“Quiet in there,” he yelled as he came racing back to Joanna’s side with an armload of blankets. “We’re trying to save a man’s life out here. Be patient. We’ll get to you in a minute.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was almost three o’clock in the morning before Joanna finally made it home to High Lonesome Ranch. She had stayed long enough for the Air-Evac ambulance to load Mark Childers’ ominously still body onto a stretcher and carry it away. She had stayed long enough for Ernie Carpenter to arrive on the scene.

“What do we do with her?” the detective asked, nodding in the direction of a no longer hysterical Karen Brainard, who had taken refuge in the back of Dave Hollicker’s patrol car. “Do we book her and haul her off to jail?”

“Not yet,” Joanna said. “We don’t know enough. I lave someone take her home for now, but tell her that she’d better not leave the county.”

After that, and with a heavy heart, Joanna drove to Bisbee and made her way up the steep steps to what had been Carmen and Lewis Flores’ home. As she climbed them, one al a time, it hurt Joanna to think that those very steps-the ones Lewis had wanted to spare his wife from climbing-were at the root of all the trouble.

When she arrived in the tiny yard, Joanna was dismayed but not really surprised to see that all the interior lights were off. Convinced her husband had merely taken off on a hunting trip without bothering to tell her, Carmen Flores had evidently gone to bed and to sleep. Roused by Joanna’s knock, Carmen flung open the door before she finished tying on her flannel robe.

“Joanna!” she exclaimed when she saw who was standing in the glow of the porch light. “What is it? What’s happened?”

And so Joanna told her story. This time she waited until Carmen’s sister Rose actually arrived on the scene before she left the Flores house. Then, knowing there was nothing else to be done, Joanna headed home. On the way, she called the department and left word for Dick Voland. She told him she was scrapping that day’s morning briefing and that she probably wouldn’t be in the office much before noon.

It warmed Joanna’s heart to drive into the yard of High Lonesome Ranch and see lights glowing at the window; to see Butch’s Outback parked in front of the gate. He and the two dogs, Sadie and Tigger, bounded out the back door to greet her before she managed to park the Blazer and turn off the ignition.

“Rough night?” Butch asked, opening the door.

“You could say that. But you didn’t wait up for me all this time, did you?”

“No. I dozed on the couch. Junior’s asleep on the living room floor. Jenny hauled an air mattress and bedroll down from the attic for him. She said you wouldn’t mind.”

“I don’t,” Joanna replied. “Come on. Let’s go inside. It’s cold out here.”

“Have you eaten?”

“I had a piece of pepperoni pizza,” she told him. “but I think that was several hours ago.”

“Do you want me to fix you something?”

Butch’s questions contained all the familiar words and phrases. Not only had Joanna Brady heard them before, she had actually said them as well. Once she and her mother had been on the other end-the solicitous end-of those carbon-copy conversations. When Andrew Roy Brady had come home after a long and grueling nighttime shift-once Joanna had finished being scared for him, once she had moved beyond being irritated with him for coming home so late-she had always offered to fix him a meal no matter what time it was, no matter how late. And Eleanor Lathrop, in her turn, had done the exact same thing for her husband, Sheriff D. H. Lathrop. It felt strange for Joanna to be the recipient of those ministrations-a receiver rather than a giver-and in her own home as well.

“All I want is a drink,” Joanna said. “A drink and some sleep.”

“It must have been bad then,” Butch said.

He wrapped one arm around her shoulder and led her inside. In the kitchen, he mixed her a vodka tonic, using some of the leftover stock of liquor he had moved down to Bisbee after the sale of the Roundhouse Bar and Grill up in Peoria. Due to a lack of storage space in his own house, he had used some of it to create what he called a respectable bar at High Lonesome Ranch.

While Joanna sipped her drink and told him what all had happened overnight, he fixed her a tuna sandwich. By the time she finished both eating and telling, Butch was standing, leaning against the counter. “Weren’t you afraid?” he asked.

“Of course I was afraid,” Joanna told him. “I was scared to death.”

“Flores could just as well have shot you instead of himself,” Butch observed. “What would have happened then?”

“I was careful,” Joanna said. “I was wearing my vest. I stayed in the Blazer. I used it for cover.”

“A vest will work for everything but a thick head,” Butch replied. “And you still haven’t answered my question. What would happen to Jenny if something happened to you? What if you hadn’t come home tonight at all? Are you sure this is what you want to do? Do you want to spend your whole life going to someone’s home in the middle of the night, waking up some poor sleeping woman, and telling her that her husband has just blown his brains out?”

Joanna felt her eyes welling with tears. “Please, Butch,” she said. “Not now. I’m too tired to fight.”

“I’m not fighting,” he said. “I’m talking. That’s why…” He stopped.

“Why what?”

“Never mind,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. Go on to bed. I’ll clean up here. Then I’ll wake Junior up and we’ll head home.”

“Don’t go,” Joanna said. “I don’t want you to go. I need you here.”

He took her glass and plate and put them in the dish-washer. “I don’t suppose a night on the couch will kill me,” he said.

“I don’t mean for you to sleep on the couch,” she told him. “We’re engaged. I want us to sleep in the same bed.”

“What will Jenny think?” Butch asked. “She doesn’t know we’re engaged. You didn’t tell her, remember?”

“I didn’t have a chance. I’ll tell her in the morning.”

In the end, it didn’t take all that much convincing to get Butch to give up the idea of sleeping on the couch and to come join Joanna in her bed. Still chilled from spending so much of the night outdoors, she snuggled up against the warmth of his body and felt her own muscles begin to relax.

“By the way,” Butch told her, “we picked up that book from Daisy-America the Beautiful.”

“Did you have a chance to look at it?”

“Jenny and Junior did. They spent at least two hours poring over every page.”

“Find anything?” Joanna asked, but she had to struggle to frame the words. She was fading fast. It was difficult to concentrate.

“I think so.”

“Tell me.”

Butch did, but Joanna Brady didn’t hear a word of it. She was already sound asleep, and she was still asleep the next morning when the phone rang at five past seven. Joanna was so groggy that even the jangling of a phone next to her bed didn’t wake her. Butch answered the call in the kitchen and then came into the bedroom.

“Phone,” he said, shaking her awake. “Something about a meeting you’re supposed to attend.”

“I called the department last night and canceled the briefing,” Joanna mumbled, turning over and burying her aching head in a pillow. “Tell them to forget it. Tell them I’ll come in when I’m good and ready.”

“I don’t think it’s that kind of meeting,” Butch said. “Jeff Daniels is on the phone. He says you’re supposed to be the guest speaker at a Kiwanis meeting this morning. When you weren’t there by the time they finished the Pledge of Allegiance, he was afraid you’d forgotten.”

Groaning, Joanna rolled out of bed. “I forgot all right. TelI him I’m on my way. But what about Jenny?”

“Don’t worry. Junior and I will get Jenny off to school,” Butch assured her. “You go do what you need to do.”