Tombstone Courage
Page 30
“Holly, come!”
But the cord had frayed too much. The choke chain of Amy’s voice didn’t work as it must have in the past. Holly Patterson didn’t move.
“She’s not a dog, Amy,” Joanna said. “She doesn’t have to obey you just because you issue an order. What else have you made her forget?”
“I remember the rocks,” Holly said softly, almost to herself. “Rocks that were so big, I could barely lift them.”
“Holly!” Amy warned, but her voice had no effect.
“I carried them for her one at a time. Carried the rocks over to the hole. I could hear him the whole time. He was down there in the hole, crying and begging her to stop, please stop. But she wouldn’t. Mother kept right on throwing the rocks down there…”
“Holly…”
The tears had stopped. Holly’s voice had taken on a strange, dreamlike quality. It was as though she wasn’t telling a story that had happened almost half a century ago but reporting something she was watching right then, the action being replayed on the indelible screen of a much younger mind.
“…and crying and saying he’d never do it again. He’d never hurt anyone ever, ever again. And then Father was there. He grabbed her by the arms. He held her and made her stop. I remember now. He held us both. And he said it was going to be okay.”
The whole time Holly was speaking, Joanna never took her eyes off Amy. For some time after Holly finished, they were all three quiet.
“You’re finished, aren’t you?” Joanna said at last to Amy Baxter. “This shoots your credibility right down the toilet.”
“You think someone’s going to believe her?” Amy said contemptuously. “If she remembered one thing wrong, the rest of it may be wrong as well. People will just call her a liar.”
“I’m not lying!” Holly said. “I’m telling the truth. Why did you do it?”
Amy shook her head. “This is stupid. It’s too cold to stand outside arguing like this. I’m leaving.”
She turned and started back toward the edge of the dump. If she was walking away with no further threat, it seemed as though the confrontation was over. In the sudden quiet, Joanna could hear sirens now. A whole flock of them, so perhaps backup help was on its way.
Meanwhile Holly was pulling herself up onto her hands and knees. “Why did you?” she said again. “Why did you make me throw those rocks again, just like I did before. You said it was Uncle Thorny and that I was finally going to get rid of him. But it wasn’t. It was my father. My God, Amy! I killed him, didn’t I? You made me kill my own father!”
As she spoke, Holly’s voice keened up in pitch, rising on the cold air like the howl of a wounded wild thing. And the sound of that desperate voice acted like a string on her body, pulling her collapsed form up from the ground the way a puppeteer gives life to a limp marionette.
Amy didn’t pause or look back. Holly, on her feet now, lurched after Amy.
Joanna, watching Amy over the top of the berm, making sure she intended no further harm, saw too late that Holly was flailing after Amy.
Afterward, there was never any clear way to tell exactly what happened—whether Holly Patterson reached out for Amy to grab her and stop her or whether she pushed her over the edge. For a moment, the two of them grappled there together—tottering on the brink, hanging in space. And then they both disappeared.
Two separate and distinct screams floated back up to the top of the dump. Joanna Brady heard them both, heard the clatter of falling rocks and boulders that were jarred loose as they fell. And then there was silence.
A moment later, Dick Voland’s voice floated up to her. “Sheriff Brady,” he shouted. “Sheriff Joanna Brady! Where the hell are you?”
“Here,” she called back. “Up here on top!”
Huffing and puffing, out of breath from a mad scramble up the side of the dump, Chief Deputy Dick Voland was the first person to reach Joanna’s side.
“Are you all right?” he demanded, throwing his own jacket around her quaking shoulders.
“I’m okay.”
“The hell you are.” He stomped away from her to the top of the berm. “We need another ambulance up here,” he shouted. “Now! And blankets. On the double!”
Voland came back. Somehow Joanna’s legs gave way, and she sank back to the ground. Dick Voland knelt beside her. “The city ambulance is down below. I’ve got cars and an ambulance coming here, but they’ll have to come by way of the main gate with a P.D. watchman escort.”
Joanna nodded through chattering teeth that made speech impossible.
“Lie down,” Dick Voland urged. “Lie down before you fall down!”
Joanna did her best to obey. The two hands that eased her down to the ground were both strong and amazingly gentle.
“Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. “Just…co…co…cold!”
Two deputies and a pair of emergency medical technicians scrambled over the top of the berm. Blankets appeared out of nowhere. One of the EMTs slapped a blood-pressure cuff around Joanna’s arm, while the other helped wrap her in the blanket. “How are the other two?” Voland asked. The EMT shook his head and didn’t answer. Which, in itself, was answer enough.
