Minor in possession jpb-8

by J. A. Jance

  "Misha takes after her mother," he said forlornly. "Whenever Fran got pregnant, she was always sick as a dog from the very first day. Her morning sickness lasted for a full three months all four times. I could almost set my watch by it. I should have figured it out myself when she looked so terrible all week, but I didn't.

  "At lunch today one of the nurses took me aside and told me she had noticed that Misha was losing weight. She was afraid there might be some serious physical problem. The nurse set up an appointment with a G.P. in Wickenburg so I could take her there this afternoon right after Group. He called me with the results just a little while ago. ‘There's nothing wrong with your daughter,' that asshole tells me. ‘She's pregnant, that's all.'"

  He paused, waiting for me to say something, but I couldn't think of a damn thing. I was too busy being grateful as hell that Michelle was his daughter instead of mine.

  "Pregnant, that's all," he repeated bleakly. "Jesus!"

  We sat there again until the silence was as thick as the darkness. Eventually, Owens heaved his ghostly figure out of the chair and stumbled to the window where he stood staring back up the path, his arrow-straight silhouette backlit by cloud-shrouded moonlight.

  "Why isn't he here?" he asked plaintively.

  The menace had leaked out of his voice as anger-fueled adrenaline dissipated. "I thought everybody was supposed to be back in their cabins by lights-out. That's what the damn brochure says. You know, that full color one full of happy horseshit they send out to all the families."

  "That may be the official rule, but Joey Rothman doesn't much concern himself with the rules," I offered quietly. "Anybody's rules."

  We were silent again until once more Owens felt compelled to speak, his voice husky with suppressed emotion. "It must have happened right after she got here. The doctor says she's about three weeks along, and she's only been here four weeks."

  "I Know."

  I remembered all too clearly my own first two fitful nights in the detox wing. The endless nighttime hours had been haunted by the distressing sound of Michelle Owens in the room just up the hall where she whimpered endlessly into her pillow. I hadn't felt terribly sorry for her at the time. I had been too busy feeling sorry for myself. I did now.

  "Your daughter and I were in the detox wing at the same time," I said.

  In the darkness I saw the whitish blob that was Guy Owens' face turn from the window to face me. "That's right," he said, "you're the one who's a cop, aren't you? Misha mentioned you in one of her letters. She never talked about Rothman, though, not once."

  "You're sure it was Joey?"

  "After I talked to the doctor, I went to her cabin and demanded that she tell me. I just came from there."

  "And what did she say?"

  "What the hell do you think she said? That it was him-Rothman. She said she was sure he'd marry her. Like hell!" Owens' hard-edged outburst ended with a snort. I couldn't tell if the sound was part of a laugh or a sob, and I had the good grace not to ask.

  For another several minutes we stayed as we were, him standing by the window staring out and me sitting on the edge of the bed, each lost in our own thoughts.

  "What are you pissed at him about?" Owens asked finally, as though it had just then penetrated that Joey Rothman was on my shit list too.

  "The same reason you are," I replied evenly. "He was nosing around my daughter after dinner tonight. I'm waiting up to let him know she's off limits."

  "You mean beat hell out of him, don't you?"

  "If that's what it takes. Some people learn slower than others. With some it takes remedial training."

  "And Misha thinks that sorry jerk is going to marry her? For Chrissake, how dumb can she be?"

  "She's how old? Fifteen? How smart were you at fifteen?"

  "Smarter than that," he snapped. "You can damn well count on that."

  He turned back to the window and looked out.

  "Wait a minute. There's a light on in one of the other cabins."

  I scrambled out of bed, hurried over to the window myself, and looked up the path. A moment later the first light went out only to be followed by the light coming on in the cabin next door.

  "Oh, oh," I said. "You'd better get the hell out of here fast. Lucy Washington must be doing a bed check. It'll be bad enough if she comes in here and finds out Joey's gone. If she also finds an unauthorized visitor…"

  Owens didn't need a second urging. He was already pushing the chair back across the room.

