Desert Heat

THREE

Joanna was surprised when, without the slightest hesitation, and without having to check the building directory, Walter Mc-Fadden led the way to the elevators and unerringly pressed the button to the correct surgical floor.

“Carol had surgery here, too,” he explained. “That’s how come I know my way around.”

“You don’t have to wait with me,” Joanna said. “I’ll be all right.”

“No,” Walter McFadden returned. “These waiting rooms are tough, especially in the middle of the night. I’m not going to leave you here alone.”

“Thank you,” she said.

‘The surgical floor waiting room was bleak and impersonal with suitably uncomfortable modern furniture and a collection of outdated, dog-eared magazines. McFadden gathered up the scattered pieces of a newspaper, then he sat down with them on one of the couches, placed his Stetson on one knee, and settled in to read and wait. Joanna hurried to a telephone at the far end of the room.

Ten o’clock Arizona time was midnight in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and she woke her in-laws out of a sound sleep. “We’ll be there just as soon as we can,” Jim Bob Brady told her once he had assimilated the bad news. “Eva Lou is already packing our bags. We’ll be on our way just as soon as she’s done.”

The next call was to Joanna’s mother. “I finally got that child of yours in bed,” Eleanor Lathrop grumbled. “She’s almost as stubborn as you are. I don’t know what in the world she was thinking of, sneaking out into the desert at night like that all by herself. And it seems to me that the least you could have done is to stop by here and let me know you were going before you took off for Tucson.”

“There wasn’t enough time, Mother,” Joanna returned evenly. “I wanted to be here at the hospital before they took Andy into surgery

“Well, it just doesn’t seem fair that I’m always the last one to know what’s going on.”

Joanna Brady had spent a lifetime fielding her mother’s chronic complaints. “At least you know now, Mother, and I need your help. Would you please call Milo and let him know I won’t be into work in the morning. And let Reverend Maculyea know as well. I’m too worn out to talk to anyone else.”

“All right. I can do that. I suppose I’d better pack Jennifer up and bring her to Tucson in the morning.”

“No,” Joanna replied. “That won’t be necessary. Sheriff McFadden already offered. He’ll bring my suitcase along as well. I don’t have any idea how long I’ll be here.”

Eleanor Lathrop hadn’t much wanted her husband to be sheriff, but even less had she wanted Walter McFadden to take over in the aftermath of Hank Lathrop’s tragic death.

“Him?” she squawked. “Why on earth should he be the one to pick up Jennifer? Doesn’t he have anything better to do? It seems to me that if people are going around shooting each other here in Cochise County, he ought to be out doing something about that. He shouldn’t be traipsing around hauling little girls all over the countryside. I’m perfectly capable of bringing her up.”

Grateful that her mother wasn’t broadcasting on a speaker phone, Joanna put her hand over the mouth piece. “My mother says she can bring Jennifer to Tucson tomorrow if you have other things to do.”

Walter peered at her over the top of the newspaper he was holding. “I promised that little girl that I’d bring her up, and I intend to do just that,” he said. “Besides, I’ll have to come back up anyway.”

“He says he’ll do it,” Joanna told Eleanor Lathrop.

“I can’t for the life of me see why.”

Joanna was fast losing patience. “Look, Mother, I can’t talk any longer. I’ve got to go now.”

She hung up, feeling betrayed. In times of trouble, mothers were supposed to give their children comfort and consolation, not a hard time. At least that’s the way it worked in books and on television. Easygoing Hank Lathrop could very well have passed for Ozzie Nelson, but Eleanor Lathrop would never be mistaken for Harriet. She had far too many sharp edges.

Joanna left the phone and paced back and forth in the small confines of the waiting room. Walter McFadden watched her over the top of the newspaper. She stopped and stood, still and unseeing, before an impossibly gaudy oil painting hanging on the far wall.

