by J. A. Jance
Bree lugged the cooler as far as the front door. As soon as she opened it, she almost choked on the raw stench of cigar smoke that lingered in a hazy cloud just outside. Alf Hastings, her father’s director of operations, was sitting in the shade of the verandah next to the fountain. He hurried to his feet as Bree came through the door. “Let me help you with that,” he offered.
Alf hadn’t been on Green Brush Ranch long. Bree didn’t know much about him other than he was one of those middle-aged men who gave her the creeps. She suspected there were times he made unnecessary security sweeps through the yard outside her bedroom window on the off chance he might catch her in the act of undressing.
“No, thanks,” she said. “I can manage on my own.”
Not one to take no for an answer, Hastings leered at her. “Looks pretty heavy to me,” he said. “At least let me open the gate to the camper.”
That was the last thing Brianna O’Brien wanted. If he opened the camper shell on the pickup, he was bound to see all the camping equipment she had smuggled out of the garage and stowed there without anyone-her parents especially-being the wiser.
“It goes in front,” she told him, quickly putting the cooler down on the ground. “I’ll have to go back inside to get the key.
He was still standing there puffing on what was left of his cigar when she came back out of the house with the key in hand.
“Off to Playas again?” he asked.
Bree gave him a sidelong look. Was he testing her? Had he seen her loading the stuff into the truck and figured out what was really going on? Or was he just making conversation?
“That’s right,” she said.
This time Alf made no offer to help, but she noticed that he had moved off to one side, no doubt hoping to look down her tank top when she bent down to pick up the cooler. Give the dirty old man a thrill. If he’s looking at my boobs, that means he probably isn’t looking inside the camper. Once the cooler was properly situated on the rider’s side of the seat, she slammed the door shut.
“Hope you keep the doors locked when you head off on your own like this,” Alf said. “A young girl like you can’t ever be too careful.”
“I’m careful,” she assured him, walking around to the driver’s side and letting herself in. “Very careful.”
As she turned the key in the ignition, she wondered if Alf would climb into the ATV parked under the portico, one of several used for routine security patrols around the ranch, and then follow her as far as the security gates. When she pulled out onto the road that led away from the house, he was still standing there, looking after her through a pall of cigar smoke.
“Asshole,” Bree hissed between clenched teeth as she watched his reflection grow smaller in her rearview mirror.
As the sun went down in the west, Nacio Ybarra stood in the shade of the gas station’s canopy and checked his watch. Bree should have been there by now. He was looking forward to seeing her, but he was dreading it, too. For a week now, Nacio’s Aunt Yolanda had been doubled over with excruciating stomach cramps. Late that afternoon, her local doctor, unable to make a solid diagnosis, had finally managed to secure an appointment with a specialist in Tucson for the following morning. The problem was, the appointment and accompanying tests required an overnight stay in the hospital. Naturally, Nacio’s Uncle Frank, the owner of Frank’s Union 76, was going to drive her there.
“I know you were planning on going camping with your friends,” Uncle Frank had said apologetically. He had come into the bay where Nacio was fixing a flat to tell him about it. “But I need you to stay. Ronnie’s way too new to be left to close up by himself. God knows what would happen if I did that. He can’t even change a tire by himself. And as for Hector… ” Frank rolled his eyes.
Ever since he was thirteen, Nacio Ybarra had worked as a gas jockey and mechanic at his Uncle Frank’s Union 76, next door to the once-booming Kmart store on the outskirts of Douglas. There was no question about Frank’s assessment of his other two employees. Ronnie Torres was an eager beaver, hut he was only sixteen and had worked at the station for less than two weeks. Frank had hired Ron in hopes of grooming the younger boy to take his nephew’s place when Nacio left for college in the fall.
As for Hector… Yolanda’s younger brother was no doubt a skilled mechanic, but his penchant for Jose Cuervo made him a bad bet to be trusted with the day’s receipts or to show up on a Saturday morning with the cash register change bag intact.
“Don’t worry about it,” Nacio said. “I’ll stay long enough to close. What about opening in the morning?”
