Desert Heat (28 page)

Joanna reached up and gave him a quick, grateful hug. “I’ll be back as soon as I finish up with Walter McFadden,” she said.

From the hospital it was a straight shot down Cole Avenue to Walter McFadden’s place. It was after eleven and no lights were showing when she pulled up outside the gate side of his yard. As she fumbled for the parking brake in the unfamiliar vehicle, a car with its lights on bright pulled up directly behind her and stopped. Temporarily blinded by bright lights followed by total darkness, she blinked once. In that brief instant of time, someone was beside the car door wrenching it open.

“Get out,” a man ordered.

Joanna recognized Tony Vargas at once. She hadn’t ever seen him in person, but his picture from the Horseshoe Casino was still in her pocket.

“Hello, Mr. Vargas,” she said coolly, stepping out of the car to face him, refusing to look at the gun he was holding in his hand.

“You know who I am, then?”

Joanna was conscious of only one thought. She was standing next to Andy’s killer. He was armed, but so was she. Thanks to Clayton Rhodes and Bobo Jenkins she had a loaded .44 in her pocket. That was something Tony Vargas probably wouldn’t expect. Fighting off panic, she forced herself to hold his eyes with hers. She wanted his eyes on her face not her hands.

“When I get through with you, everyone else will too,” she responded, deliberately taunting him.

A chillingly insincere smile flickered across Tony Vargas’ broad features. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that if I were you. Where’s Angie? Where’s my book?”

“Someplace safe. Someplace where you won’t be able to find them.”

Vargas turned his head slightly but without taking his eyes off her. “Hey, Ken, turn on the dome light in there, would you?” he asked.

Joanna glanced at the other car for the first time and was dismayed when she recognized it to be a Cochise County Sheriff’s Department patrol car. The interior lights came on in the car and revealed Ken Galloway sitting in the driver’s seat. Then something moved in the back seat. In a heart-stopping second, Joanna realized that Jenny was there, locked behind the metal mesh, waving at her through the window. Jenny and her mother both.

She turned back to Vargas in sudden fury. “What are they doing here?” she demanded.

He smiled again. “Don’t get excited. You sell insurance, don’t you, Mrs. Brady? And that’s what they are. My insurance policy. You’re going to drive this car to wherever you’ve hidden Angie. When I have her and my book, you’re going to drive us to Ken’s airplane down at the airport. Once we’re safely out of here, then you get your mother  and the little girl back, understand?”

Waller McFadden’s back porch light snapped on. The door opened and Tigger came out first, followed by the sheriff himself, barefoot and wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He was limping down his back steps. “Who’s out here?” he demanded. “What’s going on?”

The interior light of the patrol car snapped off and Ken Galloway stepped out of the car. “No biggie,” he said calmly, walking over to the gate. “We’re just doing a little damage control.”

“Damage control!” Joanna exclaimed, wondering if there was a chance the sheriff might have a weapon concealed somewhere on his body. “Walter, this is the man who killed Andy. They’ve got my mother and Jenny locked in the back of Ken’s patrol car.”

“Is that true, Ken?” McFadden asked. “About Jenny and Eleanor Lathrop?”

Ken shook his head. “It’s like Tony was telling Joanna here. We’re only using them for insurance. It’s gonna get real rough around here, Walter. We’ve got a plane to catch, and there’s enough room in it for three people—you, me, and Tony. We won’t hurt Joanna or her mother or Jenny, either. But by the time they get loose, we’ll be over the border and long gone.”

Tigger came up behind Walter, tail wagging, and dropped the Frisbee at his master’s feet. Seeing him, McFadden shook his head. “Go lie down,” the sheriff ordered. The dog, disappointed, retreated to the back porch while Walter McFadden turned back to Ken Galloway.

“It’s over then, isn’t it, Ken, for all of us. But I’m not leaving. I’ve wanted it to be over for a helluva long time. I just didn’t have guts enough to do anything about it.”

With no further warning, McFadden flung open the metal gate, catching Ken Galloway by surprise and full in the midsection. The top brine of the gate slammed into his ribs, sending him reeling backwards toward the patrol car. When Vargas turned to help Galloway, Joanna saw her chance.

Throughout the confrontation, she had been edging her hand nearer the pocket containing the gun. Now her fingers closed around the grip of the .44. Carefully she thumbed back the hammer. At that close range, there was no
need to aim the weapon or even bring it fully out of her pocket.

