by J. A. Jance
Leann shook her head.
“Why not?” Joanna continued. “She lives right town somewhere, doesn’t she?”
“Just off Indian School and Twenty-fourth Street,” Leann answered. “But there’s this little problem with my brother and sister-in-law. It’s better for all concerned if I don’t show up in person for holiday meals. That’s all right, though. Mom always saves me a bunch of leftovers.”
They drove in silence for the better part of a mile while Joanna considered what Leann had said. “So what are you doing for Thanksgiving dinner?”
Leann shrugged. “Who knows? There’ll be restaurants open somewhere. I’ll have dinner. Maybe I’ll go to a movie. As a last resort, I suppose I could always study. I’m sure good of Dave Thompson isn’t going to let us off for the holiday without a hundred-or-so-page reading assignment.”
“Why don’t you come to dinner with us?” asked impulsively. “With Jenny and my in-laws and me. We’ll be staying at the Hohokam, right there on Grand Avenue. We have a five o’clock reservation in the hotel dining room. I’m sure we could add one more place if we need to. Where are you going to be for the weekend, then, back in Tempe?”
Leann shook her head. “I’m between apartments right now,” she said. “I figured that as long as the APOA was giving me a place to stay for the better part of six weeks, there was no need for me to pay rent at the same time.”
“That settles it, then!” Joanna said forcefully. “If you’re spending the whole weekend here on campus all by yourself, you have to come to dinner with us.”
“I shouldn’t,” Leann said. “I shouldn’t intrude on your family time.”
“Believe me, you won’t. Besides, you’ll love Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady. Unlike my mother, those two are dyed-in-the-wool SOEs.”
“S-O-E?” Leann repeated with a questioning frown. “What’s that, some kind of secret fraternal organization?”
Joanna laughed. “Hardly,” she said. “It means salt of the earth. They’re nice people. Regular people.”
After thinking about the invitation for a few seconds, Leann suddenly smiled and nodded. “Why not?” she said. “That’s very nice of you. I’ll come. It’ll give me something to look forward to when I’m locked up in my room doing my homework.”
A moment later she added, “I’m glad we went tonight. We both needed to be at the vigil, and dinner was fun. I feel like I made a new friend tonight.”
“That’s funny,” Joanna replied, flashing her own quick smile back in Leann Jessup’s direction. “I feel the same way.”
By then they had reached the entrance to the APOA campus. The Blazer’s headlights slid briefly across Tommy Tompkins’s broken-winged angel guarding the entryway. Basking in the glow of a newfound friendship, the angel seemed far less incongruous to Joanna now than it had the first time she saw it.
After parking in the lot, the two women started toward the dorm. “How about going for a jog later?” Leann asked.
“No way,” Joanna answered. “Look at me. I can barely hobble along as it is. This afternoon’s session of PT almost killed me.”
“You know what they say,” Leann said. “No pain, no gain.”
It wasn’t a particularly witty or clever comment. In fact, when Brad Mason had said the exact same thing earlier that afternoon as Joanna came crawling in from running her laps, she had been tempted to punch the PT instructor’s lights out. Now, though, for some reason, it struck her funny bone.
She started to laugh. A moment later, so did Leann. They were both still convulsed with giggles and trying to stifle the racket as they struggled to unlock their respective doors.
Joanna managed to open hers first. “Good night,” she called, as she stepped inside.
“Night,” Leann said.
Closing the door behind her, Joanna leaned against it for a moment. It had been a long, long time since she had laughed like that—until tears ran down her cheeks, until her jaws ached, and her sides hurt. It felt good. She was still basking in the glow of it when her phone began to ring.
Sure the call had something to do with Jenny, she jumped to answer it only to hear Adam York voice on the line.
“Joanna,” he said. “I’ve been trying to track you down all day. Didn’t you get my message?”
“I did, but I haven’t had a chance to call. Where are you?”
“The Ritz-Carlton. On Camelback.”
“Here in Phoenix?”