Voland knelt in front of Joanna and examined her stained and bleeding feet, watching her face anxiously while the medics went to work. As it became clear Joanna wasn’t badly injured his anxiety turned to anger.
“If you were one of my deputies,” he growled, “I’d fire your ass in a minute! What the hell do you mean trying to pull some kind of rescue stunt without a damn word? If that lawyer hadn’t lost his nerve and yelled for help, it could have been much worse.”
Joanna tried to answer but couldn’t. Right then talking was out of the question.
“Forget it!” Voland barked. “And by the way, forget about that letter I gave you. If you want to fire me, fine. But if you’re going to pull this kind of damn-fool stunt, you need me too damned bad for me to quit.”
Thirty-Seven
THINGS BECAME hazy after that. Gradually, Joanna realized there were emergency lights coming toward them on the road that ran along the outside edge of the dump. The ambulance that arrived was an old one that Phelps Dodge still maintained on its own property.
The next thing Joanna remembered was arriving at the hospital. An emergency-room nurse approached the gurney. Brandishing a pair of scissors in one hand, she had a determined businesslike look on her face, but she spoke like an effusive kindergarten teacher.
“I’ll just help you out of those wet things,” she said, starting to peel off the wet layers. “We’ll get you wrapped up in some nice warm blankets.”
Joanna looked down at what was left of her torn blouse and once-good wool skirt. The material on both was a yellow, mottled brown. “Don’t cut off my clothes,” Joanna said. “I can take them off myself. This is an almost new outfit. I’ll have it cleaned.”
“Forget it, honey,” the nurse told her. “What ails these clothes no dry cleaner in the world is going to fix.”
With that, she started with what was left of Joanna’s panty hose and began working her way up. Only when she got as far as the bulletproof vest and shoulder holster, was the nurse stymied enough to let Joanna remove them under her own steam.
Jenny arrived at the emergency room, big-eyed and frightened, as the doctor finished cleaning and bandaging Joanna’s stained and lacerated feet.
“Mom, are you okay? What happened?”
Two more people were dead—Amy Baxter and Holly in addition to Harold Patterson. Joanna was struggling to figure what part of the responsibility for those two additional deaths was hers alone.
“It’s a new job,” Joanna said. “I think it’s going to take a while to learn how to do it.”
Eva Lou Brady appeared and said she was taking Jenny home with her and that she’d make sure the dogs got fed. “Thank you,” Joanna told her.
The phone in Joanna’s room rang almost before the nurses lifted her off the gurn
ey and loaded her into the bed. “How long are you in for?” Adam York asked.
“Just overnight I think. How did you know to call me here?”
“I tried to call you about Yuri Malakov’s prints. He checks out, by the way. According to my sources, there’s nothing to worry about as far as he’s concerned. When I called your office to let you know, they told me there’d been a problem with you. What the hell happened?”
Joanna told him.
“Tombstone Courage,” he said when she finished. “Not a fatal case, at least not for you, but Tombstone Courage all the same.”
“What’s that?”
“Have you started reading that book I sent you?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Where is it?”
“Out at the house.”
“Have someone go get it and bring it to you. You read every word of that book before you leave that hospital. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Marianne Maculyea brought the book to the hospital later that evening along with a suitcase of toiletries. Despite the disapproval of the nurses, Joanna read Officer Down all the way through. It was an awful book. An appalling book. One at a time, it listed and gave horrifying examples of the ten fatal errors police officers make.
Number eight was Tombstone Courage. Failure to call for backup. Adam York was right. Sheriff Joanna Brady had been guilty as charged.
It was Wednesday of the following week when Joanna had her appointment with Burton Kimball to make arrangements to draw up the guardianship. Once she had asked Jeff and Marianne and they had agreed to serve, she didn’t want any time to pass before getting the details ironed out. Joanna knew now that lightning did strike the same place on occasion, and she wanted to be prepared. She was due to leave for Peoria the following Monday to take her six-week county-paid training course, and she didn’t want Jennifer’s guardianship hanging fire while she was gone.
When Joanna looked up from signing the last documents, she caught Burton Kimball staring at her. “I’m glad you weren’t hurt worse than you were,” he said.
Joanna blushed and looked down at her feet. She was still clunking around with bandages covered by rubber-soled splints.
“I never saw Holly going after Amy Baxter until it was too late. If I had seen her in time, maybe I could have stopped her.”
