Rattlesnake Crossing : A Joanna Brady Mystery (9780061766183)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “So we keep going instead,” Frank said. “We get as close as we can, then we ad-lib like crazy.”

  “Did you ever take any drama classes in school?” Joanna asked.

  “Drama?” Frank echoed. “Me? Are you kidding?”

  “Well, I did. At good old Bisbee High. Mr. Vorhees, the drama instructor, always used to tell us, ‘Ad-libbing is for amateurs.’”

  Even though she had to fight to keep the Blazer on the washboarded road, Joanna glanced in Frank Montoya’s direction long enough to catch some of the heat from the scathing look he leveled in her direction.

  “With all due respect,” Frank returned, “when Mr. Vorhees said that, I doubt he was looking down the barrel of a Barrett fifty-caliber.”

  Surprisingly enough, Joanna and Frank both laughed then, hooting and giggling. Sonja Hosfield probably thinks we’re nuts, Joanna thought. But she understood the tension-easing and lifesaving power of laughter in situations like this. It was a way to take the pressure off long enough to stay alert and alive.

  “How much farther?” Sonja asked.

  “We can’t tell,” Joanna said. “We probably won’t know until we get there.”

  Just then Todd Kries’ voice boomed out of the radio and made her jump. “Sheriff Brady, I’m coming back now. I’ve got myself not one but two armed deputies. Both of them with high-powered rifles and night-vision sights for when the sun goes down. We’re just now crossing back over the top of the pass. How close are you and where are your reinforcements?”

  “The reinforcements are still a long way out,” Joanna told him. “They’re passing Cascabel now. As for me, I don’t know where the hell we are. The speedometer is showing seven miles since we turned onto Redington Road. Maybe we’ve already missed him. He may have finished changing his tire and moved on.”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve been keeping an eye out for traffic on the road. According to my estimate, you’re almost there. Do you want me to go in and take another look?”

  “No,” Joanna said. “Hang back a little. The sound of a helicopter can carry a long way out in the middle of nowhere. Wait until Frank and I have actually made visual contact. As soon as we do, I’ll call you in.”

  “Okey-dokey,” Todd Kries said. “We’ll just sit up here and twiddle our thumbs until you give the word.”

  The Blazer rounded a sharp curve. After that the road dropped away like a plunging roller coaster. At the bottom of the steep drop, sitting crookedly across a sandy wash, was Ryan Merritt’s blue truck.

  “We’ve got him,” Frank shouted into the radio. “Come on in, Officer Kries. Bring in your troops. Now’s the time.”

  Earlier, Todd Kries had said the panel truck was sitting crooked. It still was. At first Joanna thought it might be stuck in the sand rather than up on a jack. And there, plain to see, was Ryan Merritt himself, standing at the back of his truck and trying to wrestle the ATV out of the bed through the open back doors at the end of the truck. As the Blazer came over the rise, he must have heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. He turned briefly and looked at them, then turned his attention back to the truck. In the next few seconds Joanna realized that they had arrived just at the critical instant of his unloading the vehicle. He was balancing most of the ATV in midair. Had he relaxed his hold, he might have dropped it.

  As he continued to wrestle the ATV, Joanna slammed on the brakes. “Hit the bricks, Frank. I’m right behind you.”

  To Joanna’s dismay, Frank didn’t respond with instant compliance. Instead, he thumbed down the speak button on the radio one more time. “We’re out of the Blazer, Kries. I’m going right. Sheriff Brady’s going left. Tell those sharpshooters of yours to go after him, not us.”

  With that Frank threw the radio down and bailed out of the truck. Joanna paused long enough to look back at Sonja. “Remember, stay down!” she ordered. “If you see things are going bad—if you see that Frank and I are losing it—put the Blazer in reverse and get the hell out of here. Understand?”

  Sonja nodded wordlessly.

  Leaving the engine running and drawing her Colt, Joanna dropped out of the Blazer. She hit the ground rolling, shoulder first, and came to rest against a pillow-sized boulder. The force of hitting the rock knocked the wind out of her lungs and sent the Colt spinning away from her hand. Only when she had retrieved the gun did she realize how badly she had hurt her shoulder. Her whole arm was numb. It was all she could do to maintain her hold on the Colt’s grip.

