Desert Heat (3 page)

“Andy!” Joanna shouted, more frantically this time. “If you can hear me, for God’s sake say something.”

For an answer she heard a terrible, low moan, one that struck terror in her heart. He was down there, out of sight and hurt, too. Petrified now, Joanna darted back to the end of the bridge and started scrabbling, hand over hand, down the steep embankment.

“Hang on,” she heard herself shouting. “Hang on, Andy. I’m coming.”

She found him sprawled face down in the roadway while Sadie, tail wagging, eagerly licked the back of his neck. Roughly Joanna pushed Sadie aside and fell to her knees beside the still, prone figure of her husband.

“Andy,” she cried desperately, while her heart hammered wildly in her chest. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?”

“JoJo,” he groaned. “Help me.”

Andy tried to raise his head, but the effort was too much for him. He fell back helplessly into the dirt.

“Andy, you’re hurt. Where? Tell me what happened.”

She was almost shouting in his ear, but there was no answering response from him. The only sounds in the desert came from Sadie’s heavy panting and the faraway, high-pitched yip of a distant coyote. Searching for answers, Joanna’s eyes scanned his back, but she saw nothing. With one hand on his shoulder, she waited for him to take another breath, but he didn’t, not for a long time. The realization that her husband was dying hit her full force.

Grunting with effort and blessed with a strength beyond her capability, she managed to turn him over onto his back. Only then could she see the ink-black stain that spread from just above his belt buckle to his crotch. Fearing the worst, she touched the dark spot with the tips of her fingers. They came away wet and sticky and covered with sand.

“Oh, God!” she whispered. “Help me.” It was both an exclamation and a prayer.

Andy’s eyes fluttered open momentarily. He coughed and a shower of wet sand spattered Joanna’s face, but at least he was still breathing. Fighting back the urge to scream, she leaned close to his ear. “It’s bad, Andy, real bad. Wait here. Don’t move. I’ve got to get help.”

Leaping to her feet, she scrambled over to Andy’s Bronco and tried the door. It was locked. She ran around to the other side and tried that one as well. It too was locked. For a moment she panicked, then she remembered the extra key to the truck on her own key ring in the Eagle. At once, she climbed back up to the roadway, raced to the idling car, shut off the engine, and grabbed the keys. Afraid she might drop them scrabbling back down, she shoved the keys deep in her hip pocket before starting the steep descent.

Once back in the sandy wash, she hurried to the door of the Bronco, pulling the keys out as she ran. Her hands shook uncontrollably as she tried to shove the key into the lock. It took three attempts before the key clicked home and turned. Sick with relief, she wrenched the door open, lunged across the seat, and grabbed the radio microphone down from its clip on the dashboard.

She pressed the button. “Officer down,” Joanna shouted into the microphone. “Officer down and needs assistance.”

“Who is this?” the dispatcher demanded in return. “State your location.”

Joanna Brady took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. “Joanna Brady,” she answered. “I’ve just found my husband. I think he’s been shot.”

“Where are you?”

She forced herself to answer clearly, ration-ally. Otherwise, help would never be able to find them. “Half a mile off Double Adobe Road on High Lonesome. We’re down in the wash beneath the second bridge.”

“Hang on,” the dispatcher told her. “Help’s on the way.”

Joanna flung the microphone back into its clip and ran back around the truck where she once more knelt beside Andy’s still, silent form. He lay just as she’d left him. This time w hen she knelt beside him and lay one hand lightly on his chest, he didn’t respond at all. “Andy,” she said, but still there was no answer.

In an agony of fear, she groped at his wrist. There was a faint, weak pulse, but his skin was icy cold to the touch. Rising panic threatened to engulf her, but she fought it off, rejected it. From some dim corner of memory, her Girl Scout first aid training reasserted itself and clicked into action.

Shock. Andy must be going into shock. Once more she scrambled away from him, this time returning from the Bronco with the clean but worn blanket he always kept in the back seat with his first aid kit and tool chest. Hastily she spread the blanket over his motionless body. She knelt beside him, holding his hands, willing her own warmth into him.

Neighboring coyotes heard the sound long before she did. Only when that first eerie chorus died back could Joanna hear the faint wail of an approaching siren that had set them off.