“No,” Burton said. “Don’t blame yourself. It wasn’t your fault, any more than it was anyone else’s. Everyone did the best they could under terrible circumstances.”
“Was it deliberate, do you think?” Joanna asked. “Or was it an accident?”
“It doesn’t really matter, does it?” Burton Kimball said. “What does matter now is that it’s over.”
“Is a tragedy like that ever over?” Too many people were dead, Joanna thought. Too many lives were changed.
Burton Kimball sighed and opened his desk drawer. “I think such things can come to an end,” he said. “Ivy gave me this. It’s a letter she found in Uncle Harold’s safety-deposit box. She told me it was up to me whether or not I showed it to you.”
He put it on the desk, but Joanna made no effort to pick it up. “What is it?” she asked.
“It’s Aunt Emily’s confession,” he said. “To my father’s murder. She didn’t want anyone else to be blamed. She caught my father…” He broke off and couldn’t continue.
Joanna picked the letter up and read it. Afterward she gazed thoughtfully out Burton Kimball’s window at the gray mountainside. Finally she put the letter back in the envelope.
“I don’t think anyone else needs to see that letter, Burton,” she said quietly. “You never mentioned it, and I never saw it. Understand?”
He nodded. “Thank you,” he said, and put the letter away.
“How is Ivy, by the way?” Joanna asked.
For the first time, the somber look on Burton Kimball’s face lightened. “She’s having a hell of a time with morning sickness. Linda says it’ll most likely be a boy. She says morning sickness is always worse with boys.”
Joanna was genuinely surprised. “I don’t believe it. Ivy Patterson pregnant? I thought she was tutoring Yuri in English!”
Burton grinned. “It is something, isn’t it?” he said. “You’d think someone her age would know better than to let that happen, wouldn’t you? But I guess she just got carried away. Sowing her wild oats, as they say. Uncle Harold would be thrilled if he knew it. In fact, if it is a boy, I hope they name it after him.”
“So do I,” Joanna said.
The following Friday morning, Frank Montoya, formerly the Willcox city marshal and now the newly appointed chief deputy for administration, was present for his first-ever Cochise County Sheriff’s Department briefing.
With Joanna going off to class for six weeks the following Monday morning, she had wanted to fill that position as soon as possible. She wanted someone who was on her side keeping an eye on things in her absence.
She knew now that she could pull her own weight around the department, but in choosing a right-hand man, she had decided on Frank Montoya, her old opponent.
When Dick Voland and Ernie Carpenter left Joanna’s office after the briefing, Frank stayed on for a few minutes. “Are you sure Dick Voland won’t shoot me in the back while you’re gone?” Frank asked with a grin.
“As long as you don’t do anything stupid,” she told him. “Both Dick Voland and Ernie Carpenter are real hard on stupidity. That’s why those two guys have been around so long. That’s why we need them.”
“Whatever you say, Chief,” Frank said.
He went out and closed the door. Joanna leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes for a moment. Then she opened them and looked down at the worn buffalo-head nickel she was holding in her hand.
All during the meeting, she’d been holding Andy’s nickel concealed in the palm of her hand, holding it for luck.
After a moment, she opened her top desk drawer and dropped the nickel back inside. She wasn’t going to take that to Peoria to class with her. She’d leave it there in Bisbee in the sheriff’s cherrywood desk.
She’d leave it where it belonged.
About the Author
J.A. JANCE is the New York Times bestselling author of the J. P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, three interrelated thrillers featuring the Walker family, and Edge of Evil. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.
www.jajance.com
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ALSO BY J. A. JANCE
Joanna Brady Mysteries
Desert Heat
Tombstone Courage
Shoot/Don’t Shoot
Dead to Rights
Skeleton Canyon
Rattlesnake Crossing
Outlaw Mountain
Devil’s Claw
Paradise Lost
Partner in Crime
Exit Wounds
J. P. Beaumont Mysteries
Until Proven Guilty
Injustice for All
Trial by Fury
Taking the Fifth
<
br /> Improbable Cause
A More Perfect Union
Dismissed with Prejudice
Minor in Possession
Payment in Kind
Without Due Process
Failure to Appear
Lying in Wait
Name Withheld
Breach of Duty
Birds of Prey
Partner in Crime
Long Time Gone
and
Hour of the Hunter
Kiss of the Bees
Day of the Dead
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
TOMBSTONE COURAGE. Copyright © 2006 by J.A. Jance. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition July 2006 ISBN 9780061754340
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