Shoot Don't Shoot

by J. A. Jance

  “I’m out here on the patio. Who is it?” a male voice called from somewhere outside, somewhere beyond that iron gate.

  “Joanna Brady. Cochise County,” she answered. When she tried the gate, it fell open under her hand. Across a small patio between the two buildings, she could see a cigarette glowing in the dark.

  “It’s about time you got here,” the man growled in return. “You’re the last of the Mohicans, you know. You’re late.”

  Nothing like getting off on the right foot, Joanna thought. “Sorry,” she said. “My paperwork said suggested arrival times were between four and six. If whoever wrote that meant required, they should have said so.”

  The man ground out his cigarette and stood up. In the dim light, she couldn’t make out his features, but he was tall—six four or so—and well over two hundred pounds. He smelled of beer and cigarettes, and he swayed slightly as he looked down at her.

  “I wrote it,” he said. “In my vocabulary, suggested and required mean the same thing. Suggested maybe sounds nicer, but I wanted you all checked in by six.”

  “I see,” Joanna replied. “I’ll certainly know better next time, won’t I?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “We’ll see. Come on, then,” he added. “Your key’s inside. Let’s get this over with so I can go back to enjoying the rest of my evening off.”

  Instead of heading back through the gate, he stomped across the patio to a sliding door that opened into the office unit. Before entering, he paused long enough to drop his empty beer can into an almost full recycling box that sat just outside the door. Shaking her head, Joanna followed. This was a man who could afford to take some civility lessons from Welcome Wagon.

  Joanna had expected to step inside a modest motel office/apartment. Instead, she found herself in a huge but sparsely furnished living room that looked more like a semiabandoned hotel lobby than it did either an office or an apartment.

  Leaving Joanna standing there, the man headed off toward what turned out to be the kitchen. “I’ll be right back,” he said, over his shoulder, but he was gone for some time, giving Joanna a chance to examine the room in detail.

  It seemed oddly disjointed. On the one hand, the ornate details—polished granite floors, high ceilings, gilt cove moldings, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and lush chintz drapes—seemed almost palatial, while the furnishings were Danish-modern thrift store rejects. Between the living room and kitchen was a huge formal dining room with a crystal chandelier. Instead of a polished dining table and chairs, the room contained nothing but a desk and chair. And not a fancy one, at that. The battered, gun-metal-gray affair, its surface covered with a scatter of papers, was almost as ugly as it was old.

  The man emerged from the kitchen carrying a bottle of Coors beer. He paused by the desk long enough to pick up a set of keys. When he was barely within range, he tossed them in the general direction of where Joanna was standing. Despite his poor throw, she managed to snag them out of mid-air.

  “Good reflexes.” He nodded appreciatively. “You’re in room one oh nine,” he said. “It’s in the next building two doors down, just on the other side of the student lounge. The gold key is to your room. The silver one next to it opens the lounge door in case you need to go in after I lock it up for the night. The little one is for the laundry. It’s way down at the far end of the first floor, last door on the left. There’s a phone in your room, but it’s only for local calls. For long distance, there’s a pay phone in the lounge.”

  “Thank you…” Joanna paused. “I don’t believe I caught your name.”

  “Thompson,” he said. “Dave Thompson. I run this place.”

  “And you live here?”

  He took a sip of beer and gave Joanna an appraising look that stopped just short of saying, “You want to make something of it?” Aloud he said, “Comes with the job. They actually hired a dorm manager once, but she got sick. They asked me to handle the dorm arrangements on a temporary basis, and I’ve been doing it ever since. It’s not that much work, once everybody finally gets checked in, that is.”

  Another little zinger. This guy isn’t easy to like, Joanna thought. Stuffing the keys in her pocket, she started toward the door.

  “Class starts at eight-thirty sharp in the morning,” Dave Thompson said to her back. “Not eight-thirty-five or eight-thirty-one, but eight-thirty. There’s coffee and a pickup breakfast in the student lounge. It’s not fancy—cereal, toast, and juice is all—but it’ll hold you.”