She looked like a refugee from some nearby war. The oversized denim jacket was an ill match for a torn and tattered, silk-looking blue skirt. The skirt’s hem barely skimmed the top of a pair of scruffy men’s work boots. There were dark stains on both the jacket and skirt, stains Walter McFadden surmised would turn out to be splotches of Andrew Brady’s blood. He wondered if Joanna knew there were blood-stains on the jacket she was clutching to her body as though she were still freezing cold.

“At times like this, I miss my father,” she said softly. “Even after all these years, I still miss him.”

The sheriff turned the paper to a different page and then shook it sharply to smooth it out. “D. H. Lathrop was a good old boy,” Walter McFadden observed solemnly. “It was crazy for him to die like that, changing a tire for a lady with a carload of kids and a spare so bad that it didn’t even get her into town.”

Joanna turned from the picture and walked over to a chair, taking a seat near Walter McFadden. “Did you know he used to call me Little Hank?” she asked.

“Little Hank?” McFadden repeated.

Joanna smiled sadly. “He only used his initials in public, but Big Hank was his family nickname, and Little Hank was his way of getting back at my mother. She always insisted that if men had the babies, there’d only be one child in each family, and one was all she was having. So Daddy was stuck with me. He never got the real son he always wanted. Mother wanted me to be one of those sweet, doll-playing, mind-your-mother little girls. My dad turned me into a tomboy, mostly out of spite, I think, and not that it took much effort on his part. The natural inclination was al-ready there. And every time he called me Little Hank it drove my mother crazy.”

Walter McFadden understood that it was easier right then for Joanna to think and talk about her father than it was for her to deal with her husband’s grave injuries, with the uncertainty of what was happening with Andy’s surgery.

“Your dad was smart to get out of the mines when he did, Joanna,” Walter said. “He saw the bottom was going to fall out of the copper business a whole lot sooner than anybody else did. He got out to run for sheriff, and once he got elected, he took me with him. Smartest thing I ever did. I owe your dad a helluva lot.”

Joanna pulled the jacket more tightly around her. Looking down she seemed to become aware of the ugly stains marring the denim. She rubbed fitfully at one. When it didn’t come off, she returned her gaze to Walter McFadden.

“You paid that debt in full,” she said quietly. “Andy wouldn’t have been hired if it hadn’t been for you. I know that. His grades were okay, but they weren’t that good.”

“I didn’t do him that big a favor,” Mc-Fadden returned. “Andy was a good deputy.”

Joanna Brady’s eyes narrowed. “Is!” she said determinedly, balking at how easily the sheriff had slipped into using the past tense where Andy was concerned. “Andrew Brady is a good deputy,” she corrected. “Don’t go writing him off, Walter McFadden. It’s not over ‘til it’s over.”

The sheriff smiled. “Your daddy, Old D. H. Lathrop, was one damn stubborn hombre in his time. Is that where you get it?”

Even Joanna couldn’t help but smile in re-turn. “Actually,” she said, “I think I got a double dose. Stubborn streaks are pretty strong on both sides of my family tree.”

She picked up a ragged People magazine and made some pretense of reading it, but the words wouldn’t jell in her mind. She ended up flipping randomly through the pages without even bothering to read the captions under the pictures. When she finished with that one, she didn’t bother to pick up another. Instead, she stared fixedly at the clock. It seemed to take forever for the minute hand to move from one small black dot to the next.

Twenty minutes later, a swinging door burst open and the Reverend Marianne Maculyea strode into the room. Marianne was half-Mexican and half-Irish. To everyone’s surprise and in spite of a strict Catholic upbringing, Marianne had turned out to be one hundred percent Methodist. She was a Bisbee girl who had gone away to college in California expecting to major in microbiology. She had returned home several years later as an ordained Methodist minister, sporting braces, Birkenstocks, and a househusband named Jeff Daniels who stayed home, baked his own bread, kept an incredibly clean parsonage, and who never hinted to Marianne that perhaps they ought to share the same last name.

