“Tell Dysart I’ll deal,” Carol continued. “While I’m arranging backup, you open negotiations. Ask him what he wants. Try to keep him talking.”
Leaving the phone dangling off hook, Joanna walked back across the room. It was only then that she realized that the Thanksgiving pumpkins were all gone. She saw the poinsettia- and Christmas-tree-decorated lobby for the first time. And, though the spacious lobby wasn’t crowded, then were still far more people there than she had noticed earlier.
Near the desk, a harried young couple tried to check in while riding herd on two active toddlers and a cartful of luggage. A silver-haired, knickers-clad golf foursome stood just inside the lobby door, noisily rehashing the day’s golf game. On the other side of the bank of elevators, teenage organizers from a church youth group were setting up registration tables for a weekend conference. All of the people in the room—hotel employees and guests alike—were going about their business with no idea of the life-and-death drama playing itself out in their midst. And of all of them, only Joanna Brady was wearing a Kevlar vest.
She straightened her shoulders as she approached the fireplace. “Detective Strong says she’ll deal. She wants to know what you want.”
Larry nodded and once again smiled his chilly, humorless smile. “That’s more like it. Tell her—”
“Yoohoo, Joanna,” Jim Bob Brady’s hearty voice boomed from across the room near the hotel en-trance. “We’re back.”
With sinking heart, Joanna watched as the Bradys, arms laden with bags of merchandise, marched purposefully across the lobby.
“Get rid of them,” Larry Dysart whispered urgently. “I don’t want them here.”
“Did you have a good time shopping?” Joanna asked, turning a phony smile on her in-laws.
The phoniness of her smile didn’t seem to faze Eva Lou, who sank gratefully into a nearby chair and kicked off her shoes. “My feet hurt like mad,” c announced. “That place was crazy. I didn’t ink we’d ever get checked out.”
“This is Larry Dysart,” Joanna said lightly, while briskly rubbing her earlobe with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. “He’s an old navy friend of Andy’s. These are Andy’s folks, Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady.”
During the election, Joanna and Jim Bob had gone out doorbelling together. On a quiet street in Willcox, while Jim Bob went to the house next door, Joanna had rung the bell of a modest bungalow. The man who answered the door had seemed fine at first, but when he discovered Joanna was a candidate for the office of sheriff, he had started telling her a long, complicated story about how his neighbors on either side were really Russian spies who were planning to kill the President and overthrow the government.
Realizing the man was somewhat disturbed, Joanna had tried to drop off her literature and leave. At the prospect of her walking away, however, the man had become highly agitated. Jim Bob had gone on to two more houses before he realized Joanna was still stuck at the first one. He had come back to retrieve her. Between the two of them, Jim Bob and Joanna had effected a reasonably graceful exit.
From then on, however, a rubbed earlobe had meant that whoever Joanna was involved with at the time was trouble in one way or another. In addition to the tugged earlobe, both the Bradys and Joanna knew that Andy had served a two-year hitch in the army—not the navy.
“Is that so?” Jim Bob put down his packages and then offered a hand to Larry Dysart in greeting. “Did you say navy? Glad to meet you, Larry,” Jim Bob said, then the old man turned and focused his eyes on Joanna’s face.
A dismayed Eva Lou looked back and forth between them, but she was familiar enough
“And what did you do in the navy?” Jim Bo asked cordially, sitting down and leaning back as if settling in for a genial chat. “Andy was involved in communications.”
“Me, too,” Larry said. “That’s how Andy and I met.”
