by J. A. Jance
“I would like to have her ashes,” he said at last. “I can send a courier to pick them up.”
“Don’t bother,” Graciella said. “I’ll have them shipped to the drop box in Mexico City. Someone there can deliver them.”
“Thank you,” he croaked. A brief silence followed.
During the past ten years, although they seldom met face-to-face, Graciella had come to play a key role in her father’s financial transactions. Over time he had arrived at the conclusion that she was destined to be his chosen successor. El Pescado fully expected that once Christina no longer required Graciella’s constant care and attention, his daughter would leave Panama City behind, come to Mexico, take up residence in his fortified compound, and assume her official role.
After all, Felix was feeling his age. Running the cartel was a young man’s game. He wanted Graciella close at hand so he could teach her everything she would need to know. At this point, she understood the financial end of his business far better than Felix himself, but he needed to be around long enough to school her in the blood-and-guts aspects of running the cartel—about dealing with rival gangs; about learning who could be trusted and who could not; and, if it ever came to that, how to put down a bloody insurrection arising from inside the ranks.
El Pescado had already informed his young lieutenants, including his forty-something sons, Manuel and Pablo, of his unorthodox decision. When it came to holding their own as street thugs, the boys were capable enough. They were good at wielding guns and muscle, but they were totally unsuitable when it came to running the whole operation. Pablo drank too much and Manny was too indecisive. Neither of them had the temperament or the brainpower to keep all the balls in the air, and when El Pescado had announced his succession decision, neither of them had had guts enough to object—at least not to Felix’s face.
“What will you do now?” he asked Graciella finally, hoping to disguise the naked hope in his heart. “Will you come home to Sinaloa?”
El Pescado’s expectation had always been that Graciella would jump at the chance to leave Panama City behind after her mother’s passing. That didn’t happen, at least not now.
“There are many things that are best handled from here,” Graciella said into the phone. “If and when that changes, I’ll let you know.”
She hung up then. El Pescado wasn’t accustomed to being dismissed in such an abrupt fashion. For a long moment he stared at the suddenly silent phone before putting it down. Then, remembering Christina—his once oh-so-lovely Christina—he buried his grotesque face in his hands and wept. Much later, after the next spasm of grief had passed and because he was who he was, Felix went into his study and scrolled back through all the video feeds, including ones he hadn’t viewed previously.
Try as he might there was nothing to be seen that was the least bit out of the ordinary. On Wednesday evening the television set was on for most of the day and stayed on somewhat later than usual. There may have been more comings and goings than usual, but there was no sign of an argument or any kind of dispute or disturbance. Graciella came and went several times after helping Christina out of the room, but eventually Graciella returned to the living room and settled down on the sofa.
For more than an hour she sat there, working on a laptop before switching off the set for the night. If that was when it had happened, Christina must have been in her bedroom dosing herself with booze and pills while her daughter sat working quietly in the living room, totally unaware. But that set El Pescado to wondering. Was Graciella really as innocent and unknowing as she appeared to be on the video or was she something else entirely?
He fast forwarded through the feed to the next day, where he saw Graciella, seated on the sofa and weeping uncontrollably while people came and went around her—the ambulance crew, various police officers, and even a few neighbors. At one point Arturo Salazar, Graciella’s boss from the office, made an appearance. After that El Pescado simply stopped watching. With Christina gone, there was no longer any point.
He did, however, have a number of sources inside the police department in Panama City. Just to set his mind at ease, he made a few calls. Yes, Christina Miramar had been discovered dead in her bed on Thursday morning of the previous week. The cops had found no suicide note, but there were also no signs of any kind of violence and no indication of forced entry, either. Unused portions of a variety of prescription meds had been found at the scene. Evidence suggested that the prescription drugs Christina had ingested had been self-administered. Those, combined with her elevated blood alcohol content, had proved to be lethal. It occurred to Felix that the medical examiner might just as well have checked the box marked “accidental” or “suspicious,” but he had not. Christina’s death had been declared a suicide, and the case was closed.
Taking some slight comfort in that news, Felix allowed himself to give way to grief once more, sobbing away while Lupe, listening from the other room, wondered what in the hell was going on.
3
Like a kid eager for Christmas morning, Stuart Ramey, age forty-one and second-in-command at High Noon Enterprises in Cottonwood, Arizona, rolled out of bed bright and early that Friday morning, put some eggs on to boil, and then jumped into the shower. He was due to take a big step today, one he had never imagined possible—this morning he was scheduled for his first-ever lesson in driving a stick shift. Learning to drive a standard transmission was the last obstacle in Stu’s late-breaking campaign to become a licensed driver.
Orphaned at an early age, Stu had been raised by impoverished but loving grandparents. He’d been a “special needs” kid long before those words made their way into public education’s social consciousness. Now it was easy to recognize his high-functioning autism. Back in elementary and high school, though, he’d been considered a freak and had suffered through years of schoolyard bullying.
