Joanna Brady had owned the semi-automatic for less than two weeks, so it was still somewhat new and unfamiliar.
Even without Adam York’s advice, she had been doing target practice on her own, as much as time permitted. Every session, she pinned a black-and-white man-sized, man shaped target to a hay bale and fired away at it.
She continued to have some difficulty in mastering the sweeping trigger-finger motion required to fire the next round, but each subsequent practice showed some slight improvement. And each succeeding target came down from the bale with the bullet holes grouped more tightly in the desired deadly patterns. She didn’t have to wonder what kind of damage those kinds of groupings could do to a human body. She already knew about that. On a firsthand basis.
At ten to seven, chilled to the bone, she took off her protective ear covering and heard the shrill sharp blasts of the soccer-referee whistle she and’ Jenny used to summon each other when the distances on the ranch were too great for shouts to carry.
The high-pitched blasts had a disturbingly frantic quality to them. Joanna holstered the gun and hurried back to the house with a sense of dread walking beside her. She was relieved to see Jenny and the dogs waiting for her on the back porch. As soon as she was close enough to see her Joanna could tell from the look on Jennifer’s face that something was terribly wrong. The childs face was pasty white, her thin lips drawn together in a grim, straight line.
“What’s the matter?” Joanna asked, hurrying to Jenny’s side.
“Marianne called,” Jenny said. “She wants you to call her back right away.”
“Why? What happened?”
“She says they found Mr. Patterson. He’s dead!”
And with that, Jennifer Ann Brady threw both small arms around her mother’s neck and sobbed her heart out, the racking sobs shaking her whole body. It was as though she had somehow slipped through the protective cocoon of childhood into the terrible world of adulthood, of life and death.
Joanna took Jenny in her arms and held her close, murmuring what words of comfort she could summon. But the child’s frantic grief, her overriding anguish, went far beyond the reach of her mother’s puny words. Or of Marianne’s phone call, either.
Jenny wasn’t crying about Harold Patterson, an old man she barely knew. No, she was crying for her father.
Damn Tony Vargas anyway! Joanna thought, remembering the man who had murdered Jenny’s father. Damn him straight to everlasting hell!…
WHEN JENNY finally calmed down enough to go shower, Joanna headed for the telephone. There were three new messages on the machine from three different reporters-all wanting to schedule interviews, but no one from the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department had bothered to dial up the new sheriff to let her know what was going on out at the Rocking P Ranch. If there was some kind of official notification system within the department, Sheriff Joanna Brady’s name was not yet included on the list.
She was tempted to call Dispatch and demand to know what the hell was going on, but she squelched that idea. Going off half-cocked would be stupid. Before she did anything at all, she needed some real knowledge of the situation from a reliable source. Instead of calling the department, she dialed Marianne Macula’s number.
“What’s up?” she asked Jeff Daniels when he answered the phone.
“Marianne’s in the shower. She told me to tell you she’s heading out to the ranch as soon as she gets dressed. Ivy called a few minutes ago. They found her father in a glory hole up on Juniper Flats. Harold Patterson is dead.”
“Heart attack?”
“No. Hit on the head with a rock. At least that’s what Ivy said. The sides must have caved in on him. Ivy was hysterical on the phone. Marianne’s out of the shower now. Do you want to talk to her?”
“There’s no need. Tell her thanks for letting me know, and that I’m on my way, too. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Jenny came out of the shower wrapped in a towel. “Be where?” she asked.
“At the Patterson ranch. Hurry and get dressed,” Joanna told her. “We’ll have to leave early. I’ll check with Grandma Brady to see if you can have breakfast with her.”
After making hasty arrangements with Eva Lou, Joanna dialed the Sheriff’s Department and asked to speak to Dispatch.
“This is Joanna Brady,” she said when a youthful-sounding operator came on the phone. “I want to speak to a dispatch supervisor.”
“Who did you say this is?”
“Sheriff Joanna Brady,” she said firmly. “Who are you?”
“Larry. Larry Kendrick. But I thought…”
“What did you think?”
“Excuse me, ma’am. You just got elected the other day. How can you be sheriff already?”
“It happens, Larry, and you should have been briefed. I still need to speak to a supervisor.”
“There isn’t one available at the moment. She’s down the hall. Is anything wrong? Something I can help you with?”
“When did the call come in about Harold Patterson?” Joanna asked.
“About an hour ago.”
