Stand Down

by J. A. Jance

  “Where do we go from here?” Mel asked.

  “Well,” I said, “I assume that tomorrow morning, you’ll go back to being Chief of Police although, for my money, I’d just as soon you refrained from being locked in another car anytime soon.”

  “What about you?” Mel asked.

  “What do you mean what about me? I’m not exactly sitting around letting the grass grow under my steel-­belted radials. I’m finishing up Harry’s project and will be starting on ours as soon as his is out of the way. I can only handle one housing crisis at a time. I’m sure Jim Hunt will be dragging me hither and yon looking at plumbing fixtures, slab samples, and lighting options.”

  “That may be what we need you to be doing right now,” Mel allowed, “but I don’t see much of a future in it. You don’t plan on spending the rest of your life supervising construction projects, do you?”

  “No,” I admitted. “It’s something I can do in a pinch if I have to, but you’re right. It’s not really me.”

  “There you go,” Mel said, nodding, leaning back in her chair and giving me one of those questioning, raised-­eyebrow, Mr.-­Spock looks that I find so endearing. “So what are you going to do with the rest of your life?”

  It was a serious question—­one I had been dodging for months—­so I did my best to laugh it off. “Bowling, maybe?” I asked. “Or what about golf? Golf seems to be working just fine for Ralph Ames.”

  Ralph came into my life about the time my second wife, Anne Corley, shot through my world like a speeding comet and transformed my existence. Ralph was Anne’s attorney to begin with and became mine in the aftermath of her death. We’ve had a client/friend relationship for decades, one that continues even now that he’s semiretired. Mel leaned forward in her seat and gave me one of her most beguiling smiles. I knew at once that I’d stepped into a trap although it hadn’t yet sprung shut.

  “I’m so glad to hear you mention Ralph,” Mel said. “What about TLC?”

  TLC, aka The Last Chance, is Ralph’s baby, the same way S.H.I.T. once belonged to Ross Connors. It started years ago when one of Ralph’s already well-­heeled clients, a woman named Hedda Brinker, hit a huge Powerball jackpot. Hedda’s daughter, Ursula had been murdered years earlier, and at the time the crime was as yet unsolved. Hedda wanted to use her jackpot winnings to start a privately operated cold-­case organization. Hedda’s original vision was that Ralph, operating in the capacity of her attorney, would set things in motion and then step away. Instead, he had remained at the helm.

  After the shuttering of Special Homicide, Ralph had suggested that I should maybe think about joining up with TLC. Every time he mentioned it, I had turned him down. Unfortunately, my last cold-­case experience had been an ill-­fated effort that had resulted in the death of Seattle Homicide Detective Delilah Ainsworth. I knew too well how otherwise good intentions could have fatal consequences. Only three ­people knew how much Delilah’s death had rocked my world—­ Mel; my AA sponsor and former stepgrandfather, Lars Jensen; and Ralph Ames.

  As far as I was concerned, I was out of the homicide business, especially when it came to cold cases.

  “Being a homicide cop is in your blood,” Mel insisted. “Just look at what you did today. You were back in your element out there and saved my life in the process. You’re a savvy guy, mister. You know what you’re about, you’ve still got the moves, and I know TLC would be lucky to have you.”

  “What are you saying then?” I asked. “No bowling and no golf?”

  We both laughed at the very idea. Laughter came easily that evening, and it’s no wonder.

  “Yes,” she agreed, “no to both, so are you going to call Ralph about this, or should I?”

  It was the old Fuller Brush assumed-­close routine all over again—­How do you want to pay for this, cash or check?

  “Let me think about it,” I said. “Give it a little time. Let me get this housing stuff under control, then I’ll give Ralph a call.”

  “Promise?” Mel asked.

  “I promise,” I said.

  And just like that, I knew I was toast. I also knew that TLC was definitely in my future because Mel was right. Over-­the-­hill or not, being a cop isn’t only what I do. Like it or lump it, it’s who I am.