In all those years, he’d had only one friend, Roger McGeary, an equally geeky kid, who had been every bit as odd as Stuart. The two boys had bonded over a mutual love first of video games and later of computer coding. Buoyed by their friendship, the two outcasts, disparagingly referred to by their classmates as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, had almost made it through high school. Then, during Stu’s senior year, disaster struck. First Roger had moved away. Later on Stuart’s grandmother died, leaving the devastated teenager on his own.
The whole time Stuart was growing up, his grandparents hadn’t owned a vehicle. They had made do by relying on buses and the occasional taxi for their transportation needs. Not having a family car had made signing up for driver’s ed an impossibility for him, and once his world fell apart, he hadn’t revisited the issue.
At age seventeen and left to his own devices, Stuart had ended up in a homeless shelter, where someone had noticed his computing skills and brought him to the attention of B. Simpson. At the time, B. had been involved in a computer gaming start-up. Years later, when B. founded a cyber security company named High Noon Enterprises, he had brought Stu on board, and Stu had worked there ever since.
B., recognizing Stu’s deficiencies along with his talents, had found work-arounds for his inability to drive. For a long time, B. and his wife and partner, Ali Reynolds, had allowed Stu to live on-site by using the back room as an unofficial crash pad. A year or so earlier, they had gone to the county and obtained a zoning variance that enabled them to create a bona fide additional living unit, a studio apartment, in what had once been designated storage space on the far side of the computer lab. Happy with the new arrangement, there had been no indication that Stu would make any changes in the status quo as far as transportation was concerned.
But, weeks earlier, Stu’s life had taken a surprising turn when Julia Miller, the aunt of Stu’s long-ago chum Roger McGeary, had turned up on High Noon’s doorstep. She had come bearing the unwelcome news that Roger was dead, supposedly having taken his own life. She was there asking for High Noon to investigate the death.
To everyone’s amazement, including his own,
the previously reticent Stuart had somehow risen to the occasion. He had used his considerable technical skills to track down and unmask a serial killer named Owen Hansen, a computer genius who used cyber bullying techniques to drive desperate victims into taking their own lives. First Stuart had managed to track down one of Hansen’s potential victims in time to save the young woman’s life. Later on, Stuart had encountered the crazed killer on a lonely mountain road. On his own and armed with only his grandfather’s Swiss Army knife, Stuart had faced down the gun-wielding man, called his bluff, and watched his friend’s murderer leap to his own death.
To those around him, that incident seemed to spark an incredible turning point. It was as though Stuart Ramey had suddenly come into his own. Other than the people at work, Stuart had been relatively friendless for most of his life. Now, though, he seemed determined to reestablish and maintain his long-interrupted connection to Roger McGeary’s Aunt Julia.
In the intervening weeks he had made several visits to her ranch, Racehorse Rest, located near the town of Payson. The trip was more than seventy miles one way, and using a bus to get there and back wasn’t an option because there was no bus service between Cottonwood and Payson. Once, he had ridden there with his coworker Cami Lee. But at this juncture in his life, learning to drive was less threatening than the necessity of having to ask someone else for a ride. And so, two and a half decades after most of his contemporaries had learned to drive, Stuart had embarked on his own journey to become a licensed driver.
He’d had no difficulty passing the written exam, and people at work had been eager to help facilitate the process. Both Cami and Shirley Malone, High Noon’s new receptionist, had taken him for driving lessons. Ali’s friend, Sister Anselm, had even gotten into the act by letting him do a supervised driving excursion back and forth to Aunt Julia’s in the good sister’s Mini Cooper.
Two days earlier, after the last of those driving lessons in Cami’s Prius, she had pronounced him ready to go for the exam. That’s when the project had ground to a sudden halt over the stick shift stumbling block.
“Not before I can drive a standard transmission,” he had objected.
“A standard transmission?” Cami echoed. “Who even has a standard transmission these days, and why on earth would you want to drive one?”
“Because I have to be able to drive both,” Stuart had insisted. “If I can only drive automatics, I won’t be a real driver.”
“Whoever gave you that weird idea?” Cami wanted to know.
“Pops,” Stu answered simply, “my grandfather. He always used to say that people who could only drive automatics weren’t real drivers.”
Rather than argue the point, Cami had gone in search of a standard transmission solution. In the world of High Noon Enterprises, there were plenty of vehicles with automatic transmissions to choose from, but the only possible stick shift candidate was the antique Bronco owned by Ali Reynolds’s father, Bob Larson, and that was the vehicle Stu would be driving today. Ali had agreed to drive the Bronco over from Sedona that morning so Stu could take it for a supervised spin.
He was excited about the idea but worried, too. Physical coordination had never been his strong suit. He knew that he’d have to be able to operate the clutch, the gear shift, and the gas pedal all at the same time. He had watched YouTube videos of the process over and over, trying to get the hang of it. Stu was a wizard when it came to fingers on keyboards, but his oversized feet had always left him feeling clumsy, and he wasn’t the least bit sure he could make them work as needed.
Taking a coffee mug with him, he ventured into the lab. Despite the fact that it was half past six, Cami was already there. “Today’s the big stick shift day?” she asked.
He nodded. “Yup.”
“Don’t worry,” Cami told him. “You’ll be fine.”
“I hope so,” he said, “I really do.”
