Diana Palmer - Fire Brand

“Good for you, officer!” Fred yelled.

Gaby elbowed him. “Traitor,” she accused.

“Stupid people should be trampled,” he replied. “Fool! Lunatic!” he called across to the rival paper’s reporter/photographer, who was being led away not too gently by his accoster.

“I love you, too, Harrington!” Wilson called back. “Hey, Cane, how about calling this story in to my editor for me?”

“Eat worms and die, Wilson!” she said gaily.

He stuck his tongue out at her and vanished behind the bulk of the angry police officer.

“Will you two keep it down?” one of the nearby policemen muttered. “Honest to God, you reporters are the biggest pests.”

“Just for that, I’ll misspell your name,” Gaby promised.

He grinned at her and moved away.

“You’re crazy,” Fred said fervently. He was new to the newspaper scene, having preferred photography to journalism—although he could write good cutlines and even do good interviews. He didn’t have the wherewithal for this kind of assignment, though. Gaby usually had the political beat. She and Harrington were only here because the police reporter was out sick. And any news reporter could be commandeered to cover police news in an emergency.

Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted movement. There was a uniformed man with a rifle running into a building across the street from the abandoned department store building. “Something’s happening,” Gaby said. “Look sharp. You might get a little closer to Chief Jones and see if he can fill you in on what the SWAT team’s going to do.”

Fred glared at her. “Why don’t you do it? I can take photos.”

“Deal.” She handed him the camera and started toward Chief Jones. Then, just as he started shooting, she turned around and removed the lens cap. “It works better that way,” she said, before edging her way along the police car line.

“Hi, Teddy,” she whispered, easing up beside the tall, distinguished police chief. “What’s up?”

“Utility stocks, or so I hear,” he mused.

“Dammit, Teddy, stop that,” she muttered. “It’s been a long day, and I’ve got an engagement party to go to when I get through here.”

“You getting engaged, Gaby?” he asked. “A miracle.” He looked up at the rainy sky.

“Not me,” she said through her teeth. “Mary, down in composing. She and I went through journalism school together.”

“I might have known.” He frowned as his eyes shifted to the roof of the building across the street, where the faint glimmer of metal gave away a marksman.

“Good for you,” Gaby whispered, glancing up with eyes that were such a dark olive shade of green that they looked brown. “The robber will take out that hostage if you don’t do something drastic.”

“We don’t like this sort of thing, you know that,” he sighed. “But he’s killed one man already and there’s a pregnant lady in there and he’s gone wild. We can’t negotiate him out of a damned thing. There’s no power or telephone or heat to cut off and trade him things for, and he won’t talk to us.” He shook his head. “This is a hell of a job sometimes, kid.”

“You’re telling me.”

Three years of work on the Phoenix Advertiser had given her an education in police tactics. She stood crouched beside Chief Jones, waiting for the inevitable shot that would drop the gunman. It was like waiting for death, because a head shot was all the sharpshooter was likely to get, if that much. For one long moment, she contemplated the futility of crime and its terrible cost—to the perpetrators, the public, and the police. And then the shot came. It echoed through the darkness with a horrible finality. If death had a sound, that was it, and Gaby cringed inwardly.

“It’s a hit!” the sharpshooter called down. “I got him.”

“Okay, move in,” Chief Jones told his men solemnly.

“Can I come?” Gaby asked quietly.

He looked down at her with mingled irritation and respect. “Sure, you can come,” he said. “You’ll have nightmares.”

“I’ve always had nightmares,” she said matter-of-factly. She went back to get Fred. “Let’s get some pics and wrap this up so we can make the morning edition,” she told him.

“Pics of what?” he asked.

“Of the gunman,” she said patiently.

“You want me to take pictures of a dead body?”

She took the camera from him with exaggerated patience and followed Chief Jones into the building.

Gaby’s heart went out to the small pregnant woman, who was white-faced, sobbing, and clearly almost in shock, as she was escorted gently from the building. The gunman lay on the floor. Someone had taken off his shabby jacket and put it over his head. He looked fragile, somehow, lying there like that. Gaby took a quick shot of him without really seeing him. She didn’t photograph the hostage. Johnny could scream his head off, but she wasn’t going to capitalize on a pregnant woman’s terror. Later, she could call the hospital and find out the woman’s condition, or she could get the particulars from Chief Jones. She glanced around the room until her eyes caught the sack with the holdup money in it.

A policeman was carefully picking it up, and she looked inside.

“Twenty dollars,” the policeman said. He shrugged. “Not much of a haul for two men’s lives.”

“Does it look like he was a pro?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “Too sloppy. A witness who saw him kill the storekeeper said he was shaking all over, and the gun discharged accidentally while he was trying to get away.”

She was writing it all down. “Got a family?”

“Yeah. He’s the youngest of six kids. The older brother’s a drug dealer. The mother goes on the streets from time to time to add to her welfare check.” He smiled at Gaby. “Tough world for kids, isn’t it?”

“For some of them,” she agreed. She shouldered the camera and went back to Chief Jones, who’d just finished talking to the hostage. Gaby asked him the necessary questions, picked up Harrington, and drove back to the office in her white custom VW convertible.

“How come you rate a car this fancy?” Fred asked on the way.

She smiled. “I have rich relatives,” she said.

Well, it was the truth, in one respect. The McCaydes of Lassiter, Arizona, were rich. They weren’t exactly relatives, however.

Her eyes drifted to the traffic. Phoenix was a fascinating city, elegant for its spaciousness, with the surrounding huge, jagged peaks of the southernmost Rockies forming a protective barrier around it. The first time she’d seen the city, she had been fascinated by the sheer height and majesty of those mountains.

In fact, Arizona itself still fascinated her. It was a state like no other, its appearance first frightening and barren. But closer up, it had a staggering beauty. In its vastness, it offered serenity and promise. In its diversity of terrain and cultures, it offered a kind of harmony that was visually melodic. Gaby loved it all, from the wealth and prosperity and hustle of Phoenix, to the quiet desert peace of Casa Río, the twenty-odd-thousand-acre ranch owned by the McCaydes.

“Doesn’t one of your relatives have a construction company in Tucson?” Harrington broke into her thoughts. “McCayde—Bowie McCayde?”

Gaby tingled at the mention of his name. “He’s not a relative. His parents took me in when I was in my teens,” she corrected. “Yes, he inherited McCayde Construction from his late father.”

“There’s a ranch, too, isn’t there?”

“Oh, yes, indeed, there is,” she said, remembering with a smile. “Casa Río—River House. It dates to ten years after the Civil War.” She glanced at him. “You did know that most of southeastern Arizona was settled by people from the South—and that during the Civil War, a Confederate flag flew briefly over the city of Tucson?”