Shoot / Don't Shoot

“Please. And in the meantime, if anything comes up that you think is too important to wait, give me call.”

“Sure thing,” Butch Dixon said. “You can count n it.”

By the time Joanna drove back into the APOA parking lot, it was past eleven. Checking the clerestory windows on both the upper and lower breezeways, she saw that some were lit and some weren’t. It was possible some of her classmates were still out. Others might already be in bed and asleep.

Stopping off at the lower-floor student lounge, Joanna found the place deserted. She made straight for the telephone. It was far too late to phone High Lonesome, but Frank Montoya had told her that he never went to bed without watching The Tonight Show.

“How are things going?” she asked, when he answered. “I tried calling earlier, but neither you nor Dick Voland could be found.”

“Well,” Frank said slowly, “we did have our hands full today.”

“How’s that?”

“For one thing,” he replied, “somebody sent a petition signed by sixty-three prisoners as that you fire the cook in the jail.”

“Fire him? How come?”

“They say the food’s bad, that they can’t eat and that he cooks the same thing week after week.”

“Is that true?” Joanna asked. “Is the jail food ally as bad as all that?”

“Beats me.”

“Have you tried it?”

“No, but ...”

“These guys are prisoners,” Joanna said. “We supposed to house and feed them, but nobody said it has to be gourmet cuisine. You taste the food, Frank, and then you decide. If the food’s fit to eat, tell the prisoners to go piss up a rope. If the food’s as bad as they say, get rid of the cook and find somebody else.”

“You really did hire me to do the dirty work, didn’t you?” Frank complained, but Joanna heard the unspoken humor in his voice and knew he was teasing.

‘What else is going on down there today?”

‘The big news is the fracas at the Sunset Inn out over the Divide.”

The Mule Mountains, north of Bisbee, effectively cut the town off from the remainder of the state. In the old days, the Divide, as locals called it, was a formidable barrier. Now, although modern highway engineering and a tunnel had tamed the worst of the steep grades, the name—the Divide—still remained.

The Sunset Inn, an outpost supper club on the far side of the Divide, had changed ownership and identities many times over the years. It had reopened under the name of Sunset Inn only two months earlier.

“What happened?” Joanna asked.