Day of the Dead

by J. A. Jance

  Larry caught his breath. “Did you say six?” he asked. “I understood it wasn’t leaving until eight.”

  “No, it’s definitely departing at six. The itinerary calls for one passenger, Mrs. Stryker, leaving for Cabo San Lucas at six P.M. Do you need me to change that, or are you ready to arrange your own departure?”

  Larry could barely speak. “No,” he said. “That’s fine.”

  He ended the call, then pounded the steering wheel with both fists. “That bitch!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “That incredible bitch! She’s planning to take off and leave me holding the bag!”

  By the time he was stopped at the next light, though, Larry had reconsidered. He picked up his phone and hit redial. “This is Dr. Stryker again,” he said. “You’re right. I do need to make my own flight arrangements. I’d like to leave tonight—as soon as you can get a plane here.”

  “Departing from Tucson International?” the reservations clerk asked.

  “No. I’ll be at home, north of the city. I’d rather leave from the FBO at Pinal Air Park.”

  “Will you also be going to Cabo San Lucas?”

  “No,” he said after a moment’s pause. “I’ll be going to Mexico City.”

  “And only one passenger?”

  “That’s right,” he told her. “Only one. But I’d like a Bravo or an Excel—something big enough so I can make it in one shot.”

  “You realize this will be considered simultaneous use. I can’t guarantee you a plane until I check availability. Do you want to stay on the line?”

  “Yes,” Larry said. He almost added “please,” but he managed to stifle himself. The wait was interminable.

  “All right,” the rep said brightly, coming back on the line. “There weren’t any Excels, but I can have a Bravo there at nine-thirty. So that’s one passenger departing from Pinal Air Park.”

  “Wonderful,” he said.

  “Any special catering requirements?” she asked.

  “Scotch,” he told her, letting out his breath. “And plenty of ice.”

  “Cars? A hotel?”

  “Have a car meet me at the executive terminal in Mexico City,” he said. “I’ll decide on the hotel on the way.”

  Brandon’s arm was bothering him again. He had forgotten about it for a while, but now it was aching like crazy. And the Suburban’s air conditioner didn’t seem to be pumping out enough cool air. Nerves, he told himself. And it was true. When his cell phone rang a few minutes later, Brandon jumped as though he’d been shot.

  “Where are you?” Brian asked.

  “Stuck in traffic northbound on Oracle at Orange Grove,” Brandon replied. “At least he’s not on I-19 headed for Nogales.”

  “If he’s going north on Oracle, Stryker’s most likely going to his ranch,” Brian put in. “It’s The Flying C on the far side of the Tortolitas. That’s the address listed on his driver’s license—101 Flying C Ranch Road. Are you having any difficulty maintaining visual contact?”

  “Are you kidding? We’re crawling along at such a snail’s pace I could walk fast enough to catch up, but I’m also in the Suburban. I’m five or six car lengths back. I’m high enough to see him, but I doubt he can see me. How about you?”

  “PeeWee and I just left the department. With all the construction at I-19 and I-10, we’re taking surface streets. It may take us a while. Do you want us to use the siren?”

  “Don’t bother,” Brandon said. “Traffic’s too heavy for that. I’ll keep you posted, but give me that home address again, just in case. I’ll key it into my GPS. That way, if I do end up losing him, I’ll still have some idea where he’s headed.”

  After ending the call, he started messing around with the GPS controls. The obligatory warning came on, telling him not to make adjustments to the system while the car was in motion, but there was no danger of that. The Suburban was stopped cold at a traffic signal. As soon as the GPS system had located the address and mapped it, Brandon called Brian back.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “The Flying C is off Highway 79. It’s in Pinal County, not Pima. What’s going to happen if Bill Forsythe finds out you’ve strayed into another jurisdiction?”

  “We’re just going to ask a pair of suspects a few questions,” Brian said. “No big deal.”

  But Brandon knew that once Sheriff Forsythe heard what was going on, there would be hell to pay.

  The lunchtime rush was mostly over. Diana and Lani sat at a table in the far corner of the room while Lani picked at her food.

  “I never saw a Mexican combination plate you didn’t devour on sight,” Diana said to her daughter. “Is something wrong?”

