Rattlesnake Crossing (2 page)

"No. They're at a motel in town each night, but they come out to the farm during the day."

Mentally, Joanna closed her eyes and tried to remember the school photos accompanying letters in Christmas cards past. It seemed as though the boys were close to Jenny's age, but she couldn't be sure. "How old are they?" she asked.

"Rodney's twelve. Brian's eleven."

"Listen," Joanna said. "And I mean listen carefully. The rest of this week, I don't want you to spend any more time alone with those boys than you absolutely have to. But if you end up with them and they give you any more lip about being a Methodist or whatever, I want you to go after Rodney and punch his lights out. Use that thumb hold Daddy taught you for starters."

"But is that okay?" Jenny asked. "Don't I have to forgive them? Aren't I supposed to turn the other cheek?"

No, you're not,
Joanna thought.
And you don't have to be a victim, either
. She said, "'They've pulled these name-calling stunts more than once, haven't they?"

"Yes," Jenny replied. "The whole time they've been here."

"'Then you've already turned the other cheek as much as you need to," Joanna assured her daughter. "The next time they look at you cross-eyed, let 'em have it."

"But what will Grandpa and Grandma say?" Jenny objected. "What if they get mad at me?"

"'They won't, not if you tell them what's been going on."

Joanna heard a sound in the background. "That's Grandma Brady now," Jenny said. "It's time for dinner. Do you want to talk to her?"

Joanna took a deep breath. "Sure," she said. "You go eat, and I'll talk to Grandma." Moments later, Eva Lou came on the line. They chatted for a few minutes before Joanna brought up Rodney and Brian. "What's going on with those boys?" she asked.

"'That's it," Eva Lou said. "They're just being boys."

"It sounds to me as though they're out of control."

"Well, maybe a little," Eva Lou agreed.

Joanna didn't want to step over any lines, nor did she want to make it sound as though Jenny was being a tattletale. "Try to keep an eye on them," Joanna said. "Some extra adult supervision never hurt anybody."

Long after she put down the phone, Joanna lay on the conch, staring up at the ceiling, her heart seething with a combination of worry and anger.
Why do kids have to be such monsters?
she wondered. The incident reminded her of the little flock of leghorns Eva Lou used to keep out in the chicken yard. Among chickens, even a small difference from the rent of the flock would be enough to provoke an unrelenting attack. After a while, the different one would just give up. It wouldn't even bother to fight back.

From that standpoint, Joanna had no doubt that she had given Jenny good advice. The last thing bullies like Rodney and Brian expected was for a helpless victim to turn on them and beat the crap out of them. Which Jenny was fully capable of doing. Andy had seen to that. He had taught his daughter both offensive and defensive moves, making sure she knew how to use them.

Shaking her head, Joanna rolled off the couch. Carrying the phone with her, she made her way into the bedroom and stripped off her clothes. Only when she was standing there naked did she realize that her favorite set of summer attire—sports bra, tank top, shorts, and undies—was still in the dryer, where she had left it on her way to work early that morning.

Eleanor Lathrop, Joanna's mother, had done her utmost to inculcate Joanna with the same kinds of repression and overweening modesty in which she herself had been raised. In Eleanor's scheme of things, walking naked through her own house—even a good mile from the nearest neighbor—would have been utterly unthinkable. But Eleanor was out of town this week, on a belated Alaskan honeymoon cruise with George Winfield, Cochise County's new medical examiner and Eleanor's new husband of some three months' standing. No, if Joanna happened to walk around naked in her own home, who was going to give a damn? Certainly not the two dogs.

With that Joanna flung open the bedroom door—closed out of habit—and strode through the living room and kitchen and on into the enclosed back porch that doubled as a laundry room entryway. There she pulled the clothes out of the dryer and put them on. Then she went back to the kitchen and switched on Jenny's boom-box CD player. Patsy Cline's distinctive voice came wafting through the speakers in her trademark song of falling to pieces, a roadmap for how not to move beyond the loss of a love.

