“Maybe I should double this,” she said, hefting the weight.

“Good idea,” Joanna agreed.

She held her breath while she wrote out the check, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t bounce. Friday was payday for both Joanna and Andy. Maybe their paychecks would make it to the bank before this check did. Or, if they didn’t, maybe Sandra Henning, the manager, would cover it for a day or so until Joanna could make it good.

“Can you tell me where to find a phone?” Joanna asked.

“Down the hallway,” the woman answered. “Beyond the bellman’s desk, across from the library.”

Joanna scuttled across the old-fashioned lobby and found the tiny telephone alcove. Seated in front of the phone, she paused for a moment, wondering who exactly she should call and what she should tell them. Not knowing who else to ask for help, she finally dialed the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department and asked to speak to Walter McFadden. When told he wasn’t in, she asked for Dick Voland instead.

“Hi, Dick,” she said curtly when he answered. “This is Joanna Brady. Where’s Sheriff McFadden? I want to speak to him.”

Voland cleared his throat uneasily. “He’s not here right now.”

“Where is he?”

“I can’t say, Joanna. We haven’t heard from him. What do you need? Can I help?”

As Joanna tried to frame an answer, a man entered the lobby from outside and walked past her. When he stopped at the bellman’s desk to ask a question, she recognized the distinctive profile and realized it was the man from the Taurus, the same one who had been following her.

“Joanna?” Dick Voland said. “Are you still there? Do you want me to take a message?”

Joanna’s hand shook and her heart hammered in her chest. “No,” she said softly, lest the man overhear. “No message.”

Carefully, she put down the phone. She had no idea who this man was or what he wanted, but it was clear that he was trailing her openly, in broad daylight as if he had a perfect right to do so.

The long lobby was nearly deserted. An old man sat on a bench next to the wall far beyond the registration desk, but except for him, the bellman, and the man who was following her, there were no other people in the lobby. The sounds of laughter and tinkling glassware came floating to her from someplace else, from a room that sounded like a dining room.

Her pursuer had stepped closer to the bell-man’s desk and was reading one of the news-papers lying there. The door to the dining room was just around the corner from the public telephone. Maybe if she went through the dining room, she could disappear outside through another exit.

Joanna got up and bolted around the corner, almost colliding head-on with a dining room hostess. “One for lunch?” the woman asked.

Joanna glanced back over her shoulder. Something, maybe the sudden flurry of movement, had caused the man to look up from the papers. Their eyes met, and he started toward her.

“One for lunch,” Joanna said hurriedly. “No smoking.”

“This way please.”

The large dining room with its old-fashioned cane-backed chairs was only half-full, but the room hummed with a relaxed, convivial atmosphere. Joanna followed the hostess to a windowed table that looked out on a small patio.

“Can I get you something to drink?”

“Coffee,” Joanna murmured. “Just coffee. Black.”

Sitting with her hands clenched in front of her chin, Joanna watched as the hostess ushered the man into the room and seated him a few tables away. A busboy delivered the coffee and Joanna’s hands were shaking badly enough that some of the coffee spilled the first time she raised the cup to her lips.

What should she do, she wondered. Make a run for it out a side door and hope to elude him long enough to get back to the hospital? She took another sip of coffee and tried to calm herself. Surely there was some way out of this if she could just force herself to think clearly.

“What can I get for you today?” a smiling waiter asked.

Joanna hadn’t intended to stay, much less eat, but she felt trapped. Not eating would make her even more conspicuous. Without even bothering to check the price on the menu, she ordered a club sandwich.

She sat back and took another sip of coffee. Gradually the clanking silver and glassware combined with the enticing smells emanating from the kitchen reminded her that she had eaten almost nothing in nearly twenty-four hours.

She would eat her sandwich when it came and whoever it was who was so interested in where Joanna Brady went and what she did could sit right there and watch her eat.

It would serve him right.

SIX

Angie Kellogg sat on the soft leather couch in the living room, her satin robe untied and gaping open, one naked leg tucked demurely under her. An almost empty and long-forgotten coffee mug was nestled in the soft mound of auburn pubic hair, but coffee in the cup had grown far too cold to drink. Totally a lone, she sat absolutely still.

Her attention was focused on the antics of a pair of comical road runners who regarded the gravel-covered backyard as their own private preserve. Angie Kellogg was a lifetime city dweller. Initially, Tucson ’s strange desert creatures had been a complete mystery to her. Tony had jeered at her lack of knowledge, laughing and calling her stupid. Eventually though, he had condescended to buy her what a bookstore manager had called, “the bird-watchers’ Bible,” the Field Guide to North American Birds.

With the help of that, she had gradually learned to identify some of her neighbors-quail, dove, road runners, hummingbirds, and even an industrious cactus wren that had taken up residence in the yard’s solitary saguaro.

Drinking coffee, reading the newspaper, and watching the various birds and animals provided the sum total of Angie Kellogg’s morning diversions. She was an early riser; Tony wasn’t. When she was awake and he was sleeping, she wasn’t allowed to turn on either the radio or the television set, not even with the volume set on low.

Instead, Angie watched for the glimpses of life her backyard afforded her. She especially enjoyed the hour just before and after sunrise because that was when the cute little cotton-tails sometimes ventured out to eat and play. They came scampering into the yard through a small natural depression where the wrought-iron fence didn’t quite meet the ground. Sometimes she would see a horned toad or a small lizard perched in the sun on the rockery. Less often, she would spy a snake, sometimes even a rattler, sunning itself beside the graveled path. You had to look really carefully to catch sight of the snakes because they blended so well into the surrounding terrain.

The first time she had seen one, she had panicked and yelled for Tony. He had come running outside and had been only too happy to chop the poor snake in half with a shovel. It had seemed to Angie the two halves of the severed snake had wiggled forever. Months later the agonizing death of that writhing snake still haunted her. Now when she did happen to see a snake, any kind of snake, she didn’t mention it to Tony at all. In fact, sometimes she wished that the whole yard would fill up with slithering rattlesnakes and that Tony would go outside barefoot, but of course that didn’t happen.

She envied them all-the birds, the rabbits, and yes, even the snakes-because they at least were free to come and go as they liked. Angie Kellogg wasn’t.

All morning long she had itched to go check in the coat closet and see if this was the morning when the newest briefcase would appear, hut she hadn’t dared, not with Tony in the house and only asleep. She had learned that he was a very light sleeper, and she didn’t want him to catch her prowling around where she shouldn’t. Later on, if he went out, which he usually did, she’d have ample opportunity to check.