“Do you hear that, Andy?” she asked. “Hang on. For God’s sake, please hang on.”

But if Andy heard her, it didn’t show. Sadie whined and crawled closer on her belly until her nose touched Joanna’s leg. It was though the dog, too, was in need of comfort. She waited an eternity for Andy to take another shallow breath. But he didn’t. Three miles away, she again caught the faintly pulsing wail of the siren. Followed by another echoing chorus of coyotes. And still Andy didn’t breathe again.

A shiver of despair shot through Joanna’s body, leaving her totally devoid of hope. She rocked back on her heels and screamed her outrage to the universe. “No,” she wailed, flinging her desolation upward toward a moonlit but uncaring sky. “Noooo.”

All up and down the lonely stretches of the Sulphur Springs Valley, howling coyotes took up this new refrain. Somehow the sound of it snapped Joanna out of her unreasoning panic, reminded her of another part of her first-aid training.

Heedless of the blood, she bent over her husband’s inert form. Afraid of hurting him but knowing being too tentative could prove fatal, she placed both hands on his lower rib cage and pressed down sharply. Then, molding her lips to his, she tried to force the life-giving air back into his lungs.

“Don’t leave me,” she whispered between breaths. “Please don’t leave me.”

TWO

An ambulance and two Cochise County Sheriff’s vehicles arrived almost simultaneously followed by an officer from the Arizona Highway Patrol. When the arriving officers scrambled toward them down the embankment, Sadie barked frantically. Joanna didn’t want to stop what she was doing, but the only way for the professionals to get close enough to do their work was for Joanna to leave Andy long enough to drag the dog out of the way.

Clutching Sadie by the collar, Joanna led the protesting dog back to the Eagle and shut her inside for safekeeping. Weak with fear and spent with effort, she leaned against the fender of the car and looked down at the group of Emergency Medical Technicians clustered around Andy’s motionless body. Their hurried shouts and frenzied actions gave her some small hope that perhaps they weren’t too late and Andy was still alive.

She was still standing there looking down at them when Ken Galloway found her. “How bad is it?” he asked.

Shaking her head was all the answer Joanna could manage.

Ken took her arm. “Come with me,” he said. “You’re better off not watching.”

Holding her solicitously, Galloway guided her through the growing collection of haphazardly parked vehicles that already littered the area around the bridge. He opened the rider’s side of his still-warm patrol car and eased her into the seat. She was shaking violently. Inside her head chattering teeth rattled uncontrollably.

“My God, Joanna, you must be freezing,” Ken said. “Wait right here.”

He disappeared, returning moments later with two blankets and a cup of coffee. He handed her the coffee then wrapped the blanket around her legs and tossed the other one over her quaking shoulders. Joanna held the coffee in her hands without taking a drink while she stared at the place where people clambered up and down the embankment. From this perspective, the people on the floor of the wash were totally out of sight.

“He stopped breathing,” Joanna explained woodenly to Ken Galloway. “I tried doing CPR, but I don’t know if it worked or not. Go check for me, Ken. Please.”

“You’ll be all right here alone?”

She nodded. Ken strode to the head of the bridge and then disappeared down the bank. He came back a few minutes later, shaking his head.

Joanna’s heart sank. “Is he still alive?”

“Barely. At least they’ve got his heart beating again. You kept him going long enough for them to be able to do that.”

Joanna didn’t know she had been holding her breath until she let it out. “Thank God,” she murmured.

With a grateful sigh she took a first tentative sip of coffee, letting the hot liquid warm her chilled body from inside out. She drank with-out ever taking her eyes off the path that emerged from the wash just at the end of the bridge abutment.

“I can’t believe it,” Ken Galloway was saying, although Joanna was paying little attention. “I saw him right around five when he got off shift. He was fine when he left the office. What the hell happened? Where did all the blood come from? Did he drive off the bridge and run the steering wheel through him?”

“The truck was locked and he was outside it,” Joanna said numbly. “I think somebody shot him.”

“No. You gotta be kidding.”

“I’m not kidding.”

Ken Galloway shook his head. “Jesus, Joanna. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. Sorry as hell.” For a moment Galloway stood there as if vacillating over whether to stay or go. “I’ll go back down and check again,” he said quietly. “If I stay here, I’ll make a damn fool of myself.”

