Kiss of the Bees

“Eloping,” David Ladd echoed. “What are you talking about? Us? When?”

“Today, dummy,” she said, snuggling under his chin and nuzzling his neck. “Right now. I thought you’d catch on as soon as you saw all the suitcases. I have it all figured out. We can drive through Vegas on our way to Tucson and get married there. It’s not that far out of the way. I already have a dress and everything.”

“What about your job?” David Ladd mounted one small but clearly futile objection.

“With Dad’s firm? What about it? I got laid off,” Candace beamed. “Yesterday afternoon. So not only do I get the time off, I can collect unemployment benefits, too. Isn’t that a great deal?”

“It’s great, all right,” David Ladd muttered while that post-coital pink haze disintegrated into a million pieces around him. He managed to infuse the words with a whole lot more enthusiasm than he felt, although “great” wasn’t exactly the word he would have chosen.

“And I love the ring,” Candace continued. “It’s gorgeous.”

“I’m glad you like it” was all David could manage. After all, what else could he say?

After making a quick trip down the Sasabe Road to take a report on a one vehicle/one steer accident in which only the steer had perished, Deputy Brian Fellows stopped off at the Three Points Trading Post to buy himself a much-needed Coke to get him through the rest of his long afternoon shift.

As summer heated up, daytime temperatures on the arid Sonoran Desert made working the night shift suddenly far preferable to working days. One of the local radio stations held an annual contest, offering a prize to the listener who successfully guessed the correct day, time, and hour when the “ice broke on the Santa Cruz.” Loosely translated, that meant the day, hour, and minute the thermometer finally broke one hundred for the year. From that time on, from the moment daytime temperatures crossed that critical century mark until well into September, Brian, along with any number of other low-totem-pole deputies, found himself working straight days.

With school out for the summer, the trading post was full of ten or so kids—two Anglo and the rest Indian— milling around between the banks of shelves. Brian smiled down at them. The Anglos grinned back, while the Indians shied away. The deputy liked little kids, and it hurt his feelings that the Tohono O’othham children were frightened of him. Because he knew some of the language, he tried speaking to them in Tohono O’othham on occasion. That always seemed to spook them that much more. Was it the color of his skin? he wondered. Or was it the uniform? Maybe it was a combination of both.

Back in his county-owned Blazer, he sat looking up and down Highway 86, watching passing vehicles made shimmering and ghostlike by the waves of heat rising off the blacktop. This quiet Saturday afternoon there didn’t seem to be much happening in his patrol area, which covered Highway 86 west from Ryan Field to the boundary of the Tohono O’othham Reservation, and along Highway 286 from Three Points south to Sasabe on the U.S./Mexican border.

It was boom time once again in the Valley of the Sun. Tucson and surrounding areas in Pima County were experiencing a renewed population growth, but this part of the county—the part included in Brian’s patrol area— wasn’t yet overly affected. Sometimes he would be called out to an incident on Sandario Road that led north toward Marana. There he could drive for miles without seeing another human or meeting another vehicle. The same held true for Coleman Road at the base of the Baboquivaris. And the back and forth chatter on the radio seldom had much to do with the area assigned to Deputy Brian Fellows. Those long straight stretches of highway leading to and from the reservation yielded more drunk drivers than other parts of the county. They also had more than a fair share of auto accidents. Those mostly happened at night on weekends.

Brian had been a deputy four full years. Other officers who had come through the academy after him were already starting to move up while Brian was still stuck in what was—in terms of departmental advancement—the equivalent of Outer Mongolia. But Brian was resigned to the fact that it could have been much worse. If Bill Forsythe had wanted to, he could have figured out a way to get rid of Brian Fellows altogether. In fact, considering Brian’s close connection to Brandon Walker, it was a little surprising that the ax hadn’t fallen in the wake of Brandon’s departure.

Still, Brian didn’t dwell on the unfairness of it all. He was too busy being grateful. After all, he was doing what he had always wanted to do—being a cop and following in Brandon Walker’s footsteps. As for the rest? Nothing much mattered. Brian was single and living at home. Taking care of his disabled mother in his off-hours pretty much kept him out of the dating game, so the low pay scale for young deputies didn’t bother him all that much, either.

There were times when Brian was struck by the irony of his position. He was persona non grata with the current administration of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department because of his relationship to the previous sheriff, who was, after all, no blood relation but the father of Brian’s half-brothers.

Tommy and Quentin had been four and five years older than Brian, and they had been the banes of the younger child’s existence. But if it hadn’t been for them, Brian never would have met their father, a man who—more than any other—became Brian’s father as well.

None of the other boys—Davy Ladd included—had ever seemed to pay that much attention to anything Brandon Walker said or did. In fact, they all seemed to be at odds with him much of the time. Not Brian. For him, the former Pima County sheriff, even in defeat, had always been larger than life—the closest thing to a superhero that ever crossed the path of that little fatherless boy.

“How’s it going, Mr. Walker?” Brian Fellows had asked several months earlier, when he had stopped by the house in Gates Pass on his way back from patrol.

Brandon, working outdoors in his shirtsleeves, had looked up to see Brian Fellows, a young man he had known from early childhood on, step out of a Pima County patrol car.

“Okay,” Brandon said gruffly, reaching down to pull out another log of mesquite. “How about you?”

“Pretty good,” Brian replied, although the answer didn’t sound particularly convincing.

“How’s your mother?”

Brian’s mother, Janie Walker Fellows Hitchcock Noonan, had been Brandon Walker’s first wife. Years earlier, when Brian was a sophomore at Tucson High, his mother had been in what should have been a fatality car wreck. She had been paralyzed from the waist down. Janie’s boyfriend du jour—a lush who had actually been at the wheel of the car and who had walked away from the accident without a scratch—had skipped town immediately.

In subsequent years, most of the responsibility for his mother’s care had fallen on Brian’s narrow but capable young shoulders. Some people rise above physical tragedy. Janie Noonan wasn’t one of those. She was a difficult patient. For months she had railed at Brian, telling him that if he didn’t have guts enough to use a gun to put her out of her misery, the least he could do was bring her one so she could do the job herself.