  Seconds later, still rubbing her bruised shoulder, she heard the clatter of an arriving helicopter. Good as his word, Todd Kries had already dropped over the mountains and was bringing in his two sharpshooting deputies as promised.

  Way to go, Todd, Joanna thought, but before she could finish that train of thought, the engine of the ATV surged to life. Moments later, it came roaring down the road.

  “Joanna,” Frank shouted, “look out! He’s coming your way!”

  But then Joanna realized that Merritt wasn’t coming toward her at all. He was actually aiming for the Blazer. In a flash of intuition, she realized that her four-wheel-drive vehicle was what he was really after. A fateful flat tire had disabled Ryan Merritt’s main means of escape. He had other transportation. For off-roading, the ATV was great, but long-term, it wouldn’t move far enough or fast enough for him to get away. And it wouldn’t carry any kind of payload, either.

  As those thoughts flashed through Joanna’s mind, she also realized that because the road was terribly rough right there, he was being forced to use both hands to drive. Both hands. For those few seconds, then, Ryan Merritt wasn’t armed.

  Measuring the distance between him and the Blazer and between herself and the Blazer, Joanna knew it would be a foot race—a life-and-death foot race. She also knew she had to get there first. Placing second wasn’t an option. If Ryan beat her, the Blazer would be his. It was sitting there running with the key already in the ignition and with Sonja Hosfield trapped in the backseat.

  He wouldn’t hesitate at killing Sonja, any more than he would hesitate at killing someone else, Joanna thought.

  Sometimes during the summer, before diving into the icy-cold, well-water depths of the Elks Club pool, Joanna would stand on the diving board and gulp a single preparatory breath. She did that now. Then she pushed up off the ground and propelled herself toward the Blazer.

  She beat him there by mere inches, flying horizontally into the open driver’s door from five feet away and sliding all the way across the seat. The knuckles of her fingers slammed against the door handle on the passenger side. Once again the Colt was knocked from her hand. This time it landed on the floorboard. By the time she had groped around and found it, Ryan Merritt was already behind her at the open door. And now he, too, was armed. He was raising the deer rifle to aim it when the deafening sound of a gunshot exploded in Joanna’s ears.

  She looked on in horror while a shocked expression froze on Ryan Merritt’s face. The bullet smashed into his forehead, leaving a seemingly small hole. Then it exploded out the back of his head in a shower of gore. The half-raised deer rifle clattered to the ground. It fell backward, away from the open door. And so did he.

  At first Joanna thought that Frank must have raced back to the far side of the Blazer and fired the fatal shot from there. But then she saw him. He was still yards away. The shot had come from much closer than that.

  The sound of the shot reverberated in Joanna’s ears. The smell of cordite stung her nostrils. Puzzled, she raised herself up and turned around. In the backseat of the Blazer sat Sonja Hosfield. A small but deadly and still smoking pistol was gripped in her trembling hand.

  “I wanted him dead,” Sonja said simply. “Ryan deserved to be dead, and now he is.”

  “But where did the gun come from?” Joanna asked. “I thought…”

  “It was in my purse,” Sonja Hosfield explained. “It’s always in my purse. I’ve carried it for years.”

  “You’d better hand it over,” Joanna sa
id. Without a word, Sonja Hosfield complied.

  The next few minutes were a blur of activity. But when there was a pause in the action, Joanna tried to slip away on foot, putting a little distance between herself and the din of arriving emergency vehicles. Some thirty feet from the roadway, she sank down on a boulder. She had retrieved her cell phone from Frank. Unfortunately, her attempt at a discreet exit hadn’t gone unnoticed. She had removed the phone from her pocket and was punching numbers into the keypad when Frank Montoya came surging through the undergrowth.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked anxiously. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay,” Joanna said shakily, holding up the phone so he could see it. “But if you don’t mind, I need a little privacy—to call my daughter.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  AFTERWARD, JOANNA barely remembered the rest of that Friday night. She finally went dragging home sometime around midnight. There was a message on the machine from Marianne saying that if it was all right with Joanna, the services for Esther would be Monday afternoon at three o’clock.

