by J. A. Jance
While he opened and poured the wine, Ali loaded plates with slices of pizza and mounds of Caesar salad.
“What did you do today?” B. asked.
“Sorted through the nominees for the scholarship,” she answered. “Once again I ended up with two winners.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” B. said with a grin. “What are their names?”
“Autumn and Olivia,” Ali answered.
He raised his glass in a toast. “So here’s to Autumn and Olivia, your two new Askins scholars.”
“Thanks,” Ali said, touching her glass to his. “Let’s hope they do well. And what about you? When do you have to leave?”
He glanced at his watch. “I fly to D.C. tomorrow at four. I’m the Sunday-morning breakfast speaker at an international congress of security geeks. After the conference, I have meetings scheduled for most of the rest of the week. Should be back late Friday. If your dance card’s not too full, maybe we can spend the weekend together.”
Ali knew better than to ask for more detail. Most of what B. did these days was classified. Though he had a grueling travel schedule and work consumed most of his waking hours, he also clearly enjoyed what he did. He certainly didn’t do it for the money.
Truth was, Ali envied his passion for his work. She remembered having that fire in her belly before it got extinguished, or rather, diminished, by a series of betrayals, both professional and personal. She knew now that she felt best when she was helping people.
“My week looks a lot less complicated than yours,” she said. “With any luck, by the time you get back, the weather will have broken and we’ll be ready to plant the garden.”
“Speaking of that,” B. said, “I hope you’re not overworking poor Leland.”
“Of course not,” Ali said. “He’s limited to supervisory work only.”
“Good. How old is he, anyway?” B. asked. “Since he served in Korea, must be getting up there. Isn’t it about time for you to let him retire?”
“When I mention that to him, he says he retires every night,” Ali replied. “Besides, Leland and I have an understanding: He can work for me as long as he wants to.”
“I see,” B. said, helping himself to another slice of pizza. “Kind of like our understanding-that I’m welcome to hang around as long as I want to?”
Ali realized the conversation had gone from lighthearted to serious in the blink of an eye. “You’re too young to have grandkids,” she pointed out, “and I’m too old to have kids.”
“I never said I wanted to have kids,” B. replied evenly. “As far as I can see, skipping kids and going straight to grandkids seems pretty efficient.”
“You might change your mind.”
“I might,” he conceded, “but I doubt it. I work too much to have kids. In the meantime, you and I apparently have an understanding. I can live with that.”
Dropping the subject, he poured them more wine. When it was gone, they loaded the dishwasher and cleaned up the kitchen. Then they made their way upstairs to the combination study/bed/media room that B. referred to as his man-cave.
The furniture may not have been to Ali’s liking, but what went on in the bed was more than fine with her. Under the soft duvet, their differences in style and age were beside the point.
Yes, in that massive four-poster bed, Ali Reynolds and B. Simpson were most definitely on the same page.
7
12:30 A.M., Saturday, April 10
Patagonia, Arizona
At a bit past midnight, summoned from a restless sleep, Teresa Reyes heard the doorbell and staggered out of bed with the sense of dread that all cops’ wives live with day in and day out. She knew that whoever was out there ringing the bell in the middle of the night was bringing bad news. She flung on her robe and raced to the front door in hopes of keeping the noisy bell from ringing again and waking the girls.
When she turned on the porch light and opened the door, there stood Sheriff Renteria, his face distraught, shaking his head. Seeing him, she immediately assumed the worst-Jose was dead. She grabbed the door frame and used it to hold herself upright.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” the sheriff said, mumbling the words as he fought for control. “There’s been an unfortunate incident.”
“Oh, no,” Teresa groaned. She stumbled backward into the room, reeling under the weight of the terrible news. She might have fallen all the way to the floor if Renteria hadn’t reached out and steadied her. “Please,” she begged. “Don’t tell me Jose is dead. He can’t be.”