  Years ago, Amos Warren, a prospector, was gunned down out in the desert, and Sheriff Brandon Walker made the arrest in the case. Now, the retired Walker is called in when the alleged killer, John Lassiter, refuses to accept a plea deal that would release him from prison with time served. Lassiter wants Brandon and The Last Chance to find Amos’s “real” killer and clear his name.

  Sixteen hundred miles to the north in Seattle, J. P. Beaumont is at loose ends after the Special Homicide Investigation Team, affectionately known as S.H.I.T., has been unexpectedly and completely disbanded. When Brandon discovers that there are links between Lassiter’s case and an unsolved case in Seattle, he comes to Beau for help.

  Those two cases suddenly become hot when two young boys from the reservation, one of them with close ties to the Walker family, go missing. Can two seasoned cops, working together, decipher the missing pieces in time to keep them alive?

  Keep reading for an exciting sneak peek at J. A. Jance’s upcoming novel

  Dance of the Bones

  A Beaumont and Walker Novel

  Coming soon in hardcover from William Morrow

  AMOS WARREN WALKED with his shoulders stooped and his eyes and mind focused on the uneven ground beneath his feet. The winter rains had been more than generous this year, and this part of the Sonoran desert, Soza Canyon on the far eastern edge of the Rincon Mountains, was alive with flowers. Scrawny, suntanned, and weathered, Amos was more than middle-­aged and still remarkably fit. Even so, the sixty or seventy pounds he carried in the sturdy pack on his shoulders weighed him down and had him feeling his sixty-­plus years.

  He had started the day by picking up several top-­notch arrowheads. He slipped several of them into the pockets of his jeans rather than risk damaging them as the load in the pack increased over the course of the day. The one he considered to be the best of the lot, he hid away inside his wallet, congratulating himself on the fact that his day was off to such a great start. In the course of the morning, he located several geodes. The best of those was a bowling-­ball-­sized treasure that would fetch a pretty penny once it joined the growing collection of goods that he and his foster son, John Lassiter, would offer for sale at the next available gem and mineral show.

  Assuming, of course, that John ever spoke to him again, Amos thought ruefully. The knock-­down, drag-­out fight the two men had gotten into the night before had been a doozy, and recalling it had cast a pall over Amos’s entire day. He had known John Lassiter for decades, and this was the first time he had ever raised a hand to the younger man. The fact that they had duked it out over a girl, of all things, only added to Amos’s chagrin.

  Ava Martin, Amos thought, what a conniving little whore! She was good-­looking and knew it. She was a tiny-­blond-­bombshell type with just the right curves where they counted. Amos didn’t trust the bitch any further than he could throw her.

  His next thought was all about John. The poor guy was crazy about Ava—­absolutely crazy. As far as John was concerned, Ava was the greatest thing since sliced bread. In fact, he was even talking about buying an engagement ring, for God’s sake!

  As for Amos? He knew exactly who Ava was and what she was all about. She wasn’t anything close to decent marriage material. He had noticed the wicked little two-­timer batting her eyes and flirting with John’s best friend, Ken—­all behind John’s back, of course. And two days ago, when John had been out of town, she’d gone so far as to come by his house—­forty-­five minutes from town—­where she had tried putting the moves on Amos.

  That was the last straw. Amos was decades older than Ava. He had no illusions about his actually being phy
sically attractive to her. No, she wasn’t looking to get laid; Ava was after the main chance.

  She knew John and Amos were partners who split everything fifty-­fifty. She probably understood that, for the most part, Amos was the brains of the outfit while John was the brawn. Amos was the one who knew where to go searching and find the hidden treasures the unyielding desert would reveal to only the most patient of searchers. He knew what was worth taking home and what wasn’t. John was the packhorse who carried the stuff and loaded it into the back of the truck and carried it into the storage unit.

  When it came to selling their finds, Amos had years’ worth of contacts at his disposal, all of them listed in his little black book. He had collected a whole catalogue of gem and mineral dealers and artifact dealers, some aboveboard and others not so much. He also knew which items might interest individual dealers. He did the behind-­the-­scenes selling while John handled direct sales at booths in the various venues. John was a good-­looking young hunk, and that was always a good thing when it came to face-­to-­face sales.

