she added.
“Can I trust you not to spoil that cat, Angie?”
“Nope.” She grinned wickedly. “And I’ll spoil his master, too, if given half a chance.” He moved closer, very much liking the gleam in her eye, and quite ready to let himself be spoiled any way she wanted.
Her cell phone began to ring. Her voluminous tote was on the pine table in the dining area. She dug around in it until she found the phone. After listening for a minute, her face paled, she murmured, “Okay,” and handed the call to Paavo. “It’s Yosh. I thought he was still on vacation. Your phone is switched off or the battery’s dead. That’s why he tried me. He says it’s urgent.”
Paavo took the phone, a thousand questions going through his head at the word his partner used. Urgent in police lingo meant very bad news.
“Yosh, what’s up?” he asked.
“It seems there was a break-in,” Yosh replied. “At your stepfather’s.” A long moment went by before Yosh added, “He was shot.”
Seventy miles south of Tucson, US Highway 19 crossed the Arizona border into Mexico at Nogales. Other Arizona crossings were smaller, like the mountain pass from Douglas to Agua Prieta about ahundred miles east, or the blistering, barren desert crossing at Sonoita, over a hundred miles to the west. Around Nogales, the land consisted of rough desert, parched ranchland, a few paved roads, and lots of footpaths for illegal crossings.
On an expanse of land on the Mexican side, thirty miles southeast of the border checkpoint, in an area so remote and desolate not even illegals dotted the landscape by night, stood a two-room adobe. The house and garden were ringed by a four-foot adobe wall with a flat overhanging stone along the top, and a solid wooden gate. Such a wall helped keep down the number of snakes, scorpions, and tarantulas that made it into the house.
A woman walked out of the gate and shut it firmly behind her. Her tooled leather boots crunched on the umber-colored rock and gritty sand as she continued along the well-worn path from the gate to the nearest saguaro. She was tall and angular, her muscles toned from a daily routine of weights and running. Her gray hair was clipped short. Her eyes were also gray, but tinged with green—the color of the cholla and Mexican sage that dotted the Sonora Desert she had learned to call home.
She didn’t know if she could ever learn to truly love the desert. She’d grown up along the eastern seaboard, Maryland as a child, then to Massachusetts while a teenager, until she moved south again. She missed the greenery of that area, the thick foliage of the trees and bushes in spring and summer, the bright colors of autumn, and the peacefulness after a fresh snow. But most of all, she missed the water. Beautiful, blue, cool water. She missed the streams and ponds, lakes and rivers, of her childhood.
She had learned to respect the desert in all itscraggy intensity, its harshness, and its desolation. It constantly tested, and had made her stronger. The desert, more than anything she had ever known, taught her to abide.
A square metallic target holder hung from an arm of the cactus. She attached a new paper target to it. Then, just for the hell of it, she reached into the yellow straw pouch she carried, and lined up five tin cans in a row on the ground beneath the target.
The day before, she’d made her weekly jaunt across the border to the main Tucson post office to pick up copies of the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner . The papers had no routine delivery to any location in southern Arizona, and having them mailed directly to a small town closer to home would have caused too much local curiosity. For that reason, she subscribed to them as “Jennifer MacGraw”—as good a name as any. Tucson was big enough, and so full of sun-seeking out-of-towners, that such mail deliveries received little notice there. And if anyone was sufficiently curious, let them try to find Jennifer MacGraw with her
“Can I trust you not to spoil that cat, Angie?”
“Nope.” She grinned wickedly. “And I’ll spoil his master, too, if given half a chance.” He moved closer, very much liking the gleam in her eye, and quite ready to let himself be spoiled any way she wanted.
Her cell phone began to ring. Her voluminous tote was on the pine table in the dining area. She dug around in it until she found the phone. After listening for a minute, her face paled, she murmured, “Okay,” and handed the call to Paavo. “It’s Yosh. I thought he was still on vacation. Your phone is switched off or the battery’s dead. That’s why he tried me. He says it’s urgent.”
Paavo took the phone, a thousand questions going through his head at the word his partner used. Urgent in police lingo meant very bad news.
“Yosh, what’s up?” he asked.
“It seems there was a break-in,” Yosh replied. “At your stepfather’s.” A long moment went by before Yosh added, “He was shot.”
Seventy miles south of Tucson, US Highway 19 crossed the Arizona border into Mexico at Nogales. Other Arizona crossings were smaller, like the mountain pass from Douglas to Agua Prieta about ahundred miles east, or the blistering, barren desert crossing at Sonoita, over a hundred miles to the west. Around Nogales, the land consisted of rough desert, parched ranchland, a few paved roads, and lots of footpaths for illegal crossings.
On an expanse of land on the Mexican side, thirty miles southeast of the border checkpoint, in an area so remote and desolate not even illegals dotted the landscape by night, stood a two-room adobe. The house and garden were ringed by a four-foot adobe wall with a flat overhanging stone along the top, and a solid wooden gate. Such a wall helped keep down the number of snakes, scorpions, and tarantulas that made it into the house.
A woman walked out of the gate and shut it firmly behind her. Her tooled leather boots crunched on the umber-colored rock and gritty sand as she continued along the well-worn path from the gate to the nearest saguaro. She was tall and angular, her muscles toned from a daily routine of weights and running. Her gray hair was clipped short. Her eyes were also gray, but tinged with green—the color of the cholla and Mexican sage that dotted the Sonora Desert she had learned to call home.
She didn’t know if she could ever learn to truly love the desert. She’d grown up along the eastern seaboard, Maryland as a child, then to Massachusetts while a teenager, until she moved south again. She missed the greenery of that area, the thick foliage of the trees and bushes in spring and summer, the bright colors of autumn, and the peacefulness after a fresh snow. But most of all, she missed the water. Beautiful, blue, cool water. She missed the streams and ponds, lakes and rivers, of her childhood.
She had learned to respect the desert in all itscraggy intensity, its harshness, and its desolation. It constantly tested, and had made her stronger. The desert, more than anything she had ever known, taught her to abide.
A square metallic target holder hung from an arm of the cactus. She attached a new paper target to it. Then, just for the hell of it, she reached into the yellow straw pouch she carried, and lined up five tin cans in a row on the ground beneath the target.
The day before, she’d made her weekly jaunt across the border to the main Tucson post office to pick up copies of the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner . The papers had no routine delivery to any location in southern Arizona, and having them mailed directly to a small town closer to home would have caused too much local curiosity. For that reason, she subscribed to them as “Jennifer MacGraw”—as good a name as any. Tucson was big enough, and so full of sun-seeking out-of-towners, that such mail deliveries received little notice there. And if anyone was sufficiently curious, let them try to find Jennifer MacGraw with her
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