“Shhh,” Renteria said, pulling her to him. “He’s not dead, but he’s been shot and wounded. It’s serious, Teresa. I won’t lie to you and say he’s going to be fine, because the EMTs told me it’s bad. He’s being transported to the trauma center at Physicians Medical Center in Tucson.”
When those last few hopeful words penetrated Teresa Reyes’s consciousness, she fought her way out of the numbing fog of despair and clung to them with grim desperation. “You mean he’s really not dead?” she asked.
“He’s still alive,” Renteria allowed. “At least he was when they airlifted him out.”
Teresa knew that airlifting was expensive, that it was used in only the most desperate cases, but the welcome news filled her heart with a thin thread of hope. “Why not University Medical Center?” she asked. UMC was the premier trauma center in Tucson.
“The EMTs told me that for this kind of injury, Physicians is the best bet,” the sheriff said. Then he pointed toward a patrol car easing its way down the driveway toward the mobile home.
“Do you know Deputy Carson?” Renteria asked. “Jimmy.”
Teresa nodded. “I’ve seen him around town, but I don’t really know him.”
“I asked him to come stay with you until you can get things organized. Then he’ll drive you to the hospital. Under the circumstances, I don’t want you driving yourself.”
“You’re right,” Teresa agreed. “And thank you.”
Once the sheriff left her alone, Teresa stood in the entryway, frozen into a block of indecision. What should she do? Wake the girls? Bring them along to the hospital? Or should she leave them here, sound asleep, while she alone dealt with the crisis? She considered calling her mother, but Maria Delgado lived in Nogales. After her recent cataract surgery, she was no longer comfortable driving anywhere other than her immediate neighborhood, and she didn’t venture out at night at all. In addition to vision problems, Maria Delgado was frail. Not only did she have a debilitating heart condition, she also suffered from osteoporosis. Yes, she loved the girls dearly and could look after Lucy and Carinda as long as they were sound asleep, but she didn’t have the upper-body strength to wrestle Carinda in and out of her crib, and she didn’t have the energy to chase after the two lively preschoolers once they were awake.
There was only one option. In preparation for having the baby, Teresa had already packed a bag to take to the hospital. She grabbed a diaper bag and stuffed it with enough items to get Lucy and Carinda through the morning. Motioning Deputy Carson into the house, she handed him the bags and asked him to get Carinda’s car seat and Lucy’s booster out of the back of her minivan and put them in the back of his patrol car. With any luck, the girls would never remember that they’d been hauled out of their beds in the middle of the night. While Carson loaded the car, Teresa lugged the two sleeping girls out to the waiting vehicle and buckled them in. The deputy had started the engine. His car was warm. The girls stirred a little and were quiet.
The gate at the end of the driveway was closed. Jimmy started to get out to open it. “I will,” Teresa said. She held it open while Jimmy drove through. Had Teresa looked to the right just then, she might have seen a car parked at the far end of the cul-de-sac with its lights doused and its engine running. Teresa’s mind was elsewhere, however. Hurriedly, she closed the gate, fastened it, and climbed back into the patrol car. Then she sat quietly while Carson maneuvered the winding road that led back to the highway.
“What happened?” she asked when they turned onto the blacktop, where the deputy switched on his emergency lights and hit the gas.
“Didn’t Sheriff Renteria tell you?”
“Some,” she said. “But I was so upset, I wasn’t really listening.”
“Jose was out on patrol by himself,” Carson said. “Down by the Kino Ridge golf course. He called Dispatch, saying he was doing a routine traffic stop. After that, his radio went silent. Dispatch sent someone looking for him at his last reported location. They found him shot and bleeding at the bottom of a ravine.”
“Do they have any idea who did it?” Teresa asked.
Carson shrugged. “We sent out a Blue Alert, but we have no leads. It’s early, though.”
Blue Alerts were for injured cops what Amber Alerts were for kids. They went out to other police jurisdictions when an officer had been assaulted and the perpetrator was at large.
“What about his dashboard camera?”
“Smashed and then taken. Along with the rest of the system,” Carson said.
“So there’s no film of what happened?”