Frank nodded. “That too,” he said. “I’ll be here by early afternoon, so once Hector gets workwise, you could probably take off later in the morning.”
Frank Ybarra was the only father Ignacio Ybarra had ever known. Ignacio had never met his real one, whom he thought of only as a sperm donor. Nacio’s mother, sixteen years old and eight and a half months pregnant at the time, had crossed the border west of Douglas and walked as far as the emergency entrance to the Cochise County Hospital. Her water had broken along the way. She had arrived in the hospital lobby with just time enough to be put on a gurney and wheeled into an emergency room before her son catapulted into the world. For years, Uncle Frank had teased his nephew that there was more than one way to be a wetback.
Having assured her son’s U.S. citizenship, Imelda Ybarra had left him in the care of her older brother, Frank, and promptly returned to Mexico, resuming her designated role in a thriving business in Agua Prieta’s red-light district. She had died a few years later of what her son now suspected was probably an early case of heterosexually transmitted AIDS. Frank and Yolanda had raised the boy as one of their own, watching in wonder and with no small pride as this towering foster son of theirs totally eclipsed the physical, academic, and athletic accomplishments of their four natural children.
For almost five years, Nacio had worked in Frank’s gas station after school, on weekends, and during the summers. He was dependable and personable. The customers loved him, and most were aware that he was saving every penny toward college. Frank had always figured there would he plenty of scholarship help available to put someone as bright and talented as Nacio through school. That had seemed especially true when, it the beginning of his senior year in high school, he was as good as promised a full-ride football scholarship to Arizona State University in Tempe. Unfortunately, the football scholarship had disappeared the moment Nacio’s leg had been broken during the Bisbee-Douglas game the previous fall. Doctors had managed to save the leg and pin it back together, but Ignacio Ybarra’s football-playing days were gone forever.
The two academic scholarships Nacio had been granted instead of the athletic one were both to the University of Arizona hi Tucson. Taken together, they didn’t add up to nearly the some amount as the single sports scholarship would have been, and only one of them was renewable. That made Ignacio’s job at Frank’s Union 76 all the more important.
“Don’t worry, Uncle Frank,” Nacio had said. “You take care of Aunt Yoli. I’ll handle the station.”
A Tioga motor home with Kansas plates pulled in and swallowed up a huge tankful of fuel while Nacio washed the wind-shield and checked the oil. He was just finishing checking the air pressure in the last tire when Bree pulled up behind him. Naturally, Ronnie hurried out to wait on her before Nacio had a chance.
After running the motor home driver’s credit card through the machine, Nacio went over to the red Toyota Tacoma. “Hey, Ronnie,” he called, without looking in Bree’s direction but making sure his voice carried through her open window, “I’m going to grab a soda.”
With that, Nacio limped off across the parking lot. The doctors kept telling him that eventually the leg would get better, but he doubted it. He went inside, bought himself a soda, and then came outside to sit on the picnic bench left behind by a short-lived and now departed latte stand. There he waited for Bree to join him.
Nacio hated having to meet her this way, h
aving to sit stiffly on the bench as though they were nothing more than a pair of strangers passing the time of day. It was only when they were alone that they could be themselves-free to be young and in love.
He was struck by the irony of their living a real-life version of the Romeo and Juliet roles they had played all those months earlier. According to Bree, her father hated Mexicans, and Ignacio’s Aunt Yolanda was forever pointing out the folly of mixed dating, which inevitably led to the far worse folly and inevitable heartbreak of mixed marriages. Such warnings had fallen on two sets of determinedly deaf ears.
Brianna O’Brien had returned to Nacio Ybarra’s hazy line of vision while he was still so groggy from the anesthetic and painkillers that at first he had imagined her to be some kind of ethereal being-an angel perhaps-rather than the same flesh-and-blood, blond-haired beauty whose lips had breathed fire into his one hot June night in Tucson several months earlier. Even after the drugs wore off, he still expected she would simply disappear. But she didn’t. Instead, she visited him every day of the three weeks he was stuck in the Copper Queen Hospital. Each time she came to his room, she brought with her a sense of joy and laughter and the hope that, although his leg was undeniably broken, his life was certainly not over.