  Lani looked at her mother—her Mil-gahn mother—and shook her head. Lani still didn’t understand the terrible dread she was feeling—dread brought on by that vision of the flesh disappearing from Gayle Stryker’s face. And if Lani couldn’t understand it, there was no way she could explain it to her mother.

  “I’m worried about Dad,” she hedged at last.

  “Don’t be,” Diana said with absolute confidence. “Your father’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.”

  Not without help, Lani thought. She pushed her plate away and gave her mother what she hoped was a convincing smile. “I’m full,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

  She wanted to be back home—back in her room with the door closed. There, at least, she’d be able to sit on the floor with her legs crossed, hold Looks at Nothing’s crystals in her hands, and sing the song that had come to her earlier. As a medicine woman, it was all she knew to do. As a daughter, it was the best help she could offer.

  Staying at a discreet distance, Brandon followed Larry’s LS 430 through Catalina, past Saddle Brook, and then off onto Highway 79 at Oracle Junction. When Larry slowed and signaled for a left-hand turn at Flying C Ranch Road, Brandon took his foot off the gas and then drove by with his face averted in case Larry happened to look in his rearview mirror. Brandon continued on up the highway another half mile or so before pulling another U-turn and parking on the shoulder.

  Taking out his phone, he called Brian. “Where are you?” Brandon asked.

  “Just past Oracle and Orange Grove,” the detective returned. “Traffic is the pits. We finally had to put on the lights and siren.”

  “Don’t worry,” Brandon said. “Everything’s cool. Larry just pulled off Highway 79 onto Flying C Ranch Road. My GPS says that’s a dead end, so he’ll have to come back out eventually. I’m parked up the road a few hundred yards. When he comes back out, I’ll see him, but he won’t see me.”

  “Sounds good,” Brian said.

  “I’ve been thinking about all this while I’ve been driving,” Brandon added. “Larry was all upset when I brought up the possibility of his being the father of Roseanne Orozco’s baby. I’d talked to him about Roseanne yesterday. He kept his cool then, but the paternity issue threw him into a blind panic. If you and PeeWee can apply the screws…”

  “With pleasure,” Brian returned. “We’ll see what we can do.”

  “Okay,” Brandon told him. “I’ll hang tight. See you when you get here.”

  Larry’s phone rang again as he drove up Flying C Ranch Road. When he checked the readout and saw that it was Gayle, he didn’t answer that time, either. Obviously she knew now that he had left the office and was trying to track him down. Too bad!

  He was still shaken by the phone calls to CitationShares, still astonished that she would betray him like that. He had always worried it might happen, though he had never really thought it would, though now it had. Gayle had turned on him, just as she had turned on Erik LaGrange, but with one big difference: Larry had figured out what was up in time to get his own damned plane. Gayle was on her way out of town; so was he.

  When he drove into the yard, Gayle’s Lexus was nowhere to be seen. He had half expected that she might have beaten him here and he’d arrive to find the ranch house already reduced to rubble, but it wasn’t. She probably lied to me about that,
too, he thought bitterly. She probably never planned to blow it up at all.

  That was an appalling possibility. What if somebody stumbled into the basement room with its restraints and shackles and the rest of his equipment? He stopped the car. For a space of time he was too shaken to get out. He had cleaned things up as best he could, but he knew enough about current crime scene investigation to realize that tricky alternate-light sources could locate blood droplets that were invisible to the naked eye.

  What should he do? If Gayle wasn’t going to destroy the evidence against him, should he try to do it himself?

  No, he decided finally. Get the notebooks and get the hell out. Go wait at the airport. No one will ever think to look for me there…not at Pinal Air Park.

  So Larry Stryker hurried into the house and on into the study. He’d had a wall safe installed there, behind one of the big oil paintings. And because Gayle had no idea the safe existed, it had been the right place for him to keep his notebooks.

  He was upset enough that his hand shook as he worked the combination. It took three tries before he got it right. Swinging the door open, he grabbed up the notebooks. He shoved them into the open briefcase on his desk and slapped the lid shut. He turned back to the safe to close it and return the painting to its place.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Gayle asked.