  "I'll go," he whispered urgently, "but do me a favor. When that SOB comes in, don't tell him I was here. I want to blindside that little cock-sucker."

  "Believe me," I told him, "I wouldn't want to spoil your surprise."

  Guy Owens left then, quickly, disappearing around the far side of the cabin away from the path. I heard him strike off up the hill, crashing blindly toward the tennis courts. I hoped Santa Lucia, Ironwood Ranch's tough-talking night nurse, was still far enough away that she wouldn't be able to hear him.

  Fumbling with buttons and zipper, I stripped out of my clothes, shoved them in a wad under the bed, and slipped between my mangled covers. By the time the door opened and the overhead light was switched on, I was ready with an Emmy Award-winning performance of someone being rudely awakened out of a sound sleep.

  "Okay, Mr. Beaumont. Where's Mr. Rothman?"

  I've no idea how she got her nickname. That story had become lost in Ironwood Ranch's group memory. Her real name was Lucy Washington, and as near as I could tell, this huge, implacable black woman wasn't particularly saintly. She was also totally devoid of anything resembling a sense of humor.

  I blinked my eyes several times, holding both hands over my face to shield my eyes from the glare. "You mean he's not here?" I asked innocently.

  "You know damn good and well he's not here. Look for yourself. Does that bed look like it's been slept in? So where is he?"

  "Believe me, Mrs. Washington, I have no idea. If I did, you can bet I'd be the first to tell you."

  "Mr. Beaumont, I've been hearing all kinds of wild rumors about your roomie Mr. Rothman tonight, tales about him being out and around and doing things he shouldn't be doing. You wouldn't know anything about that, now would you?"

  "Not a thing," I said.

  Lucy Washington stared at me impassively. She didn't believe me, not for a moment, but at least she didn't call me a liar to my face.

  "I see," she said finally, giving up. "I tell you what. When he shows up, you let him know he'd better drag his white ass down to the office and see me. On the double. Understand?"

  "Got it," I said.

  She switched off the light, turned, and stepped outside, banging the door shut behind her. I waited long enough for her to be well away from the cabin before I got up and looked out the window. I could see the wobbling beam of the flashlight as she trudged back up the hill toward the main ranch house.

  "Damn," I said, under my breath.

  I knew my not blowing the whistle on Joey's truancies would be yet another black mark that would go against J. P. Beaumont in the annals of Ironwood Ranch, and that my transgression, however minor, would be duly reported to Louise Crenshaw, the final arbiter of client affairs.

  Louise Crenshaw had made it clear during my admission interview that since I hadn't come in as a destitute, homeless bum, I hadn't yet hit bottom in her book. As a consequence, I was nowhere near ready to get better. She missed no opportunity to throw juicy tidbits about my alleged misdeeds to the group, items she regarded as ongoing proof of my lack of serious intent as far as recovery was concerned. This incident would provide more grist for her mill, and it gave me one more bone to pick with Joey Rothman, once I managed to lay hands on him.

  I stood there in my skivvies and tried to calculate my cabin's Grand-Central-Station potential for the remainder of the night. I figured chances were pretty close to one hundred percent that when Joey Rothman came to the surface, he would return home with Ironwood Ranch's version of a police escort
. Without turning the light back on, I dragged my clothes out from under the bed and got dressed. Then, wrapping two blankets around me, I bundled up in the cabin's only comfortable chair and settled down to wait. I wanted him to know that I was waiting up for him, and I didn't think it would take long.

  But that's where I was wrong. I woke up cold as hell and with a stiff neck and both feet sound asleep at four o'clock in the morning. Joey Rothman's bed was still empty. It was raining again, and the cabin was downright frigid. The heating system for each cabin consisted of an old-fashioned, wall-mounted gas heater that required a match each time it needed to be lit.

  When the circulation returned to my feet, I hobbled over to my desk in the dark, still wary that turning on the light would summon Santa Lucia's immediate return. I pulled open the drawer and groped blindly inside, expecting to lay hands on one of several books of matches I had left in the front right-hand corner of the drawer. They weren't there. Throwing caution to the winds, I turned on the desk lamp.