Those visits had continued for a while even after Nacio was released from the hospital and allowed to return home to Douglas. They had ceased abruptly once Aunt Yolanda, alerted by nosy neighbor, came home early one day and figured out that what was going on had slipped well beyond the sphere of ordinary friendship. Since then, the two young people had learned to be discretion itself, but that took work and a whole lot of creativity.
Bree would often come into the station in the late afternoons, pulling up to the full-service pumps about the time Uncle Frank went home for dinner. While Nacio pumped her gas and checked her tires, oil, water, and windshield fluid, while he cleaned all her windows and polished her rearview mirrors, they would hurriedly make arrangements for when and where they would meet again-often at a secluded spot halfway between Bisbee and Douglas on a long-deserted ranch road that ran alongside the railroad line near the Paul Spur Lime Plant.
They both lived for weekends like this one, though, when Bree would tell her parents she was going to New Mexico to visit her friend Crystal Phillips, and Nacio would tell Uncle Frank and Aunt Yolanda he was going camping with some of his friends from school. From Friday night until Sunday after-noon, it would just be the two of them. Usually they would rendezvous at a secret meeting place in the Peloncillo Mountains, east of Douglas, at a wild, deserted place called Hog Canyon. Once they met up, they’d spend the night there, sleeping on an air mattress in the back of Bree’s truck. The next day, they’d leave Nacio’s old Bronco parked out of sight somewhere in the canyon and head out for parts unknown. They loved wandering around in out-of-the way places in New Mexico, an area where they weren’t likely to run into anyone they knew.
Bree always had plenty of money. They went where they wanted with the understanding that by three o’clock Sunday afternoon she would drop him off at his car and they would go their separate ways. That was how this weekend was supposed to work. Now, though, with Nacio unable to get away until sometime Saturday morning, he supposed they would have to scrap the whole thing.
“You look like you just lost your best friend,” Bree said, sitting down on the same bench, but not so close that it looked as though they were actually sitting together.
“Aunt Yolanda’s still sick. Uncle Frank’s taking her up to Tucson to see an internist, and they won’t be back until tomorrow afternoon,” Nacio told her. “I’ll have to close tonight and open tomorrow morning. I’m sorry, Bree. I don’t know what to do.”
Bree had spent every moment of that week longing for Friday, when the two of them could be together. Still, it never occurred to her to argue with him about it or try to change his mind. Ignacio had told her enough about his background-about how much his aunt and uncle had done for him-that she knew he owed them everything. Whatever they needed him to do, Nacio would do without question or else die in the attempt.
“Do you want to come over to the house?” Nacio asked after a pause. “Uncle Frank’s up in Tucson. No one will know.”
“Your neighbor will,” Bree objected. “If she tells on us again like she did the last time, your aunt will have a fit.”
Nacio nodded. “I guess we’ll just have to forget it, then,” he said reluctantly. “Unless you want to go back home and tell your parents you changed your mind and decided to leave tomorrow morning instead of tonight.” Bree considered. It had been hard enough to convince her parents that she needed to go back to Playas yet again. If she retuned home, there was a chance Bree’s father would put his fool down and not allow her to leave a second time.
“What if I went on out to the mountains tonight and waited you to catch up with me tomorrow morning?” Bree asked.
Nacio swung around and stared at her in disbelief. “All by yourself? Wouldn’t you be scared?”
Bree shrugged. “Not that scared. I’d be in the truck. That would he safe enough.” She looked at him and smiled. “Besides, if it means getting to see you later instead of not seeing you at all, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
Ignacio felt a sudden warm glow in his chest, a feeling that came over him whenever he realized how much Bree loved him, how much she cared. Aunt Yolanda was always saying that the only reason Anglo girls hung out with Hispanic boys was because they were sluts, not good enough to catch an Anglo boy of their own. Even so, she said, they always acted like they were better than everyone else and treated their Mexican boyfriends like shit. But Bree wasn’t like that with Nacio Ybarra. Not at all.
