groaned. Her back was stiff. Her neck felt as though it had been held in a hammerlock all night long.
“It must have been exciting, all right,” Butch said as he sorted through the jumbled pages. “It put you out like a light.”
“Not until midnight,” she said. “I loved every minute of it, right up until I fell asleep.”
“Really?” he asked. “You really do like it?”
“I didn’t say I liked it,” she corrected. “I said I loved it. In my book, love is better than like.”
“Oh,” Butch said. “I see. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
After breakfast, Joanna and Butch had to hang around Peoria until the tux shop opened at ten, then they headed for Bisbee. With Joanna driving, Butch sat in the passenger seat and read his manuscript aloud, pausing now and then while he changed a word or scribbled a note. Joanna continued to be intrigued by the fact that the story was funny—really funny. There were some incidents that seemed vaguely familiar and no doubt had their origins in events in and around the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department, but just when she would be ready to point out that something was too close to the mark, the story would veer off in some zany and totally unpredictable fashion that would leave her giggling.
“This is hilarious,” Joanna said after one particularly laughable scene. “I can’t get over how funny it is—how funny
Butch looked thoughtful. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I was usually the smallest boy in my class. So I had a choice. I could either get the crap beaten out of me on a regular basis or I could be a clown and make everybody laugh. I picked the latter. Once I grew up and went into business, it was the same thing, I could let things get to me or have fun. I don’t like serious, Joey. I prefer off-the-wall.”
Joanna looked at him and smiled. “So do I,” she said.
Listening to him read the story made the miles of pavement speed by. Traffic was light because most Memorial Day travelers were not yet headed home. It was a hot, windy morning. The summer rains were still a good month away, so gusting winds kicked up layers of parched earth and churned them into dancing dust devils or clouds of billowing dust. Near Casa Grande Joanna watched in amusement as long highway curves made the towering presence of Picacho Peak seem to hop back and forth across the busy freeway. They had sped along at seventy-five, and just before noon they pulled into the parking garage at University Medical Center in Tucson.
“Are you coming up?” she asked before stepping out of the car.
Butch rolled down his window. “I don’t think so,” he said. “You go ahead. If you don’t mind, I’d rather sit here and keep on proofreading.”
With her emotions firmly in check and trying not to remember that awful time when Andy was in that very hospital, Joanna made her way into the main reception area.
“Yolanda Canedo,” she said.
The woman at the desk typed a few letters into her computer keyboard. Frowning, she looked up at Joanna. “Are you a relative?”
Joanna shook her head. “Ms. Canedo works for me,” she said.
“She’s been moved into the ICU. You can go up to the waiting room, but only relatives are allowed into the unit itself.”
“I know the drill,” Joanna said.
“The ICU is—”
“I know how to get there,” Joanna said.
She made her way to the bank of elevators and up to the ICU waiting room, which hadn’t changed at all from the way she remembered it. Two people sat in the tar corner of the roost, and Joanna recognized both of them. One was Olga Ortiz, Yolanda’s mother. The other was Ted Chapman, executive director of the newly formed Cochise County Jail Ministry.
Ted stood up and held
