Shoot Don't Shoot

by J. A. Jance

  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 specter started up 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 Brady had planted years earlier. Neither dog moved. Meanwhile, the intruder was almost to the door, running full speed. Joanna struggled to loosen her 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.

  15

  On Wednesday before Thanksgiving, classes ended at noon. Within minutes, the parking lot was virtually empty. Since the Hohokam Resort Hotel was only a half mile away from campus, Joanna had no reason to pack very much to take with her from dorm to hotel room. If she discovered something missing over the weekend, she could always come back for it later. In fact, the dorm and the hotel were close enough that she and Jenny could easily walk over if they felt like it.

  Hauling one of her suitcases down from the shelf in the closet, Joanna tossed in two changes of clothing, her nightgown, and a selection of toiletries. She sighed at the size of the next reading assignment and dropped her copy of The Law Enforcement Handbook on top of the heap before she zipped the suitcase. On her way to the parking lot, Joanna stopped by the student lounge long enough to call home and ask Eva Lou to please bring along Jenny’s extra bathing suit just in case Ceci Grijalva wanted to try swimming in the hotel pool.

  “She’s the little girl whose mother died, isn’t she?” Eva Lou asked.

  “That’s the one.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Medium,” Joanna answered, thinking about the less than friendly Ernestina Duffy and her frail, oxygen-dependent husband. “Not as well as Jenny,” Joanna added. “Unfortunately for her, Ceci Grijalva doesn’t have the same kind of support system Jenny does.”

  “Poor little thing,” Eva clucked. “I’ll go hunt down that bathing suit just as soon as I get off the phone.”

  For a change there wasn’t anyone else waiting in line to use the phone. Dialing the Sheriff’s Department number, Joanna savored the privacy. Trying to handle both her personal and professional life from an overused pay phone in an audience-crowded room was aggravating at best.

  Once again, Kristin was chilly on the telephone, but she was also relatively efficient. “Chief Deputy Voland is out to lunch, and Chief Montoya’s still over in the jail kitchen.”

  “What’s he doing over there?” Joanna asked. “Micromanaging the cook?”

  “He’s been there all morning,” Kristin answered. “The last I heard he was supervising the crew of inmates who are washing all the walls.”

  “Washing walls? Maybe you’d better try connecting me to the jail kitchen,” Joanna said. A few moments later, Frank Montoya came on the line.

  “What’s my chief of administration doing washing walls?” Joanna asked without preamble.

  “Putting out fires,” Frank answered, “but I think we’ve got this little crisis pretty well under control.”

  “What crisis?” Joanna demanded.

  “The cook crisis,” Frank Montoya answered. “I wrote you a memo explaining the whole thing. Didn’t you get it?”

  “Not yet. My father-in-law picked up the packet a little while ago, but I won’t get it until later on tonight. What’s going on?”

  “As soon as the cook figured out I was on his case, he took off, but before he left, he cleaned out the refrigerator.”

  “Good deal,” Joanna said. “He cleaned the refrigerator, and now you’ve got a crew washing the walls. Sounds like the place is getting a thorough and much-needed housecleaning.”

  “Not really,” Frank Montoya returned wryly. “When I said cleaned out the refrigerator, I meant as in emptying it rather than making it germ-free. When I came in to work this morning, we almost had a riot on our hands. The cook didn’t show and the inmates were starving. I thought maybe he’d just overslept, but when I tried calling him, his landlady said he left.”

  “Left. You mean he moved out? Quit without giving notice?”

  “That’s right. Not only that, when I went home last night, there were a dozen frozen turkeys in the
walk-in cooler waiting to be cooked for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. Today they’re gone, every last one of them.”

  “Gone? He took them?” Joanna asked in disbelief. “All of them?”

  “That’s right, the turkey. He left town under the dark of night without leaving so much as a forwarding address. Nada.”

  This was just the kind of crisis someone like Marliss Shackleford could turn into a major incident. “Somebody should have called me,” Joanna said. “That settles it. I’ll call Eva Lou and tell her not to come up. I can cancel the hotel reservations and be home in just over four hours.”