  Joanna turned back to him. “You’ll be in class?”

  He raised the bottle to his lips, took a swallow, and then grinned at her. “You bet,” he said. “I teach the morning class. We’ve got a real good-looking crop of officers this time around.”

  Joanna started to ask exactly what he meant by that, but she thought better of it. Her little go-round with Peewee Wright at the truck stop earlier that afternoon had left her feeling overly sensitive. Thompson probably meant nothing more or less than the fact that the students looked as though they’d make fine police officers.

  “Any questions?” Thompson asked.

  Joanna shook her head. “I’d better go drag my stuff in from the car and unpack. I want to put everything away, shower, and get a decent night’s rest.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Wouldn’t do at all for you to fall asleep in class. Might miss something important.”

  As Joanna hurried out the door and headed for her car, she was suddenly filled with misgivings. If Dave Thompson was indicative of the caliber of people running APOA, maybe she had let herself in for a five-and-a-half-week waste of time.

  After lugging the last of her suitcases into the room and looking around, she felt somewhat better. Although the room wasn’t as large or as nice as Dave Thompson’s, it was done in much the same style with floor-to-ceiling mirrors covering one wall of both the room and the adjacent bath. The ceilings weren’t nearly as high as they were in the office unit, and the floor was covered with a commercial-grade medium-gray carpet. The bathroom, however, was luxury itself. The floor and counter tops were polished granite. The room came complete with both a king-sized Jacuzzi and glass-doored shower. All the fixtures boasted solid brass fittings.

  Looking back from the bathroom door to the modest pressboard dresser, desk, headboard, and nightstand, Joanna found herself giggling, struck by the idea that she was standing in a cross between a castle and Motel 6.

  Joanna spent the next half hour emptying her suitcases and putting things away. Her threadbare bath towels looked especially shabby in the upscale bathroom. When she was totally unpacked, she treated herself to a long, hot bath with the Jacuzzi heads bubbling full blast. Lying there in the steaming tub, supposedly relaxing, she couldn’t get the Grijalva kids out of her mind. Ceci and Pablo. They were orphans, all right. Twice over. Their mother was dead, and their father might just as well be.

  Sighing, Joanna clambered out of the tub into the steam-filled room and turned on the exhaust fan, hoping to clear the fogged mirrors. The first whirl of the blades brought a whiff of cigarette smoke into her nostrils. A moment later it was gone. Obviously, her next door neighbor was a smoker.

  After toweling herself dry, Joanna pulled on a robe. By then it was only nine o’clock. Instead of getting into bed, she walked over to the desk and picked up Juanita Grijalva’s envelope, which she had dropped there in the course of unpacking. Settling at the desk, she emptied the envelope and read through all the contents, including rereading the articles she had read earlier that afternoon in the truck stop.

  This time, she took pen and paper and jotted notes as she read, writing down names and addresses as they appeared in the various articles. The Grijalvas—Antonio Jorge, Ceci, and Pablo; Jefferson Davis and Ernestina Duffy of Wittmann; City of Peoria Detectives Carol Strong and Mark Hansen; Butch Dixon, bartender of the Roundhouse Bar and Grill; Anna-Ray Melton, manager of the WE-DO-YU-DO Washateria; Madeline Bellerman, Serena’s attorney.

  Those were the players in the
Serena Grijalva case—the ones whose names had made it into the papers. If Joanna was going to do any questioning on her own, those were the people she’d need to contact.

  It was after eleven when she finally put the contents back in the envelope, climbed into bed, and turned off the light. As she lay there waiting for sleep to come and trying to decide what, if anything, she was going to do about Jorge Grijalva, another faint whiff of cigarette smoke wafted into her room.

  Her last thought before she fell asleep was that whoever lived in the room next door had to be a chain smoker.

  Joanna woke early the next morning, dressed, and hurried down to the lounge, hoping to call Jenny before she left for school. Unfortunately, there was a long line at the single pay phone. All her classmates seemed to have the same need to call home.