This unusual arrangement inevitably caused Bisbee’s old-timers to be somewhat suspicious. Scandalized was more like it. Five years after Marianne Maculyea’s return, the braces were gone but the househusband remained. Even though the town as a whole languished in economic woes, the once dwindling First Methodist Church up the canyon in Old Bisbee boasted a healthy, thriving congregation. When the local Kiwanis Club began admitting women, Reverend Marianne Maculyea was one of the first women invited to join.

“I figured I’d find you here,” Marianne said to Joanna, who had gotten up and hurried to meet the other woman. “Your mother called Jeff, and Jeff called me. What’s the word? What’s going on?”

“We still haven’t heard anything,” Joanna answered. “Andy isn’t out of surgery yet. Mari, how on earth did you get here so fast?”

“I was already in Tucson,” she said. “I came up to meet with Deena O’Toole to help her plan the memorial service. Jeff caught me at her house out in the foothills just as I was leaving.”

“Memorial service?” Joanna asked, frowning. “What memorial service? Who died?”

Marianne shook her head. “I didn’t know you hadn’t heard. I’m sure you remember Lefty O’Toole, don’t you?”

Wayne O’Toole had graduated from Bisbee High School in the early sixties and had gone on to receive a degree from the University of Arizona before falling prey to the draft. After a stint in Vietnam he had returned to Bisbee to teach only to leave the district in disgrace three years later when he was found to be growing a healthy crop of marijuana in his Mother’s backyard up in Winwood Addition. It was years since Joanna had heard his name.

“1 didn’t know him,” she said, “not personally. But Andy did. Mr. O’Toole was the line coach the whole time Andy played football, JV and Varsity both. He got fired the year I was a freshman. What happened?”

“Murder, evidently,” Marianne Maculyea replied. “Someone shot him in the back. He had just gotten out of drug rehab a month or so ago. According to his mother, he was living in Mexico and supposedly getting his life back in order. Lefty’s like me. He was raised a Catholic but left the church years ago. I’ve become friends with Mrs. O’Toole up at the Mule Mountain Rest Home. She asked me to handle the memorial service. Deena, Lefty’s ex-wife, is helping with the arrangements. Between the two of them, I’ve had my hands full, but enough of that. Tell me about Andy. What in the world happened? Jeff said he’d been shot, too.”

Joanna nodded. “That’s right. It must be an epidemic. I found Andy down under one of the bridges along High Lonesome Road. They brought him here by helicopter. He’s been in surgery for over an hour so far.”

“Tell me again what happened to Lefty O’Toole?” Walter McFadden interrupted.

Marianne Maculyea’s total focus had been on Joanna. Now, for the first time, she seemed aware of the sheriff’s presence.

“Oh, hi there, Walter. I didn’t see you when I came in. The story we’re getting is still pretty muddled. It happened down near Guaymas. When they found him, he was thirty miles from nowhere, out in the middle of the desert. It’s a miracle anyone found him at all. His car turned up abandoned by an old airstrip, so chances are it was robbery. At least that’s what the Mexican authorities are saying so far.”

“And he was living down there?” Mc-Fadden asked.

“That’s right. In a dilapidated old school bus someone had converted into a poor-man’s RV. From what we’ve been able to piece together, he disappeared from the mobile home park over a week ago. The body was found this last Wednesday and the federales notified Mrs. O’Toole late Thursday afternoon. Since then, Deena’s been trying to make arrangements to bring him home. It’s costing Lefty’s mother a small fortune to get the body back across the border.”

“Why haven’t I heard about this before now?” McFadden demanded.

Marianne shrugged. “Mordida doesn’t work all that well if too many people hear about it.”

Joanna wasn’t fluent in Spanish, but living in a border town, you didn’t have to be. Mordida, literally translated as “the bite,” refers to bribing public officials. Across the line, it was the time-honored if illegal custom by which Mexican border guards supplemented their meager incomes. If an American citizen happened to die in Old Mexico, getting him home could be a very expensive process, especially it the case received very much publicity. Then the delays could become insurmountable.

