by J. A. Jance
"The next light."
It was just turning green as we approached. There was no chance of catching a red. Abruptly, I stepped on the brakes and almost stopped, forcing the vehicle behind us to come far closer than the driver of the pickup had intended. I could see enough detail then to know it was a dark-colored, late-model Toyota 4-X-4 with huge, outsized tires. In the glow of the headlights from the car behind him, I could see the silhouettes of four round driving lights, "asshole lights" we call them, studding the top of the cab.
Behind us a horn blared.
"What are you going to do?" Rhonda asked.
Without a weapon of any kind, there was no point in forcing a confrontation. "Lose him," I said.
It sounded good, but it didn't mean a goddamned thing. Back home in Seattle, where I know all the streets and their intersecting nooks and crannies, it would have been easy to do, but there in Arizona, in unfamiliar territory driving a car with no guts, it was a bad joke. My only hope was to drive erratically enough to attract the attention of some passing traffic cop. With luck I might manage to offend some poor bloke into reporting me on his cellular phone.
Jamming the accelerator to the floorboard, I fishtailed onto Invergordon with the 4-X-4 right behind me. Far ahead of us the orange light at the next intersection turned red.
"What's that street up there?"
"At the light? Chaparral," she answered. "The one after that is Camelback."
I recognized Camelback as one of the heavily traveled arterials.
"Make sure your shoulder strap's on tight," I warned grimly, snapping my own across my chest. "This could get rough."
Mentally I timed the light as I wound the Subaru up as tight as it would go. I sailed through the first one on green and made a mad dash for the second. I could see the passing headlights of cross traffic as vehicles moved sedately across Invergordon on Camelback. A pair of headlights approached the intersection from the other direction. Desperately I hoped that the light on Invergordon was a demand light set on a short cycle in our direction.
We were three blocks away and still accelerating when the light facing us turned green. It switched back to orange as soon as the oncoming car moved into the intersection.
I'm still not sure if Rhonda knew what I was planning, but she didn't say a word. The light was red as we started through the intersection. Naturally, there was one hotshot who jumped the light. He clipped our back fender and spun into the path of the 4-X-4, which dodged crazily from side to side. There was a chorus of honking horns in our wake, but I was too busy fighting to get the Subaru back under control to see exactly what happened in the intersection behind us.
For a moment or so, it looked like we had gotten clear. In the rearview mirror the pickup seemed to be trapped in a maelstrom of stalled vehicles, while before us Invergordon lay straight and flat and empty.
But before I could breathe a sigh of relief, I saw the DEAD END sign beside the street and knew we were still in trouble.
"Dead end!" I yelped. "What the hell do they mean, dead end?"
"The canal," Rhonda replied through clenched teeth. "The Arizona Canal. It's right up here."
"Shit! So how do we get out of here? Right or left?"
"I don't know."
I wanted to get off Invergordon and duck into a side street before the pickup got loose from Camelback. I figured there was a fifty-fifty chance of making the right choice. I swung left onto a small side street. For a moment I thought it was going to be all right, but then we ran into a T.
People on the run instinctively turn right, so I swung left again, hoping to outfox our pursuer. We came out on a street called Calle Redondo that seemed to run on a diagonal. Behind it was a tall chain link fence.
"What's beyond the fence?" I asked, "The canal?"
"Yes."
"Is there water in it?"
Rhonda craned her neck. "I can't tell. Probably."
"How deep?"
"Seven or eight feet."
"Great."
Beyond the canal was another street, one that appeared to cross the canal, if only we could find a way to get over onto it. The problem was, the guy in the pickup had come to the same conclusion. He must have seen me turn left off Invergordon and realized there was only one way out of the maze. As we came around a blind corner onto Lafayette, I saw him lying in wait, parked inside the fence on the access road that ran next to the canal. He was hanging back, hoping to pounce as soon as we surfaced.
"What are you going to do?" Rhonda asked.