  While she waited, Joanna helped herself to coffee, juice, and a piece of toast. A newspaper had been left on the table. She picked up the paper and read one of the articles. A power-line installation crew, working on a project southwest of Carefree, had stumbled across the decomposing body of a partially clad woman. Officers from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department were investigating the death of the so-far unidentified woman as an apparent homicide.

  Joanna’s stomach turned leaden. Some other as yet unnamed family was about to have its heart torn out. Unfortunately, Joanna Brady knew exactly how that felt.

  “You can use the phone now,” someone said.

  Joanna glanced at her watch. Ten after eight. “That’s all right,” she said. “My daughter’s already left for school. I don’t need it anymore.”

  7

  Within minutes of the beginning of Dave Thompson’s opening classroom lecture, Joanna was ready to pack her bags and go back home to Bisbee. Her first encounter with the bull-necked Thompson hadn’t left a very good impression. The lecture made his stock go down even further.

  Listening to him talk, Joanna could close her eyes and imagine that she was listening to her chief deputy for operations, Dick Voland. The words used, the opinions voiced, were almost the same. Why had she bothered to travel four hundred miles round-trip and spend the better part of six weeks locked up in a classroom when she could have the same kind of aggravation for free at home just by going into the office? The only difference between listening to Dave Thompson and being lectured to by Dick Voland lay in the fact that after a day of wrangling with Dick Voland, Joanna could at least go home to her own bed at night. As far as beds were concerned, the ones in the APOA dormitory weren’t worth a damn.

  The man droned on and on. Joanna had to fight to stay awake while Dave Thompson paced back and forth in front of the class. Joanna had spent years listening to Jim Bob Brady’s warm southern drawl. Thompson’s strained down-home manner of speech sounded put on and gratingly phony. Waving an old-fashioned pointer for emphasis, he delivered a drill-instructor-style diatribe meant to scare off all but the most serious-minded of the assembled students.

  “Look around you,” he urged, waggling the pointer until it encompassed all the people in the room. “There’ll be some faces missing by the time we get to the end of this course. We generally expect a washout rate of between forty and fifty percent, and that’s in a good class.”

  Joanna raised her eyebrows at that. The night before, Dave Thompson had said this was a good class. This morning, it evidently wasn’t. What had changed his mind?

  “You may have noticed that there aren’t any television sets in those rooms of yours,” Thompson continued. “No swimming pool or tennis courts, either. This ain’t no paid vacation, my friends. You’re here to work, plain and simple. You’d by God better get that straight from the get-go.

  “There may be a few party animals in the crowd. If you think you can party all night long and then drag ass in here the next morning and sleep through the lectures, think again. Days are for classwork, and nights are for hitting the books. Do I make myself clear?”

  Careful not to move her head in any direction, Joanna kept her eyes focused full on Thompson’s beefy face. Peripheral vision allowed her a glimpse of movement in the front row where a young blond-haired man nodded his head in earnest agreement. The gesture of unquestioning approval was so pronounced it was a wonder the guy’s teeth didn’t rattle.

  “Over the next few weeks, you’ll be working with a staff made up from outstanding officers who have been selected from jurisdictions all over the state,” Thompson was saying. “These are the guys who, along with yours truly, will be conducting most of the classroom instruction. We’ll be overseeing some of the hands-on training as well as evaluating each student’s individual progress. All told, the instructors here have a combined total of more than a hundred twenty years of law enforcement experience. Try that on for size.”

  He paused and grinned. “You know what they say about experience and treachery, don’t you? Wins out over youth and enthusiasm every time. Count on it.”

  The room was quiet. No doubt the comment had been meant as a joke, but no one laughed. While Thompson consulted his notes, Joanna noticed that the young guy in the front row was busily nodding once again.

  “That brings us to the subject of ride-alongs,” Thompson resumed. “When it comes time for those, you’ll be doing them with experienced onduty officers from one or more of the participating agencies here in the Valley. By the way, be sure to sign the ride-along waivers in your packet and return them to me by the end of the day.

