“pretend” meals and, even more, “helping” a doting and exceedingly patient Leland with real cooking chores at Ali’s house.
Colin, on the other hand, was introspective, almost dreamy. Needless to say, he was the quieter of the two. Yes, he played with blocks and could be persuaded to do “art,” as in finger painting, but what he really liked was being cuddled and read to. He also loved animals to distraction.
“Where’s Sammy?” Colin wanted to know when it got chilly enough to go inside, where they settled into the playroom off the kitchen.
Sammy was Ali’s one-eyed, one-eared adopted tabby. She’d come into Ali’s life years earlier, arriving as a particularly ugly sixteen-pound foster-care case. The fact that Ali had never had cats and hadn’t cared for them all that much was irrelevant. She’d rescued the overweight aging cat as a favor to a dead friend, but over time, Sam had become her cat.
As Sammy had aged, she’d developed mobility issues. Ali and Leland had placed pet stairs here and there, which allowed Sam to reach her favorite spots-on the pillows of Ali’s tall bed or on top of the warm clothes dryer. Two years ago, a sudden loss of weight had necessitated a regimen of daily insulin shots. A month ago, Ali had awakened to find Sam seemingly asleep in her usual spot on the bed, only she hadn’t been sleeping. All that remained of Sam were the ashes in a polished elm wood box on the fireplace mantel in Ali’s bedroom.
“I’m sorry,” Ali reminded Colin. “Remember? Sammy’s not here anymore.”
“Where is she?”
“In heaven.”
“Where’s that?”
“Far away.”
“But why isn’t she here?”
“She’s dead.”
“What’s dead?”
Ali had no compunction about tossing Chris under the bus. “Ask your father,” she said.
Moments later, as if by magic, Chris returned to collect his offspring and helped oversee the process of putting away toys. After the exchange of sloppy toddler goodbye kisses, Ali went to her room to change out of her tracksuit.
Earlier in the day, B. Simpson had called. “I hope we still have a date tonight for dinner at my place.”
“Of course we do. I was just going to change from my sweats into something more appropriate.”
“Don’t dress up,” B. said. “The menu is pizza.”
“What a surprise,” Ali said. As a dedicated noncook, B. was big on eating out and taking out.
Ali and B. had both grown up in Sedona but fifteen years apart, far too long for them to have known each other. Given the name Bartholomew Quentin Simpson at birth, B. had shortened his name to a single letter in junior high as the result of too much teasing from classmates about the “other” Bart Simpson.
Like Ali, B. had left Sedona in hopes of making his mark on the world, and he had, earning a fortune designing computer games. In the aftermath of a failed marriage, B., again like Ali, had returned to Sedona to get his bearings. For months after coming back home, he had been a daily visitor at Bob and Edie Larson’s Sugarloaf Cafe.
When Bob Larson had learned that his regular customer was in the process of starting a computer security company called High Noon Enterprises, he suggested that Ali look into using their services. At the time Bob made the introduction, he’d had no idea that he was acting as a matchmaker-in-chief.
Ali and B. had now been a couple for several years. During that time, B.’s business, although locally based, had developed into an internationally recognized computer security company with more than a few government contracts. Operating out of a former warehouse in nearby Cottonwood, High Noon employed almost fifty people, an economic boom in an area where many businesses, especially those involving tourism, had taken a big hit.
High Noon still did some private security work, though the company had morphed into one that specialized in providing anti-hacker services to both businesses and government agencies. Believing in fighting fire with fire, B. had attracted a cadre of talented young hackers who were willing to ply their high-tech trade in relatively rural Yavapai County, with its spectacular scenery and laid-back lifestyle. And the understated appearance of the corporate offices belied the multimillion-dollar contracts that routinely found their way into High Noon’s in-box.
B. would have happily married Ali, anytime, anywhere, but she wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment. She had yet to recover from the emotional damage left behind by the multiple betrayals of her previous husband, Paul Grayson, a serial philanderer who had cheated on her five ways to Sunday. In addition to Ali’s trust issues, there was also the fifteen-year age difference between her and B. The idea of being labeled a cradle-robbing cougar was more than Ali could handle, although the label was out there anyway, wedding or no.
For now having pizza together was fine. Having fun together was fine. As for getting married? Not so much.
5
8:00 P.M., Friday, April 9
Nogales, Arizona
Deputy Jose Reyes squirmed in the driver’s seat of his idling Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department Tahoe, trying to find a comfortable position. He had the heat turned down, but with his uniform and Kevlar vest on, it was way too warm in the front seat of his patrol unit.
It was an unusually quiet night. He turned the thermostat down one more notch, leaned back on the headrest, and closed his eyes. It was hours before his shift was due to end, and Jose was more than a little bored.
He would have preferred to be on the prowl for some of the real bad guys in Santa Cruz County, the drug and people smugglers who had turned Nogales-both Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, in Mexico-into booming homicide centers. Instead, he was following orders from headquarters and hanging out on the far side of the Kino Ridge Country Club, waiting to see if he could pick off a likely-looking DUI suspect who would help him meet his moving-violation quota for the week.
Not that Jose had a quota, at least not officially. Unofficially? That was another story, and the retirees who frequented the relatively lowbrow Kino Ridge were more likely than the more upper-crust folks at Amado or Rio Rico to shut up and pay their fines than they were to hire criminal defense attorneys. Every deputy in the department had been told-off the record, of course-that when fines got paid without involving costly court cases, it helped keep the fiscal wheels turning in the Santa Cruz county government.
In southern Arizona, where border security was a top priority, it was also an incredibly divisive issue. People lined up on either side of the illegal-immigrant divide. Some wanted a completely airtight border, while others wanted to open the floodgates. Jose’s boss, Sheriff Manuel Renteria, had staked his claim on the tiny sliver of middle ground between the two opposing factions.
As a relatively new officer on the force, Jose chafed under Renteria’s “majoring in the minors” approach. He had campaigned for office as a law-and-order man, with a small L and a small O. It seemed to Jose that Renteria was far more concerned with keeping the state roads free of speeders and drunk drivers than he was with stopping the drug or people smugglers. The sheriff wasn’t as interested in making a big name for himself as he was in maintaining the status quo by doing the little jobs of law enforcement rather than the big ones. Renteria had let it be known that problems related to the somewhat diminished flood of illegal immigrants and drug cartel smugglers flowing across the border and making their way up and down I-19 were Homeland Security’s problem, not the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department’s.
Jose wasn’t wild about his agency’s low-key serve-and-protect focus, but he went along with the program, quietly and without a whole lot of enthusiasm. Nearly three years out of the academy, he had plenty of people counting on him, including a wife and two preschool-aged stepdaughters as well as a boy due to be born within the next few weeks. That meant Jose was grateful to have a job. Lots of the people he knew from the academy weren’t that lucky. They had either been laid off or had never found jobs to begin with.
