Halfway through the freshman class roster, Ali located the first photo of Sally Laird. Even in a low-budget, badly lit school photo, Sally was a knockout, with a straight-toothed smile and a halo of naturally blond hair.
Several pages later, Sally Laird was pictured again. This time she was posed in a tight-fitting and revealing uniform as a member of the junior varsity cheerleading squad. The third and final photo showed Sally as that year’s homecoming queen. Dressed in a formal gown and wearing a rhinestone tiara, she managed to assume a regal pose while clinging to the arm of a beefy uniformed football player listed as Carston Harrison.
Carston was someone Ali remembered. He had been a senior along with Ali and Reenie when Sally had been a freshman. Ali had been in a couple of classes with Carston over the years. He had been a less than exemplary student, long on brawn and athletic ability. He had scraped by with average to below-average grades while lettering in four different sports.
That homecoming photo notwithstanding, Ali didn’t remember Sally and Carston being an ongoing item during the remainder of that year, but she now realized they must have been. Having a jock like Carston supporting her candidacy and lobbying in her favor could go a long way toward explaining how Sally Laird had packed off the homecoming queen title as a lowly freshman.
As Ali closed the book, it occurred to her that Sally and Carston must have peaked early, and she wondered if anything the couple had done later on had matched their successes in high school.
The next morning Ali had gone straight to the Sugarloaf to pick up the promised sweet rolls. By the time she got there, the restaurant was in full breakfast mode, so there wasn’t much opportunity to visit with her mother. She grabbed the sweet rolls and a cup of coffee and headed for Prescott, where she hoped Edie Larson’s delectable treats would make Ali Reynolds the hit of the break room, if not the department. Mindful of her father’s advice about keeping her enemies close, Ali drafted none other than a grudging Holly Mesina to help carry the trays of rolls from the car, through the lobby, and into the break room.
The construction flagger now came over and tapped on Ali’s window, startling her out of her long reverie. “Pilot car’s here,” he said, pointing. “Get moving.”
When Ali finally arrived at the Congress substation, both of the deputies she had been scheduled to meet- Deputies Camacho and Fairwood-were nowhere around. The only person in attendance was a clerk named Yolanda, who looked so young that Ali wondered if she was even out of high school. The clerk may have been young, but when Ali introduced herself, Yolanda had the good grace to look embarrassed.
“Are you kidding?” she asked. “When they left, I reminded them you were coming today. They said they’d call and let you know they’d been called out and that you probably shouldn’t bother.”
Ali understood that it wasn’t Yolanda’s fault that the two deputies she was stuck working with happened to be a pair of jerks who had deliberately stood Ali up.
“They probably got busy and forgot,” Ali said easily, excusing them and thereby letting Yolanda off the hook. “Don’t worry about it. But since I’m here anyway, where did they go?”
“A rancher busted some cactus smugglers down along the Hassayampa River a few miles north of Wickenburg,” Yolanda answered. “We have a lot of that around here. It takes a long time to grow saguaros-like a hundred years or so. That’s why people try to steal them.”
“Tell you what,” Ali said. “Why don’t you get their location for me? This sounds like something that would make an interesting press release.”
She wasn’t sure that releasing information about a cactus-rustling ring would do much to bolster Sheriff Maxwell’s image in the community, but it was a start. While Yolanda waited for information from Dispatch, Ali put on a winning smile and plied her for more information.
“When did all this go down?” she asked. “And how did it happen?”
“Earlier this morning. The rancher is an old guy named Richard Mitchell. His deeded ranch is up by Fools Canyon, but he leases a lot more BLM land to run his cattle.
“Anyways, he was out checking fence lines on his Bureau of Land Management lease this morning and came across two guys in a rental truck loaded with cactus. He told them to stop, but they didn’t. When they tried to make a run for it, they, like, ended up getting stuck in the middle of the river.”
Ali thought about her days working in the east. People unfamiliar with the desert southwest might have jumped to an immediate and erroneous conclusion at hearing the term “middle of the river.” If you grew up near the Mississippi or the Missouri rivers, for example, you would most likely assume that someone “stuck” in the middle of any river would be over their head in water and swimming for dear life.
That wasn’t true for the Hassayampa. As the sheriff had said a day or two ago, “It’s a white horse of a different color.” For one thing, most of the time the riverbed was bone dry. There was no water in it-not any. A few times a year, during the summer monsoon season or during winter rainstorms, the river would run for a while. If it rained long enough or hard enough, occasional flash floods coursed downstream, liquifying the sand and filling the entire riverbed with fast-moving water that swept away everything in its path. People in Arizona understood that their very lives depended on heeding warning signs that cautioned,
On the other hand, when longtime Arizonans saw the highway sign in Wickenburg that stated, No Fishing from Bridge, they understood that was an in-crowd joke, because there hadn’t been fish in the bed of the Hassayampa for eons.
In this instance, six weeks or so from the first summer rainstorms, Ali knew that the term “middle of the river” really meant “middle of the sand.” No one would be drowning, but in the heat of the day, if people had ventured into the desert with an insufficient supply of water, they could very well be dying of thirst.
“Anyways,” Yolanda said again, warming to her story and losing track of her grammar in the process. “Mr. Mitchell chased after them. Once they were stuck, he hauled out his shotgun and held ’em at gunpoint. Then he used his cell phone to call for help.”
Picturing the action in her head, Ali couldn’t resist allowing herself a tiny smile. In the old days, and probably faced with cattle rustlers rather than cactus rustlers, Mr. Mitchell would have been left on his own to deal with the bad guys. Now, through the magic of cell phones, he could run up the flag and call for help when he was miles away from the nearest landline phone.
A radio transmission came in from Dispatch and Yolanda jotted down a note. “Okay,” she said. “Got it.” When she finished writing, she handed the note to Ali and then turned to a nearby file drawer, where she retrieved another piece of paper, which turned out to be a map. Using a blue felt-tipped pen, she outlined the route Ali would need to follow.
“Here’s a detailed map of the area,” Yolanda added, pointing. “Just follow the blue lines. According to Dispatch, they’re right here where this little road crosses the river. The bad guys are in custody, but the deputies are waiting for a tow truck to come drag the rustlers’ rented truck out of the sand.”
“Good,” Ali said. “If you happen to talk to one of the deputies, you might let them know that I’m on my way.”
As she started for the door, Yolanda seemed to reconsider. “Maybe you shouldn’t drive there. It’s rough country. What if you get stuck, too?”
“I have four-wheel drive,” Ali told her. “I can manage.”
She had to drive almost all the way into Wickenburg before she found the narrow dirt track that led back out to the river and the stalled rental truck. The intersection was easy to find because she arrived at the junction at the same time the summoned tow truck did. All Ali had to do was follow the truck with its red lights flashing, and that’s exactly what she did, keeping back just far enough so her Cayenne wasn’t engulfed in the billowing cloud of dust kicked up by the vehicle.
The tow truck ran down into a dip and came to a stop on the edge of a trackless desert wasteland. Ali stopped, too. When she did so, a uniformed police officer sauntered up to her SUV. She opened the window and let the early summer heat engulf her.
“You’ll have to move along,” the officer told her brusquely as she rolled down the window. “You need to go back the way you came. We’ve got an incident playing out here,” he continued. “We can’t have civilians involved.”
The name tag on his uniform read F. Camacho. Ali had done her homework. That would be Deputy Fernando Camacho, a six-year veteran in the sheriff’s office.
“I’m not a civilian, Deputy Camacho,” she answered, flashing her own official sheriff’s office name tag in his direction. “I believe we had an appointment earlier. I’m your department’s new public information officer. What’s