“Yes, in Phoenix. There may be streets named Camelback other places, but I don’t know of any.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I came in from the East Coast this afternoon for a meeting that’s scheduled for both tomorrow and Friday. I thought I’d check in and see how things are going for you before you head on down to Bisbee for Thanksgiving.”
“I’m not going,” Joanna said. “My in-laws are bringing Jenny up here for the weekend.” She paused for a moment. “It just seemed like a better idea for us to be here for Thanksgiving rather than at home. What about you?”
“I considered driving back to Tucson, but it would just be for one day. And I’ve been gone much that the food in my refrigerator has probably mutated into a new life-form. My best bet is to hang out here where, if I get hungry, I can always call for room service.”
“Room service for Thanksgiving dinner? Sounds pretty grim,” Joanna said. “If you don’t get a better offer, you could always join us. We’re all stay at a new place out here in Peoria, the Hohokam. Tomorrow I have to up our dinner reservation by one anyway. I could just as well add two.”
“I wouldn’t want to barge in . . .” Adam York objected.
“Look,” Joanna interrupted, “don’t think you’d be barging in on some intimate, quiet family affair. It’s not like that. One of my classmates from here school, Leann Jessup, will be joining us. And Eva Lou’s--my mother-in-law’s—watchword is that there’s always room for one more.”
“I’ll think about it,” Adam said. “Is tomorrow morning too late to let you know?”
“No. Tomorrow will be fine. I plan on checking in to the hotel after class tomorrow afternoon. In fact, you could leave me a message there, one way or the other.”
“In the meantime,” Adam said, “how about you? How’s your training going?”
“All right,” Joanna said. “It’s hard work, but I guess you knew that. And some of the instrucTors strike me as real jerks.”
Ai lam York laughed. “You know what they say. ‘Them as can, do. Them as can’t—’ “
“I know, I know,” Joanna interjected. “But still, I expected something better.”
“Joanna,” Adam York said, no longer laughing, “I know most of the APOA guys, either personally or by reputation. They know the territory. They’ve been out there on the front lines. They’ve been there done that, and got the T-shirt. But for one reason on or another, the world is better off with them out of doing active police work. They’ve got the training. They know the stuff backwards and forwards, but they should no longer be out interacting with the public on a regular basis.”
“Someone told me the process is called remoting.”
“You bet,” Adam answered. “I’ve used it myself on occasion, but that doesn’t mean green young cops can’t learn from them. Each one of those old crocodile cops has a lifetime’s worth of invaluable experience at his disposal. With the crisis in crime that’s occurring in this country, those guys are a national resource we can’t afford to waste.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Joanna replied. “You’re not stuck in the classes.”
“But I’ve had agents sit through some of the sessions. It sounds to me as though someone’s giving you a hard time. Let me take a wild guess. Dave Thompson.”
Joanna said nothing. Her silence spoke volumes.
“So it is Thompson. Look, Joanna, I won’t try to tell you Dave Thompson’s a great guy, because he isn’t. But I will say this—if you’re up here at school expecting to pick up an e
ducation that will stand you in good stead out in the real world, you’ll learn a whole lot more from someone who’s less than perfect than you will from Mary Poppins.”
“Thank you,” Joanna said, trying not to sound as sarcastic as she felt. “I’ll try to remember that.”
“Good,” Adam York said. “Thompson does the lecture-type stuff. What about the rest of it?”
“The lab work is great, but I had my first session of PT this afternoon, and I can barely walk.”
“Take a hot shower before you go to bed. Doctor’s orders.”
“I can do better than that,” Joanna answered. “I think I’ll hop in the hot tub.”
“They have a hot tub there on campus? That’s a big step up from when the facility used to be downtown. That place was nothing short of grim.”
“It’s not just a hot tub on campus,” Joanna returned. “I happen to have a hot tub right here in my room. It even works.”
“Amazing,” Adam York said. “I may be staying at the Ritz, but I sure don’t have a hot tub in my room.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Joanna said with a laugh. “Some people seem to have all the luck.”
