In the searing noontime heat, they took Lefty’s Samurai and drove slowly through the little gringo retirement enclave outside Guaymas. It was high noon, siesta time, and none of Lefty’s friends or neighbors were anywhere in evidence. The Samurai traveled north through the barren Mexican desert. Thirty miles from town, where the narrow ribbon of cracked blacktop seemed to melt into the mist of a road-eating mirage, they turned off the pavement into trackless, powdery sand. They drove for several more treacherous miles be-fore, on a small rocky knoll, Vargas told Lefty to stop.

“This will be fine,” he said.

“What now?”

Lefty had been paying close attention to the way they had come, remembering landmarks. Several months out of rehab, he was in good physical shape, better than he had been in years. Even in the afternoon heat he could probably make it back to the road.

“Get out,” Vargas said. “Now you walk.” Lefty O’Toole’s mouth was too dry to speak. “From here?” he croaked.

“It’s not as far as you think,” Vargas returned.

Slowly Lefty started to get out of the Samurai. Then, in one final act of defiance, he grabbed the keys from the ignition and flung them as far away as he could throw them. He had been a hell of a passer for the University of Arizona in his day, and the keys sailed far into the air, with the sun glinting off them as they sped away. The sudden, unexpected movement caught Vargas unawares and for a moment he was too stunned to react.

“You crazy bastard!”

Before the keys came to rest thirty or forty yards away, Lefty O’Toole spun around and bolted across the desert. A strangled noise that was half-sob/half-cackle rose in his throat and escaped his parched lips. He felt good, weight-less almost, gliding effortlessly over the powdery sand. It was like one of those good old LSD trips, the early ones, that had been more like flying than flying.

Lefty had tricked Antonio Vargas by God! He had caught him flat-footed. The very idea filled him with unreasoning delight.

In fact, he was just starting to laugh when the first powerful bullet caught him directly between the shoulder blades, propelling him forward faster than his legs could move, smashing him face forward into the yielding, smothering sand.

Not even Lefty O’Toole ever knew that he died laughing.

Cursing the dead man under his breath, Tony Vargas didn’t bother to go searching the trackless sand for those missing keys. His early training had taught him how to hot-wire cars, and he did it now with only a minimal amount of difficulty. Driving carefully, he made his way back to the deserted airstrip where his plane and pilot were waiting.

“You took care of him?” the other man asked anxiously.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Tony returned. “Let’s go.”

“Is it going to work?”

“Don’t worry. I told you I’d handle it.” Once the plane was airborne and heading north, Tony leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes, and thought longingly about Angie Kellogg’s lush, lithe body. He could hardly wait to get home and take her to bed. Killing people always made him horny as hell, and Angie always did what he wanted.

Joanna Brady stepped to the doorway of the screened back porch and stared out into the night. The moonlit sky was a pale gray above the jagged black contours of the Mule Mountains ten miles away. September’s day-time heat had peeled away from the high Sonoran Desert of southeastern Arizona, and Joanna shivered as she stood still, listening to yipping coyotes and watching for traffic on the highway a mile and a half away. Beside her, Sadie, Joanna’s gangly blue-tick hound, listened as well, her tail thumping happily on the worn, wooden floor of the porch.

“Where is he, girl?” Joanna asked. “Where’s Andy?” Happy to have someone speaking to her, the dog once more thumped her long tail.

Up on the highway, a pair of headlights rounded the long curve and emerged from the mountain pass. Speeding tires keened down the blacktop, passing the Double Adobe turn-off without even slowing down. That one wasn’t him, either. Disappointed, Joanna sighed and went back inside, taking the dog with her.

In the living room she could hear the drone of her mother’s favorite television game show while Jennifer, her daughter, was eating dinner in the kitchen.

“Is Daddy coming now?” Jennifer asked.

Joanna shook her head. “Not yet,” she answered, trying to conceal the hurt and anger in her voice. She kicked off her heels, poured herself another cup of coffee, and settled into the breakfast nook opposite her blonde, blue-eyed daughter. At nine, Jenny was a female mirror image of her father.

Despite Joanna’s soothing words to the contrary, Jennifer assessed her mother’s mood with uncanny accuracy. “Are you mad at him?” she asked.

“A little,” Joanna admitted reluctantly. A lot was more like it, she thought. It was a hell of a thing to be stood up like this on your own damn wedding anniversary, especially when Andy himself had insisted on the date and had made all the arrangements. He was the one who had first suggested, and then insisted, that they get a room at the hotel and spend the night, reliving their comic opera wedding night from ten years before.

At the time Andy had suggested it, Joanna had asked him if he was sure. For one thing, staying in the hotel would cost a chunk of money, an added expense they could ill afford. For another, there was time. Not only was Andy a full-time deputy for the Cochise County Sheriff’s department, he was also running for sheriff against his longtime boss, Walter McFadden.

The election was now less than six weeks away. Joanna had been through enough campaigns with her father to know that conserving both energy and focus was vital that close to election day. In the meantime, Joanna had her own job to worry about. Milo Davis, the owner of the insurance agency where she worked as office manager, had offered her a partnership. To that end he had started sending her out on more and more sales calls, letting her earn commission over and above her office-duty pay. But it meant that she, too, was essentially holding down two full-time jobs.

Joanna was the first to admit that between the two of them, she and Andy had precious little time to spend together, but staying in the hotel overnight seemed to be overdoing it. Andy, however, had laughed aside all Joanna’s objections and told her to be ready at six when he’d come by to pick her up.

Well, six had long since come and gone and he still wasn’t home. Eleanor Lathrop, Joanna’s mother, had been at the house watching television since five-thirty. Since six sharp, Joanna’s small packed suitcase had sat forlornly by the back door, joined now by her discarded shoes, but at seven forty-five, An-drew Roy Brady was still nowhere to be found.

“Maybe he had car trouble,” Jennifer suggested, snagging a piece of green chili from her plate and stuffing it back inside her grilled cheese sandwich from which she had carefully removed all the crusts. Joanna bit back the urge to tell jenny to stop being silly, to shape up and eat her discarded bread crusts, and to stop casting herself in the role of family peace-maker, but Joanna Brady had embarked on a conscious struggle to be less like her own mother. She let it pass. After all, there was no sense in turning Jennifer into any more of a family Ping-Pong ball than she already was.

“You’re right,” Joanna agreed finally. “That’s probably what happened. He’ll be here any minute.”

“Are you going to tell Grandma to go on home?” Jenny asked.

Joanna shook her head. “Not yet. We’ll wait a little longer.”

Jenny finished her sandwich, pushed her plate aside, and started in on the dish of sliced peaches. Eva Lou Brady, Joanna’s mother-in-law, had canned them herself with fruit from the carefully nurtured freestone peach trees planted just outside the kitchen door. Joanna got up and dished out a helping of peaches of her own. Two hours past their usual dinner hour, it was a long time since lunch, and she was starving.