"Hector, what brings you to Santa Rosa?"

"We have run into a little problem, Marshal."

"Constable."

Camacho shrugged and stared through Vickers as if he were made of glass. The lawman did not want to hear about his little problem, but he couldn't see a way around it now.

"Senor Rivera knows that, as a friend, you will be pleased to help him with his difficulty."

"I don't have jurisdiction in Sonora. You know that."

"Of course. The difficulty lies in Santa Rosa."

Vickers hooked both thumbs behind the buckle of his gun belt, frowning at Camacho. "Guess you'd better spell that out."

"Senor Rivera was attacked last night, at home. He is unharmed, but property was damaged, members of his household killed. The man responsible is here, in Santa Rosa."

"What? One man? What kind of loco idiot would go against Rivera on his own?"

Camacho shrugged again. "This is a question el jefe wants to answer for himself. I have been sent to find the man and invite him back to share Senor Rivera's hospitality while they discuss these things."

It was a job to keep from laughing at Camacho, but the lawman had more sense than that. He also had no doubts about the form Rivera's "invitation" would be bound to take. And he was not excited by the prospect of a shooting war in Santa Rosa.

"So, what makes you think your man came here?"

"We found his vehicle abandoned on the highway south of town," Camacho answered. "Also, he is wounded and in need of medical attention. He could not go far."

He thought of Becky first, and wondered if the guy would try to get in touch with her for help. She would be bound by law to let him know about a bullet wound, but Vickers thought that maybe he should stop in at her office, just in case. If nothing else, it would provide him with a fine excuse to see her, pass the time of day.

The sound of Hector's voice snapped Vickers from his reverie. "How's that?"

Camacho's scowl was withering. "I asked if you have seen a stranger, anything unusual this morning."

Vickers shook his head in an emphatic negative. "I'll keep my eyes peeled, but the kind of man that you're describing won't be dropping by the diner here to catch himself a BLT. He'll go to ground somewhere, most likely. Try to flag himself an outbound ride."

"We have anticipated that," Camacho told him. "I am certain that Senor Rivera would appreciate your help. In case a stranger should present himself to you..."

"I've got your number," Vickers told him. "I know how to handle it."

"Of course. Good hunting."

"Listen, Hector, I don't want a lot of fireworks here in Santa Rosa, if you follow me."

"We do what must be done."

He didn't like the sound of that at all, but Vickers knew that it would do no good to argue with the gunman. Nodding solemnly, he waited until Hector stepped aside, then unlocked the car door and eased behind the squad car's wheel and fired her up. Before he had a chance to pull away, Camacho snapped his fingers and a dark sedan appeared from out of nowhere, nosing in to block the cruiser at the curb. Camacho took his place beside the driver, flashed a hungry smile at Vickers, and then the wheelman put his wagon through a sharp, illegal U-turn, headed north again, in the direction of the highway.

It was too much to expect that they were leaving town. He knew Camacho well enough to realize the gunner would not go home empty-handed. Hector and his sidekicks would be hanging in until they found their man, or until they satisfied themselves that he had slipped away.

Camacho had been right, of course. If he was wounded and on foot, their quarry could not have gone far. His hopes of flagging down a ride this time of day were slim and none, but even if he tried he would be forced to show himself along the highway, and the vultures would be waiting there to pick him off. If he had gone to ground somewhere in Santa Rosa, on the other hand, he would be hungry, thirsty, maybe dying from his wounds. The guy would have to try to get in touch with someone who could patch him up, at least enough for him to travel.

And his thoughts came back to Becky. As the only doctor in a radius of about thirty miles, she stood a decent chance of meeting Mr. X before he tried to hit the road. If he was armed and desperate, she might be in a dangerous predicament. Held hostage, maybe, in her own damned office by a raving lunatic.

It might be the solution to his problems, Vickers thought, if things worked out that way. He'd have a chance to rescue Becky, earning her eternal gratitude, while taking out Camacho's man without a lot of fireworks from the border rats. He would be forced to shoot the guy, of course; he couldn't have Rivera's people coming for him at the jail, and if Rivera didn't like it... well, he'd have to live with it.

Grant Vickers reined in his wild imagination before it had a chance to carry him away. He had no proof as yet that the stranger was in town, forget about the Dirty Harry number out at Becky's. Still, it wouldn't hurt to warn her, just in case. It was his duty as the law in Santa Rosa, and no one could ever say that he had left his duty unfulfilled.

Bud Stancell was surprised to hear the bell that signaled customers in need of gas this early in the morning. He continued to open at seven every morning, even though he seldom turned a dollar prior to noon, and lately there were days when only one or two loyal patrons — locals — stopped at all. Sometimes he thought he should have sold the business after Ellen died, and tried his luck in Phoenix or Las Vegas, but he could not bring himself to leave.

He had grown up in Santa Rosa, as his parents had before him, but the town was different in those days. There was more border traffic in the years before the interstate had placed a quarantine on smaller towns, conducting tourists in their air-conditioned Cadillacs to Tucson and points east without a necessary stop in Santa Rosa. Time had been when stores were flourishing on Main Street, dealing souvenirs and cactus candy, buckskin duds and beadwork from the Papagos, but that was old news now. A few more years, he thought, and Santa Rosa might dry up and blow away, another ghost town swallowed by the creeping desert, lost to living memory.

Bud Stancell would remain because it was his home, but he had other dreams for Rick, his son. Already taller than his father, Rick had been starting quarterback for Ajo's high school football team last fall, and if he kept his grades up, he was looking at a scholarship, no sweat. It made a father proud to realize his son was strong and smart, a combination noticeably lacking in a number of his teammates. Once he went away to college, Rick would have a new perspective on his life, a view of something outside Pima County, even outside Arizona. He would see there was a big, wide world out there, and no mistake.

Bud Stancell's time away from home had been accumulated in Korea, at the Chosin killing grounds, and he was grateful to return and find Santa Rosa more or less unaltered in his absence. All the changes had come later, after he had married, sunk his final dollars into the construction of a service station and garage. In those days, "service" meant precisely that; a patron didn't have to kiss your ass to get the windshield cleaned, and gasoline was nowhere near the price of liquid gold. Sometimes Bud wondered what had happened to America, allowing little piss-ant countries where they couldn't even grow a decent weed to treat the richest nation in the world like she was second-class.

Perhaps Korea was the straw that broke the camel's back. He heard a lot of people bitch and moan about the beating taken in Vietnam, but the States had settled for a draw at Panmunjom some twenty years before the Nixon pullout from Saigon. Sometimes, especially when he'd had a beer or three too many, Stancell thought the creeping weakness might have started in Korea, taking years before it surfaced, like some kind of virus that lies dormant in your system, waiting for your natural resistance to break down. When the virus hit full-strength, it surely knocked the bottom out of StancelPs business, out of Santa Rosa as a whole.