When she pulled the trigger, the roar of gunfire was deafening. The force of the recoil sent her spinning back against the roof of the Camino. Tony Vargas groaned in surprise, doubled over, and crumpled to the ground.

Tony’s gun fell from his hand, but it was still within reach. As soon as Joanna regained her balance, she kicked it under the car, as far as she could away from his grasping fingers. the meantime, Ken Galloway had pulled his own gun from its holster and was holding it on Walter McFadden. Trying to watch both I McFadden and Joanna, his head swiveled back and forth between them.

“Go ahead and shoot,” Walter McFadden dared Galloway. “That way I’ll have the monkey off my back once and for all.” As he spoke, the sheriff was easing himself through the now-open gate, steadily closing the distance between himself and his renegade deputy.

“Stop right there, Walter,” Galloway warned. “Don’t come any closer.”

“Actually,” Walter drawled, “I do believe I much prefer shooting.”

All the while the sheriff was moving inevitably forward as Galloway backed away. That’s when Joanna realized what McFadden was doing. By pushing Galloway farther into the street, away from the patrol car, he was effectively easing Jenny and Eleanor out of the line of fire. Joanna moved with the two men, taking her part of the triangle along. Meantime lights were coming on all over the neighborhood.

“That way I won’t have to stand around any longer, turning a blind eye to your slimy blackmail deals and murder for hire schemes,” McFadden continued. “I’m looking forward to that, to not having scumbags like you in my life, Ken. Besides, if you do a good enough job, if your aim is good enough, there won’t be enough of me left over to ship off to prison. I never did much like Florence, you know. It’s too damned hot up there.”

With that, Walter McFadden lunged forward, throwing himself toward Ken Galloway’s gun. In the blazing hail of gunfire that followed, both men went down, first Ken Galloway and then Sheriff Walter McFadden.

Joanna heard sirens then. As close as they were, they must have been audible for some time before she noticed them. Still holding the gun, she hurried to where Ken Galloway lay moaning on the ground. She picked up his .357 and handed it over to the first neighbor who appeared on the scene.

“Watch him,” Joanna ordered. “Don’t let him move.”

She rushed to Walter McFadden and knelt beside him. He was pressing his hand to his chest, a hand’s breadth beneath his breastbone. Despite the pressure, blood still oozed up through his fingers.

“Good shooting, Joanna. But then your daddy always said you were a crack shot.”

“Quiet,” she said. “Listen to the siren. The ambulance is on its way.”

“Morphine was the hook—that’s what finally got me,” he whispered. “When the pain got too bad, when Carol was crying for it in
middle of the night, I would’ve done anything to get it for her. One buy was all it took. As soon as I stepped out of line, the bastards had me.”

“Shhhhh,” she said, but he ignored her, although his voice was weaker now. She had to strain to hear him over the noise of arriving emergency vehicles.

“They blackmailed me, Joanna.” He took a breath before he could go on. “I didn’t know what all went on or who all was involved. My job was to walk around howdying people and being blind, deaf, and dumb to what was going on in my own department.” He paused again. “Was Andy in on it?”

Tears were coursing down Joanna’s cheeks. She bit her lip and ducked her head. “I don’t know, Walter.”

“I hope not,” Walter McFadden muttered weakly. “For your sake and Jenny’s, I sure as hell hope not.”

And he was gone.

TWENTY-ONE

Joanna stood up. By then the place was crowded with Emergency Medical Technicians and City of Bisbee police officers to say nothing of dismayed neighbors who were struggling to come to grips with exactly what had happened.

Both Tony Vargas and Walter McFadden were beyond help, so all the lifesaving activity centered around Ken Galloway. Joanna walked past the flurry of activity to the patrol car. There, without anyone paying attention, she pressed the door lock and opened the door, freeing both Jenny and her mother. Once they were out of the vehicle, Eleanor and Jenny clung to Joanna as though fearing she might somehow disappear.

“is Sheriff McFadden all right?” Jenny tearfully.

Joanna shook her head. “He’s dead,” she answered. “He died before the ambulance ever got here.”

Bobo Jenkins turned up just then with Adam York in tow. Joanna took Jenny by the shoulders. “Go sit on the porch with Tigger,” she said. “Stay out of the way. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Jenny tiptoed through the gate then ran to the back porch where she flung her arms around Tigger’s neck. The dog, as ordered, was still lying down, waiting for a release signal from Walter McFadden that was never going to come.

