Desert Heat

by J. A. Jance

  She envied them all-the birds, the rabbits, and yes, even the snakes-because they at least were free to come and go as they liked. Angie Kellogg wasn’t.

  All morning long she had itched to go check in the coat closet and see if this was the morning when the newest briefcase would appear, hut she hadn’t dared, not with Tony in the house and only asleep. She had learned that he was a very light sleeper, and she didn’t want him to catch her prowling around where she shouldn’t. Later on, if he went out, which he usually did, she’d have ample opportunity to check.

  Tony knew a lot about her, but not everything. Her ability to pick the locks on briefcases, for instance, was a carefully guarded secret. Every time the doorbell rang like that in the middle of the night, she knew that in the morning a different briefcase would show up on the shelf in the entryway closet. It would stay there, for a day or two, until Tony was called out of town, then the briefcase would disappear, along with the banded packets of currency inside it.

  Angie understood the connection between the intermittent arrival of money and Tony’s subsequent sexual prowess. Tony regarded himself as a hell of a lay, but it was only when the money came or when he went off to do what he called a consulting job that he could come up with a decent hard-on, and those didn’t last long. By the next day, he’d be after her, demanding satisfaction despite his perpetually soft dick and blaming her when it didn’t work. Angie was enough of a pro to make it happen most of the time, but it was hard work, much harder than she had envisioned when Tony Vargas plucked her off the mean streets of East L.A. After the brutality of her last pimp, Tony had seemed a safe haven, at first. Now, though, she realized she had moved from frying pan to fire, and once more she was searching for a way out.

  From the bedroom she heard Tony cough his first hacking cough of the day and flick open his cigarette lighter. He was awake then, finally, and had lit up the morning’s first smoke. It was amazing to her that in a house that spacious-Tony said there were almost 5,000 square feet under the roof-that she could still hear the tiny click of his damned lighter so distinctly. She hated that sound. It was a signal to her, as plain as if he had punched a buzzer or rung a bell. Angie knew better than to ignore that arbitrary summons.

  Pulling the robe closed around her, she went to the kitchen and switched on the Krups coffee maker that had been sitting on the counter loaded and ready since nine o’clock that morning. When Tony woke up in the mornings, he always wanted a cigarette, sex, and a cup of coffee, and he wanted them in that exact order.

  “Where are you, Angie?” he bellowed from the bedroom. “What the hell are you doing out there?”

  Sometimes, when she came back to the bed, he’d only want her to lie there next to him and keep quiet, but today he ran his hand over her thigh. “You on top,” he told her shortly. “And take off that damned robe. I like looking at your tits.”

  Angie peeled off the robe and clambered on top of him. She resented it when he wanted to do it that way, lying there with one hand behind his head, smoking his cigarette and watching her while she tried to get him hard enough to fit inside her. Maybe if he’d put down the cigarette and concentrate some, it might work better.

  She played with him, caressed him, knowing that if she didn’t make it work, it would be her problem far more than his. By the time he finished the cigarette and stubbed it out in the overflowing ashtray on the bedside table, she thought it was hard enough, but when she settled herself on him, what little erection there had been disappeared and he flopped back out.

  “Sorry, Tony,” she said. “It won’t go in. Maybe later.”

  He seized one pendulous breast in his hand and squeezed it until she yelped with pain. “It’ll go in something,” he said, pulling her down to him. “Use your imagination.”

  Seething with resentment, Angie did what he wanted, plying him with her tongue and teeth, using all the tricks nine years of working the streets had taught her. At times like this, when she knew it would take forever, she tried not to think about how long it would be, tried to ignore the scratches his jagged toenails sometimes left on her leg when he jammed his knee into her crotch.

  One of the girls in L.A. had told her that the secret was to put yourself on automatic and think about something else entirely, something happy or pleasant. To do that, she had to go way back, to first or second grade, before the night when, with her mother in the hospital having another baby, her father had come to her room in the middle of the night and forced himself inside her. That night had marked the end of Annie Beason’s childhood and the be-ginning of a nightmare that lasted for years. Two days shy of her thirteenth birthday, she had boarded a Greyhound bus and left Battle Creek bound for California.

  Even there the nightmare had changed, but it hadn’t ended. She had expected to make it big in California. Back home in Battle Creek, she had overheard people telling her mother how beautiful she was and how she could maybe be a model some day. Annie Beason headed for California determined to become a movie star. As the noisy bus rumbled cross-country, she had decided on her stage name-Angie Kellogg, after the company her father worked for. Once she made it big, she expected to come back home and rub his red, vein-marked nose in it. And, with a different name, if something bad happened to her along the way, her mother would never have to know.

  Of course, something bad had happened, lots more bad than good as a matter of fact. In L.A. there was a whole industry ready to snap up any and all would-be movie stars, the younger the better. On the streets she had learned that she wasn’t alone, that there were lots of other girls just like her, girls from families like hers where the only sign of love or affection between fathers and daughters was a stiff poke between the legs in the middle of the night. Knowing she wasn’t alone made it a little easier, but not much.