4
Ali Reynolds awakened that morning to find herself clinging to the far edge of the bed with both her elbows dangling over the side. Bella, their long-haired miniature dachshund, was pressed up against Ali’s shoulder. Turning over, Ali bodily moved the dog back toward the middle of the bed. Bella may have been a small dog, but she insisted on occupying a surprisingly large amount of the real estate in B.’s and Ali’s king-sized bed.
“Just wait ’til your daddy gets home tonight,” Ali warned the dog with a laugh. “No more shoulder-sleeping for you.”
Bella had been found abandoned in a casino parking lot the afternoon before B. and Ali’s wedding. The dog had been part of their marital equation from the very beginning. Initially the honeymooners had agreed that their bed would be totally off-limits as far as the dog was concerned, but they had soon succumbed to Bella’s single-minded dachshund determination. It was no longer a question of whether or not she would be in the bed so much as it was a matter of where she would be in the bed.
“Come on, girl,” Ali urged. “Time to go out.”
Bella was not your basic morning kind of dog. Her response was to burrow under the covers. Gathering her up, Ali opened the patio door and shoved the dog out into the enclosed side yard to do her business. The house on Sedona’s Manzanita Hills Road may have been well inside the city limits, but there were still too many predators in the neighborhood—coyotes, cougars, and eagles—to send the ten-pound dog out in the open without human supervision.
Coming back inside, Ali noticed that the air was laden with the enticing odor of baking bread. Summoned by the aroma, she headed for the kitchen. Leland Brooks, the man who had long served as Ali and B.’s majordomo, had recently retired and returned to the UK. His successor, a retired US Navy cook named Alonso Rivera, had slipped seamlessly into their lives, creating barely a ripple. His propensity for baking homemade bread was both a blessing and a curse, the latter when Ali was trying to curb her carbs or calories.
“You’re up early,” Alonso announced when she appeared in the kitchen doorway.
Nodding, Ali poured herself a mug of coffee. “I’m due in at seven. Today’s my day to be the student driver instructor,” she said.
“The stick shift issue?” Alonso asked.
“Yup,” she said. “You’ve got it.”
“Good luck with that,” Alonso told her. “But as far as dinner is concerned, everything here is under control. I’ll have the food ready and waiting in the warming drawer so you and B. will be able to eat whenever the shuttle drops him off and the two of you are ready.”
“Meatloaf?” Ali asked.
Alonso smiled. “Leland told me before he left that when the man of the house comes home from his travels, that’s what he wants, and that’s what he’ll get.”
Forty-five minutes later, Ali pulled into the side parking lot at Nick’s Auto Care at the far west end of Sedona. Her parents, Bob and Edie, had moved into an active-adult retirement community where they were allowed only one designated parking place. That one belonged to the car Edie referred to as her “toes-up Buick.” In the meantime, Bob’s beloved single-owner, seventies-era Bronco had been relegated to off-site parking. Nick, Bob’s longtime mechanic and pal, let him keep the aging SUV stored overnight in one of the garage’s unused bays. By the time Ali arrived and parked, Bob had moved the Bronco out of the garage and into the crisp morning air.
Bob may have agreed to let Ali use the vehicle for Stuart’s behind-the-wheel driving lesson, but he appeared to be having second thoughts. “I’m not too sure about this,” he warned, dangling the key ring over his daughter’s upturned hand. “This vehicle better come back to me tonight without a single dent or scratch!”
Suddenly, Ali Reynolds felt as though she had entered a time machine and had been booted back to her teenaged years when she herself had been a newly licensed driver. Her mother, who had always favored Oldsmobiles up until the time GM stopped making them, had handed Ali the keys to her current Olds and dispatched her daughter to pick up a few items from the grocery store. Ali had returned with the groceries, all r
ight, but in the process she had inadvertently backed into a bollard. The Olds had come home with a seriously crumpled rear bumper. It was a piece of history that she had never lived down, and one that was front and center when her father handed over the car keys to his vintage Bronco complete with its new paint job and reconditioned interior.
“Believe me,” Ali said, “we’ll be careful.”
“I’m sure you will be,” her father muttered, “but I’m not so sure about Stu Ramey. In this day and age what makes him think he needs to know how to drive a stick shift?”
“Beats me,” Ali said, climbing into the driver’s seat. “You’ll have to ask Stu the next time you see him.”
She was fastening her seat belt when her dad tapped on the driver’s window.
“Remember,” he said when she cranked down the window, “no off-roading.”
“Gotcha,” she replied. “Now are you sure you don’t want a lift back to Sedona Shadows?”
“Nope,” Bob said. “Your mom’s got a bridge game this morning. I’ll just hang out here and chew the fat with Nick. I’ll be able to get a ride back home if I need one.”
“Okay, then,” Ali said, shifting into gear. “I’m off.”
It was a bright, cloudless late-October day as Ali embarked on the half-hour drive from Sedona to Cottonwood, the home of High Noon’s corporate headquarters. The grass that had sprung up during the summer monsoon season had turned yellow in the sun, and the cottonwoods along the creek beds were ablaze in all their wondrous fall glory.