  As soon as I did, I could see that someone had hastily rummaged through the drawer. I'm not so fastidious that I know where each and every item is in a drawer, but I certainly knew the general layout, and the items in the drawer were definitely not as I'd left them. With a growing annoyance, I pulled the drawer wide open and examined it closely.

  It's always tough to discover what isn't there. The things that are there are perfectly obvious. What's missing is a lot harder to see. I took several minutes, but finally I figured it out.

  My keys. That's what was gone, the Keys to the rented Grand AM. Unlike some other treatment centers I've heard about, Ironwood Ranch prides itself on the fact that people come there and stay voluntarily. Instead of daily bed checks, we had intermittent ones. At patient check-in we were allowed the privilege of keeping our keys and personal property under what Louise Crenshaw described as Ironwood Ranch's atypical honor system.

  Which is fine as long as you're dealing with honorable people, which Joey Rothman Obviously was not. I knew damn good and well he had taken my keys and probably the car as well. I had visions of him smashing up the rental car, turning it over in a ditch somewhere. On my nickel. With Alamo Rent A Car and American Express taking the damage out of my personal hide since Joey Rothman was anything but an authorized driver. The only way to prevent that was to get on the horn right then and report the vehicle as stolen.

  Curfew or no, I pulled on my jacket and headed for the main building. Almost there, I decided to take a detour to the parking lot to see if the car might possibly have been returned in one piece. And sure enough, there it was, still in the same parking place where I had left it originally, but not in quite the same position. It was parked at an odd angle. Despite the chill, slanting rain, I walked around the car twice, examining it in the pale light of the parking lot's mercury-vapor lamps. As far as I could see, it didn't have a mark on it.

  Stopping by the driver's door, I noticed it was unlocked. I opened the door and slid onto the seat. The keys with the rental company's cardboard tag still attached were in the ignition. Breathing a sigh of relief, I grabbed them and stuffed them in my pocket.

  So Joey had taken the car out for a joyride, but it didn't look as though he'd done any damage. I wondered where he'd taken it. A glance at the mileage on the odometer told me nothing, because I didn't remember how many miles had been on the car when I picked it up in Phoenix.

  I was about to back out the car when I remembered the rental agreement. It would have the mileage on it. I had tossed that in the glove box along with my holster and my. 38 before I ever left the airport. The Smith and Wesson is just like my gold card-I don't leave home without it, and I hadn't wanted to turn it over to someone else when I checked into Ironwood Ranch. Instead I had left it in the locked glove box of a locked car-which is fine as long as nobody else has the key.

  Now, stretching full length across the seat, I dug the keys back out of my pocket and unlocked the glove compartment door. It fell open at once and the tiny light inside switched on.

  I had put the gun in first and the rental agreement second, so the agreement should have been right on top. It wasn't. The gun was.

  At first I didn't think that much about it. I pulled the Smith and Wesson out, intending to put it on the seat beside me long enough to retrieve the rental agreement, but as I brought it past my face, I smelled the unmistakably pungent odor of burnt gunpowder. The gun had been fired, recently. Sometime within the past few hours.

  "What the hell has that goddamned fool been up to now?" I said aloud to myself. I swung out the cylinder and checked it. Two rounds had been fired.

  Shaken, I put the gun back where I'd found it and relocked both the glove box and the car, then I went looking for Lucy Washington.

  If Joey Rothman thought I wasn't going to report his car prowl to the proper authorities, he had another think coming.

  CHAPTER 3

  Louise Crenshaw wore sobriety like the full armor of Christ. Her nails ended in long sharpened talons polished to a brilliant magenta. She consistently wore the kinds of dress-for-success costumes that would have been far more appropriate for hawking securities on Wall Street than they were for riding roughshod over a herd of hapless recovering drunks. Rumor had it that she had come to Ironwood Ranch as one of the first fulltime counselors, married her boss Calvin Crenshaw without much difficulty, and immediately assumed the throne.