“What should I do?” Eleanor asked meekly.

“Stay with Jenny, Mother.”

Eleanor started after her granddaughter then paused. “It was him, wasn’t it,” she said. “The man with the gold in his teeth.”

Joanna looked down at the lifeless body of Tony Vargas. She nodded. “It was him,” she said.

Joanna had spoken gently to both her daughter and her mother, but when she turned to face Bobo Jenkins her face was full of barely repressed fury. “What’s
he
doing here?” she asked, nodding toward Adam York who was off to one side consulting with several of the uniformed officers on the scene.

“I talked to the man, Joanna,” Bobo Jenkins explained. “He followed the bloody footprints down the stairs from the hotel, put two and two together, and came to the hospital. He’s on the up-and-up.”

“Sure he is,” Joanna returned with her eyes narrowing. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

As if on cue, Adam York turned and caught her looking at him. He left the officers and walked over to where she was standing. “Joanna, are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine.”

“Good.”

“Look,” she said, “you may have convinced my friend Bobo, here, that you walk on water, but I’m not buying it. Until I see some proof otherwise, I’m going to continue to consider you part of the opposition.”

“Your husband got Lefty O’Toole to agree to come into the Witness Protection Program,” York said. “Andy had contacted me and told me to expect Lefty within a matter of days. When it all fell apart, when Lefty showed up dead and then Andy suddenly laid his hands on a considerable sum of unexplained money,
I figured the cartel had turned him. Then,when Andy was killed as well it made sense that there was some other traitor pretty close to home.”

“You thought it was me?” Joanna asked.

York shrugged. “Why not? I was casting my net around and you turned up in it. You’re right, I do owe you an apology, and not just over the autopsy results. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Ken Galloway was the one who typed the suicide note in Andy’s file. We’ve known for years that Cochise County was a major conduit of the drug trade and we figured there had to be someone in law enforcement working with them, but it wasn’t until Andy connected with Lefty that we figured we were going to get a break. Now, thanks to you, we finally know who some of those people were.”

“If Lefty knew Galloway was involved, why didn’t he warn Andy?”

“Maybe he did or maybe he didn’t. It’s possible he tried to and Ken intercepted the message. Andy and Ken were supposedly good friends, weren’t they?”

“Supposedly,” Joanna agreed, bitterly. “We thought he was a friend.”

“With Lefty out of the picture, I figured the whole investigation was blown, but now, with this book ...”

“What book?” Joanna demanded.

“Angie’s book. She’s scared to death and tired of running. I guess she finally decided she had to trust somebody. She spilled her guts about Tony and his little black book. She even suggested a possible deal.”

“Angie trusted you?” Joanna asked sharply. “Why not?” Adam York returned. “You don’t think I’d cheat her, do you?”

“Until I read that book for myself and make sure your name isn’t in it, I’m not trusting anybody “

York studied Joanna’s face for some time before he nodded. “Considering what you’ve been through,” he said, “that’s probably a very wise position to take. By the way,” he added, “are you aware that you have what appears to be a bullet hole in your jacket pocket? You may want to mention that to the crime le investigators here. Otherwise, they’re not going to understand some of the evidence they’re looking at.”

It was several hours later before anyone made a move to go home. Marianne Maculyea had shown up in her 1967 sea foam-green VW Bug. Jeff Daniels, who kept the old Bug running perfectly, turned up in Joanna’s Eagle, which he had hot-wired to bring down from the hotel. When it was time to go, Joanna loaded her mother into the car first and then went to find Jenny.

“What’s going to happen to Tigger?” Jenny asked. “We can’t just leave him here, can we?”

And, of course, the answer to that question was no. Jenny and Tigger rode in the back while a strangely subdued Eleanor rode in front . “Thank you for the ride,” Eleanor said when Joanna dropped her off in front of her own house at four in the morning. “Thank you for everything.”

Try as she might, Joanna could never remember hearing her mother saying those words ever before.

At home at last, Joanna was so tired she could barely walk. Without thinking, she went directly to the bedroom. Looking at it, she realized there would be times in the future when the memories of that bed would make sleeping there impossible, but now she was too tired. Joanna tumbled across it. With the comforting scent of Andy’s pillow lingering in her nostrils, she was asleep within minutes.