  She stood in the shower until she ran out of hot water, but no amount of showering could wash away the horror of what Fran Daly had shown her when she met up with the medical examiner in the hot little room behind the garage on Alton Hosfield’s Triple C. Monty Brainard’s assessment had been right on the money.

  The frost-covered freezer compartment of Ryan Merritt’s refrigerator was his trophy room. There, wrapped in separate plastic sandwich bags, Fran Daly had discovered the frozen, bloodied remains of four newly harvested human scalps. A few feet away, in the bottom dresser drawer, she had found one more, much older than the others.

  “What do you think?” Fran Daly had asked, opening the drawer and shining a flashlight so Joanna could see inside.

  Joanna had sighed. “I think we just found the rest of Rebecca Flowers,” she had said. “The poor little runaway from Yuma.”

  After the shower, Joanna went to bed and tried to sleep, but without much success. She found herself almost wishing that Butch had come back to the house so she could have cuddled up next to him. It wasn’t that her body was chilled; her soul was.

  Butch called the next morning as Joanna was getting ready to leave for work. “How about breakfast?” he asked.

  “I can’t,” she told him. “I have to be in the office in ten minutes.”

  “Are you okay?”

  Joanna closed her eyes, grateful that he had asked the question, while at the same time wondering what about her voice had given her away.

  “No,” she said. “It turns out I’m not all right. But I have to go in all the same. We’ve got a whole lot of cleaning up to do around the department this weekend. It’ll probably take most of the day.”

  “Dinner, then?”

  “I think so,” she said, “but call me later, just to be sure.”

  During the morning briefing, Joanna learned from Dick Voland that more than thirty thousand dollars in cash had been found packed into the back of Ryan Merritt’s truck. “Since we didn’t find any guns other than his father’s deer rifle and the one fifty-caliber in his truck, I think it’s safe to assume that he unloaded most of the weapons from Clyde Philips’ shop. We don’t know where yet, but I’ve got ATF chasing after them. The agent in charge wanted to know how come we hadn’t clued his office in earlier.”

  “You mean you hadn’t?” Joanna asked.

  Voland looked at her sheepishly and shook his head. “I told him I put on too much Vitalis and it must have slipped my mind.”

  In spite of herself, Joanna smiled. “How’d that go over?”

  Voland grinned back at her. “Not too well,” he said. “But what could the guy say?”

  “Not much.” Joanna turned to the others. “Now, have we had any luck sorting out the connections between Frankie, Clyde, and Ryan?”

  Ernie nodded. “As a matter of fact, we have,” he said. “The evidence techs were going over Frankie Ramos’ VW bus here in the impound lot when they found an unfinished letter addressed to his folks. Here’s a Xerox copy.”

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  I’m sory for all the trubble I caused. Clyde was nice to me but he was getting sicker and sicker. I tried to take him to the doctor but he wuldn’t go. Ryan said we should take the stuff from the shop and cell it. He said he had frends from Florens who wuld buy guns and stuff, but Clyde hurd and was mad as hell. Ryan hit him and put him to bed I thought he was dead but he wasn’t. When Ryan saw he was still breathing he wanted me to hit him to, but I culdn’t. I put a bag over his head. Mom, pleese ask God to forgiv me.

  I’m scarred of Ryan. He sez he’s comming tonite to giv me the mony. But I don’t want it. What shud I do? I can’t tell what

  The letter ended in mid-sentence. “That’s all there is?” Joanna said.

  Ernie nodded. “That’s it.”

  “Has Ruben Ramos seen this yet?” she asked.

  “No,” Ernie answered. “Not yet.”

  “You’ll take it to him?”

  “Right away. As soon as we finish up here.”

  “And stay with Ruben after he finishes reading it,” Joanna added. “He may need someone to talk to.”

  Later, when the briefing had finished with the one set of cases and moved on to more routine matters, Frank Montoya brought up the issue of Eddy Sandoval’s dismissal. Firing a deputy put a real crimp in Dick Voland’s Patrol Division. It also meant that Frank’s carefully contrived work roster for the following month would have to be redone. Neither of the two chief deputies was happy about that, but neither of them faulted Joanna for her decision.