  At first, as young as she was and as pretty, it was easy to make the big bucks, but Angie was bright and she noticed what went on around her. She stayed away from drugs. Girls who did drugs ended up dead more often than not, and Angie Kellogg was nothing if not a survivor. The trick was to make good money, save some of it, and stay alive long enough to get out. If you were smart and lucky, you found a rich daddy to take care of you while you still had your looks.

  By twenty-two, Angie Kellogg was old for someone in her line of work. Worldly in some ways but hopelessly naive in others, she was lucky to have kept her looks. Over time, however, she had been passed down from one pimp to another until she ended up with a guy who was not only a pimp but psychotic as well. He had caught her freelancing in a neighborhood bar on her day off, and he would have killed her if Tony Vargas hadn’t stepped into the middle of it and come to her rescue.

  By then, it had no longer mattered to Angie who she worked for. She figured Tony was another pimp, and she expected him to put her back on the streets. Instead, he moved her to Tucson, settled her into the nicest house she had ever seen, one filled with the very best in rented furniture. He bought her food and clothing and even books on occasion. She thought at first that she had died and gone to heaven, but now that she had lived there for a while, she realized that hell was more like

  Angie was used to having some independence, some say in spending her time and her money, but Tony didn’t see it that way. He didn’t let her have any money of her own, and he wouldn’t allow her to leave the house with-out him. She wore only the best clothes, but they were clothes Tony selected and paid for. He wouldn’t even let her go to the grocery store by herself. Her reading was limited to what books she managed to find at the check-out counter in the grocery or drug store.

  Beneath her, Tony moaned and grasped her head, pulling her hair to make her move faster. When he came, finally, he lay gasping on the bed while she retreated to the kitchen. There she brewed fresh coffee and juiced grapefruit and wished it were poison instead of juice when she poured it into the glass.

  While Tony stood under the water of a steaming shower, Angie prepared a tray with more coffee, freshly squeezed grapefruit juice and
a bowl of Frosted Flakes. It was Angie’s job to make sure they didn’t run out of the daily staples-grapefruit, milk, and Frosted Flakes. She set the breakfast tray on the coffee table where it was waiting by the time Tony finished his shower.

  He came into the living room wearing a robe and still dripping wet. He padded over to the couch and sat down, leaving a trail of wet footprints on the thick white carpeting. Angie placed the morning newspaper on the marble-topped coffee table next to the break-fast tray. Without a word she backed away to the recliner in the corner. Tony Vargas didn’t like to talk to anybody until after he had eaten breakfast, read the funnies, and watched the news.

  Angie sat and observed him while he ate, listening to the hollow crunch of cereal in his mouth and wondering if her father, who had once worked on the bagging line in Battle Creek, had helped make that particular batch. She didn’t even know if her father was still alive, and she didn’t much care one way or the other.

  “What are you staring at?” Vargas demanded, glowering at her over the top of his newspaper.

  “We’re almost out of cereal,” she said woodenly. “And toilet paper.”

  “I’ll take you to the store this afternoon. Switch on the set would you? It’s almost time.”

  The television had a remote control, but it was broken. Angie wondered sometimes if Tony had broken it deliberately so he’d have something else to tell her to do, another reason to order her around. She turned on the set and switched the channel selector to Channel 5’s Noontime Edition. Tony Vargas had the hots for Donna Ashforth, Channel 5’s blonde-bombshell noonday anchor. Hots or not, Angie suspected he probably wouldn’t be able to get it up for Donna Ashforth either, if he ever lucked out and managed to corral the woman into bed.

  Angie didn’t watch the news itself. Like prisoners everywhere whose very existence is dictated by the moods and whims of their keepers, she watched Tony’s face to see how he was reacting to whatever was showing on the screen. She had learned to recognize the danger signals, items that would throw him into towering fits of rage-elections sometimes affected him that way, and the arrests of various people on various charges. Angie had noticed that some of those arrested, especially ones connected with the drug trade, were people Tony seemed to know personally, but she discreetly kept that knowledge to herself.

  Today, Tony didn’t appear to be paying that much attention until, just before the commercial, they mentioned that the next item would be about an injured sheriff’s deputy from somewhere down around Bisbee, wherever that was. When they made the pre-commercial lead-in announcement, he stopped chewing the food that was in his mouth. It was as though his jaw had suddenly turned to stone. Angie had seen that happen before, and she felt her own stomach become a leaden mass. She wished she had gone into the bathroom to shower or outside to swim, anywhere so she’d be out of his way. But she hadn’t, and she didn’t dare leave now. She sat perfectly still, hoping he wouldn’t notice her.

  She was holding her breath as the commercial ended, and there was Donna Ashforth’s lovely face once more smiling into the camera. As soon as the woman said the fateful words “hospitalized in critical condition,” Tony Vargas leaped to his feet, spilling the tray and the rest of the milk and cereal onto the carpet. He hurled the heavy crystal glass, grapefruit and all, at the television set. The sticky yellow contents sprayed all over the room as the glass smashed into the set, demolishing both it and Donna Ashforth’s award-winning smile. There were a few bubblegum-like pops before the set sputtered and went out altogether.

  “Tony!” Angie exclaimed.

