would never come.”

Of course you didn’t, Jonathan had told himself. Because you always thought I was dumb.

“Do your homework. Study harder. Don’t hang out with those loser friends of yours. Listen to decent music instead of that punk rock. Don’t drink. Don’t do this. Don’t do that.” When he was little, Jonathan had thought he had the best mother in the world. By junior high, that had changed. By high school they were in an undeclared war. By college the hot war became a cold one.

“Well, it did,” he had said to her then. “No thanks to you.”

With that, Jonathan had walked away from his mother and stayed away. Permanently, until now. It turned out that absence hadn’t made the heart grow fonder. If anything, his opinion of her had deteriorated. Over the years, she became the root cause of everything that went wrong with his life.

When Jonathan’s marriage began to come apart at the seams, it was because Esther was just like his mother. Jonathan’s father had told him that Abby was a spendthrift, and Jonathan believed it. His mother had spent Hank’s money; Esther had spent Jonathan’s. And every criticism Esther had leveled at him seemed to be an echo of his mother’s words and voice. He knew that his father was living a hellish existence with his relatively new wife and dipshit daughter, Jonathan’s half sister.

But here was Abby living a seemingly carefree existence with this new husband. She had made a couple of halfhearted e-mail attempts at reconciliation over the years, but Jonathan hadn’t been interested. He didn’t need a mother in his life any more than he needed a wife. One was gone and the other would be soon.

As he pulled into traffic a few vehicles behind the Lexus, it struck him that he had felt precious little remorse about what he had done so far. No, make that no remorse. He was relieved. Isn’t that what they always said during trials, that the killer showed no remorse? He wouldn’t, either.

In the hours after the murders in Thousand Oaks and before he drove away from the house just prior to sunrise, he had used Esther’s phone to buy himself some time. He had sent out a series of text messages to people in her address book-even to the boyfriend he wasn’t supposed to know about-letting them know that she and Jonathan were taking the kids to Yosemite for a couple of days. Once the bodies were found in Thousand Oaks, once it made the news, maybe he’d feel something, but by then he expected to be somewhere south of the border, sipping margaritas and living off the funds he had already transferred to an account in the Cayman Islands. That was the thing about continuing education. In teaching bankers how to counter illegal money transfers, the instructors had inadvertently taught them how to do it as well.

So the money that he didn’t have with him would be there waiting for him wherever he ended up. In the meantime, he knew that he had spared his own children the pain of knowing that one or the other of their parents had rejected them. He knew that feeling all too well. Yes, he had turned away from Abby, but only after she had already abandoned him.

He had taken care of Esther. Tonight he would even the score for his mother’s betrayal as well. Once he had fixed that, he would be able to move on into his new life, whatever and wherever that might be. His old life was over. Jonathan Southard had finally gotten a little of his own power back-power both his mother and his wife had leached out of him.

Once again he was careful to stay in the background. He expected they’d be going back to the reservation, so he was a little surprised when they set off in an entirely different direction. Eventually Jack turned off the freeway, first onto Cortaro Road and finally onto Sandario. When that happened, Jonathan knew he had been right all along about where they were headed. He could afford to relax. He would get there when he got there.

Jack and Abby Tennant could start their little party without him, but he was the one who would finish it.

South of Sells, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 8:10 p.m.

78º Fahrenheit

Dan was glad to be driving south toward the border. Coming from Tucson, he had been driving into the setting sun. This was much better.

This would be his second full summer with the Shadow Wolves. Brainwashed by what’s on television, most people probably expected that every shift had at least one high-speed chase and maybe a running gun battle or two. That had been Dan’s preconceived notion as well, but Aaron Meecham had disabused him of that notion at his first official Shadow Wolves briefing.

“Okay, guys,” Aaron had said. “Meet Dan Pardee, a San Carlos Apache who comes to us via Iraq and the U.S. Army.” There were a dozen uniformed men assembled in the briefing room that morning. Most of them nodded in welcome and three gave Dan a discreet thumbs-up. In other words, several guys there had the same kind of military credentials Dan did. That meant that, in a tight spot, whoever had his back would be someone he could count on.

The guy sitting directly in front of Dan, a Paiute from Nevada named Russell Muñoz, turned back to Dan. “Welcome to the most dangerous cop job on the planet,” he said. “Got my passenger window shot out just last night, thanks to some jerk-face federale from across the border who decided to use my SUV for target practice. And all we get to carry around with us is a lightweight piece-of-crap Beretta.”