“You shouldn’t do that,” he told her at once. “It could be dangerous. There are bears out there, to say nothing of mountain lions…”
“Don’t worry,” Bree returned with a winning and confident smile. “I’ll be fine. No mountain lion in its right mind would dare attack me. I’m a Puma, too, remember?”
Nacio was still laughing as Bree stood up and walked away with her hips swaying and her ponytail bouncing playfully hick and forth in the warm summer sun.
CHAPTER TWO
Joanna Brady stopped at the door of her daughter’s room and peered inside. Ten-year-old Jennifer Ann was sitting cross-legged in the midst of what looked like chaos. Frowning in concentration, she was going down a list checking off items as she went. The next day she was due to leave home for a two-week stay at Whispering Pines, a Girl Scout camp located in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson.
“How’s it going?” Joanna asked.
“Okay,” Jenny replied. “I think I have everything. All I have to do now is get it into the duffel bag.”
“Do you want some help?”
“No, Mom,” Jenny replied. “The directions say I’m sup-posed to pack it myself.”
“All right, then,” Joanna said. “But don’t stay up too late. Tomorrow’s a big day.”
Feeling slightly useless, Joanna backed away, went to her own room, and got ready for bed. The swamp cooler was running. She usually turned it off overnight, but the last few days had been so miserably hot that tonight she left it on.
“See there?” she said, addressing her husband Andy and counting on the drone of the cooler to cover her voice. After all, Andy had been dead since the previous fall, the victim of a Colombian drug lord’s hired assassin, but Joanna Brady still talked to him sometimes, especially at night when she was all alone in what had once been their bedroom. “That’s what happens. Kids grow up, and then they don’t need their parents anymore. Not even to pack their bags.”
She paused, as if to give Andy an opportunity to respond, but of course, being dead, he had nothing to say.
“What I can’t figure out,” she continued, “is if this is the way things are supposed to be, why do I feel so awful about it?”
Since Andy’s death, his daughter, Jennifer, had gone through a dozen different guises and stages-from b
ossy to totally pliant and passive, from a whining clinging vine to this new stage of haughty independence. Faced with the prospect of Jenny’s being gone for two whole weeks, her mother could have handled a bit of clinging right about then.
Closing her eyes, Joanna lay there and waited for sleep to come. If Andy was still here and we were both handling this together, she thought, maybe it wouldn’t be so hard.
For a Friday evening it was still surprisingly quiet in the Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge in Old Bisbee’s Brewery Gulch. So to this shift, Angie Kellogg, the bartender, had had little to do other than making sure her two regulars-the toothless Archie McBride and hard-of-hearing Willy Haskins-were supplied with beer and an occasional vodka chaser.
The two were both retired underground miners. They loved to regale Angie with tales of Bisbee’s glory days, of how things used to be when payday weekends in Brewery Gulch had been nothing but boozing and brawling good times. In nine months of working at the Blue Moon, Angie had come to have a genuine affection for the two old men. Even half drunk, they always treated her with a degree of old-fashioned gentlemanly respect and never failed to apologize when one of them made an inadvertent slip and used what they considered a bad word in front of her. Even when they reached a point where she had to cut them off, they hardly ever gave her a hard time about it. Instead, they’d just get up and leave.
“No problem. We’re eighty-sixed, old buddy. Little lady’s jus’ doin’ her job,” the more sober of the two would say to the other as they fell off their bar stools and headed for the door. “See you tomorrow.”
Angie would nod and wave. “See you,” she’d say. And after they left, she would stand there marveling at the fact that she liked them and they liked her. In her previous life as an East L.A. hooker, those kinds of easygoing relationships had never been possible. But here in Bisbee, Arizona, they were. Not only was she friends with those two harmless but kindhearted drunks, Angie also counted among her pals the local sheriff, Joanna Brady, and a Methodist minister by the name of Marianne Maculyea. In fact, on her days off, Angie sometimes baby-sat for Marianne and her husband, Jeff Daniels. She would take charge of their rough-and-tumble daughter Ruth while Jeff and Marianne took Ruth’s twin sister, Esther, to one of her all too frequent visits to the cardiologist at University Medical Center in Tucson.