  Her remark was totally involuntary. Angie had planned to keep her mouth shut, but his sudden violence shocked her into speech. Hearing her, he swung around and shook his finger in her face, his features distorted by a spasm of undiluted fury.

  “Don’t you say a word to me, cunt. Not one word! Get off your dead ass and clean up the mess! Call somebody and tell them to send somebody out here tomorrow or the next day to fix the set. And if they can’t do the work here, tell ‘em to bring a loaner. You got that?”

  Angie was left nodding while Tony stalked from the room. Numbly, she went about cleaning up the mess. Bringing a plastic garbage ran from the kitchen, she picked up the shards of broken crystal and glass. Then, armed with a damp sponge, damp towels, a brush, and spray bottle of carpet cleaner, she set about cleaning up the sticky sprays of grapefruit juice that seemed to be everywhere. While she worked, she heard Tony making a series of phone calls from the bedroom. She was still working on the carpet on her hands and knees a few minutes later when he emerged from the bedroom fully dressed.

  “I’m going out,” he announced.

  She nodded mutely, grateful that for once she hadn’t been the target. He left, unlocking the deadbolt, taking the key, and locking it again from the outside.

  Motionless as a light-blinded deer, Angie waited until she heard the car start up. Gravel sprayed against the outside of the house as he churned out of the driveway into the street. Only then did she get to her feet.

  She stumbled into the bathroom and heaved her guts out into the toilet. When it was over, when the shivering finally stopped and her teeth no longer chattered, Angie went back to the living room and finished cleaning up the mess.

  In the beginning, Tony had told her he was a business consultant. As time passed, she realized that wasn’t the truth, but she didn’t press him, figuring she was better off not knowing. But now she did. There could be no mistaking it. For Tony Vargas, business consulting meant killing cops.

  Because she had been watching so closely, Angie knew exactly what had provoked his rage-Donna Ashforth’s smiling face saying the words “critically injured.” That was the problem. Whoever it was Tony was supposed to have killed-that poor deputy from Bisbee, whatever his name was-he wasn’t quite dead, not yet. But Angie had seen the look on Tony’s face, the cold, calculating determination, and she knew the man would be dead noon, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.

  Working with wet towels and the vacuum cleaner, it took Angie forty-five minutes to finish cleaning up the mess in the living room to a point where it would pass Tony’s inspection. Then she hurried into the kitchen, got out the phone book, and started looking for a television repairman.

  She figured it wasn’t going to be easy to find a repairman who would be willing to match an appointment with Tony’s schedule, so she figured she’d better get started.

  SEVEN

  Seven miles away at the Arizona Inn, Joanna Brady was just finishing her club sandwich. The spacious room with its graceful tableware and bud vases of fresh dahlias had a calming, quieting effect on her. As the food found its way into her system, she felt her strength being renewed and with it her ability to think.

  For the first time, she remembered what Dr. Sanders had said much earlier in the day when he had warned her about the reporters camped out in the lobby waiting to talk to her. Maybe, she thought hopefully, this man was one of those. After all, he hadn’t tried very hard to conceal the fact that he was following her.

  While she was eating her sandwich, she had caught him looking at her several times. The last time, he stared at her openly. She couldn’t escape the feeling that she had seen him somewhere before, that he was someone she knew but couldn’t quite place.

  She observed that he hadn’t bothered to eat anything. He drank only a glass of iced tea while she wolfed down her sandwich and two cups of coffee. When the waiter dropped off his ticket, the man stood up immediately. Joanna breathed a sigh of relief, thinking he was going to leave. Instead, after leaving money on his table, he walked directly over to hers.

  “Mrs. Brady?” he said.

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “I didn’t want to interrupt you until after you had finished your meal, but I wondered if I could have a word with you?”

  Without waiting for her to answer, he pulled out the chair opposite her and eased himself into it.

  “Who are you?” Joanna a
sked.

  He reached into the vest pocket of his well-cut suit jacket, pulled out a thin leather wallet, and handed it to her. Inside was a gold badge and an identification card showing the man’s picture.

  ‘My name’s Adam York,” he said, when she handed the wallet back to him. He pocketed it quickly before anyone else in the room had a chance to see it. “I’m the local agent in charge of the DEA. Glad to make your acquaintance.”

  He held out his hand, and she shook it.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. York?” she asked.

  He smiled what seemed to be an ingratiating smile. She noticed that his skin was evenly tanned. His teeth were straight and very white. His expensive suit and tie to say nothing of his wrinkle-free white shirt made her acutely aware of the garish yellow smock she wore over the stained and ragged blue dress.

  “Call me Adam, Joanna,” he said cordially enough, leaning back in his chair, crossing his legs, and watching her expectantly. His impeccable clothing was bad enough. Combined with a haughty smile and indulgent manner, they were infinitely worse. Everything about the man set Joanna’s teeth on edge.

  “Haven’t I seen you someplace before, Mr. York?” Joanna asked, ignoring his given name and keeping the conversation on a strictly formal basis.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t believe so.”

  But just then she realized when and where she had seen him before. He had been in and out of the ICU waiting room during the morning, mingling with the people waiting there. She had assumed he was connected to one of the other families, but now it was clear that wasn’t the case.