  Amos suspected that John had gotten into his cups and talked too much about what they did and how much money they brought in—­something Amos regarded as nobody’s business but their own. He was convinced that was what Ava Martin was really after—­the shortest route to the money. Amos had sent the little witch packing, and he’d had no intention of telling John about it, but Ava had gotten the drop on him. She had told John all about their little set-­to. The problem was, in Ava’s version of the story, Amos had been the one putting the make on her. With predictable results.

  The previous evening, Amos had gone to El Barrio, a run-­down bar on Speedway just east of I-­10. When he’d lived in town, El Barrio had been within walking distance of the house. When developers came through and bought up the whole block where his house was, Amos had taken his wad of money and paid cash for a five-­acre place up in Golder Canyon, on the far back side of Catalina. The house was a tin-­roofed affair that had started out long ago as a stage stop. In town, John and Amos had been roommates. The “cabin,” as Amos liked to call it, was strictly a one-­man show, so John had chosen to stay on in town—­closer to the action—­and had rented a place in the old neighborhood.

  When Amos went to El Barrio that night, he had done so deliberately, knowing it was most likely still John’s favorite hangout. And knowing, too, that he was coming there to have it out with John because Amos had made up his mind. Either Ava went or John did. He’d been sitting at the bar, tucked in among the other twenty or so Happy Hour regulars and sipping his way through that evening’s boilermaker, when John had stormed in through the front door.

  “You bastard!” the younger man muttered under his breath as he slid uninvited onto an empty stool next to Amos.

  Amos knew that John was hot-­tempered, and he was clearly spoiling for a fight—­something Amos preferred to avoid. He had come here hoping to talk things out rather than duking them out.

  He took a careful sip of his drink. “Good afternoon to you, too,” he responded calmly. “Care for a beer?”

  “I don’t want a beer from you. Or anything else, either. You keep telling me that Ava’s bad news, telling me she’s not good enough for me, but the first time my back is turned, you try getting her into the sack!”

  “That what Ava told you?” Amos asked.

  “It’s not just what she told me,” John declared, his voice rising. “It’s what happened.”

  “What if I told you Ava was a liar?”

  “In that case, how about we step outside so I can beat the crap out of you?”

  Looking in the mirror behind the bar, Amos saw the reflection of John as he was now—­a beefy man four inches taller than Amos, thirty pounds heavier, and three decades younger with a well-­deserved reputation as a brawler and an equally well deserved moniker, Big Bad John. Amos’s problem was that, at the same time he saw that image, he was remembering another one as well—­one of a much younger kid, freckle-­faced and missing his two front teeth. That was how John—­Johnny back then—­had looked when Amos had first laid eyes on him.

  Amos knew that in a fair fight between them, outside the bar, he wouldn’t stand a chance; he’d be dog meat. The younger man might not have been tougher, but he was younger and taller. By the time a fight was over, most likely the cops would be called. One or the other of them, or maybe both, would be hauled off to jail and charged with assault. Amos had already done time, and he didn’t want anything like that to happen to John. That in a nutshell took the fair-­fight option off the table. What Amos needed was a one-­, two-­punch effort that put a stop to the whole affair before it had a chance to get started.

  As the quarrel escalated, tension crept like a thick fog throughout the room, and the rest of the bar went dead quiet.

  “I don’t want to fight you, kid,” Amos said in a conciliatory tone while calmly pushing his stool away from the bar. No one noticed how he carefully slipped his right hand into the hip pocket of his worn jeans, and no one saw the same hand ease back out into the open again with something clenched in his fist. “Come on, son” he added. “Take a load off, sit down, and have a beer.”

  “I am not your son!” John growled as he started to get to his feet. “I never was, and I’m not having a beer with you, either, you son of a bitch. We’re done, Amos. It’s over. Get some other poor stooge to be your partner.”

