Feeling her throat tighten, Joanna took Jenny’s hand and squeezed it. “I will,” she said. “Sleep tight,” she whispered, reaching up to switch off the lamp. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
Leaving the room, Joanna found herself fighting back tears. Be careful. That’s what Jenny had said. Those words were never far beneath the surface in law-enforcement households. They were especially hard-hitting in a family like Jenny’s. Her father, Andy, had died at the hands of a drug smuggler’s hit man, and her maternal grandfather, Sheriff D. H. “Big Hank” Lathrop, had perished after being hit by a drunk driver. The last part of that sentence was never spoken, but it was always understood. Be careful so you don’t go away and never come back.
In her own bedroom, Joanna unlocked the rolltop desk where she kept her weapons. Her Colt 2000 had proved undependable and had been relegated to the status of collector’s item. As an engagement present, Butch had prevailed on her to replace that and her backup Glock 17 with a new pair of Glocks, a 19 and a 26 with interchangeable magazines.
Joanna’s trip to Clayton Rhodes’ place wasn’t really an official police matter. It was more a case of a concerned neighbor looking in on someone else. There was no reason to show up armed to the teeth like some latter-day gunslinger. Still, if something was amiss up the road, it was best to be prepared. In the last few months, Cochise County had been overrun with hundreds of undocumented aliens making their illegal and dangerous journey from Mexico into the States. It wasn’t at all out of line to worry that maybe Clayton had run afoul of a gang of UDAs more interested in the easy pickings of banditry than they were in harvesting strawberries or melons.
Leaving her shoulder holster with its heavy-duty 19 where it was, Joanna strapped on the compact 26 in its inconspicuous small-of-back holster. Then, putting the denim jacket back on and adding both her cell phone and flashlight, she hurried out the back door, carefully locking it behind her.
After clambering into her county-owned Blazer, Joanna headed for the Rhodes place. As the crow flies, Joanna’s house and Clayton Rhodes’ were little more than a mile apart. To get there, however, Joanna had to drive almost five miles of rough dirt road—first from her house out to High Lonesome Road, north on that for the better part of two miles, and then back up another winding road into the hills.
By now the nearly full moon, high in the sky, cast a silvery glow over the nighttime landscape. That was something Joanna appreciated, and something that caught most city dwellers unawares. People who live in the artificial glow of streetlights have no idea that away from the pollution of manmade light, a full moon can make the nighttime desert bright enough to render headlights unnecessary.
Clayton Rhodes’ house dated from pre-air-conditioning times and had been built into the cleft of Mexican Canyon where it was naturally sheltered during the worst of the Sonora Desert’s afternoon heat. Carefully nurtured cottonwoods had grown up around the house, adding a much-needed layer of summertime shade. As Joanna drove into the silent yard, those cottonwoods, still bare-branched, stood like ghostly sentinels with their arms stretched skyward. The windows of the house were totally black. The only light was the eerie reflection of moon glow off the house’s old-fashioned tin roof. There was no sign of life. Joanna remembered that, months earlier, Clayton had sold off the last of his livestock and taken his arthritic old dog, Biddy, to the vet to be put down.
“Won’t be gettin’ me another dog, neither,” he had told Joanna then. “I’m too dang old. Wouldn’t be fair.”
And so, in Clayton Rhodes’ yard, there was no welcoming chorus of barking dogs to announce Joanna’s arrival. Nor was there any sign of a parked vehicle to indicate someone was at home.
Here, as on High Lonesome Ranch, the yard had been fenced to keep out marauding livestock. Joanna parked the Blazer in the gravel outside the closed gate. Before getting out of her vehicle, she pulled the radio’s microphone out of its holder. “Tica,” Joanna told the dispatcher. “I’m here now—at Clayton Rhodes’ place. It looks pretty much deserted. I’m about to go inside.”
“As in breaking and entering?” Tica asked.
“The man’s in his eighties,” Joanna returned. “He may be inside, sick or hurt. I know for a fact that Clayton isn’t much of a believer in locking doors. But if it comes down to breaking in, I’m not above doing it.”
“I’ve contacted Deputy Howell,” Tica responded. “She’s on her way, but she’s coming from Saint David, so it’s going to take some time for her to get to you.”