  Hours afterward, Joanna had just put down her phone for what seemed like the tenth time and was reaching for her office bottle of aspirin when the private line rang.

  “Joanna,” Eleanor Lathrop Winfield said the moment her daughter answered, “you’ll never guess what happened!”

  “What?”

  “We’re here in Seattle getting ready to catch our plane back to Phoenix when there you are!”

  “Mother,” Joanna said, “I haven’t been anywhere near there. Believe me, I’ve been stuck right here in the office all day long.”

  “Not in person, silly,” Eleanor said. “Your picture. It’s right here on the front page of the Seattle Times, along with a big article that was continued two pages later. What in the world have you been up to while we’ve been gone? I’ve read the article and so has George. We can hardly believe it. And the article calls you a hero. Whatever happened to the word ‘heroine’? I think it’s ever so much nicer. ‘Hero’ makes you sound so…well…masculine. In my day, a woman who wrote books called herself an authoress, not an author. That sounded much more ladylike, too, if you ask me.”

  Joanna sighed. “I didn’t write the article, Mother. As a matter of fact, who did?”’

  “Someone from the Bisbee Bee,” Eleanor answered. “The article and picture both must have been picked up by the wire services.”

  “Marliss Shackleford didn’t write it, I hope.”

  “Heavens, no. She’s nothing but a columnist. No, I think it was probably Kevin Dawson, the son of the publisher. Anyway, I have to go now. They’re calling our plane. We won’t be in until late tonight. Will I see you tomorrow?”

  “I doubt it, Mother,” Joanna said. “I’ll need to spend time with Jeff and Marianne tomorrow before Jenny and the Gs get home. The funeral’s Monday.”

  “Funeral!” Eleanor exclaimed. “What funeral?”

  “Esther’s,” Joanna said wearily.

  “Esther? You mean Jeff and Marianne’s little girl?”

  “Yes. She died yesterday afternoon at University Medical Center in Tucson. She had surgery and then she caught pneumonia.”

  Eleanor was outraged. “Joanna Brady!” she exclaimed. “Why on earth didn’t you call and let me know?”

  “It turns out I was a little busy.” And then Joanna almost did it again. She was on the verge of apologizing when she caught herself and
realized that she didn’t have to. There was nothing to apologize for. “Besides, Mother,” she added, “you were on a ship, so you weren’t exactly available. Remember?”

  “Oh,” Eleanor Lathrop Winfield said. “I guess that’s right.”

  An hour later, Joanna picked up the phone, called the Copper Queen, and asked to be put through to Butch Dixon’s room.

  He came on the line and greeted her. “Does this mean you’ve surfaced?”

  “For the moment. Do you have any plans for the evening?”

  “Hopes, yes,” Butch said. “Plans, no.”

  “How’d you like to come on out to the house? We’ll cook dinner together. And bring your jammies,” she added with a nervous laugh.

  “Wait a minute, does that mean dinner might turn into another sleepover?”

  “It might,” she conceded. “Jenny comes home tomorrow afternoon. That’s when I turn back into a pumpkin.”

  “When should I show up?” Butch asked.

  “Make it an hour,” Joanna said. “I still have to go to the store and buy groceries.”

  “Make it half an hour,” he countered. “I’ll go buy the groceries.”

  Butch was as good as his word. He showed up with his Outback loaded with groceries five minutes after Joanna had walked into the house and kicked off her shoes. They had an early dinner, listened to Patsy Cline, and were in bed but not exactly sleeping when the phone rang at a quarter past ten.

  Joanna groaned first, but she answered.

  “Sheriff Brady?” Tica Romero said. “I’m sorry to bother you at home, but we have a problem here.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “There’s a convoy of eighteen-wheelers parked in front of the department. We’ve got a man and woman screaming something about unlawful imprisonment, and then there’s a whole bunch of pissed-off truckers who claim the woman—who happens to be married to one of them—is the naked hitchhiker who’s been running the honey-pot deal out on I-10. What should we do?”

  “Call Dick Voland,” Joanna said. “Tell him I’m under the weather. He’ll have to handle it.”