  “No need to do that,” Frank reassured her. “I already told you. It’s pretty well handled.”

  “What did you do, cook breakfast yourself?”

  “Are you kidding? I don’t have a valid food handler’s permit. Besides, I’m a lousy cook. No, Ruby did the whole thing.”

  “Who the hell is Ruby?” Joanna demanded crossly. “Did you already hire another cook?”

  Frank paused momentarily before he answered. “Not exactly,” he said.

  “What exactly does ‘not exactly’ mean?” Joanna asked.

  “Ruby is Ruby Starr. I think I told you about her. She and her husband are the people who leased the Sunset Inn. She’s the one who did the actual cooking.”

  “In other words, the lady who took after her husband’s windshield with a sledgehammer and deadly intent is the one who cooked breakfast in my jail this morning?”

  “That’s right. When she went before Judge Moore, he set her bail at only five hundred dollars. I think everybody—including Burton Kimball, her lawyer—expected her to get bailed out, but she refused to go. She said if she left on bail that her husband would expect her to go to work and keep the restaurant open while he sits on his tail in his mother’s home over in Silver City. She said she’d rather stay in jail.

  “So this morning, when I heard the cook had skipped, I drafted Ruby. Right out of the cell and into the kitchen. Seemed like the only sensible thing to do. Breakfast may have been a few hours late, but it drew rave reviews from the inmates. Great biscuits. After that, I asked Ruby if she’d consider cooking Thanksgiving dinner. She turned me down cold. Said she wouldn’t set foot in that filthy kitchen again until after it got cleaned up. That’s when the most amazing thing happened. Once word got out that their Turkey Day dinner hung in the balance, I had inmates lining up and begging for me to let them help clean and cook.

  “Believe me, Ruby Starr’s a hell of a tough task-master. She’s been working everybody’s butts off all morning long, mine included.”

  “So you’ve got an almost clean kitchen and a cook,” Joanna said. “But you’re missing the fixings.”

  “I told you, Joanna, everything is under control.”

  “So what’s on the revised menu?”

  “Turkey, dressing, and all the trimmings,” Frank answered, sounding enormously pleased with himself.

  “Wait a minute,” Joanna objected. “Where are you going to find a dozen unsold, thawed turkeys in Bisbee the day before Thanksgiving, and how are you going to pay for them twice without cutting into next month’s food budget?”

  “That’s the slick thing. Ruby’s lawyer is taking care of all that.”

  “Burton Kimball?”

  “That’s right. He and his wife donated the whole dinner,” Frank answered smugly. “All of it.”

  “How come?”

  “He says with all the defense work he does, most of the inmates in the jail are clients of his, one way or the other, anyway. He said it was about time he and Linda did something for the undeserving poor for a change. As soon as Burton heard Ruby was willing to cook, he sent Linda to the store to buy up replacement turkeys. They both seemed to be getting a real kick out of it.”

  Good-hearted people like Linda and Burton Kimball were part of what made Bisbee a good place to live. Part of what made it home.

  “That’s amazing,” Joanna said, “especially considering all they’ve been through in the past few weeks.”

  Two weeks earlier, Burton Kimball’s adoptive father and sister had both been killed. He had also been divested of whatever positive memories he might have cherished concerning his own biological father. In the face of that kind of personal tragedy, Burton Kimball’s selfless generosity was all the more remarkable.

  “All I can say is good work, Frank. That was an ingenious solution to a tough problem.”

  Frank laughed. “That’s what you hired me for, isn’t it?”

  “I guess it is.”

  Just as Joanna was signing off, the door to the student lounge popped open, and Leann Jessup walked inside carrying a video. “There you are,” she said. “There wasn’t any answer in your room, but your Blazer was still in the parking lot so I figured I’d find you here somewhere. My mom just dropped off her tape of the news from last night. She says we’re both on it. She dropped it by in hopes your family could get a look at it over the weekend because she’d really like to have it back in time to take it to work next week.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” Joanna said. “We’re booked into the Hohokam on a special holiday package that offers kids under sixteen the use of two free videos a day during their stay. That must mean there are VCRs available. If push comes to shove, we could always come back here and ask Dave Thompson to let us use the one in his classroom.”

