She straightened her shoulders as she approached the fireplace. “Detective Strong says she’ll deal. She wants to know what you want.”
Larry nodded and once again smiled his chilly, humorless smile. “That’s more like it. Tell her—”
“Yoohoo, Joanna,” Jim Bob Brady’s hearty voice boomed from across the room near the hotel en-trance. “We’re back.”
With sinking heart, Joanna watched as the Bradys, arms laden with bags of merchandise, marched purposefully across the lobby.
“Get rid of them,” Larry Dysart whispered urgently. “I don’t want them here.”
“Did you have a good time shopping?” Joanna asked, turning a phony smile on her in-laws.
The phoniness of her smile didn’t seem to faze Eva Lou, who sank gratefully into a nearby chair and kicked off her shoes. “My feet hurt like mad,” c announced. “That place was crazy. I didn’t ink we’d ever get checked out.”
“This is Larry Dysart,” Joanna said lightly, while briskly rubbing her earlobe with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. “He’s an old navy friend of Andy’s. These are Andy’s folks, Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady.”
During the election, Joanna and Jim Bob had gone out doorbelling together. On a quiet street in Willcox, while Jim Bob went to the house next door, Joanna had rung the bell of a modest bungalow. The man who answered the door had seemed fine at first, but when he discovered Joanna was a candidate for the office of sheriff, he had started telling her a long, complicated story about how his neighbors on either side were really Russian spies who were planning to kill the President and overthrow the government.
Realizing the man was somewhat disturbed, Joanna had tried to drop off her literature and leave. At the prospect of her walking away, however, the man had become highly agitated. Jim Bob had gone on to two more houses before he realized Joanna was still stuck at the first one. He had come back to retrieve her. Between the two of them, Jim Bob and Joanna had effected a reasonably graceful exit.
From then on, however, a rubbed earlobe had meant that whoever Joanna was involved with at the time was trouble in one way or another. In addition to the tugged earlobe, both the Bradys and Joanna knew that Andy had served a two-year hitch in the army—not the navy.
“Is that so?” Jim Bob put down his packages and then offered a hand to Larry Dysart in greeting. “Did you say navy? Glad to meet you, Larry,” Jim Bob said, then the old man turned and focused his eyes on Joanna’s face.
A dismayed Eva Lou looked back and forth between them, but she was familiar enough with the Willcox story to say nothing and follow her husband’s lead.
“And what did you do in the navy?” Jim Bo asked cordially, sitting down and leaning back as if settling in for a genial chat. “Andy was involved in communications.”
“Me, too,” Larry said. “That’s how Andy and I met.”
The lie seemed to come easily. He played along, all the while looking daggers at Joanna with the same hard-edged stare he had used on Leann Jessup at the end of the candlelight vigil.
“Anyone care for a drink?” a cocktail waitress asked.
“Sure,” Jim Bob said. “If you don’t mind, the wife and I will join you. We’ll both have coffee, black.”
“You’d better get back to your friend on the phone,” Larry said. “She’ll think you’ve forgotten all about her. Tell her to come here and we’ll talk.”
Joanna walked back to the phone. “What took you so long?” Carol demanded.
“My in-laws showed up. They’re sitting there chatting with us. They’ve ordered coffee.”
“Get rid of them,” Carol said, repeating verbatim the same thing Larry had said. “I’ve called for backup. The SWAT team is gearing up, but it’ll take a little while to get everybody in place. They’ll take up strategic positions outside the hotel. Cars should be on the scene within two minutes. I told them no lights, no sirens. Nobody’s to try going inside until I give the word, and I’m leaving my office now. Can you tell if he’s armed?”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell for sure, but most likely.”
“That’s my guess, too. Are you?”
“Yes.”
“Good girl. Hang in there, Joanna. Believe me, everybody here’s on top of this thing. We’re getting a search warrant for both his house and vehicle. And don’t worry. No matter what happens, we’ll find those girls.”
“You’d better,” Joanna said, but it was a hollow threat, fueled by desperation and hopelessness and nothing else.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Joanna hung up the phone and started back toward the congenial-looking group gathered in front of the poinsettia-banked fireplace. As she walked, the physical weight of the Colt under her jacket was almost as heavy as the terrible weight of responsibility pressing against her heart.
This time it was no dream. Wide awake now, she was back in her worst shoot/don’t shoot nightmare—with Jenny in danger and with people she loved sitting directly in the line of fire. Carol Strong and her backup officers were riding to the rescue, but none of them knew this lobby layout as well as Joanna did. And if Dysart caught a glimpse of cops taking up positions outside, he might turn a gaily decorated hotel lobby into a killing zone.
While Joanna had been on the phone, a school bus had pulled up outside the hotel entrance. Now with whoops of laughter, a crowd of thirty or so teenagers, all of them carrying luggage, swarmed into the lobby. At the sight of all those kids, something came together in Joanna’s heart—an urgency and a determination that hadn’t been there before. As a police officer and as a parent, she had a moral obligation to do something to prevent a gun battle from erupting in a room packed with other people’s innocent children. Ready or not, the way to do that was to stop the battle before it ever had a chance to start.
Joanna was almost back at her chair when the cocktail waitress arrived carrying cups, saucers, and a pot of coffee on a tray. Seeing an opening, Joanna paused, letting the waitress step in front of her.
“Carol’s coming,” she said to Larry, carefully establishing and maintaining eye contact with him as she continued forward. “She’ll be here in just a few minutes.”
As Joanna stepped around the waitress, she reached out and snagged the coffeepot’s handle. With one smooth movement, Joanna shoved the waitress out of the way and sent the glass coffeepot and its steaming contents hurtling past Jim Bob’s startled face. It landed, upside down, in Larry Dysart’s lap.
He screamed and lurched to his feet, shattering the pot as well as his cup and saucer into a thousand pieces on the brass-and-glass coffee table in front of him. While Joanna fought the Colt out of its holster, Jim Bob sprang to his feet as well. The older man made a flying tackle, grabbing for Larry’s knees. Leaping almost three feet straight up in the air, Larry managed to dodge out of the way.
“Stop or I’ll shoot,” Joanna ordered.
Instead of stopping, Larry sidestepped both Jim Bob and the chair. As the waitress scrambled to her knees, he grabbed her arm and yanked her toward him. With his forearm angled across her throat, he pinned the struggling woman to his chest, using her as a living shield between his body and Joanna’s deadly Colt.
Behind them in the lobby, horrified hotel customers started to scream. “Oh, my God,” someone wailed. “She’s got a gun. Somebody call the cops.”