by Diana Palmer
The weather was nuts. There had been epic drought throughout the whole southern tier of America, from Arizona to Florida, and there had been horrible wildfires in the southwestern states. Triple-digit temperatures had gone all summer in south Texas. There had been horrible flooding on the Mississippi River due to the large snowmelt, from last winter’s unusually deep snows up north.
Now it was November and Gwen was actually sweating long before she reached her car, although it had been chilly this morning. She took off her jacket. At least the car had air-conditioning, and she was turning it on, even if it was technically almost winter. Idly, she wondered how people had lived in this heat before air-conditioning was invented. It couldn’t have been an easy life, especially since most Texans of the early twentieth century had worked on the land. Imagine, having to herd and brand cattle in this sort of heat, much less plow and plant!
Gwen got into her car and drove by the crime lab to see if Alice had found anything on that digital camera. In fact, she had. There were a lot of photos of people who were probably friends—Gwen could use face recognition software to identify them, hopefully—and there was one odd-looking man standing a little distance behind a couple who was smiling into the camera against the background of the apartment complex where the victim had lived. That was interesting and suspicious. She’d have to check that man out. He didn’t look as if he belonged in such a setting. It was a mid-range apartment complex, and the man was dingy and ill kempt and staring a little too intently. She drove back to her precinct.
Her mind was still on Marquez, on what she knew, and he didn’t. She hoped he wasn’t going to have too hard a time with his true history, when the truth came out.
Barbara glared at her son. “Can’t you just peel the tomato, sweetie, without taking out most of it except the core?”
He grimaced. “Sorry,” he said, wielding the paring knife with more care as he went to work on what looked like a bushel of tomatoes, a gift from an organic gardener with a hothouse, that his mother was canning in her kitchen at home. Canning jars simmered in a huge tub of water, getting ready to be filled with fragrant tomato slices and then processed in the big pressure cooker. He glared at it.
“I hate those things,” he muttered. “Even the safest ones are dangerous.”
“Baloney,” she said inelegantly. “Give me those.”
She took the bowl of tomatoes and dunked them into a pot of boiling water. She left them there for a couple of minutes and fished them out in a colander. She put them in the sink in front of Rick. “There. Now they’ll skin. I keep telling you this is a more efficient way than trying to cut the skins off. But you don’t listen, my dear.”
“I like skinning them,” he said with a dark-eyed smile in her direction. “It’s an outlet for my frustrations.”
“Oh?” She didn’t look at him, deliberately. “What sort of frustrations?”
“There’s this new woman at work,” he said grimly.
“Gwen.” She nodded.
He dropped the knife, picked it back up and stared at her.
“You talk about her all the time.”
“I do?” It was news to him. He didn’t realize that.
She nodded as she skinned tomatoes. “She trips over things that she doesn’t see, she messes up crime scenes, she spills coffee, she can’t find her cell phone…” She glanced at him. He was still standing there, with the knife poised over a tomato. “Get busy, there, those tomatoes won’t peel themselves.”
He groaned.
“Just think how nice they’ll taste in one of my beef stew recipes,” she coaxed. “Go on, peel.”
“Why can’t we just get one of those things that sucks the air out of bags and freeze them instead?”
“What if we have a major power outage that lasts for days and days?” she returned.
He thought for a minute. “I’ll go buy twenty bags of ice and several of those foam coolers.”
She laughed. “Yes, but we can’t tell how the power grid is going to cope if we have one of those massive CMEs like the Carrington Event in 1859.”
He blinked. “Excuse me?”
“There was a massive coronal mass ejection in 1859 called the Carrington Event,” she explained. “When it hit earth, all the electrics on the planet went crazy. Telegraph lines burned up and telegraph units caught fire.” She glanced at him. “There wasn’t much electricity back in those days—it was in its infancy. But imagine if such a thing happened today, with our dependence on electricity. Everything is connected to the grid these days, banks, communications corporations, pharmacies, government, military and the list goes on and on. Even our water and power are controlled by computers. Just imagine if we had no way to access our computers.”
He whistled. “I was in the grocery store one day when the computers went offline. They couldn’t process credit cards. Most people had to leave. I had enough cash for bread and milk. Then another time the computers in the pharmacy went down, when you had to have those antibiotics for the sinus infection last winter. I had to come home and get the checkbook and go back. People without credit cards had real problems.”
“See?” She went back to her tomatoes.
“I suppose it would be a pretty bad thing. Is it going to happen, you think?”
“Someday, certainly. The sun has eleven year cycles, you know, with a solar minimum and a solar maximum. The next solar maximum, some scientists say, is in 2012. If we’re going to get hit, that would have my vote for the timeline.”
“Twenty-twelve,” he groaned, rolling his eyes. “We had this guy come in the office and tell us we needed to put out a flyer.”
“What about?”
“The fact that the world is ending in 2012 and we have to have tin-foil hats to protect us from electromagnetic pulses.”
“Ah. EMPs,” she said knowledgeably. “Actually, I think you’d have to be in a modified and greatly enlarged version of a Leiden jar to be fully protected. So would any computer equipment you wanted to save.” She glanced at him. “They’re developing weapons like that, you know,” she added. “All it would take is one nicely placed EMP and our military computers would go down like tenpins.”
