Trial by Fire by J. A. Jance Read Free Book Online

thirst.
    “Anyways,” Yolanda said again, warming to her story and losing track of her grammar in the process. “Mr. Mitchell chased after them. Once they were stuck, he hauled out his shotgun and held ’em at gunpoint. Then he used his cell phone to call for help.”
    Picturing the action in her head, Ali couldn’t resist allowing herself a tiny smile. In the old days, and probably faced with cattle rustlers rather than cactus rustlers, Mr. Mitchell would have been left on his own to deal with the bad guys. Now, through the magic of cell phones, he could run up the flag and call for help when he was miles away from the nearest landline phone.
    A radio transmission came in from Dispatch and Yolanda jotted down a note. “Okay,” she said. “Got it.” When she finished writing, she handed the note to Ali and then turned to a nearby file drawer, where she retrieved another piece of paper, which turned out to be a map. Using a blue felt-tipped pen, she outlined the route Ali would need to follow.
    “Here’s a detailed map of the area,” Yolanda added, pointing. “Just follow the blue lines. According to Dispatch, they’re right here where this little road crosses the river. The bad guys are in custody, but the deputies are waiting for a tow truck to come drag the rustlers’ rented truck out of the sand.”
    “Good,” Ali said. “If you happen to talk to one of the deputies, you might let them know that I’m on my way.”
    As she started for the door, Yolanda seemed to reconsider. “Maybe you shouldn’t drive there. It’s rough country. What if you get stuck, too?”
    “I have four-wheel drive,” Ali told her. “I can manage.”
    She had to drive almost all the way into Wickenburg before she found the narrow dirt track that led back out to the river and the stalled rental truck. The intersection was easy to find because she arrived at the junction at the same time the summoned tow truck did. All Ali had to do was follow the truck with its red lights flashing, and that’s exactly what she did, keeping back just far enough so her Cayenne wasn’t engulfed in the billowing cloud of dust kicked up by the vehicle.
    The tow truck ran down into a dip and came to a stop on the edge of a trackless desert wasteland. Ali stopped, too. When she did so, a uniformed police officer sauntered up to her SUV. She opened the window and let the early summer heat engulf her.
    “You’ll have to move along,” the officer told her brusquely as she rolled down the window. “You need to go back the way you came. We’ve got an incident playing out here,” he continued. “We can’t have civilians involved.”
    The name tag on his uniform read F. Camacho. Ali had done her homework. That would be Deputy Fernando Camacho, a six-year veteran in the sheriff’s office.
    “I’m not a civilian, Deputy Camacho,” she answered, flashing her own official sheriff’s office name tag in his direction. “I believe we had an appointment earlier. I’m your department’s new public information officer. What’s going on here?”
    The deputy straightened. “Glad to meet you,” he said with obvious insincerity. “Sorry about not letting you know. We had an emergency call out and didn’t have time.”
    That, of course, was a lie. From the information on Yolanda’s note, Ali knew exactly when the call came in. They could have contacted Ali while she was still in Prescott. Traveling between the substation and here they would have had time enough to make a dozen separate calls. The deputies had done this on purpose, to inconvenience Ali and make her look stupid.
    “I guess you’ve been drinking the water, then?” she asked innocently.
    “Water?” Deputy Camacho repeated blankly, looking off across the half-mile-wide expanse of sand. A quarter of a mile away, a U-Haul truck sat mired hubcap-deep in fine, hot sand. “What water are you talking about?”
    “The water in the river,” Ali answered. “According to legend,people who