While classes were in session, Dave Thompson tried to limit his drinking to the confines of his own apartment, but that Tuesday night he sought solace in the comforting din of his favorite neighborhood watering hole, the Roundhouse Bar and Grill.
Holidays were always tough, but Thanksgiving was especially so since that was when the problem with Irene and Frances had come to a head. Even more than Christmas, that was when he missed his kids the most, when he wished that somehow things could have turned out differently. Unfortunately, when it came to living happily ever after, Dave Thompson had ended up on the short end of the stick.
In his mind’s eye, he still saw the kids as they had been six years earlier when Irene took them and left town. At least he supposed they had left town. All Dave got to do was send his child support check to the Maricopa County court system on the first of every month. He didn’t know where it went from there. He wasn’t allowed to know. Irene’s lawyer had seen to that. She had been a regular ring-tailed bitch. So was the judge, for that matter. By the time that bunch of hard-nose women had finished with him, Dave had nothing left—not even visitation rights.
And maybe that was just as well. Truth be known, Dave didn’t want to know what kind of squalor Little Davy and Reenie were living in or what they were learning from Irene and that goddamned “friend” of hers. In fact, it was probably far better that he didn’t.
For months after that last big blowup—the one that had landed Dave in jail overnight—he had rummaged eagerly through his mail each day, hoping to receive a card or letter. Something to let him know whether or not his kids cared if he was dead or alive. But none ever came. Not one. All these years later, he had pretty much given up hope one ever would. In fact, he doubted he would ever see his children again, especially not if Irene had anything to do with it.
Of course, there was always a chance that eventually they might grow up enough to ignore her. If somebody else ever told the kids their father’s side of the story—if they ever got tired of all the lies and bullshit Irene had to be feeding them—they might even come looking for him one day. If and when that happened, Dave was prepared to welcome his children back home with open arms.
But that kind of thing was years away at best. Now the kids were only eleven and twelve. Davy was the older of the two, by sixteen months. Brooding over his beer, Dave wondered how tall the boy was and whether or not he still looked like his father and if, also like his father, Davy was any good at sports. As far as Reenie was concerned, Dave tried not to think about her very much. She had been a sweet-tempered, dark-haired cutey the last time saw her. But the problem with little girls was that they grew up and turned into women. And then they broke your heart.
Clicker in hand, Butch Dixon was surfing through the local news broadcasts. “Hey, Dave,” the bartender said, interrupting the other man’s melancholy reverie. “Isn’t that one of your students?”
Thompson turned a bleary eye on the huge television set. Sure enough, there was Joanna Brady being interviewed about something. Dave had come in on the story too late to catch what was going on, but Joanna was there. Next, Leann Jessup stepped forward and said something about how the system had to do better.
‘What the hell’s that all about?” he asked.
“Some kind of big deal down at the capitol,” Butch Dixon told him. “Something about this year’s domestic violence victims.”
“I wonder what those girls were doing there,” Dave Thompson muttered. “If my students have time enough to fool around with that shit, I must not be piling on enough homework. Give me another beer, would you, Butch? It’s mighty thirsty out tonight.”
Within minutes of hanging up the phone with Adam York, Joanna was lounging in the tub. By the time she crawled out and dried off, fatigue overwhelmed her. There was no point in even pretending to read the assignment in The Law Enforcement Handbook. Instead, she set the alarm for 5:00 A.M. and crawled into bed. The evening spent in Leann Jessup’s company and the chat with Adam York left Joanna feeling less lonely than she had in a long time. She was starting to forge some new friendships. She was learning how to go on with her life. Oddly comforted by that knowledge, she fell asleep within minutes.
The dream came later—an awful dream that invaded her slumber and shattered her hard-won sense of well-being. It began with Joanna driving her old AMC Eagle down Highway 80 from Bisbee toward the Double Adobe Road turnoff. A woman—a complete stranger—was riding in car with her. For some reason Joanna didn’t quite understand, she was taking this woman she didn’t know home to High Lonesome Ranch.