He put down the knife. “Where do you learn all this stuff?” he asked, exasperated.
“On the internet.” She pulled an iPod out of her pocket and showed it to him. “I have Wi-Fi in the house, you know. I just connect to all the appropriate websites.” She checked her bookmarks. “I have one for space weather, three radars for terrestrial weather and about ten covert sites that tell you all the stuff the government won’t tell you…”
“My mother, the conspiracy theorist,” he moaned.
“You won’t hear this stuff on the national news,” she said smartly. “The mainstream media is controlled by three major corporations. They decide what you’ll get to hear. And mostly it’s what entertainer got drunk, what television show is getting the ratings and what politician is patting himself on the back or running for reelection. In my day—” she warmed to her theme “—we had real news on television. It was local and we had real reporters out gathering it. Like the Jacobsville paper still does,” she added.
“I know about the Jacobsville paper,” he said with a sigh. “We hear that Cash Grier spends most of his time trying to protect the owner from getting assassinated. She knows all the drug distribution points and the drug lords by name, and she’s printing them.” He shook his head. “She’s going to be another statistic one day. They’ve killed plenty of newspaper publishers and reporters over the border for less. She’s rocking the boat.”
“Somebody needs to rock it,” Barbara muttered as she peeled another tomato skin off and tossed it into a green bag to be used for mulch in her garden. She never wasted any organic refuse. “People are dying so that another generation can become addicted to drugs.”
“I can’t argue that point,” he said. “The problem is that nothing law enforcement is doing is making much of a dent in drug trafficking. I
f there’s a market, there’s going to be a supply. That’s just the way things are.”
“They say Hayes Carson actually talked to Minette Raynor about it.”
That was real news. Minette owned the Jacobsville Times. She had two stepsiblings, Shane, who was twelve, and Julie, who was six. She’d loved her stepmother very much. Her stepmother and her father had died within weeks of each other, leaving a grieving Minette with two little children to raise, a newspaper to run and a ranch to manage. She had a manager to handle the ranch, and her great-aunt Sarah lived with her and took care of the kids after school so that Minette could keep working. Minette was twenty-five now and unmarried. She and Hayes Carson didn’t get along. Hayes blamed her, God knew why, for his younger brother’s drug-related death, even after Rachel Conley left a confession stating that she’d given Bobby Carson, Hayes’s brother, the drugs that killed him.
Rick chuckled. “If there’s ever a border war, Minette will stand in the street pointing a finger at Hayes so the invaders can get him first.”
“I wonder,” Barbara mused. “Sometimes I think where there’s antagonism, there’s also something deeper. I’ve seen people who hate each other end up married.”
“Cash Grier and his Tippy,” Rick mused.
“Yes, and Stuart York and Ivy Conley.”
“Not to mention half a dozen others. Jacobsville is growing by leaps and bounds.”
“So is Comanche Wells. We’ve got new people there, too.” She was peeling faster. “Did you notice that Grange bought a ranch in Comanche Wells, next to the property that his boss owns?”
Rick pursed his sensual lips. “Which boss?”
She blinked at him. “What do you mean, which boss?”
“He works as ranch manager for Jason Pendleton. But he also works on the side for Eb Scott,” he said. “You didn’t hear this from me, but he was involved in the Pendleton kidnapping,” he added. “He went to get Gracie Pendleton back when she was kidnapped by that exiled South American dictator, Emilio Machado.”
“Machado.”
“Yes.” He peeled the tomato slowly. “He’s a conundrum.”
“What do you mean?”
“He started out, we learned, as a farm laborer down in Mexico, from the time he was about ten years old. He was involved in protests against foreign interests even as a teenager. But he got tired of scratching dirt for a living. He could play the guitar and sing, so he worked bars for a while and then through a contact, he got a job as an entertainer on a cruise ship. That got boring. He signed on with a bunch of mercs and became known internationally as a crusader against oppression. Afterward, he went to South America and hired on with another paramilitary group that was fighting to preserve the way of life of the native people in Barrera, a little nation in the Amazon bordering Peru. He helped the paramilitary unit free a tribe of natives from a foreign corporation that was trying to kill them to get the oil-rich land on which they were living. He developed a taste for defending the underdog, moved up in the ranks of the military until he became a general.” He smiled. “It seems that he was a natural leader, because when the small country’s president died four years ago, Machado was elected by acclamation.” He glanced at her. “Do you realize how rare that is, even for a small nation?”
“If people loved him so much, how is it that he’s in Mexico kidnapping people to get money to retake his country?”
“He wasn’t ousted by the people, but by a vicious and bloodthirsty military subordinate who knew when and how to strike, while Machado was on a trip to a neighboring country to sign a trade agreement and offer an alliance against foreign corporate takeovers.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It’s sort of privileged info, so you can’t share it,” he told her. “Anyway, the subordinate killed Machado’s entire staff, and sent his secret police to shut down newspapers and television and radio stations. Overnight, influential people ended up in prison. Educators, politicians, writers—anyone who might threaten the new regime. There have been hundreds of murders, and now the subordinate, Pedro Mendez by name, is allying himself with drug lords in a neighboring country. It seems that cocaine grows quite nicely in Barrera and poor farmers are being ‘encouraged’ to grow it instead of food crops on their land. Mendez is also nationalizing every single business so that he has absolute control.”