"Something that son of a bitch doesn't expect," I told her. "Brace yourself."
Shoving the accelerator all the way to the floor, I aimed for the 4-X-4's looming front left tire and nailed that sucker head-on, doing a good thirty-five miles an hour.
From what I remember of Doc Ramsey's high school physics class at Ballard High School, when a moving object hits a stationary one, the stationary one shares the momentum of the moving one. During the intervening twenty-eight years, everything else may have changed, but the laws of physics hadn't.
The Subaru stopped dead in its tracks with its nose bent straight into the ground while the pickup started moving. As the shoulder belt cut painfully into my collarbone, I caught only a brief glimpse of the shocked driver's open-mouthed amazement as his behemoth truck went ass-backwards into the canal. With the oversized tires half floating and half bouncing off the bottom, the truck, still right side up, floated out of sight under the bridge.
In this updated, four-wheel-drive version of David and Goliath, the Subaru may have won hands down, but the folks at Alamo sure as hell weren't going to like it.
CHAPTER 16
Whoever said you can never find a cop when you need one was dead wrong. By the time I had helped a dazed but unhurt Rhonda Attwood out of the crippled Subaru, we found a whole wad of cops, or rather they found us, summoned to the scene by an irate jogger who insisted he had seen the whole thing and it was all my fault. The incident left me with a whole lot of explaining to do, although not nearly as much as I would have expected.
Once we gave him a description of the 4-X-4, the patrol officer in charge seemed to pay a lot closer attention to what I was saying. Within moments of hearing that Rhonda Attwood was Joey Rothman's mother, he was on the horn to his dispatcher, calling for a helicopter backup to search the canal for our assailant. His use of the word "assailant" struck me as important, especially in view of the fact that the jogger was still jumping up and down and telling anybody who would listen that I had attacked the pickup with my Subaru.
Subdued but uninjured, Rhonda seemed content to sit on the berm between the road and the canal with a blanket thrown around her shoulders while I worked my way through the tangle of paperwork. The last representative of officialdom was the tow-truck driver, a burly barrel-chested man in his late fifties who looked at the battered wreck of the Subaru and shook his head.
"I've picked up Alamo casualties for years," he said with a scowl. "But I've never heard that whole office so riled up as they are over this."
"They're pretty upset?" I asked innocuously. He nodded. "And you don't think it would be such a good idea for me to ride along out there with you tonight to get things straightened out?"
The tow-truck driver grinned. "It's up to you, buddy. Just how brave are you?"
"Not very," I said. "Maybe I'll send my attorney out to handle it in the morning."
"That's the ticket," he said.
I watched him load the crumpled remains onto a slanted rack on the back of his tow truck. The Subaru was neither driveable nor towable.
Boeing test pilots talk about flying the biggest piece home. They claim that you're all right as long as you keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down. The game little Subaru was still shiny side up, but her flying days were over.
"Detective Beaumont?" I turned to see who was calling. It was the Scottsdale patrol officer who had been first on the scene, although I didn't remember telling him or anyone else there my
title as well as my name.
He motioned me over to his car. "We're about finished up here. Are you done with the car?"
I nodded. "He'll be gone in a few minutes."
"The Town of Paradise Valley has two detectives waiting for Mrs. Attwood at La Posada. We're sending one of ours as well. We'd like her to accompany the detectives when they go through her room. Another detective, one from Prescott, is on her way to pick you up."
"Delcia? How did she find out about it?"
"I wouldn't know about that, sir," the patrolman said, "but she should be here in a few minutes."
I went back over to where Rhonda was sitting. "Are you all right?" I asked.
"My collarbone hurts, where the shoulder strap cut into me, but I don't think anything's broken."
"Me too," I agreed, rubbing my finger along the painful bruise that cut diagonally across my own chest. "It could have been worse. That's why I aimed for the tire. The rubber took some of the shock."
"Have they found him yet?"
"No," I answered, "but I'm sure they will. A pickup stuck in the canal should be easy enough to spot."