Behind the Eagle, another vehicle appeared out of nowhere, looming up large and impatient in the rearview mirror. Bright headlights flashed on and off in Joanna’s eyes. She tried to move out of the way, but that wasn’t possible. She was driving in a no-passing zone through one of the tall, red-rocked cuts that line Highway 80 as it comes down out of the mountain pass into the flat of the Sulphur Springs valley. There was no shoulder on either side of the roadway, only a solid rock wall some thirty feet high.
Ignoring the double line in the middle of the roadway, the vehicle behind Joanna swung out into the left-hand lane. It inched along, slowly overtaking the Eagle, driving on the wrong side of the road, even though there was no way to see around the curve ahead or to check for oncoming traffic.
“My God!” Joanna’s unknown passenger yelled. “What’s the matter with that guy? Is he crazy or what? He’s going to get us killed.”
Joanna was too busy driving the car to answer, although she did glance to her left, trying to catch a glimpse of the driver of the other car. But none was visible. All the windows were blacked out. An oncoming pickup came careening around the curve in the other lane. With only inches to spare, the other car ducked back into the lane directly in front of Joanna.
As Joanna clung to the steering wheel and fought to keep her car on the road, an awful sense of foreboding swept over her. Even without glimpsing any of the other vehicle’s occupants, Joanna knew instinctively that they were dangerous. Reflexively, Joanna reached for the switch to turn on the flashing lights on the light bar and to activate the siren, but they weren’t there. Then she remembered. She wasn’t in her county-owned Blazer. This was her own car. Those switches didn’t exist in her basic, stripped-down AMC Eagle.
There was a gas pedal, though. As the other car sped up and threatened to outrun her, Joanna plunged the accelerator all the way to the floor. The
Eagle leaped forward. Then suddenly, in the peculiar way things happen in dreams, Joanna was no longer in the car. Instead, she was standing outside her own back gate with the idling Eagle parked behind her. While she stood there watching helplessly, a hulking, hooded figure leaped out of the other vehicle, which was now parked directly in front of her back gate. As the frightening spector started u
p the walk, Joanna yelled at the dogs. “Sadie. Tigger. Get him.”
But the dogs lay panting and unconcerned in the shade of the backyard apricot tree Eva Lou had planted years earlier. Neither dog moved. Meanwhile, the intruder was almost to the door, running full speed. Joanna struggled to loosen Colt from under her jacket. It seemed to take forever, but at last she was holding it in her hand
“Stop or I’ll shoot,” she shouted.
But the hooded figure didn’t stop, didn’t even slow down. Joanna pulled back on the trigger only to find that instead of holding the deadly Colt 2000 she was aiming a plastic water pistol. The expected explosion of gunpowder never came. Instead, a puny stream of water shot out of the pistol and fell to the ground not three feet in front of her. The intruder, totally undeterred, raced into the house through the back door.
Enraged, Joanna threw down the useless water pistol and then headed toward the house herself just as she heard Jenny start to scream. Jenny! Joanna thought. She’s in there with him. I have to get her out!
She started toward the house, running full-out. Even as she ran, she could see a spiral of smoke rising up from the roof of the house, from a part of the roof where there was no chimney, a place where there should have been no smoke.
“Jenny!” Joanna screamed. “Jenny!”
The sound of Joanna’s own despairing voice awakened her. Heart pounding, wet with sweat, she lay on the bed and waited for the nighttime terror to dissipate.
When her breathing finally slowed, she glanced at the clock beside her bed. Twelve-fifteen. It wasn’t even that late. She turned over, pounded the pillow into a more comfortable configuration, and then tried to go back to sleep.
That’s when she realized that although the dream was long gone, the smell of smoke remained. Cigarette smoke—as sharp and pungent as if the person smoking the cigarette were right there in the room with her.
Which is odd, she thought, closing her eyes and drifting off once more. Leann Jessup is my closest neighbor, and she doesn’t even smoke.