“No wonder the general is trying to retake his country,” she said curtly. “I hope he makes it.”
“So do I,” Rick replied. “But I can’t say that in public,” he added. “He’s wanted in this country for kidnapping. It’s a capital offense. If he’s caught and convicted he could wind up with a death penalty.”
She winced. “I don’t condone how he’s getting the money,” she replied. “But he’s going to use it for a noble reason.”
“Noble.” He chuckled.
“That’s not funny,” she said shortly.
“I’m not laughing at the word. It’s Gwen. She goes around mumbling that she’s Don Quixote.”
She laughed out loud. “What?”
He shook his head. “Rogers told me. It seems that our newest detective won’t give out on dates and she groups herself with Don Quixote, who tried to restore honor and morality to a decadent world.”
“My, my!” She pursed her lips and smiled secretively.
“I don’t want to marry Gwen Cassaway,” he said at once. “I just thought I’d mention that, because I can read minds, and I don’t like what you’re thinking.”
“She’s a nice girl.”
“She’s a woman.”
“She’s a nice girl. She has a very idealistic and romantic attitude for someone who lives in the city. And I ought to know. I have women from cities coming through here all the time, talking about unspeakable things right in public with the whole world listening.” Her lips made a thin line. “Do you know, Grange was having lunch next to a table of them where they were discussing men’s, well, intimate men parts,” she amended, clearing her throat, “and Grange got up from his chair, told them what he thought of them for discussing a bedroom topic in public in front of decent people and he walked out.”
“What did they do?”
“One of them laughed. One of the others cried. Another said he needed to start living in the real world instead of small town ‘stupidville.’” She grinned. “Of course, she said it after he’d already left. While he was talking, they didn’t say a word. But they left soon after. I was glad. I can’t choose my clientele and I’ve only ever ordered one person to leave my restaurant since I’ve owned it,” she added.
She dragged herself back to the present. “But the topic of conversation was getting to me, too. People need to talk about intimate things in private, not in a public place with their voices raised. We don’t all think alike.”
“Only in some ways,” he pointed out, and hugged her impulsively. “You’re a nice mother. I’m so lucky to have you for an adoptive parent.”
She hugged him back. “You’ve enriched my life, my sweet.” She sighed, closing her eyes in his warm embrace. “When I lost Bart, I wanted to die, too. And then your mother and stepfather died, and there you were, as alone as I was. We needed each other.”
“We did.” He moved away and smiled affectionately. “You took on a big burden with me. I was a bad boy.”
She groaned and rolled her eyes. “Were you ever! Always in fights, in school and out. I spent half my life in the principal’s office and once at a school board meeting where they were going to vote to throw you right out of school altogether and put you in alternative school.” Her face hardened. “In their dreams!”
“Yes, you took a lawyer to the meeting and buffaloed them. First time it ever happened, I heard later.”
“I was very mad.”
“I felt really bad about that,” he said. “But I put my nose to the grindstone after, and tried hard to make it up to you.”
“Joined the police force, went to night school and got your associate degree
, went to the San Antonio Police Department and worked your way up in the ranks to sergeant,” she agreed, smiling. “Made me so proud!”
He hugged her again. “I owe it all to you.”
“No. You owe it to your hard work. I may have helped, but you pulled yourself up.”
He kissed her forehead. “Thank you. For everything.”
“You’re my son. I love you very much.”
He cleared his throat. Emotions were difficult for him, especially considering his job. “Yeah. Me, too.”
She grinned. The smile faded as she searched his large, dark eyes. “Do you ever wonder about your mother’s past?”
His eyebrows shot up. “What a question!” He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Do you know anything about her friends? About any male friends she had before she married your stepfather?”
He shrugged. “Not really. She didn’t talk about her relationships. Well, I wasn’t old enough for her to confide in me, either, you know. She never was one to talk about intimate things,” he said quietly. “Not even about my real father. She said that he died, but she never talked about him. She was very young when I was born. She did say she’d done things she wanted forgiveness for, and she went to confession a lot.” He studied her closely. “You must have had some reason for asking me that.”
She put her lips tightly together. “Something I overheard. I wasn’t supposed to be listening.”
“Come on, tell me,” he said when she hesitated.
“Cash Grier was having lunch with some fed. They were discussing Machado. The fed mentioned a woman named Dolores Ortíz who had some connection to General Machado when he lived in Mexico.”
Chapter Two
“Dolores Ortíz?” he asked, the paring knife poised in midair. “That was my mother’s maiden name.”
“I know.”
Rick frowned. “You mean my mother might have been romantically involved with Emilio Machado?”
“I got that impression,” Barbara said, nodding. “But I wasn’t close enough to hear the entire conversation. I just got bits and pieces of it.”