Shoot / Don't Shoot

She made it back to Peoria in twenty minutes, which seemed like record time. When she came to the turnoff that would have taken her home to the APOA campus, she kept right on going across the railroad tracks and right on Grand, returning once more to the Roundhouse Bar and Grill. Instead of going back to the dorm and her reading assign­ment, she was going back to see Butch Dixon, her one and only slender lead in this oddball investigation. Even Joanna was forced to acknowledge the irony. She would be enlisting the bartender in a possibly ill-fated and harebrained crusade to save someone who wasn’t the least bit interested in be­ing saved. Who was, in fact, dead set against it.

By ten o’clock, Monday Night Football was over. With only local news on TV, the bar was nearly deserted when she stepped inside. Butch waved to her as she threaded her way across the floor through a scatter of empty tables. There was only one other customer seated at the bar. Even though she could have taken any one of a number of empty seats, she made directly for the same spot she had abandoned several hours earlier.

“The usual?” Butch Dixon asked with a pleasant grin as she hoisted herself up onto the stool. Joanna nodded. Moments later, he set a Diet Pepsi on the counter in front of her. While she took a tentative sip from her drink, he began diligently polishing the nearby surface of the bar even though it didn’t look particularly in need of polishing.

“I suppose you get asked this question all time,” he said.

“What question?”

“What’s a nice girl like you doing in this line of work? I mean, how come you’re sheriff?”

“The usual way,” she answered. “I got elected.”

“I figured that out, but what did you do before the election? Is being a cop something you always wanted to be, or is it like me and bartending? I sort of fell into it by accident, but it turns out it’s something I’m pretty good at.”

Joanna considered before she answered. Butch must be one of the few people in Arizona who had somehow missed the media blitz about Andy’s death and about his widow being the first-ever elected female sheriff in the state. If he had seen some of the news reports or read the newspaper articles, he had long since forgotten. It was all far enough in the past that for him there was no connection between those events back in September, and Joanna’s name and title on the business card she had given him.

So what should she do? Tell Butch Dixon the painful story about what had happened to Andy? Or should she just gloss over it? After a moment’s hesitation, she decided on the latter. If she was going to try to enlist Butch Dixon’s help, it would be tier to approach him as a professional rather than play on his sympathies as some kind of damsel in stress.

“Fell into it by accident, I’d say,” she replied. “I used to sell insurance.”

“And what are you doing over at the academy, teaching classes?”

“I wish,” she answered. “No, I’m taking them. I’m there as a student, not as an instructor.”

When Butch stopped polishing the counter, his towel was only inches from Joanna’s hand. For a moment he seemed to be staring at it. Then he looked up at her face. “What does your husband do?”

Joanna’s gaze had followed his to where the diamond on her engagement ring reflected back one of the lights over the bar. No matter how hard she tied, there didn’t seem to be any way to avoid telling this inquisitive man about Andy.

“He’s dead,” Joanna said at last, feeling both re­lieved that she had told him and surprised by how easy it was right then to say the words that placed Andrew Roy Brady’s life and death totally in the past tense.

“Andy was a police officer,” she added. “He died in the line of duty.” She told the story briefly mild