“The memory stick was in the camera, and that’s gone,” Carson said.
“What about Jose?”
“The EMTs transported him by ambulance back to the parking lot at Kino Ridge. There, an air ambulance picked him up and took him to Tucson.”
Teresa spent the rest of the drive to the hospital in prayerful silence. Three years earlier she had made an eerily similar trip. That one had taken her from the rented home she had shared with her first husband, Danny, on Tucson’s far west side to the trauma unit at UMC. That night a uniformed cop from the Tucson PD had knocked on her door to tell her that Danny Sanchez had been shot in a drive-by in South Tucson.
On the way to the hospital that time, she remembered what her mother had tried to tell her about Danny when she first started dating him: that he was bad news. Even though Danny came from a decent family-his father, Oscar, raised quarter horses in the San Rafael Valley-the boy was trouble.
The problem, of course, was that bad boys were always more exciting and interesting than the good ones. In the beginning Teresa had found it easy to ignore all of her mother’s warnings. Besides, she wasn’t worried. Danny promised her that once they had kids, he’d settle down, quit hanging around with his bad-boy buddies, and stop using drugs.
When Lucy was born, Teresa had fully expected those promises would be kept, but they weren’t-none of them. She soon found herself hassling Danny about everything: quitting drugs, ditching his friends, and getting a real job. The more she nagged, the worse things got. When they ran behind on the bills or needed money for groceries, Danny’s mother-far more than his father-was there with a checkbook, ready and willing to bail out her mama’s-boy only son.
Teresa hadn’t wanted to be bailed out. What she’d wanted was for Danny to grow up. She wanted the two of them to have a real life together, functioning as a real family, without always having to be beholden to his parents, especially to Olga. Teresa had already figured out that Olga’s purse strings were iron-clad apron strings.
By the time Lucy turned two, Teresa was pregnant again, and she and Danny were fighting more and more. Finally, she gave him an ultimatum. Either he grow up and get a job, or she was taking Lucy and leaving. She had been screaming at him when he stormed out of the house and drove away.
It was later that night when the cop knocked on her door. Still in a rage, Danny had gone to some of his favorite South Tucson hangouts, where he and his friends had done some serious drinking. Just before closing time, there was an altercation that went from inside a bar to outside. Out in the parking lot, one of the guys from the fight got in his car and drove away. A few minutes later, he came back, driving past where Danny and his friends were gathered. The driver’s window rolled down. Danny was shot at point-blank range without the vehicle ever coming to a stop.
At the time, the car Danny was driving was registered in his mother’s name. The address on his license was Olga Sanchez’s Tucson address. For that reason, Danny’s parents were the first to be notified of the shooting. They had been at the hospital for some time before Olga thought to send someone to let Teresa know what had happened. The cop who had rung her doorbell that night had been kind enough to take Teresa and Lucy to the hospital.
The next three days had been a nightmare. Danny’s grim-faced doctors had made it clear from the beginning that it was unlikely their critically injured patient would survive. Even if he did, the kind of catastrophic brain damage he had suffered would probably leave him permanently paralyzed. While Danny’s father had stayed in the background, Olga had been front and center, weeping hysterically and railing at her daughter-in-law. If only Teresa had been a better wife to Danny, maybe he wouldn’t have been out partying in the middle of the night. As far as Olga was concerned, what had happened had everything to do with Teresa’s behavior and nothing at all to do with her son’s bad choices.
Teresa already had a toddler to care for and was expecting a second baby. The prospect of caring for a helpless and possibly bedridden husband was more than she could take. She was actually relieved when, three nights after he was shot, the lines on Danny’s monitor went flat, announcing to the world that he was gone. Yes, she grieved for him, but more for what she had hoped to have with him rather than what she’d had.
