Dead to Rights

how his words of concern had affected her. By the time she vaulted into the Blazer and started down the road, she was crying like a baby.

And the thing that made those tears so very puzzling was that she didn’t really know why she was crying. She had no idea at all.

By the time Joanna reached High Lonesome Road, she had herself under control enough to stop the tears and switch on the radio. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“The situation is under control, Sheriff Brady,” the calm voice of Tica Romero, one of the dispatch operators, assured her. “We’ve got it handled.”

Pica’s unruffled response was frustratingly low on information. “I’d like to know exactly how it’s being handled,” Joanna responded.

“Deputy Ted Long has the Buick under surveillance. The suspect still hasn’t left the gas station. It looks like he’s headed northbound on Highway 191.”

“What are Deputy Long’s orders?” Joanna asked.

“Visual contact only. No hot pursuit. No lights or sirens.”

Joanna was relieved. She had visions of civilians caught in an Elfrida shootout or maybe some twilight-working former on a tractor being creamed by either a fleeing suspect or a speeding patrol car. “Good,” she said. “What else?”

“Chief Deputy Voland has authorized establishing a road-block just beyond the Sunizona curve.”

Visualizing the road, Joanna worried about other cross-odds that turned off Highway 191 prior to Sunizona- roads that led off into the Chiricahua Mountains on the east or up into the Dragoons on the left. What if Hal Morgan turned off on one of those? In the 1860s, those high desert mountain fringes had been the ones where a canny Apache chieftain named Cochise had led his people in order to elude capture by the U.S. Cavalry. The rugged part of the Dragoons called Cochise Stronghold came by the name honestly. If those steep, rockbound canyons had once been able to afford a safe haven to a whole band of people, Joanna knew it would be all too easy for a single modern-day homicide suspect to disappear into them.

“Can’t we put up the roadblock any sooner than that?” Joanna asked. “Why wait so long?”

“Because Deputy Casey can’t get there any faster, for one thing. He’s on his way down from a domestic over in Dragoon. Chief Deputy Voland figures if Deputy Casey can get as far as Township Butte, he can hide behind the butte to put the roadblock in place. That way the suspect won’t be able to see him until he’s right there. When he comes around that curve at Sunizona, it’ll be too late for him to turn off. The two patrol cars will have him in a squeeze play.”

“Where’s Chief Deputy Voland right now?”

“He’ll be leaving the complex as soon as he finishes gathering the response team. Where are you?”

Joanna’s Blazer had just bounced across the last cattle guard on High Lonesome Road. “I’m on my way to the scene, just now turning left on Double Adobe Road at High Lonesome,” she responded. “Once I hit Double Adobe, I’ll take Central Highway up to Elfrida. Anybody else ahead of me?”

“Nope. Other than Deputy Casey coming south from Dragoon, you’re the next one up.”

Knowing that, Joanna switched on both flashing lights and siren. The road was relatively straight but narrow and bisected every few miles by washes that made for gut-wrenching dips. She flew through them so last that more than once the Blazer felt as though it was momentarily airborne.

“He’s moving now,” Tica announced.

“Which way?”

“North, just like we figured.”

Nodding grimly, Joanna kept on driving. It was one thin} to know intellectually that Cochise County was comprised of 6,256 square miles. Only now, as Joanna Brady sped first east and then north, did her understanding of the challenging distances in her jurisdiction come fully into focus.

Her departmental patrol division consisted of fifty sworn officers. That sounded like a sizable force but that was before it was parceled out-before those fifty officers had to be divided into five separate shifts and spread over seven twenty four-hour days. Seven days and all those miles. In all, a single patrol officer often was responsible for covering as much as seven hundred square miles.

Considering the fact that a suicidal Hal Morgan had attacked Deputy Howell in making good his escape, he had to be classified as a danger to himself and others. He posed serious threat to the public welfare regardless of where he was and whether or not he was armed. And across all those vast miles of Cochise County, only two responding deputies and Sheriff Joanna Brady herself were anywhere near striking distance of his damn gas-guzzling Buick.

Several minutes passed before the radio squawked again. “Sheriff Brady?”

“Yes.”

“We’ve got a problem,” Tica Romero said. “We’ve lost him.”

“Lost whom?” Joanna demanded.

“Deputy Long. Something’s wrong. We’ve lost radio contact”

Joanna was just coming into Elfrida then, pausing but not stopping at the junction where Central Highway met 191 and then racing north through town. Highway 191 was a far better road than the one from Double Adobe to Elfrida, but on a better roadway there was always a possibility of more traffic.

No sooner was she clear of the hamlet of Elfrida than she saw the fallacy in Dick Voland’s plan. In an otherwise black sky, a pulsating halo of red and blue light threw the silhouetted shadow of Township Butte into sudden sharp relief. The mountain may have hidden Deputy Casey’s vehicle, but not the pulsingly eerie glow from his flashing emergency lights. And if, from miles away, Joanna Brady knew the roadblock was there, so did a fleeing Hal Morgan.

“Lost radio contact,” Joanna repeated. “How can that be?”

“Hold it,” Tica said. “I’m getting something.”

During the seemingly endless pause that followed, Joanna held her breath and drove like a maniac. Eventually Tica came back on the air. “Officer down, code three,” she said. “Deputy Casey has abandoned the roadblock and is on his way to the scene. So’s an emergency medical squad from Douglas.”

“What the hell happened?”

“Morgan rammed the patrol car,” Tica Romero answered. “Flipped him right over. According to Deputy Long, he’s pinned inside his vehicle and needs help.”

Even as Tica spoke, the flashing lights of Deputy Casey’s patrol car appeared from around the curve and came speeding south. Between Joanna’s Blazer and that one there was no sign of any other vehicle.

“And the suspect?”

“Gone,” Tica answered.

Except it wasn’t possible that he was gone completely. “He didn’t come north past Deputy Casey?”

“Not so far.”

And no vehicle had come southbound toward Joanna, either. That meant Hal Morgan was out there somewhere, out on the vast plain of the Sulphur Springs Valley, and about to make good his escape. Joanna was north of Rucker Canyon Road by then. That meant he couldn’t have turned off there.

Her first urge was to go racing off to the scene, to do what she could to help Deputy Long. But the truth was, help for him was on the way-both in the form of Deputy Casey and the emergency medical technicians from Douglas. Joanna’s prime concern had to be capturing Hal Morgan.

Forcing herself to respond logically, Joanna pulled over, stopped on the shoulder of the road, and doused the lights. Groping in the glove box, she located a pair of long-range night-vision binocular goggles. Several pairs had found their way into Joanna’s department through participation in the M.J.F., a multi-jurisdiction task force created solely to help local authorities deal with border-focused crime.

As Joanna scanned the horizon, the flashing lights of Deputy Casey’s southbound patrol car were even more clearly visible. Between Joanna and the flashing lights was a slowly dissipating cloud of dust. She was sure the dust marked the site of the ramming. Shaking her head, Joanna resolutely turned the goggles away from there and looked out toward the black mound of the Chiricahuas rising out of the desert to the east. Slowly she scanned back and forth between High way 191 and the mountains along what she thought had to be the approximate location of Highway 181. There were other, smaller, roads the suspect might have taken, but 181 was the main road leading up to the Wonderland of Rocks, a most popular camping and picnicking area known officially as the Chiricahua