The CD was new, a birthday gift from Butch Dixon, a friend of Joanna's from up near Phoenix. It was a never-before released recording of a concert Patsy Cline had given shortly before the plane crash that had taken her life. Listening to Patsy sing from across all those years was like hearing from Andy as well. Patsy Cline was dead and yet, through the magic of her work, she lived on in much the game way Andy was still a part of High Lonesome Ranch and of Jenny's and Joanna's lives as well.

Joanna had been taken aback by her strong emotional reaction to the music.
She
had been surprised. To her dismay, Butch Dixon hadn't been surprised in the least.

With the music still swirling around her, Joanna opened the refrigerator door and stared at the contents, wondering what to fix for dinner. It came to her all at once. Closing the refrigerator door and opening the cupboard instead, she plucked out the box of Malt-o-Meal. She had always wondered what it would be like to have hot cereal for dinner.

That night, with no one there to criticize or complain—with no one to consider but herself—Joanna Brady found out. She cooked the cereal in the microwave, covered it with milk and brown sugar, and then ate it standing there by the counter. Eleanor would have been aghast.

For the first time, a fragile thought slipped across Joanna's consciousness—flitting briefly through her mind on gossamer butterfly wings—that maybe living alone wasn't all bad.

CHAPTER ONE

"So what went on overnight?"

Morning briefing time the next day found Sheriff Joanna Brady closeted in her office at the Cochise County Justice Complex with her two chief deputies, Dick Voland and Frank Montoya. For a change, the burly Voland and the slight and balding Montoya weren't at each other's throats.

Montoya, deputy for administration and a former city marshal from Willcox, had been one of Joanna's several opponents in her race for sheriff. Voland, chief for operations, had been chief deputy in the previous administration and had actively campaigned for another losing candidate. Joanna had confounded friends and critics alike by appointing the two of them to serve as her chief deputies. Almost a year into her administration, their volatile oil-and-water combination was working. The constant bickering didn't always make for the most pleasant office environment, but Joanna valued the undiluted candor that resulted from the two men's natural rivalry.

"Let's see," Voland said, consulting his stack of reports. "Hot time up in the northwest sector last night. First there was a report of a naked female hitchhiker seen on Interstate 10 in Texas Canyon. Not surprisingly, she was long gone before a deputy managed to make it to the scene."

"Sounds to me like some long-haul trucker got lucky," Montoya said.

"That's what I thought, too," Voland agreed. "Then, overnight, somebody took out Alton Hosfield's main pump and two head of cattle over on the Triple C."

CCC Ranch, referred to locally as either the Triple C or the Calloway Cattle Company, was an old-time cattle ranch that straddled the San Pedro River in northwestern Cochise County. The family-owned spread had historic roots that dated all the way back to Arizona's territorial days. Alton Hosfield, the fifty-three-year-old current owner, was waging a lonely war against what he called "enviro-nuts" and the federal government to keep his family's holdings all in one piece. Meanwhile, neighboring ranches had been split up into smaller parcels. Those breakups had caused a steady influx of what Alton Hosfield regarded as "Californicating riffraff." Most of the unwelcome newcomers were people the rancher could barely tolerate.

"Does that mean the Cascabel range war is heating up all over again?" Joanna asked.

Voland nodded. "It could be all those rattlers are getting ready to have another go at it."

In high school Spanish classes Joanna had been taught that
cascabel
meant "little bell." But in Latin American Spanish it meant "rattlesnake." No doubt Voland wanted to impress Frank Montoya with his own knowledge of local Hispanic place-names.

"Deputy Sandoval checked to see if maybe Hosfield's cattle had broken into Martin Scorsby's pecan orchard again," Voland continued. "As far as he could tell, the fence was intact, and both rattle were found on the Triple C side of the property line."

Scorsby, Hosfield's nearest neighbor, was a former California insurance executive who had planted a forty-acre pecan orchard on prime river bottom pastureland Alton Hosfield had coveted for his own. During an estate sale, he had attempted to buy the parcel from the previous owner's widow. Years later, Hosfield still read collusion into the fact that Scorsby's offer had been accepted by the former owner's son—yet another Californian—in place of his. In addition, Joanna knew that on several previous occasions, when Triple C cattle had breached the fence and strayed into Scorsby's peccan orchard, Hosfield had been less than prompt in retrieving them.