Because Danny had no job, there was no group insurance. In fact, there was no insurance of any kind. Danny’s parents had paid the medical bills, which Teresa suspected were astronomical. They also paid for the funeral at the old Catholic church on South Sixth and Twenty-second, only a few blocks from where Danny had been gunned down. At the hospital, Oscar had told Teresa that she and the girls were welcome to come live on the ranch with them. It was a generous offer, and it meant that Teresa’s girls would have wanted for nothing. Teresa had been considering it right up until the scene at the funeral when Olga lit into Teresa again, proclaiming in public that Danny’s death was all her fault.
For Teresa, that was the final straw. A few weeks later, when the rent came due and she had no money, Teresa didn’t even consider accepting Olga and Oscar’s help. Instead of taking the easy way out, Teresa had rented a U-Haul truck. With the help of Uncle Tomas, her mother’s younger brother, and a couple of cousins, she had moved out of the house and back into her widowed mother’s tiny place in Nogales. Her uncle had helped her get a job as a receptionist for one of the trucking companies headquartered in Nogales. That was where she was working when Jose came back into her life through a friend of his who was a driver for the same company.
Teresa and Jose had known each other slightly in high school, but he had been one of those boring good guys who, at the time, hadn’t gotten a second glance. Jose had known Danny, too. They had played football together, but they hadn’t been pals.
Teresa had been pregnant with Carinda when she started dating Jose shortly after Jose had been hired by the sheriff’s department. They had married days after his graduation from the academy.
The last time Olga communicated with Teresa was the day of Danny’s funeral, but just because she wasn’t talking to Teresa didn’t keep her from talking about her. Word of the rumors made their way back to Teresa. Olga told anyone who would listen that she was sure Teresa and Jose had been an item long before Danny’s death. It hurt Teresa to think that the girls’ grandmother had shut them out of her life-that in order to punish Teresa for something she hadn’t done, Olga had resolutely turned her back on Lucy and Carinda. That was too bad for Olga, and too bad for the girls, but for Teresa, given the choice between having a relationship with her toxic former mother-in-law and having Jose Reyes as her husband, it was no contest.
Now Teresa’s life was about to undergo another sea change. What if Jose died? Then she’d be on her own again, this time with three kids to support instead of two. She had become involved with Jose because he was Danny’s exact opposite. Jose was a good guy. She had known instincti
vely that he would be a good provider. Yes, she had worried about him being a police officer. She read about police officers dying on the job all the time, but she had also read about officers who retired after thirty-plus years on the job without ever firing a round in the line of duty. When Jose put on his uniform and went to work, she simply closed her mind to the possibility that he might die.
With Jose lying unconscious in the ICU, Teresa forced herself to face facts. If he died, there would probably be some insurance benefits. Jose had put Teresa on the county paperwork as his beneficiary even before they tied the knot. Even so, raising kids was expensive. Teresa knew that she’d probably end up losing the house in Patagonia. It had been Jose’s dream house but not hers, and Teresa alone wouldn’t be able to cover the expenses. She’d have to go back to Nogales to live with her mother again; she’d have to see if she could get her old job back.
“Here we are,” Deputy Carson said.
For the last twenty miles of the trip, Teresa had been so lost in thought that she hadn’t said a word. They had driven all the way across the city without her noticing. They arrived at the hospital at almost three in the morning. Deputy Carson stayed in the car with the two sleeping kids while Teresa walked into the main entrance to get directions.
With Deputy Carson’s help, Teresa eventually managed to get the two girls and all their stuff hauled to the waiting room outside the OR. Three hours later, with the girls waking up and asking nonstop questions, a surgeon emerged from the operating room. “Mrs. Reyes?” he asked, holding out his hand.
Teresa had tried to prepare herself for the bad news. Nodding, she stood up, holding Carinda on her hip while Lucy, suddenly shy, ducked out of sight behind her.
“Yes,” Teresa said, taking the proffered hand.
“I’m Dr. William Lazlo, your husband’s surgeon. The good news is that he’s survived the surgery. He’s being transferred to a recovery room. It’s a miracle that he didn’t bleed to death before he got here. The EMTs did a great job of stabilizing him. We’ve done what we could to repair the damage, but we had to resection his bowel. For right now he’ll have a stoma-you know what that is?”