Marianne Maculyea turned back to Joanna. Taking both Joanna’s cold hands in hers, she squeezed them tight. “I’m sure Andy has an army of doctors and nurses looking after him. How are you holding up?” she asked. “Can get you anything?”

“I’m all right,” Joanna answered. “So far.” She extricated her hands and walked back over to the painting. In the meantime, Walter McFadden put down his newspaper, picked up his hat, and walked over to Marianne. “Reverend Maculyea, if you’re going to be here with Joanna, maybe I’d better be getting on about my business.”

Marianne nodded. “I plan to stay all night, if that’s all right.” She looked to Joanna for confirmation, but she seemed to have faded out of one conversation and into another.

“I’m sorry Lefty O’Toole’s dead,” she said quietly. “And Andy will be, too. No matter what happened later, Andy always liked the man. He always said Lefty would have been fine if the war hadn’t messed him up. He thought Lefty deserved another chance.”

Marianne shook her head. “Andy’s always been a man ahead of his time,” she observed. “Small towns don’t necessarily make heroes out of people who turn the other cheek.”

“Don’t be putting down Andy,” Walter McFadden grumbled. “And don’t be hard on old Bisbee, either. Lefty O’Toole’s been messed up on drugs for as long as I can remember. Sounds to me like he got in way over his head, and somebody took care of him.”

Tipping his hat to Joanna, he stalked from the waiting room. The two women exchanged glances. “I don’t think Walter liked hearing about Lefty from somebody like me,” she said, “but Deena insisted on keeping it quiet.”

“Don’t worry,” Joanna said. “He’s probably just worn out. I know I am.”

After McFadden left, Marianne located a vending machine and bought two cups of acrid coffee. For the next two hours Joanna Brady and Reverend Marianne Maculyea sat in the waiting room and talked. Or rather, Joanna talked and Reverend Maculyea listened. Finally, at one o’clock in the morning, the door to the waiting room swung open and a doctor dressed in surgical green stuck his head inside.

“Mrs. Brady?” he asked.

Joanna scrambled to her feet, her heart thud-ding heavily in her chest. “Yes.”

“I’m Doctor Sanders. Your husband’s come through surgery as well as can be expected under the circumstances. He’s in the recovery room right now, and from there he’ll be going to the Intensive Care Unit.”

Feeling her knees sag, Joanna sank back down into the chair. “Is he going to be all right?”

Dr. Sanders shook his head. “That I don’t know. He’s been gravely injured. For the next forty-eight hours at least, it’s going to be touch and go.”

“How bad is it?”

“We’ve already been through one episode of cardiac arrest, and there may be some brain damage from that. As far as the wound itself is concerned, we’re dealing with possible peritonitis as well as damage to his liver, kidney, and large intestine. Not only that, the bullet lodged against the spine, so it’s possible there could be some spinal damage as well.”

The hard-hitting words sent Joanna reeling: brain damage, peritonitis, paralysis. She felt as though she were flying apart, but Dr. Sanders seemed unaware of the effect his words were having. “Actually,” he continued, “we should all count ourselves lucky that he’s made it this far.”

“Can I see him?” Joanna asked.

“No. Not at the moment, Mrs. Brady. There’s not much point. He’s still under anesthesia, and we’re going to keep him heavily sedated for a while. With that kind of abdominal damage, we’ll be leaving the incision open so we can continue monitoring exactly what’s going on. Infection and all that. If I were you, I’d go somewhere and try to get some sleep. It’s going to be a long haul. You’ll need your rest.”

“What are his chances, doctor?”

Dr. Sanders was young, not much older than Joanna. He gave her a searching look. “Do you want it straight?”

She nodded. “Please.”

“He’s got about one chance in ten of making it.”

“Those aren’t very good odds, are they, doctor?”

“No, but you said you wanted it straight.”