Another car approached the scene, red lights flashing. "Come on," I said, gently helping Rhonda to her feet. "That's probably our ride."
It was. Delcia Reyes-Gonzales came around the car to meet us. "Are you two all right?" she asked anxiously.
"So far," I told her. The tow truck was just pulling away, and she allowed her eyes to follow it. "I'm going to need some more help with Alamo," I said.
She nodded. "I can see that. Ready?"
Delcia held open the back door of her Reliant, and I handed Rhonda into the back seat. There wasn't enough leg room for me, so I went around and climbed in on the rider's side. Delcia's unquestioning acceptance of what had happened seemed odd to me. I expected her to ask who was in the 4-X-4 and why I had deliberately collided with him. Instead, she drove us back to La Posada in thoughtful silence.
We went by way of Camelback and Invergordon. An assortment of officers had cleared away the wrecked cars, but the intersection was still lit with flashing lights while someone armed with a massive broom finished sweeping broken glass out of the street.
"In the entire Phoenix metropolitan area, you couldn't have picked a worse place than this," Delcia said, as she eased her way through the still-stalled traffic.
"Why's that?"
"This is the borderline where Paradise Valley, Scottsdale, and Phoenix all meet. It's going to take weeks to sort out all the paperwork."
"Oh," I said.
Once back at the hotel, Delcia and I stayed with the car while two Paradise Valley police detectives took charge of Rhonda.
No matter where I went, no matter what I touched, some other jurisdiction got dragged into the fray. If I thought about it very long, it would give me a complex.
"How are you feeling?" she asked.
"Fine. Better than fine, actually. Dumping that asshole in the drink did me a world of good. It beats sitting around doing nothing."
"Doing nothing sounds about right to me," she returned.
I glanced at my watch. It was only seven-thirty, a bare two hours after Rhonda and I had left Ames' house. "How did you get here so fast?" I asked. "It's a long drive down from Prescott."
"I never went home," she said. Closing her eyes, she leaned back and rested her head on the car seat.
"Why not?"
"Too busy," she replied.
"They were already looking for that truck, weren't they?" I ventured shrewdly.
Delcia straightened up and looked at me. "What makes you say that?"
"As soon as I described the truck, everything shifted into high gear. Despite all indications to the contrary, the officer immediately assumed we had been the ones under attack."
She shrugged, as though she was too tired to argue about it. "You're right," she said. "They were looking for a truck matching that description."
"Why?"
"Because I asked them to," she said quietly.
I could see that Delcia Reyes-Gonzales was bone weary, but her demeanor was far different from the way she'd been at lunch. Then she'd been alert and toying with me, sparring and taunting at the same time. Now the sparkle had been drained out of her as well as the subterfuge. She weighed her words carefully when she spoke, but she answered my questions without ducking them. For the first time, she was treating me like a fellow police officer, someone working the same side of the street. It made a new man of me.
"But how did you know they'd come here looking for Rhonda?"
"I didn't. I put out an alert on the pickup because of the kids in Wickenburg."
"Wait a minute. What kids?"
"Two junior high kids, a boy and a girl, out necking in the middle of the night without their parents knowing they were gone. They had slipped out of their respective houses and met down by the river the night Joey Rothman died. They saw a dark-colored 4-X-4 parked right beside your Grand AM."
"Jesus Christ! You mean you've got eyewitnesses?"
"One of them told the counselor at school the next morning. That's why I had to leave your interview, to go talk to those kids."
"Eyewitnesses," I repeated.
"Not exactly. They saw two people, a man and a woman. Three, counting Joey. The man did the dirty work, pulled the trigger, while the woman stayed in the truck. Afterward, the man drove the car away, and the woman drove the pickup. The kids saw the whole thing, but from a distance, and they were way too scared to report it that night."
"But can they identify them?"
"No." Delcia sighed. "No such luck."
We were quiet for a few moments.