With that, Ken Galloway hurried away. Left alone on the sidelines, Joanna saw people she knew coming and going in an eerie glow of flashing blue and red lights. Even though they saw her and knew she was there, for the most part they ignored her. One or two of them nodded in her direction, but to a man they found themselves tongue-tied and shy in the face of Joanna Brady’s looming personal tragedy. Aghast at the extent of Andrew Brady’s injuries, none of them wanted to be trapped into telling Joanna exactly how bad it really was. Unfortunately, their wary silence was something she recognized all too well.

Joanna had heard that same terrible silence once before in her life. She had been ignored exactly the same way the night of her father’s accident. Sheriff D. H. Lathrop, Hank for short, had been bringing a group of girls back from a camping trip in the Chiricauhuas when he stopped to change a flat tire for a stranded female motorist. He had been struck from be-hind by a drunk driver and had died at the scene with his thirteen-year-old daughter looking on helplessly from the sidelines. Now, fifteen years later, Joanna was once again trapped in similarly ominous silence.

With eyes glued to the top of the path, Joanna was only dimly aware that another vehicle had arrived on the scene. Within minutes, Sheriff Walter V. McFadden himself, Stetson in hand, loomed up beside her out of the darkness.

“Dick Voland called me at home,” he said gruffly. “I can’t believe this. I came as soon as I could, Joanna. How are you?”

“All right,” she whispered.

“And Andy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why the hell didn’t they leave the engine running in this damn thing? It’s colder ‘an blue blazes. Want to come sit in my truck? It’s warmer there.”

Joanna shook her head. “No. I can see better from here. In case . . . in case . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence, but Walter McFadden understood what she meant.

“Here. Give me your cup,” he said. “I’ll go get you a refill on that coffee.”

McFadden returned and handed her a second cup of coffee, this one far stronger than the first. Joanna accepted it gratefully. “What happened?” he asked.

Joanna shook her head. “I still don’t know. I found him here. His truck was locked, but I have an extra key. I got in and radioed for help.”

“Somebody told me he’s been shot. How bad?”

Joanna swallowed hard. It was what she herself had suspected, but this was the first official confirmation. “Real bad, I think,” she replied.

“Damn! Could he still talk when you got here? Did he say anything at all? Tell you who did it?”

“No. Nothing.”

“You got in the truck?” McFadden asked. Joanna nodded. “Did you touch anything?”

“The doors, I guess. And the radio. That’s all I remember touching.”

“I’ll be right back,” McFadden said. He marched away from her and disappeared into the wash. He returned a few minutes later, puffing with exertion.

“I checked the Bronco,” he said. “There’s still a set of keys in the ignition. Are they yours or Andy’s?”

“They must be Andy’s,” Joanna replied. “Mine are right here in my pocket.”

She pulled the heavy key ring from her jacket pocket. It jangled heavily with its collection that included house, work, and car keys as well. Andy had often teased her that her key ring looked like it would have been more at home on a school janitor’s belt rather than in a woman’s purse.

“You say the doors were locked when you got here?”

“Yes. Both of them. Who would do this, Walter?”

“I don’t have any idea, Joanna, but believe me, we’re going to find out.”

“I want to help,” Joanna whispered fiercely.

McFadden looked down at her and shook his head. “You already did enough just getting help here as soon as you did. Your job right now is to be there for Andy. Let us handle it, Joanna. Answer the questions when the detectives get around to talking to you, but other than that, leave well enough alone. He’s one of our own. We’ll take care of it.”

Joanna gazed up at him. “You will, won’t you?”

“Damned right,” McFadden responded. “You’d better believe it.”

Just then a small, frail voice came wafting through the cool desert air. “Mommmmy,” Jennifer called from somewhere back down the road in the direction of the house. “Mommmy, where are you?”

“Dear God in heaven,” Joanna exclaimed.

“It’s Jenny. What in the world is she doing out here?”

“Jenny?” Walter McFadden asked. “Your little girl?”

Joanna nodded. She put down the coffee cup and threw off the blanket that had been wrapped around her legs while McFadden squinted up the darkened roadway. “There she is,” he said, pointing.