him. “Everyone inside and under cover. Now!”
For a second or two the man blinked at her in stricken amazement, then he turned and sprinted back into the office. Within seconds, Joanna heard his frantic announcement to clear the area. In the meantime, Nick turned the key in the ignition and started the Lexus. Ducking behind the door of the van, Joanna pulled the Glock out of her small-of-the-back holster. Taking careful aim, she shot out first one rear tire and then the other.
To her amazement, the passenger-side door of the Lexus flew open and Amy Bernard shot out of it into the lot. “What the hell are you doing?” she railed. “You can’t just stand there and shoot the hell out of my car. I’ll have your badge.”
Joanna noticed two things at once. For one, the driver’s door opened. Nick sprang out of the car and sprinted into the relative safety of the office. For another, both of Amy Bernard’s hands were empty. She had left her purse inside the Lexus. There was no weapon in either hand.
Seeing that, Joanna launched herself into the air. Her flying tackle caught Amy Bernard right in the midriff. The force of the blow knocked the wind out of both of them. They went down in a tangle of legs and arms. They rolled across the burning blacktop until they came to rest next to the wheel of the Econoline van. By the time they stopped rolling, Jaime Carbajal had entered the fray as well. As he reached for one of Amy’s flailing arms, she nailed him in the eye with her elbow and sent him careening backward.
Joanna, too, was trying to grab on to Amy and hold her. She felt a sharp pain on her face as Amy’s doorknob-sized diamond raked across her cheek. As Joanna’s hand went reflexively to her face, Amy Bernard scuttled away. Before she made it to the open door of the Lexus, Joanna tackled her again. Jaime came charging back as well. By then, most of Amy’s initial fury had been spent, and with two against one, it wasn’t much of a contest. Between them, Joanna and Jaime shoved the struggling woman to the ground long enough to fasten a pair of handcuffs around her wrists. Once they were secure, Jaime hauled the still-screeching woman to her feet.
“You can’t do this,” Amy wailed. “It’s police brutality. I have witnesses.”
“Why?” Joanna managed, still gasping for breath.
It was almost as though she had thrown a glass of cold water in the woman’s face. Amy Bernard stopped yelling and grew strangely still. “Why what?” she asked.
“Why did you kill Dora Matthews?” Joanna asked.
“She was a little piece of shit,” Amy snarled. “She was going to ruin my son’s life.”
“I don’t think so,” Joanna said, shaking her head. “If anyone’s going to ruin Christopher Bernard’s life, it’s you.”
Jaime Carbajal was still holding on to Amy Bernard with one hand. Using his other hand, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a clean hanky, which he passed to Joanna.
“What’s this for?” she asked.
“You’re bleeding, Boss,” he said. “Didn’t think you’d want to wreck that brand-new uniform.”
That night, when Joanna finally came home to High Lonesome Ranch, she had three ugly stitches in the jagged gash on her cheek and a sore butt from the tetanus shot.
“What in the world were you thinking?” Butch Dixon demanded once she told him what had happened. “Tackling her like that when you thought she had a gun; God knows what might have happened.”
“She didn’t have a gun in her hand,” Joanna explained patiently. “And there wasn’t one in her purse, either. We looked. She was bluffing the whole time.”
“I don’t care; you still could have been killed.”
“I had to do something,” Joanna said. “There were innocent bystanders everywhere. Someone else could have been hurt.”
“I did, actually,” Joanna admitted. “The whole time I was in the emergency room waiting to have my face stitched up and the whole way home from Tucson. Did you know,” she added