  Big Bad John Lassiter never saw the punch coming. Amos’s powerful right hook caught him unawares and unprepared. His blow broke John’s cheekbone and sent him reeling backward, dropping like a rock on the sawdust-­covered floor. Big John landed, bloodied face up and knocked cold. In the shocked silence that followed, with all eyes focused on John, no one in the room noticed when Amos Warren slipped the brass knuckles back into his pocket. No, it hadn’t been a fair fight, but at least it was over without any danger of its turning into a full-­scale brawl.

  As John started coming to and tried to sit up, several ­people hurried to help him. Amos turned back to the bartender. “No need to call the cops,” Amos said. “Next round’s on me.”

  As far as the bartender was concerned, that was good news. He didn’t want any trouble, either. “Right,” he said, nodding in agreement. “Coming right up.”

  It took several ­people to get John back on his feet and work-­wise. Someone handed him a bar napkin to help stem the flow of blood that was still pouring from the cut on his cheek, but the wad of paper didn’t do much good. The damage was done. His shirt was already a bloody mess.

  “See you tomorrow then?” Amos called after John, watching him in the mirror as he staggered unsteadily toward the door.

  “Go piss up a rope, Amos Warren,” John muttered in reply. “I’ll see you in hell first.”

  That was the last thing John had said to him—­I’ll see you in hell. They’d quarreled before over the years, most recently several times about Ava, but this was the first time they’d ever come to blows. In past instances, a few days after the dustup, one or the other of them would get around to apologizing, and that would be the end of it. Amos hoped the same thing would happen this time around although, with Ava standing on the sidelines fanning the flames, it might not be that easy to patch things up.

  Lost in thought, Amos had been walking generally westward, following the course of the dry creek bed at the bottom of the canyon, some of it sandy and some littered with boulders. During monsoon season, flash floods carrying boulders, tree trunks, and all kinds of other debris would roar downstream. As the water level subsided, and the sand settled out, there was no telling what would be left behind. In the course of the day, Amos had seen plenty of evidence—­spoor, hoofprints and paw prints that indicated the presence of wildlife—­deer, javelina, and even what Amos assumed to be a black bear. But there was no indication of any human incursions.

  At a point where the walls of canyon narrowed precipitously,
Amos was forced off the bank and into the creek bed itself. And that was when he saw it—­a small hunk of reddish-­brown pottery sticking up out of the sand. Dropping his heavy back with a thud, he removed the prospector’s pick he carried on his belt and knelt on the sand.

  It took several minutes of careful digging to unearth the treasure. Much to his amazement, it was still in one piece. How it could have been washed down the streambed and deposited on a sandy strand of high ground without being smashed to bits was one of the wonders of the universe. Amos suspected that the sand-­infused water of a flash flood had buoyed it up before the water had drained out of the sand, leaving the pot on solid ground.

  Once it was free of the sand, Amos pulled out his reading glasses and then held the piece close enough to examine it. He realized at once that it was far too small to be a cooking pot. Then he noticed that a faded design of some kind had been etched into the red clay before the pot was fired. A more detailed examination revealed the image of what appeared to be an owl perched on top of a tortoise. The presence of the decorative etching on the pot, along with its size, meant that the piece was most likely ceremonial in nature.

  Still holding the tiny but perfect pot in his hands, Amos leaned back on his heels and considered the pot’s possible origins. He wasn’t someone who had a degree in anthropology, but he had spent a lifetime finding and selling Native American artifacts from all over vast stretches of Arizona deserts.

  Years of experience told him the pot was most likely Papago in origin. Sometimes known as the Tohono O’Odham, the Papagos had lived for thousands of years in the vast deserts surrounding what was now Tucson. This particular spot, on the far southeastern flanks of the Rincon Mountains, overlooked the San Pedro Valley. It was on the easternmost edge of the Papagos’ traditional territory and deep into the part of the world once controlled and dominated by the Apache. Had a stray band of Tohono O’odham come here to camp or hunt and left this treasure behind? Amos wondered. More likely, the tiny artifact had been a trophy of some kind, spoils of war carried off by a marauding band of Apache.