my way through the scrub bush and around the prickly pear and cholla that with the wrong move could have immobilized me. I didn’t see another person, the one I feared might be coming up from behind. It made sense. First of all, the rain made it nearly impossible to see anything at more than ten feet. Plus, that other person wouldn’t want to come face-to-face with me any more than I wanted to run into him, partly because he would know I was a force to be reckoned with, and partly because he might not want to risk recognition. Maybe this was a person I knew.
With some luck on my side, I finally made it back down to the wash where all the trailheads joined and managed to wade across before it became a torrent that would sweep me and the Pugs downstream.
When I got back to the car, I threw the Pugs into the front seat, where they panted, slightly traumatized, a light steam rising off their backs. I shut my door and caught my breath, but left my Smith on my lap. I drove slowly around the parking lot peering through the windshield wipers at the other cars. There were two, with people inside waiting out the storm. The killer had twice as far to walk back to the parking lot as I did. He wasn’t in either of these cars. He had hiked from a different trailhead.
I drove back to the house and reassured Carlo that we were all fine, just wet, got caught in the storm. He and I got busy with our own pursuits, my trying to get the more stubborn cholla spines unstuck from my shirt and finally throwing the thing away.
What was most on my mind was who had tried to have me killed, twice. I had put plenty of scumbags away for life without parole. A few convicted of lesser charges might get out, and a few of those had threatened me in the past. But I always received notification when that was going to happen, and it hadn’t happened lately, Sigmund had said. I was still convinced this had something to do with Floyd Lynch, and my thoughts turned to his family. Two of them, with weapons and knowledge of the local terrain. A stretch, and why? To keep me from proving Floyd’s innocence? If you could believe the elder Lynch, he’d be just as happy to see Floyd dead.
The most immediate concern: if someone wanted me dead bad enough to try twice it was likely they’d try again, or else go after people I loved. I thought again about the danger to my pack, this time imagining rattlesnakes in the mailbox and antifreeze cocktails tossed over the back fence for the Pugs. I thought about my dear Perfesser abducted. Tortured. Did I mention I have a sordid imagination?
I called Gordo Ferguson, an ex–Secret Service guy I knew who had opened up an executive protection firm here in Tucson. Gordo was the kind of man who could intimidate an entire rugby team, and if the rumors were right, once had. He owed me several favors, so I asked him if he’d watch over Carlo and the Pugs without their knowing.
Next. If life had been normal Carlo and I would have played a game of Scrabble before lunch. He would have beaten me. Then we might have settled down with our books in the afternoon, him to read the life of Wittgenstein and me to finish the Clive Cussler action/adventure where the bad guys are bad and the good guys always win. In the evening we would have tossed a coin on watching an intelligent film or an action movie, and I would have won either way. I couldn’t help but wonder if that life would ever come again and figured I was kidding myself that I could hold on to it. Even now I could feel myself slipping away from the Perfesser, preparing myself again to face the loneliness I hadn’t before realized I felt. Pushing people away was one thing I could say I was good at.
When there was no response to repeated calls to Coleman’s cell phone, I called her office a little before lunch, got the receptionist Maisie Dickens, a relentlessly cheerful person for someone who is the gatekeeper to so much murder and mayhem. You could be looking at photos of a mass grave when she asked you to sign a birthday card with baby ducks