“Then I’ll stay here and stretch out on one of the couches. Ask someone to come get me w hen they move him from the Recovery Room to the ICU.”

“All right,” he said. “I can understand your not wanting to leave. I’ll have someone bring in a blanket.”

Reverend Marianne Maculyea kicked off her shoes. “Have them bring two,” she said. “If she’s staying, so am I.”

“Okay,” Dr. Sanders said. “Suit yourselves.” He walked as far as the door and then paused as if reconsidering. “Since you’ll be here,” he said, “I’ll set it up for you to be able to see him for five minutes once they get him to ICU.”

“Thanks,” Joanna murmured.

An orderly appeared a few minutes later and dropped off two blankets and two pillows. The women made makeshift beds on the couches. Reverend Maculyea padded around the room until she located the light panel. She shut off all the lights except the red EXIT sign directly over the door.

“Hope you don’t mind the red glow,” she said, making her way back to the couch, “but it looks as though that one doesn’t have a switch.”

Joanna settled herself on the couch and pulled the blanket up around her chin. For a moment the room was quiet, then the stillness was broken by the wail of an approaching ambulance which finally quieted once it arrived at the Emergency Room entrance.

“Mari?” Joanna asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m trying to pray, but I can’t remember how to do it. I’ve forgotten all the words.”

“You don’t have to remember the words,” Marianne Maculyea returned. “Trying to remember the words counts. God’s got a pretty good idea of what you mean, but would you like me to pray for you?”

“Please.”

“Now I lay me down to sleep,” Reverend Maculyea began. “I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”

Joanna found the old, familiar words of the childhood prayer oddly comforting. Somehow they made her want to laugh and cry at the same time.

“If I should die before I wake,” Marianne continued, “I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

The prayer had barely ended when Joanna Brady fell into an exhausted and troubled sleep.

Seven miles away, in his luxurious rented home in the Catalina foothills, Antonio Vargas answered his doorbell. He checked through the peephole to make certain no one was there. Sure enough, there was nothing visible on his front porch but a single briefcase.

Quickly Vargas unbolted the door and hauled the case inside. It was a good one, a Hartmann with a combination lock. He spun the locks to the correct combination and snapped open the lid. There they were, lined out in neatly wrapped bundles of twenties and hundreds-$50,000-blood money, his pay-check for taking out both Lefty O’Toole and Lefty’s pal, Andrew Brady. Killing people was his job, and he was very good at it.

There had been some grumbling over the cost of this particular operation, but those L damned bean-counters didn’t know anything about working out in the field. It had been necessary to convince them what exactly was at stake if preventive measures weren’t taken. They’d come around then, when Tony had shown them in black and white that one of the most lucrative drug routes in the country-the one through Cochise County-was at risk. After that, they’d seen things his way, and money was no object.

Closing the briefcase, Vargas stuck it up on the top shelf in the coat closet next to the door. Fortunately, Angie was either smart enough to stay out of his business or dumb enough not to know what was going on. Either way, she kept out of his way and didn’t ask questions. She could cook, and she was a hell of a lay, one who seldom told him no. What else did a man want? Or need?

Tony felt his growing erection and marveled that his hard-on materialized at the very touch and smell of all that money. He wondered which for him was actually the bigger turn-on-blood or money. As he sauntered back into the bedroom, he switched on the bedside lamp. Angie Kellogg groaned, rolled over on her side, and covered her eyes with a pillow, trying to shut out the light, but Tony was not to be dissuaded. He pulled back the bedding and climbed onto the bed, turning her over onto her back and peeling back her gown.

“Wake up, Angie baby, and see what daddy has for you. He wants you to take him for a little ride.”

“Please, Tony. Not now. It’s the middle of the night. I’m tired. I want to sleep.”

“Sleep hell! Open up!”

And she did, too, because Angie Kellogg was first and foremost a survivor, and she was far too frightened of Tony Vargas to do any-thing else.