  “This particular class—procedures—is my baby. It’s also the backbone of what we do here. As you all know, the academy is being funded partially by state and federal grants and partially by the tuition paid by each participating agency. Tuition doesn’t come cheap. The state maybe picked up this fine facility for a song from the folks at the RTC, but we’ve gotta pay our way. Here’s how it works, folks. Listen up.

  “Each person’s whole tuition and room rent is due and payable on the first day of class. In other words, today. The minute you all walked through our door this morning, that money was gone. The academy doesn’t do refunds. You quit tonight? Too bad. The guy who hired you—the one who sent you here in the first place—doesn’t get to put that money back in his departmental budget. That means anybody who drops out turns into a regular pain in the bottom line.

  “In other words, boys and girls, if you blow this chance, you end up outta here and outta law enforcement, too. Nobody in his right mind’s gonna give a quitter another opportunity.

  “For those of you who don’t blow it, for those of you who make the grade, when you go back to your various departments, you’re more than welcome to do things the way they do them there. Here at the academy, we have our own procedures, and we do things our way. The APOA way. In other words, as that great American hero, A. J. Foyt, has been quoted as saying, ‘my way or the highway.’

  “It’s like you and your ex-wife own this little dog, and the doggie spends part of the time at her house and part of the time at yours. Maybe your ex doesn’t mind if the dog climbs all over her damn furniture, but you do. When the dog goes to her house, he does whatever the hell he damn well pleases, but when he’s at your house, he lives by your rules. Got it?”

  Joanna didn’t even have to look to know that the guy in the front row was nodding once again. Disgusted by what she’d heard, and convinced the whole training experience was destined to be nothing more than five weeks of hot air, Joanna folded her arms across her chest, sighed, and sank down in her seat. Next to her at the table sat a tall, slender young woman with hair almost as red as Joanna’s.

  Using one hand to shield her face from the speaker’s view, the other woman grinned in Joanna’s direction then crossed both eyes. Wary that Thompson might have spotted the derogatory gesture, Joanna glanced in the speaker’s direction, but he was far too busy pontificating to notice the humorous byplay. Relieved, Joanna smiled back. Somehow that bit of schoolgirlish high-jinks made Joanna feel better. If nothing else, it convinced her that she wasn’t the only person in the room who rega
rded Dave Thompson as a loudmouthed, overbearing jerk.

  “Our mission here is to turn you people into police officers,” Thompson continued. “It’s not easy, and it’s gonna get down and dirty at times. If you two ladies think you’re going to come through this course looking like one of the sexy babe lawyers that used to be on L.A. Law, you’d better think again.”

  The redhead at the table next to Joanna scribbled a hasty note on a yellow notepad and then pushed it close enough so Joanna could read it. “Who has time to watch TV?” the note asked.

  This time Joanna had to cough in order to suppress an involuntary giggle. She had never watched the show herself, but according to Eva Lou, L.A. Law had once been a favorite with Jim Bob Brady. Eva Lou said she thought it had something to do with the length of the women’s skirts.

  Thompson glowered once in Joanna’s direction, but he didn’t pause for breath. “Out on the streets it’s gonna be a matter of life and death—your life or your partner’s, or the life of some innocent bystander. Every department in the state has a mandate to bring more women and minorities on board. Cultural diversity is okay, I guess,” he added, sounding unconvinced.

  “It’s probably even a good thing, up to a point—as long as those new hires are all fully qualified people. And that’s where the APOA comes in. The buck stops here. The training we offer is supposed to help separate the men from the boys, if you will. The wheat from the chaff. The people who can handle this job from the wimps who can’t. We’re going to start that process here and now. Could I have a volunteer?”

  Pausing momentarily, Thompson’s gray eyes scanned the room. Naturally the guy in the front row, the head-bobber, raised his hand and waved it in the air. Thompson ignored him. Tapping the end of the pointer with one hand, he allowed his gaze to come to rest on Joanna. A half smile tweaked the corners of his mouth.

  “My mother always taught me that it was ladies before gentlemen. Tell the class your name.”

  “Joanna,” she answered. “Joanna Brady.”