  The lady's age was difficult to determine. Her skin had that transparently fragile and stretched look that comes from having had more than one meaningful encounter with a plastic surgeon. Even the most skillful face-lift technique hadn't entirely erased the road-map ravages caused by years of hard drinking and chain smoking.

  Her husband, Cal, was a pudgy dough-boy of a man whose group-session drunkalogue chronicled years of failure at everything from running an auto dealership to selling computerized office products. He had finally sobered up and was wanting to help others do the same when his mother died leaving him sole owner of the aging Ironwood Ranch. Cal had decided to turn his inheritance into a treatment center. To hear him tell it, he was well on his way to screwing that up as well when Louise came along at just the right time and saved his bacon.

  Cal himself seemed content to hover vaguely in the background while his front-office wife appeared to be everywhere at once-overseeing admissions, dropping in and out of group-session discussions, personally directing everything from how the laundry was run to what went on in the kitchen.

  Louise was a formidable woman, particularly when crossed, but I was provoked enough myself that morning that I was actually relishing the approaching confrontation when I heard her high heels beating an angry staccato down the tiled hallway toward the office where I waited.

  "How dare you!" she demanded shrilly as she strode into the office and slammed the door behind her. I may have been spoiling for a fight, but she was the one who set the tone of our meeting.

  "How dare I what?" I asked, striking a deliberately provoking, nonchalant pose.

  Louise Crenshaw bristled, infuriated that much more by my offhand attitude. Setting her mouth in a thin, grim line, she stepped around to the other side of a plain oak desk and sat down facing me. She was making a supreme effort to control herself, but the results weren't entirely successful. I noticed that her brightly tipped fingers closed tightly over the ends of the chair armrests even as she leaned back to regard me with a studied look of arch contempt.

  "You're a bully, Mr. Beaumont, and you know it. How dare you browbeat Lucy Washington into letting you call the sheriff's department?"

  The previous night's lack of sleep hadn't left me feeling particularly charitable toward anyone, most especially Louise Crenshaw. During our verbal battle over whether or not to report the car incident, Lucy Washington had invoked Louise's name over and over. According to Santa Lucia, Mrs. Crenshaw had decreed an unwritten but nonetheless inviolable rule that she and only she was to notify the authorities of any irregularities involving Ironwood
Ranch and its residents. But at four-thirty that morning the Crenshaw answering machine had been the only one in the household taking phone calls.

  I had finally overruled Lucy Washington's objections by simply picking up the telephone and making the forbidden call myself.

  "Let me point out that my car had been stolen, Mrs. Crenshaw. Why the hell shouldn't I report it?"

  "Oh, come now, Mr. Beaumont. Stolen? Aren't we being a bit melodramatic? Joyriding is more like it. After all, I understand the car is safely back in the parking lot this morning. I believe it was already there by the time you made your forcible phone call to Deputy Hanson up in Yarnell. Isn't it far more likely that Joey just borrowed it?"

  My temper flared not only at her tone but also at her holier-than-thou attitude. "No, he didn't borrow it," I replied shortly, "because the word ‘borrow' implies my giving permission, which I most certainly did not. He took the keys out of my desk without asking. I don't know where he went with it, but according to the rental agreement, it's been driven several hundred miles since I picked it up at the airport. I drove straight here. That couldn't be more than seventy-five miles at the outside."

  She frowned. "Your family is here this week. Isn't it possible one of them used the car?"

  "They came in their own cars," I replied. "And I haven't been anywhere near the Grand AM since I checked in other than to walk by it in the lot on my way to Group."

  The magenta nails moved swiftly from the armrest to the desktop, where she tapped them thoughtfully.

  Sitting there eyeball to eyeball with Louise Crenshaw, I somehow failed to mention the. 38, and not because it slipped my mind, either. At the moment the fact that Joey Rothman had fired my Smith and Wesson worried me a whole lot more than the idea of his taking the car, but what was the point of bringing it up? I figured there'd be enough hell to pay if and when Madame Crenshaw discovered that the gun existed at all. In the meantime, what she didn't know didn't hurt her.