J. Jance: Devil’s Claw

“I’ve contacted Deputy Howell,” Tica responded. “She’s on her way, but she’s coming from Saint David, so it’s going to take some time for her to get to you.”

Leaving the Blazer idling where it was, Joanna let herself in the gate, walked up onto the creaking porch, and knocked hard on the wood-framed screen door. “Clayton,” she shouted. “Are you in there? Are you all right?”

She reached down and took hold of the knob. It turned easily in her hand and the door swung open, squawking noisily on elderly hinges. The house smelled musty and unkempt. Clayton had been a widower for years. Clearly he wasn’t very interested in doing much of what he always considered “women’s work.”

“Clayton,” Joanna called again. “Are you in here? Are you all right?”

No answer. Using her flashlight, Joanna located an antique push-button light switch. She pressed the upper button and an equally antique hanging light fixture with a single bulb cast a wan glow around the dingy room.

Making her way across a threadbare rag rug, Joanna walked through the dining room and into the kitchen, where she found Clayton’s antique wood-burning stove cold to the touch.

“Clayton?” she repeated. Still nothing. He wasn’t in the kitchen or on the screened back porch, either. Leaving the kitchen behind, Joanna hurried back through the sparsely furnished living room to check the two tiny bedrooms and the spacious bathroom that had been carved out of what had once been a third minuscule bedroom. Nowhere did Joanna see anything out of order. There was no sign of a struggle-nothing that indicated Clayton Rhodes had left his home under any kind of duress.

Shaking her head, Joanna went back outside. She had been listening so intently for a reply to her continuing calls that her hearing seemed to have been tuned to a higher level than when she had first exited the Blazer. Now, in addition to the steady rumble of the Blazer’s engine, she could hear something else as well-the sound of another vehicle. It was muffled and faint and stationary-with none of the rises and falls in engine noise that would have occurred in a vehicle making its way on the rough road that wound up Mexican Canyon from High Lonesome Road.

Bounding back to the Blazer, Joanna quickly switched off the engine and then stepped back outside to listen once again. Without interference from the Blazer’s idling engine, the muffled sound Joanna had heard was much clearer now. Following it, she walked toward a collection of outbuildings, including the sagging clapboard barn with a lean-to shed that Clayton used as a makeshift garage to shelter his beloved vintage Ford pickup truck that dated from the early fifties. As she neared the shed, Joanna smelled the heavy scent of exhaust and the distinctive odor of an overheated engine.

Sprinting now, she raced up to the windowless shed and tried the door. Nothing happened when she yanked on the outside handle. Too heavy to be raised by hand, the door refused to respond to her pulling. Pounding on the garage door, she shouted again. “Clayton! Are you in there? Answer me!”

This time Joanna heard no answer other than the continuing low growl of an idling engine. She turned and raced back to her Blazer. First she grabbed up the ax and crowbar she kept in the back cargo area. Then she paused long enough to use the radio.

“Tica,” she said urgently. “Send an ambulance. I’m pretty sure Clayton Rhodes is locked in his garage-with a car engine running.”

Back at the garage, Joanna made short work of beating a hole in the door. As soon as she did so, a thick cloud of acrid exhaust boiled out around her. Holding her breath, she crawled in through the jagged hole and felt her way through the oily exhaust up to the front of Clayton’s old pickup. Through the murk she could just make out the shape of a human body slouched over the steering wheel. Blindly she reached in, felt along the dashboard for the ignition key, and switched it off.

Only then did she reach for Clayton. As soon as she touched his cold, lifeless hand, she knew it was far too late. By then she had run out of breath. As soon as she breathed, her lungs filled with smoke. Coughing and choking, she stumbled back outside, pulling out her cell phone and dialing as she went.

“Nine-one-one,” Tica Romero responded. “What are you reporting?”

“Cancel that ambulance,” Joanna told the dispatcher. “It’s too late. Clayton Rhodes is dead.”

Agnes Hooper looked back longingly at the good old days-before CNN. Once her husband had watched the news only twice a day-after work in the evenings and again at ten o’clock. That was back before Wayne’s heart went bad and before Dr. Loomis put him on total disability. The next thing Agnes knew, he had installed one of those little satellite dishes up on the roof. Now the news went on and on, hour after hour, all day long, with the same smiling faces endlessly repeating the same stories over and over.

Tonight the big story was from Tennessee, where some kid had gone berserk and had shot up a school bus, killing the driver as well as two children and injuring three others before some of the other kids on the bus tackled the shooter and wrestled the gun out of his hands.

“He was just a regular kid,” a tearful principal was saying into the microphone someone had shoved in his face. “Something of a loner, but he never gave his teachers any trouble. This just came at us out of the blue, with no warning.”

“See there,” Wayne said. “Now they’re turning school buses into war zones. You should stop driving that thing, Aggie. The way kids are today, it’s too dangerous.”

The stricken principal’s words had already chilled Agnes Hooper’s heart. Loner, she thought. Never gave teachers any trouble.

“That’s what people say about Lucy Ridder behind her back,” Agnes said softly. “That she’s a loner.”

Wayne turned away from the blaring television set and studied his wife’s face. “Lucy Ridder,” he said thoughtfully. “Isn’t she that Indian kid who lives with her grandmother out on Middlemarch Road?”

Agnes nodded. “Lucy’s the last one off my bus in the afternoon and the first one on in the morning.”

Wayne covered his face with both hands. “Dammit, Aggie!” he exclaimed. “I wish you could quit that damned job. Just haul off and quit. Walk away from the whole stupid mess.”

But they both knew quitting wasn’t an option. Driving a school bus didn’t pay beans, but the benefits were good. And it was Agnes Hooper’s medical benefits with the Elfrida Unified School District that were keeping her husband alive.

“You know I can’t do that, hon,” she said calmly. “It’s just not in the cards.”

Wayne shook his head. “It’s not right,” he said. “I’m the one who should be out working and taking care of you. That’s how life’s supposed to be, not the other way around. The last thing you should have to do is be out dealing with a bunch of crazy kids day in and day out!”

“They’re good kids,” Agnes said soothingly, wanting to calm him down. Dr. Loomis said it was bad for Wayne to be stressed. “They’re not crazy. As for Lucy Ridder, she’s never given me a moment’s trouble.”

“Right,” Wayne Hooper said with a despairing shake of his head. “As I recall, that’s the exact same thing that principal just said about the kid who shot up the school bus back there in Tennessee-he never gave anybody a lick of trouble.”

After finding Clayton Rhodes’ body, Joanna shifted into automatic and made all the necessary calls. Once George Winfield, Cochise County’s medical examiner, had been summoned to the scene, there was nothing for her to do but wait. She did go inside the unlocked house as far as the little telephone table. There she came face-to-face with a much younger image of Clayton Rhodes in a framed, formally posed wedding picture taken of him and his late wife, Molly. Bony and bow-legged even then, Clayton looked grimly uncomfortable and out of character in a dark, double-breasted suit. The youthful, sweet-faced Molly, slender in her bridal finery, bore little resemblance to the broad-hipped, heavyset woman Joanna remembered meeting years earlier, when she had first come to High Lonesome Ranch.