“All right, Meadows,” she ordered. “Throw the knife out the rider’s window. Do it now! I want to see your right hand behind your head.”
“But my arm…”
“First the knife,” she said. “We’ll worry about your arm later.”
After ten seconds or so, he finally gave in and threw the knife outside. Joanna, watching to see where it landed, caught sight of something that looked like a dollar bill fluttering on the ground between her feet and the fallen knife. She hurried over, reached down, and picked up a piece of currency. Expecting to see George Washington’s portrait, Joanna was surprised to find herself staring at Ben Franklin’s bloated picture. This was no dollar bill. It was a brand-new hundred-dollar bill.
Ernie Carpenter reached her right then. “Joanna,” he panted. “Are you okay? Is anybody hurt?”
“He is,” Joanna said, pointing at the Hummer. “I’ve got this guy covered, but I need you to go over to the Blazer and check on Dick Voland.”
“He’s okay. Maybe not completely okay. It looks to me like he’s got a mild concussion, but I’m sure he’ll be fine.” “How do you know that?”
“Because we found him up there on top of the ridge, running around like a chicken with his head cut off, looking for you and asking what the hell happened. By the way, what did happen?”
Joanna’s knees really did go weak then-weak with relief rather than fear. Dick Voland was okay. So was Dennis Hacker. And so, amazingly, was she.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Once Ernie Carpenter had applied a tourniquet to Aaron Meadows’s mangled left arm, they handcuffed his other wrist to Adam York’s left one. While the DEA helicopter ferried the pair off to University Hospital in Tucson, Ernie used the still-working radio in the wrecked Blazer to summon assistance.
“Where’s Hastings, then?” Ernie asked Joanna.
“Beats me. The bad guy I saw was Meadows, and I’m stumped as to motive for Brianna’s death.”
Fortunately, despite having suffered a multiple rollover, the sturdy Hummer still seemed to be driveable. With a bloody bandage wrapped around his head, Dennis Hacker was busy changing the bullet-flattened tire when Ernie put almost the same question to him. “Where’s the other guy?”
“What other guy? I only saw one.”
Ernie shook his head. “I guess we’ll find him eventually.”
“Look at this,” Hacker said, shoving the damaged tire in Ernie’s direction before the detective walked away. “That blown sidewall is enough to make me a believer in exit wounds.”
With the tire changed, Hacker climbed into the battered vehicle, started it up, and drove it right back up the bank, which probably was one of those commercially touted 60 percent grades. When the Hummer was back topside, Joanna loaded the walking wounded into it, ordering both Dennis Hacker and Dick Voland to belt themselves into the backseat. Assured of their grudging compliance, Joanna took it upon herself to drive them out of the war zone.
In the darkness, retracing the path they had followed earlier took longer than she expected. For one thing, because Joanna was taking casualties into consideration, she perhaps drove slower than necessary. She eased the Hummer over dips and bumps both vehicles had taken far too fast earlier when they had been racing in the opposite direction. Joanna found that driving the cavernous growl-and-go Hummer was different from driving either the low-slung Crown Victoria or her old Blazer. In fact, the experience made Joanna miss her Blazer that much more. Months earlier an insurance adjuster had declared it totaled. She wondered if there was any way to get it back.
Here and there along the way the sketchy road became virtually invisible in the dark. Joanna was relieved when the moldering ruins of the ranch house materialized in the wavering glow of her headlights. From then on, the dim path turned into a more well-defined road.
As they traveled, Dennis Hacker related his version of the events of the afternoon-telling how, while he had been on the telephone with Angie, a gun-and-knife-wielding, half-naked, and blood-spattered madman had burst into his camper. He told how they had struggled briefly before Hacker had knuckled under to Aaron’s superior firepower. He told how, while being held at gunpoint, he had struggled to free a wrecked Suburban from the flood-swollen stream while on the bank his captor had fumed and raged. And he told how, once the Suburban was on dry land, he had been ordered to open up the secret storage compartments and to remove a hoard of hidden cash and documents.
“He kept telling me to hurry because somebody was after him.”
Dick Voland, making notes despite the inconvenience of the bouncing truck, stopped writing then. “Did he give a name?”
“Marco,” Hacker said. “I’m sure that’s the name he mentioned, but I couldn’t tell if that was a Christian name or a family name.”
“Neither,” said Joanna. “The man’s name is Marcovich. Ste phan Marcovich. He ’s an air-conditioning contractor up in Phoenix. Unless I’m sadly mistaken, he’s also Adam York’s big-fish Freon smuggler.”
“That’s all, then?” Voland asked Dennis Hacker.
“As far as I’m concerned.”
Voland closed his notebook and flipped off the reading lamp. “All I can say is, you’d better thank your lucky stars for a young woman named Angie Kellogg. She’s the one who came busting into Sheriff Brady’s office yelling that something was up. If it hadn’t been for her, there’s no telling what would have happened.”
Out of sight of both her passengers, Joanna smiled to herself. She found it amusing that her chief deputy had neglected to make any mention of his initial reluctance to believe Angie’s story.
“I know what would have happened,” Dennis Hacker said grimly. “As soon as that Meadows guy no longer needed me, I would have been history.” He paused. “Where is she, by the way? Angie, I man. Is she still in Bisbee? We should call and let her know I’m okay.”
Guiltily, Joanna stole a look at her watch. Almost four hours, had passed since she and Dick Voland had left Angie alone at the Cottonwood Creek Cemetery with orders to stay there, out of sight, and wait for them. At the time, the sun had still been shining. The idea of Angie’s waiting all that time alone in a dark, deserted cemetery seemed like a cruel joke.
When they came into view of Dennis Hacker’s lighted trailer, however, Joanna knew at once that whatever orders had been issued, the free-spirited Angie had disregarded them. As soon as the diesel-driven Hummer rumbled into hearing distance, the trailer’s door flew open and Angie bounded outside.
Joanna was in the process of stopping the Hummer, but she hadn’t quite finished braking when Dennis Hacker pushed open his door. He leaped out and hit the ground running. By the time Joanna had the vehicle stopped and the emergency brake located, Hacker had Angie wrapped in an all-enveloping bear hug. In order to give them a moment of privacy, Joanna waited a second or two before she climbed down.
“I was so worried,” she heard Angie saying. “There was blood all over the place in there and broken glass and the telephone smashed to bits. I was scared to death you were hurt. And you are, too,” she added breathlessly, catching sight of the bandage on Dennis Hacker’s head.
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “It’s nothing. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d probably be dead by now. Right, Sheriff Brady?”
Angie, her face awash in tears, turned from Dennis to Joanna. “You saved him,” she said. “Thank you.”
“We were lucky,” Joanna said. “But he’s right. If we hadn’t come right when we did, things might have been a whole lot different.” She walked over to the trailer, intending to close the door. “Come on now,” she added. “As soon as I put up some crime scene tape-”