  “Fat chance of that.” Leann laughed. She sobered a moment later. “How soon does your company show up?” she asked.

  “Not until eight or later. They can’t even leave Bisbee until after Jenny gets out of school. It’s a four-hour drive.”

  “How about some lunch, then?” Leann suggested. “I’m hungry.”

  “So am I, now that you mention it,” Joanna said. “What do you want to eat?”

  “I wish I knew somewhere around here to get a decent hamburger,” Leann moaned.

  Joanna laughed. “Boy, do I have a deal for you,” she said. “Come with me.”

  By then Joanna wasn’t particularly worried about going back to the Roundhouse Bar and Grill with Leann Jessup in tow. Of all the people Joanna knew, Leann was the one most likely to be sympathetic and understanding of Joanna’s more than passing interest in a case that was, on the face of it, none of her business. Besides, what were the odds that they would actually encounter Butch Dixon? Since he was evidently the nighttime bartender, he probably wouldn’t be anywhere near his nighttime place of employment at one o’clock in the afternoon.

  At least that was Joanna’s line of reasoning as she and Leann Jessup walked out to the Blazer and then drove north to Old Peoria. She was wrong, of course. Butch Dixon was the first person she saw once her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the darkened room. He was hunkered over the bar, eating a sandwich. A yellow legal pad with a pen on top of it lay beside an almost empty plate.

  “Why if it isn’t the sheriff of Cochise, star of News at Ten.” He grinned in greeting when he saw Joanna. “And this must be your sidekick. You both looked great on TV.”

  “You saw us?” Leann asked.

  “That’s right. So what will Madam Sheriff have today, the regular?”

  Joanna smiled as she sat down next to him. “You make me sound like a real barfly.”

  “Aren’t you?” he returned. “Is your friend here a heavy drinker, same as you?”

  Leann glanced questioningly in Joanna’s direction. “Not at one o’clock in the afternoon,” she protested. “I’ll have a Coke.”

  “Pepsi’s all we have. Diet or regular?”

  “Diet.”

  “Hey, Phil,” Butch Dixon called to a bartender who was only then emerging from the door that evidently led to the kitchen. “How about bringing a pair of Diet Pepsis for the ladies.” He focused once more on Joanna. “You looked fine on the tube, but I think you’re a lot better looking in person.”

  She laughed. “Flattery will get you nowhere,” she said.

  “Rats,” he returned.

  Joan
na laughed again. “Besides, not everybody liked our performances nearly as much as you did. Dave Thompson, the morning lecturer, climbed all over us about it this morning.”

  “That’s right,” Leann put in on her own. “He seems to think he’s running a convent instead of a police academy. He wants his students to live cloistered lives with no outside distractions.”

  “That would be a genuine shame.” Butch Dixon grinned, looking at Joanna as he spoke. “Not only is this lady good-looking, she’s a real mind reader, too. I was just about to finish my opus here and was wondering how to get it to her. The next thing I know, she shows up on my doorstep.”

  “This is Butch Dixon,” Joanna explained to Leann Jessup. “I asked him to write me a brief summary of what he could remember from the night Serena Grijalva died. Mr. Dixon here was one of the last people to see her alive.”

  “When you say it that way, you make me sound like a prime suspect,” Butch Dixon returned darkly. “I hope I’ve remembered all the important stuff, although I don’t see what good it’s going to do. I gave the exact same information to that first homicide detective when she came around asking questions right after it happened. As far as I can tell, it didn’t make a bit of difference.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were conducting your own independent investigation,” Leann said accusingly to Joanna.

  Joanna shrugged and tried to laugh it off. “I can’t afford to advertise it, now can I? And God knows I shouldn’t be doing it, especially since there’s more than enough going on in my own little bailiwick. One case in particular could be called the Case of the Missing Cook.”

  “Are we talking about a real cook?” Leann asked. “It sounds like one of those Agatha Christie mysteries.”

  “That’s ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook,’” Butch Dixon said in a casual aside without bothering to look up from his pen and paper.