  He hadn’t heard the car or her. The sound of her voice scared him to death. A chill ran up his spine. The painting fell from his hand, splitting the heavy gilt frame as it smashed onto the Saltillo floor. This couldn’t be happening. Larry led a charmed life. He wasn’t supposed to get caught.

  “Nothing,” he said, turning to face her. That’s when he saw the gun—a chrome-plated pistol—that was pointed straight at his chest. It wasn’t a very large weapon, but it seemed to grow in size. He stared at it until the gaping mouth of the pistol was all he could see. “I came to see if you needed any help,” he added lamely.

  She smiled and shook her head, but she didn’t move the gun. It stayed pointed at him.

  “I never knew about that safe,” she said quietly. “What do you keep in it?”

  “Odds and ends. Nothing important. Put down the gun, Gayle. Shouldn’t we get to work?”

  “Did you have money in there?” she demanded. “Were you hiding money from me?”

  “Of course not!” he declared. Flustered, he felt his face turn red. “Nothing of the kind.”

  “Then open the briefcase,” she ordered. “Show me.”

  As he carried on his end of the conversation, Larry Stryker was trying to grapple with this new reality. There was no question about whether or not she would pull the trigger. Of the two of them, Gayle was the natural-born killer. He had known that about her for more than thirty years. He had always supposed he was immune. But he wasn’t. His only hope was to fight back.

  So he stepped toward the desk and made as if to comply. Instead of opening the briefcase, he picked it up and heaved it at her. She dodged out of the way of the flying briefcase, and her first shot missed him completely. The second one didn’t. The bullet hit him square in the chest and flung him backward. It took forever for him to slide down the wall. He watched her, expecting her to fire again. She simply disappeared from view as he slid behind the desk.

  “Gayle,” he called. “Don’t leave me like this. Please.”

  She didn’t answer. The last thing Larry Stryker heard was the sound of the study door slamming shut behind her.

  In twenty-six years of driving gravel trucks, Amos Brubaker had never had an accident—not even a fender bender. This, his last load of the day, was headed for another new development on the far side of Saddle Brook. The gravel pit was in the riverbed west of I-10 and southeast of Marana. According to the map, it should have been easier for him to get where he was going by backtracking as far as Rillito and going east there. Mileagewise, that would have been closer, but that was the sad truth about Tucson-area traffic. Amos was actually better off going miles out of his way, taking the freeway as far as north Red Rock, cutting over there to Highway 79, and approaching his drop-off point from the opposite direction.

  Amos was doing that now, sailing along on the straightaway at slightly over the 65-miles-per-hour legal limit. He slowed slightly when he saw a green Suburban parked on the right-hand shoulder. These days DPS sometimes used stealth vehicles rather than clearly marked patrol cars to police Arizona’s highways. But the Suburban turned out to be just that, a Suburban with a single occupant—a man—sitting in it. His hazard lights weren’t on. He didn’t look like someone having car trouble or trying to flag someone down, so Amos put his foot back on the gas pedal and kept going.

  Just then some dim-bulb babe in a Lexus went tearing past him doing at least eighty-five. She’d barely gone around the front fender of his Mack truck when she slammed on her brakes and turned off on a dirt road. Amos flipped her a bird as he went past. What the hell was the matter with drivers today—and not just women drivers, either? If she was planning on turning right, couldn’t she have stayed behind him for that last quarter of a mile? Did bimbos like her have even the vaguest idea of how much blacktop was needed to stop a loaded gravel truck? That was another problem with driving these days. Everybody was in too much of a hurry.

  Amos was coming up on Oracle Junction. He reached the place where the straightaway ended. Beyond that point the road narrowed slightly and was far more curvy. Amos eased back to a real 65. He saw the car ahead of him—a pale yellow vehicle of some kind—approaching in the opposite lane, but he didn’t worry about it—didn’t consider it at all. He saw the approaching car and assumed whoever was in it saw him, too. Bright red Mack gravel trucks are hard to miss.

