So Jose kept his mouth shut and his nose clean and did his job. This night it meant sitting there, waiting and resting. Once he picked up a speeder or a drunk driver, he’d be home free. Unless there was some kind of emergency call, hours of paperwork would help fill the time until the end of his shift, when he could go home.
Home. Jose was inordinately proud that, a year earlier, he and Teresa had been able to buy a three-bedroom double-wide mobile home on a one-acre plot just outside Patagonia. Jose considered Nogales a less than perfect place to raise kids; he had always dreamed of raising them in a country setting. When they found the place in Patagonia, Teresa hadn’t been wild about the location, because it was closer than she liked to her former in-laws, but the price had been more than right-something they could afford on one income without Teresa having to go back to work.
It turned out that Teresa’s concerns about her ex-in-laws had been totally unfounded. She hadn’t heard word one from Olga and Oscar Sanchez. From what Jose knew about Teresa’s vocal ex-mother-in-law, that was just as well. Jose was prepared to let that sleeping dog lie indefinitely.
Buying a house was a big deal for Jose. Both his grandfather Raul and, later, his father, Carmine, had worked in Arizona’s copper mines. Jose remembered growing up in low-cost company housing in San Manuel. At first Carmine had worked underground. Later on he had labored in the smelter in temperatures so sweltering that, on a few occasions, his hard hat had melted.
Both Carmine Reyes and his father before him had been “dusted,” the copper miner’s term for the lung diseases that plague miners the world over. Both Jose’s father and paternal grandfather, neither of whom ever smoked, had succumbed to emphysema in their forties. Ill and dying, Carmine had returned to Santa Cruz County. On his deathbed, he had grasped his teenage son’s wrist and begged him to find something to do besides kill himself working in a mine, and to live someplace where he wasn’t stuck in company housing.
For a while after high school, Jose had walked on the wild side without ever getting into any serious trouble. He’d reached his mid-twenties before he got serious about his life and enrolled in Santa Cruz Community College to study criminal justice. He had just received his two-year degree when he met Teresa Sanchez. Recently widowed and pregnant with her second child, Teresa came with a ready-made family that included a toddler named Lucia. A beautiful child, Lucy had wormed her way into Jose’s heart right along with her mother. When an opening turned up at the Sheriff’s Department, Jose had jumped in with both feet. After being hired, he had spent the next month and a half attending police academy training in the Phoenix area.
He and Teresa had married shortly after Jose graduated from the academy and a month before her second child, Carinda, was born. As far as Carinda was concerned, Jose was her father, the only one she had ever known. Since Jose was the one who had driven mother and daughter to and from the hospital, he regarded Carinda as his own. Given the unfortunate circumstances surrounding Danny Sanchez’s life and death, Jose was thankful neither Lucy nor Carinda had any real memory of their biological father.
Now. Almost two years later, Teresa was expecting again. This would be her third child and Jose’s first. They knew the baby would be a boy, and they had decided to name him Carmine, in honor of his grandfather. Jose was looking forward to having a boy in the family, another male presence in a house that he teasingly told Teresa was overpopulated by females.
Jose hadn’t been physically big in high school, but he’d been quick and smart. Years of weightlifting had given him strength that belied his size so that, as a senior, he was named outstanding quarterback on that year’s all-state football team.
Since Teresa was tiny-just over five feet-Jose expected their son would be on the small side. Even so, Jose hoped he could raise the boy with the sense that you didn’t have to be a big bruiser in order to make your mark in the world. He wanted to instill in this child the same things he had learned from his father and grandfather-that you worked hard, raised your family, kept your promises, and met your obligations. Jose wanted his son to be proud of him the way Jose had been proud of his father and the way Carmine had been proud of his father before him. That was the family legacy he hoped to pass along to his baby boy.
While Jose had been sitting there, several vehicles had come and gone. Two of them had edged up a couple of miles an hour over the posted thirty-five mile-an-hour limit, but that wasn’t enough of a margin to get excited about, nothing that made them worth pulling over.
Then another pair of headlights swung into view, coming down the road behind him rather than from the golf course entrance. Jose already had his radar gun in hand, but even before it registered fifty-three he knew he had a live one. By the time the car, an older Buick, surged past him, he was turning on his lights and slamming the Tahoe into gear.
As the car sped past, Jose had the odd impression that he had seen it several times over the course of the evening, although there had been nothing about it then that had aroused his suspicion. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the driver, whose head was covered with a scarf and whose face was half covered by a gigantic pair of post- cataract-surgery, glare-stopping sunglasses.
“It’s nighttime, lady,” Jose told himself as he swung the Tahoe onto the narrow pavement. “Time to ditch the shades.”
Already in pursuit, he tried radioing in his position, but the dispatcher was busy with some other problem. Since this was a routine traffic stop of a solitary speeder, Jose didn’t worry about the communications situation all that much, though it did annoy him that the driver didn’t pull over immediately. In fact, she didn’t seem to notice he was there, even when he came right up on her back bumper with his lights flashing overhead.
When Jose let out another squawk from the siren, the Buick swerved in a slight jiggle that showed the driver was aware of his presence. Although the Buick slowed down, it didn’t stop. Instead, the signals came on, and the Buick turned right onto a small unpaved side road where, after a quarter mile or so, it came to a stop in a cloud of dust.
It was only then, as Jose was opening his car door, that dispatch got back to him. He spat out his location, said he was making a routine traffic stop, and left his vehicle. He approached the Buick as he’d been taught, walking up to the driver’s side, hand on his holstered weapon, calling out instructions.
“Hands where I can see them,” he ordered through the open window. Except by the time Jose actually saw the driver’s hands, one of them was holding a drawn weapon-a handgun.
Jose closed his fingers around the grip of his own firearm, but before it cleared his holster, a point-blank gunshot caught him full in the gut inches below his vest and sent him sprawling backward onto the soft shoulder, where he tumbled head over heels down a steep brush-covered hillside. At the bottom, his body crashed into a man-size boulder before coming to rest facedown in the rocky dirt.
For a moment or two he lost consciousness.
When his brain came back online, Jose was dimly aware of noises coming from far above him. Warning signals beeped in the night, indicating that car doors had been opened while keys were in the ignition. Doors thumped open and closed while noisy footsteps scurried between at least two vehicles. Those noises were soon followed by the sound of something being smashed, something metal or maybe glass being beaten to pieces.
He tried to sort out whether she was alone or if someone else had driven up to help her. Or maybe an accomplice of some kind had been hiding in the backseat. If there was someone with her, neither of them spoke, but Jose didn’t need to hear any words to understand the gravity of his situation. It was no accident that the woman had pulled off on the deserted road. He’d been deliberately lured into a trap. But why? Were they after his patrol car or something in it? Did someone want him dead?
Far above, a car door slammed shut. The night went totally quiet as the insistent beeping of the ignition alarm was silenced. Footsteps rustled through dried weeds and grass on the shoulder above him, then the blinding light from a flashlight cut through the night. Jose knew that whoever was up there was looking down at him, getting ready to finish the job.
Injured and helpless, Jose could do nothing except lie there waiting for the kill shot he knew was coming, It was only in that final extremity that Jose Reyes remembered Miss Swift, the drama teacher in his senior year at Nogales High School. She had been new to town, a first-year teacher who was also surprisingly good-looking. Jose, along with half the guys in his senior class, had a crush on her.
Wanting to make a good impression on the townsfolk, Miss Swift had decided to bring some culture to town
