“You don’t?”
“Not at all. Because my intentions are honorable, you see. Completely. What about yours?”
“Mine?” Joanna stammered stupidly.
“Yes, yours,” Butch said. “We can either go on having what they call a totally meaningless relationship-which, I have to tell you, isn’t half bad. Or we can get married. If you’ll have me, that is.”
“Wait a minute. You’re asking me to marry you?” Joanna returned. “On the telephone?”
“Well, I admit it’s not the best possible arrangement, lint it seems like I’d better do it now. Otherwise, your mother will do it for me.”
“Butch. I don’t know what to say.”
On the other end of the phone, Joanna heard a doorbell chime.
“Say yes,” he urged.
“But you promised. You told me you wouldn’t push.”
“That was before your mother rang my doorbell. So, will you or won’t you?” The doorbell chimed again. “Well?” he pressed.
Joanna took a deep breath. “Yes, dammit. All right. I will.”
“Good answer. Good answer,” Butch said. “Now I’ve gotta run and answer the door. Otherwise Junior will beat me to that.”
Butch Dixon hung up then. Twenty miles away, across the San Pedro Valley, Joanna Brady stared at her cell phone in stunned silence.
CHAPTER TEN
For the next several minutes, Joanna was so thunderstruck by what had happened that she barely saw where she was going. How could it be? Butch had asked her to marry him and she hadn’t said no. She hadn’t said “I need to think it over.” She had simply said yes. And not even very graciously at that.
She wanted to call him back, to say something-anything, but she couldn’t do that. Not with her mother there! Her mother! How dare she! And yet… Try as she might, Joanna couldn’t be angry with Eleanor Lathrop Winfield right then. She was happy in a way she had never thought to be happy again. Giddy, almost.
When Joanna was growing up, a place called Nicksville-little more than a bar and a couple of scattered mobile homes-had been civilization’s last visible outpost along Highway 92 between Sierra Vista and the cutoff to Coronado Pass. The isolated mountain pass overlooked the route Coronado and his men once followed as they came north in search of the Seven Cities of Gold. Nicksville was where Joanna finally came to her senses. She realized then that she had overshot the turnoff to Mark Childers’ Oak Vista Estates without even noticing.
Laughing now, Joanna made a U-turn in the bar’s parking lot and headed back the way she had come. On the way she made a conscious effort to put her life-changing phone call to Butch aside. She was going to Oak Vista on business-on police business. She understood how vitally important it was for her to keep her mind on the job. Inattentive cops too often become dead cops.
Just north of the cutoff to Coronado Pass, the sweeping majesty of the Huachucas was marred by several moving columns of dust and by the thick smoke of a slash-burn fire that spiraled skyward above the grassy foothills. Gigantic bulldozers had left behind red earthen scars through the tall yellow grass and knocked down grove after grove of sturdy scrub oak.
Seeing the damage, Joanna shook her head. Welcome lo urban blight, she thought. No wonder people were offended by Mark Childers’ grandiose plans and thundering equipment. By the time his dozer-wielding construction crews were done with their work, people buying homes in Oak Vista would be lucky if there were any viewable oak left standing for miles around.
Three miles back down the highway she came to a huge billboard. WELCOME TO OAK VISTA ESTATES, the sign read. MODELS OPENING SOON. Underneath, on the far side of a cattle guard, a narrow road wound off into the desert. Next to the cattle guard, propped against one of the uprights, was an orange-and-white hand-lettered sign. NO TRESPASSING, the sign announced. CONSTRUCTION VEHICLES ONLY.
Switching the Blazer into four-wheel drive, Joanna bounced across the cattle guard. She followed the narrow dirt track for the better part of a mile. By then she noticed that, although smoke from the slash burns was still rising in the brisk autumn air, the moving columns of dust she had spotted from farther up the road were no longer visible. She drove up to a construction shack behind which sat a row of transportable chemical toilets.
It was only when she arrived at the shack that Joanna realized why the earth-moving equipment was no longer moving. It was lunchtime. One whole wall of the construction shack-the shady side-was lined with dusty, hard-hat-wearing workers, all of whom sprawled in the shade, eating lunches out of lunch pails and brown paper bags.
One of the men, a muscular blond in his early thirties, stood up and sauntered toward her. He was stocky with the broad, bulging shoulders and bull neck of a chronic weight lifter. He swaggered up to Joanna’s unmarked Blazer, buttoning the top several buttons of a faded flannel shirt and grinning suggestively. Joanna rolled down her window.
“Hey, red,” he said, referring to Joanna’s bright red hair, “can’t you read, or didn’t you see the sign? It says ‘no visitors.’ Mr. Childers doesn’t want people who don’t belong hanging around here.”
Joanna pulled out her ID wallet and opened it. As soon as she did so, the extra badge she had picked up from the storeroom-the one she had planned to drop off for Junior-plummeted out of the wallet. It landed in the dirt with a tinny thank. Bent on retrieving it, Joanna bounded out of the truck. As she hit the ground, her ears were assailed by a series of approving catcalls from the other workers. Meanwhile, Mr. Weight Lifter beat her to the punch. When he handed the fallen badge back to Joanna, she was blushing furiously and still trying to offer him a glimpse of the other badge as well as her picture ID.
He chose to ignore both. “What’s the matter, little lady?” Mr. Weight lifter asked with a leering grin. “Are Crackerjacks having a run on badges these clays?”
At five feet four inches tall, Joanna Brady had spent a life-time being self-conscious about her height-or lack thereof-and being teased about it as well. Consequently, there were few terms that raised her ire more than a derisive “little lady,” although sarcastic comments about her hair color came in a close second.
“No,” she said frostily. “As a matter of fact, this badge came out of a box of Wheaties right along with my Colt 2000, my Glock, and my handcuffs. Care to tell me where I can find Mr. Childers?”
The leer retreated slightly but it didn’t disappear altogether. “He’s not here,” the man answered. “He went into town to grab some lunch.”
“Do you know what time he’ll be back?”
Mr. Weight Lifter raised his hard hat and swiped a grimy forearm across his forehead, leaving behind a muddy track on a sweat-stained brow. “Probably not before two-thirty or so. He believes in long lunches.”
Joanna dug in her pocket and pulled out a business card. “Tell Mr. Childers Sheriff Brady stopped by to see him,” she said. “Now then, one of my deputies is out here somewhere. Any idea where I’d find him?”
“The guy with the dog?”
Joanna nodded.
Taking her card, the man stuffed it into a shirt pocket that was scarred with the round telltale brand of an ever-present can of snuff. “Hey, you guys,” he called back to his fellow workers. “Anybody here know where that deputy went-the one with the big dog?”
One of the other men tossed a soda can past Joanna into trash can a few feet away. Dregs of soda sprayed out of the can, missing her dry-clean-only suit by mere inches. Evidently pleased with himself the guy favored Joanna with a gap-toothed grin as she dodged back out of the way.
“Up on the back forty,” he said. “Youse go straight up here and turn right at the barbed wire. It’ll take youse right to him.”
Dismissing her, the first guy ambled away. As he turned his back, Joanna noticed a sickeningly familiar bulge in his hip pocket. “Wait a minute,” she said. “What’s your name?”