  But then, when he was almost on top of the car—a Honda—it turned left directly in front of him. He saw now that the pale yellow Honda was driven by a woman—a gray-haired woman about the same age as Amos. At the very last moment, she glanced up and saw the truck. In that electric instant, he saw the look of horror flash across her face; saw her lips form themselves into a surprised O; saw her eyes open wide, shocked and disbelieving.

  Looking for a way to avoid hitting her, Amos checked the left lane, but now there was another car in that lane, a cop car with flashing lights that was speeding toward both the Honda and Amos’s truck. By then, the Honda was fully astraddle the right-hand lane, directly in the path of the speeding Mack truck. Amos Brubaker had split seconds to make his decision. Between T-boning the seemingly stationary Honda or crashing head-on into an oncoming vehicle, the woman’s Honda presented the least lethal choice.

  Almost standing on the brake pedal, Amos clung to the wheel and tried to keep the truck and its add-on trailer on the road. He had dodged enough—or maybe she had sped up enough—that instead of hitting her dead-on, he clipped her right quarter panel. Instead of being flattened under the truck’s front bumper, the Honda spun away. When it hit the soft shoulder on the side of the road, it flipped and flew end over end before finally coming to rest, leaning at an angle, against a barbed-wire fence.

  Amos felt the impact and saw the car go whirling away. For the barest of moments, he thought he had made it—thought he was home free, then he felt a sickening lurch behind him. He looked in the rearview mirror long enough to see the trailer swing back across the centerline. In that awful moment he knew what was going to happen. The heavy load of gravel would pull him over. As the wheels of the tractor left the ground, all Amos Brubaker could do was hold on for dear life. Hold on and pray.

  Twenty-Nine

  Brian Fellows had heard the expression “watching a train wreck,” but he had never understood the implications until that very moment. It seemed to happen in slow motion. Not wanting to alert Larry Stryker, he had shut off the siren as they entered Oracle Junction. Once they were on Highway 79, he saw the approaching gravel truck. He saw the little yellow Honda. When the Honda’s brake lights came on, Brian assumed that the vehicle was preparing to turn, but when the turn signal didn’t co
me on, there was no way to tell which way the Honda was going. Then, to Brian’s gut-wrenching dismay, the Honda turned directly into the path of the truck. And through it all, there was nothing—not one thing—Brian could do to stop it.

  “My God!” PeeWee shouted. “Look out!”

  And Brian was looking. He was searching desperately for some safe haven, somewhere to pull off the road and get the hell out of the way. He saw the speeding tractor slam into the side of the Honda. With one tire bouncing high in the air above them all, the out-of-control Honda spun through the air while the truck careened straight toward them. Trying to dodge out of the way, Brian wrenched the wheel to the right. He managed to miss the bouncing tire and the Honda, but the maneuver sent the Crown Victoria pitching off the steep shoulder and directly into a concrete-bridge abutment, where it slammed to a stop.

  For the briefest moment, Brian’s vision was obscured by what turned out to be his deployed air bag. When he could see again, the fully loaded gravel truck and trailer were skidding on their sides along both lanes of roadway, spilling mounds of gravel and raising clouds of dust.

  Brian turned to PeeWee. “Are you okay?”

  PeeWee nodded, rubbing his collarbone. “I think so,” he said. “You?”

  Brian tried the door. The frame was evidently jammed. His door wouldn’t open. Neither would PeeWee’s. They ended up having to shove their way through the shattered safety glass in the windshield.

  “You go,” PeeWee said when the hole was wide enough for Brian to slip through. “I’ll radio for help.”

  When Brian hit the ground, the Mack truck tractor lay on its side, wheels still spinning, with its signature bulldog hood ornament buried in the broken remains of a crushed mesquite tree. As Brian watched, the shaken truck driver scrambled out through a window opening and crawled across the door. Gripping the running board, he slipped over the side and then dropped the last few feet to the ground.

  As soon as the man landed, he took off at a dead run. At first, Brian had no idea where he was going. Only when he looked beyond where the driver was headed did Brian see the wreckage of the smashed yellow Honda. It lay at the bottom of a steep wash, leaning up against several strands of barbed-wire fence. The truck driver ran to the edge of the wash and scrambled down the side. By the time Brian reached him, he was pulling desperately on the driver’s-side door handle.