“Do you hear that, Lewis?” Joanna asked. “The other deputies are coming right now. Please, put down your weapon so no one gets hurt.”
His hand shot out again. Joanna thought he was reaching for the bottle again, which was out of her sight line on the other side of the hood. But what Lewis Flores raised to his lips that time wasn’t tequila. Joanna saw the flare of light as the gun was fired, heard the explosion, and saw him flop back-ward against the windshield.
“No!” she heard herself screaming as she ran toward the Taurus. “N0000000!” But Lewis Flores was dead long before she reached him.
“Oh, God. What’s he doing now?” Karen screeched. “Make him stop. He’s going to kill us. The man is crazy. He’s going to kill us all.”
Joanna stopped at the Taurus long enough to grab Lewis Flores’ limp wrist. Briefly her fingers searched for a nonexistent pulse. One look at the bloody carnage that had once been the back of Lewis Flores’ head told her there was nothing to do. Dropping his lifeless arm, Joanna raced to the line of Porta Potties just as a patrol car skidded to a stop behind her Blazer.
Unholstering his side arm, Deputy Dave Hollicker jumped out of the vehicle. “What’s the status, Sheriff Brady?”
By then Joanna was at the door to the Porta Potty. It wasn’t just closed. It had been nailed shut. The top of the door was riddled with bullet holes. From inside, she heard the sound of hysterical weeping.
“Bring a crowbar, Dave,” she ordered. “And make it quick. There’s one in the back of my Blazer.”
Leaving the first Porta Potty, Joanna went down the lint, until she found another one that had been nailed shut. Again, the top of the door was riddled with bullet holes. Lewis had been firing at the Porta Potties all right, but high enough not to hit anyone inside-scaring hell out of them but not necessarily trying to kill anyone.
“Mr. Childers,” Joanna called through the door. “Are you in there? Are you all right?”
There was no answer, not even a whimper. Behind her Joanna heard the sound of running footsteps and, off across the ghostly starlit grassland, another siren. Dave was headed toward the first Porta Potty, but Joanna stopped him.
“Open this one first,” she ordered. “The woman’s all right, but I’m not so sure about Mark Childers.”
It took several tries before Dave Hollicker finally pried open the door. When he did so, Mark Childers’ limp body cascaded out onto the ground.
“He may have been shot,” Joanna said, kneeling beside the stricken man and checking for a pulse. There was one. It was faint and erratic, but it existed. Nowhere on his body, however, was there any sign of blood.
“Call for an ambulance, Dave,” she said. “We’ll have to have him airlifted out of here. And bring blankets.” About that time Mark Childers’ pulse disappeared altogether. Without even thinking about it, Joanna began to administer CPR.
“Please,” Karen Brainard pleaded from her prison. “What are you doing? Can’t you let me out? What’s taking so long?”
Joanna wanted to tell the woman to shut up and wait, but she didn’t. Couldn’t. She was too busy concentrating on what she was doing-too busy keeping track of the rhythmic and life-saving breathing and pushing. In the end, Joanna didn’t have to say a word. Dave Hollicker did it for her.
“Quiet in there,” he yelled as he came racing back to Joanna’s side with an armload of blankets. “We’re trying to save a man’s life out here. Be patient. We’ll get to you in a minute.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It was almost three o’clock in the morning before Joanna finally made it home to High Lonesome Ranch. She had stayed long enough for the Air-Evac ambulance to load Mark Childers’ ominously still body onto a stretcher and carry it away. She had stayed long enough for Ernie Carpenter to arrive on the scene.
“What do we do with her?” the detective asked, nodding in the direction of a no longer hysterical Karen Brainard, who had taken refuge in the back of Dave Hollicker’s patrol car. “Do we book her and haul her off to jail?”
“Not yet,” Joanna said. “We don’t know enough. I lave someone take her home for now, but tell her that she’d better not leave the county.”
After that, and with a heavy heart, Joanna drove to Bisbee and made her way up the steep steps to what had been Carmen and Lewis Flores’ home. As she climbed them, one al a time, it hurt Joanna to think that those very steps-the ones Lewis had wanted to spare his wife from climbing-were at the root of all the trouble.
When she arrived in the tiny yard, Joanna was dismayed but not really surprised to see that all the interior lights were off. Convinced her husband had merely taken off on a hunting trip without bothering to tell her, Carmen Flores had evidently gone to bed and to sleep. Roused by Joanna’s knock, Carmen flung open the door before she finished tying on her flannel robe.
“Joanna!” she exclaimed when she saw who was standing in the glow of the porch light. “What is it? What’s happened?”
And so Joanna told her story. This time she waited until Carmen’s sister Rose actually arrived on the scene before she left the Flores house. Then, knowing there was nothing else to be done, Joanna headed home. On the way, she called the department and left word for Dick Voland. She told him she was scrapping that day’s morning briefing and that she probably wouldn’t be in the office much before noon.
It warmed Joanna’s heart to drive into the yard of High Lonesome Ranch and see lights glowing at the window; to see Butch’s Outback parked in front of the gate. He and the two dogs, Sadie and Tigger, bounded out the back door to greet her before she managed to park the Blazer and turn off the ignition.
“Rough night?” Butch asked, opening the door.
“You could say that. But you didn’t wait up for me all this time, did you?”
“No. I dozed on the couch. Junior’s asleep on the living room floor. Jenny hauled an air mattress and bedroll down from the attic for him. She said you wouldn’t mind.”
“I don’t,” Joanna replied. “Come on. Let’s go inside. It’s cold out here.”
“Have you eaten?”
“I had a piece of pepperoni pizza,” she told him. “but I think that was several hours ago.”
“Do you want me to fix you something?”
Butch’s questions contained all the familiar words and phrases. Not only had Joanna Brady heard them before, she had actually said them as well. Once she and her mother had been on the other end-the solicitous end-of those carbon-copy conversations. When Andrew Roy Brady had come home after a long and grueling nighttime shift-once Joanna had finished being scared for him, once she had moved beyond being irritated with him for coming home so late-she had always offered to fix him a meal no matter what time it was, no matter how late. And Eleanor Lathrop, in her turn, had done the exact same thing for her husband, Sheriff D. H. Lathrop. It felt strange for Joanna to be the recipient of those ministrations-a receiver rather than a giver-and in her own home as well.
“All I want is a drink,” Joanna said. “A drink and some sleep.”
“It must have been bad then,” Butch said.
He wrapped one arm around her shoulder and led her inside. In the kitchen, he mixed her a vodka tonic, using some of the leftover stock of liquor he had moved down to Bisbee after the sale of the Roundhouse Bar and Grill up in Peoria. Due to a lack of storage space in his own house, he had used some of it to create what he called a respectable bar at High Lonesome Ranch.
While Joanna sipped her drink and told him what all had happened overnight, he fixed her a tuna sandwich. By the time she finished both eating and telling, Butch was standing, leaning against the counter. “Weren’t you afraid?” he asked.
“Of course I was afraid,” Joanna told him. “I was scared to death.”
“Flores could just as well have shot you instead of himself,” Butch observed. “What would have happened then?”
“I was careful,” Joanna said. “I was wearing my vest. I stayed in the Blazer. I used it for cover.”
“A vest will work for everything but a thick head,” Butch replied. “And you still haven’t answered my question. What would happen to Jenny if something happened to you? What if you hadn’t come home tonight at all? Are you