"It's not just that the cattle are dead," Voland added ominously. "It's how they got that way. This isn't in the report, because I just talked to deputy Sandoval about it a few minutes ago. He managed to recover a bullet from one of the dead cattle. He said he's never seen anything like it. The slug must be two inches long."

"Two inches!" Joanna repeated. "That sounds like it came out of a cannon rather than a rifle."

"Sniper rifle," Frank Montoya said at once. "Probably one of those fifty-caliber jobs."

Both Joanna and Voland turned on the Chief Deputy for Administration. "You know something about these guns?" the sheriff asked.

"A little," Montoya said. "There's a guy over in Pomerene named Clyde Philips. He's a registered gun dealer who operates out of his back room or garage or some such thing. He called me a couple of months ago wanting to set up an appointment for his salesman to come give us the whole sniper-rifle dog and pony show. He said that since the bad guys might have access to these things, our Emergency Response Team should, too. He sent me some info. After I looked it over, I called him back and told him thanks, but no thanks. Maybe the crooks can afford to buy guns at twenty-five hundred to seven thousand bucks apiece, but at that price they're way outside what the department can pay.”

"What can fifty-calibers do?" Joanna asked.

"Depends on who you ask. After I talked to Philips and looked over the info he sent me, I got on the Internet and researched it a little further. Fifty-calibers were first used as Browning automatic rifles long ago. Remember those, Dick? Then the military in Vietnam tried a sniper version. The farthest-known sniper kill is one point four-two miles, give or take. Not bad for what the industry calls a 'sporting rifle.' "

"Sporting for whom?" Joanna asked.

"Probably not for the cattle," Voland replied.

"We'll be running forensic tests on the slug?"

Voland nodded. "You bet."

"I don't suppose there's any way to tell who some of Clyde Philips' other local customers might be," Joanna suggested.

Montoya shrugged. "You could ask him, I suppose, but I don't know how much good that'll do. Fifty-calibers may be lethal as all hell, but they don't have to be registered. Anybody who isn't a convicted felon is more than welcome to buy one, including, incidentally, those Branch Davidian folks from over in Waco. But just because felons can't buy then doesn't necessarily mean they don't have them. All the crooks have to do is steal one from somebody who does."

"Great," Joanna said. She glanced at her watch. "I guess I'll take a run over to Pomerene later today and have a little chat with Clyde Philips. Anybody care to join me?"

“Can't," Montoya said. "I've got a set of grievance hearings with jail personnel lined up for this afternoon."

"I've got meetings too," Voland said, "although if you need me to go . . ."

"Then I'll make like the Little Red Hen and do it myself," Joanna said firmly. "While I'm at it, I may stop by and visit both Hosfield and Scorsby. Maybe I can talk sense into one or both of them. The last thing we need is for all those wackos up around Cascabel to choose sides and start throwing stones."

"Orr bullets," Frank Montoya added.

"Right," Joanna said. "Now, what else is going on?"

"Just the usual," Voland replied. "An even dozen undocumented aliens picked up on foot over east of Douglas. A stolen pickup down in Bisbee Junction. Two domestics, one in Elfrida and another out in Palominas. A couple of DWIs between Huachuca City and Benson. In other words, no biggies.”

Joanna turned to Montoya. "What's happening on the administration side?"

"Like I said before, those grievance hearings are set for this afternoon. I should have the September rotation and vacation schedules ready for you to go over by tomorrow morning, and next month's jail menus by tomorrow afternoon. Also, there are two new provisioners, one from Tucson and one from Phoenix, interested in bidding on coming our food supplier. I'm trying to set up meetings with their sales reps for later this week. You should probably be in on both of those."

Joanna nodded. "All right. Anything else?" Both deputies shook their heads. "Okay, then," she told them. "Let's go to work."

Voland and Montoya left Joanna's office. Running one hand through her short red hair, Joanna contemplated the hard nut of uncompleted paperwork left over from the day before when her private phone rang. It was a line she had installed specifically so family members—Jenny in particular—could reach her without having to fight their way through the departmental switchboard.

"Hello, Joanna," Butch Dixon said as soon as she picked up the phone. "How are things with the Sheriff of Cochise?"