I was amazed, not by what she was telling me so much as by the very fact that she was telling me. Those kinds of inside details aren't usually divulged to anyone outside the immediate scope of a homicide investigation, even people in the same department, yet here she was, unloading it on a complete outsider.
"Why are you telling me all this, Delcia? At lunch today, you wouldn't give me the time of day, and now, a few hours later, it's full-disclosure time. What's going on?"
"I've done some checking on you, Detective Beaumont," she said at last.
"Oh? What kind of checking?"
"I've talked with a number of people in Seattle-Captain Lawrence Powell, for one. Sergeant Watkins, and your partner, Allen Lindstrom."
"You have been busy," I observed. "What did they say?"
Irrepressible laughter bubbled up through her weariness. "They all said that you're a regular pain in the ass on occasion, but they all agreed unanimously that you're way too smart to shoot somebody with your own gun and then hide the weapon in your car."
"Some friends," I snorted.
Delcia grew serious again. "Convincing friends," she said. "Altogether, they made a pretty good case."
"So where do we stand?"
She didn't acknowledge my question. "Did Michelle Owens know where Rhonda was staying?"
I thought about it for a moment. "Michelle? I don't know. Why? I remember Rhonda saying that she had invited Michelle to the funeral. She may have mentioned then that she was staying at La Posada."
"Michelle Owens has turned up missing," Delcia answered grimly. "From her house, sometime during the night last night. I've been on the phone with her father off and on all afternoon."
"What does this mean? Did she take off on her own, or did somebody grab her?" I asked.
"My first guess, after I talked to him, was that she left of her own accord. Now, after this business here, I'm not so sure. Did anyone else know where Rhonda was staying?"
"I don't know. Ralph Ames, my attorney, and I both knew. And as far as that goes, Rhonda could have told any number of people."
Delcia nodded. "I guess you're right."
"You said you thought at first that Michelle left on her own. Why? What did her father say?"
"That the two of them had had a big fight last night. He'd evidently made an appointment for Michelle to
go to an abortion clinic in Tucson early next week, but she didn't want to go. He said he went to bed without worrying about it because he was sure he could get her to change her mind. This morning, though, when he got up, Michelle wasn't in her room. She's disappeared without a trace."
"Any sign of foul play?" I asked.
"None, and nothing seems to be missing. The officers on the scene are betting she has simply run away."
"So did she?"
"I don't know," Delcia replied. "If someone came looking for Rhonda, they might have come looking for Michelle as well."
"Exactly."
"And I don't like the score. Joey's dead. One attempt on Rhonda and two on you, so whoever's behind this isn't playing games."
"You've got that one right," I told her. "That bastard in the pickup wasn't out for a friendly game of chicken. He'd have nailed us good if I hadn't gotten to him first."
"There's a third possibility," Delcia said.
"What's that?"
"What if Michelle was the woman those kids saw in the truck?"
I didn't like it, but the theory carried with it a certain ugly plausibility. Delcia didn't seem to like it much either.
"It's more likely that she just took off, that it all got to be too much for her. Think about it. The girl's pregnant, her boyfriend dies, her father wants her to have an abortion, the boy's mother wants her to keep the baby. That's a hell of a load for someone to carry around when they're only fifteen years old."
"It's a hell of a load at any age," I said, reminded once more of my own mother's struggles.
Again we fell silent. Although I appreciated the changed basis between us, I couldn't just let it go at that. I had to pick at the scab and know what lay under it.
"So how come I'm not a civilian anymore, Delcia? I don't mind, not at all, but I'd like to know why."
"Maybe I need the opinion of an outside observer," she replied. Her answer sounded coy, and I balked at the idea that she was putting me off again.
"Why?"
She sighed as though finally giving in to something she'd done her best to sidestep. "Today, after I talked to you at lunch, I did some checking into the prosecutor who arranged Joey Rothman's MIP. There seem to be some irregularities in the plea-bargain arrangement."
