J Jance - Queen of the Night

Jonathan Southard did neither. He stood stock-still for a moment, as if assessing the situation and his opposition. Then, without checking for traffic, he turned and sprinted into the speeding freeway traffic.

Brian Fellows made as if to follow, but then he saw the woman again. She had managed to wrestle the child out of the vehicle. Now she stood there holding the baby and frozen in place, staring in horror back at the freeway.

Brian heard the bellowing horn of an approaching semi. He knew as soon as he heard it that it was coming too fast. He heard the thump of engaging air brakes and smelled the smoke from scorching tires. The woman was terrified and too dumbstruck to move. Brian wasn’t. He leaped forward, grabbed the woman’s arm and propelled her up the bank to safety. Then something smashed into him from behind. After that he knew nothing.

Tucson, Arizona

Sunday, June 7, 2009, 2:10 p.m.

89º Fahrenheit

Kath Fellows left the store parking lot and went home. She unloaded the car, put away her groceries, and waited for Brian to call. She didn’t want to call him. If he was involved in some sort of emergency situation, the last thing he needed was the distraction of a ringing telephone. First ten minutes went by without any word. Then twenty. Then thirty. With each passing minute she grew more and more anxious. She was sure something was wrong-terribly wrong.

Finally, unable to wait any longer, she put in a call to Brian’s office. She managed to bluff her way through to an emergency operator, but what she was told didn’t help. “Sorry, Ms. Fellows. It’s a chaotic scene right now. There are injuries. We don’t know who or how bad.”

As soon as Kath heard those words, she knew that she had to go see for herself. She didn’t want Amy and Annie to know how worried she was, but she didn’t want to take them with her, either. She called their elderly neighbor, Mrs. Harper, and asked for help.

“Of course,” Estelle said. “Just let me turn off the ball game. I’ll be right there.”

Kath was standing by the front door with her purse in one hand and the car keys in the other when Estelle rang the doorbell.

“Okay,” she announced as she let the woman into the house. “I’m going out for a while, girls,” she called over her shoulder. “You listen to Mrs. Harper and do whatever she says.”

“Where are you going?” Amy asked.

“Out,” Kath answered.

“Why can’t we come with you?”

“Because,” she said, then she fled out the door and down the steps.

She drove toward the spot where she’d last heard from Brian-I-10 and Kino. She was half a mile from the intersection when she ran into stopped traffic. She still had a rooftop emergency bubble light in her glove box, one she’d never quite gotten around to taking out of the Odyssey. She retrieved the light, plugged it in, and slapped it on top of her vehicle. Then she threaded her way through the traffic jam until she reached a cop who was directing people away from the freeway.

“Freeway’s closed, ma’am,” the officer said when she reached him. “You’ll have to go around.”

She reached into her purse and pulled out her Border Patrol ID. “I’m off duty,” she said. “They called in all available units.”

The officer barely looked at her ID. He simply stepped aside, motioned Kath onto the on-ramp, and then stopped the car directly behind her.

As soon as she turned onto the ramp, she could see the jumble of traffic ahead of her. There were a good hundred cars or so, stopped here and there, parked at odd angles. Some of them had stopped so suddenly that they had rear-ended the vehicle ahead of them, which meant that there were several fender benders, but at the head of that field of broken and battered automobiles Kath could see a mass of wreckage. At first what she was seeing didn’t make sense. As she inched her way closer, however, she realized that the debris field came from an overturned eighteen-wheeler that had spilled a massive load of construction materials in all directions.

All right, then, Kath thought. Brian’s up there, helping deal with this horrendous wreck. No wonder he couldn’t call me.

When Kath could drive no farther, she stowed the bubble light, left her car parked crookedly on the shoulder, and walked. She could see that the accident had started somewhere just after the I-19 exit ramp. And sure enough, there was Brian’s car-the only one in the collection of cop cars that didn’t have a red flashing lightbar. If Brian’s car was here, that meant he was here somewhere, too.

Kath pulled her phone out of her purse and punched the green button that automatically called the last number dialed. Unfortunately, that turned out to be Mrs. Harper’s number. She ended that call when Estelle Harper’s answering machine came on. Then Kath scrolled through to the next number and dialed that.

The phone rang and rang. It rang six times. Just when Kath expected the call to switch over to voice mail, somebody answered-somebody who wasn’t Brian.

“Hello?”

The voice belonged to a woman. It sounded tentative and uncertain. Kath tried to be all business.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “I’m looking for my husband. What are you doing with his phone?”

“I don’t know,” the woman said. “I heard the phone ringing. It was right here next to my car. I thought I should answer it.”

“What car?”

“I’m in a Chevrolet Lumina,” the woman said. “It’s blue. We’re stuck on this side of the truck. Thank God Bobby didn’t hit it-the truck, I mean. It was so close I’m still shaking like a leaf.”

By then Kath was shaking, too. She spotted the Lumina. Going up to the window, she flashed her ID and took possession of Brian’s phone. The front of the phone was shattered. The battery cover was missing completely, although the battery was still in place. It was a miracle that the phone worked at all.

Determinedly Kath picked her way forward through the debris field. The broken semi had disgorged hundreds of rolls of roofing and hundreds of packets of shingles. Those were scattered in every direction. When Kath came around the front end of the disabled eighteen-wheeler, two more cops-DPS officers this time-barred her way.

“Sorry, lady,” one of them said. “You’ll have to go back.”

“That’s my husband’s car over there,” she said, pointing at the unmarked patrol car sitting undamaged on the shoulder of the road, with its hazard lights still blinking. “He’s a Pima County homicide detective,” she added. “He was chasing a killer with his arm in a sling.”

“The guy with his arm in the sling jumped out of the wreckage and ran into traffic,” one of the officers replied. “He got nailed by a car going eastbound. He’s already been transported in an ambulance.”

“Under guard?” Kath asked.

“Yes, under guard.”

She peered around at the remaining slew of cop cars, fire trucks, and ambulances, and at a group of EMTs frantically working on somebody who had yet to be transported.

“Anybody else hurt?” she asked.

At first neither of the cops replied, but the look they exchanged spoke volumes. As Kath started forward again, one of them reached out to stop her.

“Really, ma’am,” he said. “You probably shouldn’t go there right now…” he began.

Kath shook off his hand. “Either arrest me or let me go,” she told him.

He let her go. She reached the clutch of EMTs just in time to see a bloodied human form on a backboard being lifted onto a gurney and then into a waiting ambulance. There was nothing about the battered face or hands that she recognized, but she knew the shoes. Or rather, she knew the one shoe that had survived the impact and had stayed on Brian’s right foot. Her husband was no clotheshorse, but shoes, more specifically ECCO, were his one personal extravagance.