Josie unlocked the office door and the rows of fluorescent lights hummed on. Otto filled the coffeepot with water at the back of the room and they both settled into the comfortable early-morning routine they had developed in their ten-plus years of working together.
Josie sat down at her computer and started through the several dozen emails that had come through since the evening before and began making return phone calls regarding a vandalized water tank behind the gas station and a burglary at an apartment downtown. A young couple had reported a thousand dollars was stolen from their apartment, but Josie had talked to the sheriff that morning and he said they’d also supposedly lost fifty thousand dollars’ worth of heroin and cocaine earlier in the week. If true, the domino effect would travel along the drug trail that started in Mexico and chugged up north into the U.S. from dealer to dealer, until the drugs were recovered, or someone paid the price. The police carried out an investigation while the criminals conducted their own, which often resulted in a faster, more violent conclusion.
*
At two o’clock Marta called from home.
“What’s up?” Josie asked.
“I got a follow-up for you. I’m off duty tonight and just wanted to make sure to get this on record. I had a busy night and didn’t have time to leave you a note.”
“No problem. What do you need?”
“It’s Slick Fish. He’s back at it again. I thought we ran him off, but he just changed locations.”
“Somebody saw him?”
“Agnes Delaney, of all people.”
Josie grinned. “Was he naked?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s coming up out of the water just south of Agnes’s house,” Marta said.
“Okay. I’ll check it out.” She hung up the phone and turned to Otto. “Slick Fish resurfaced. Out by Cotton Canyon. Want to go take a look?”
“You bet,” he said. “You got your bathing suit?”
Josie shuddered. “Slick and I will not be swimming together.”
*
Josie drove with the windows down, enjoying the cooler mid-eighties temperature while Otto cranked up the air-conditioning and pointed all the vents toward his face.
“Four decades I’ve spent in this desert, and I still haven’t adapted to the heat,” he said.
“I’m over a decade into it here, and I wouldn’t go back to Indiana winters for anything.”
Josie slowed her jeep to take a long curve in the road that hugged a bend in the Rio, and then pulled up in front of Agnes’s double-wide trailer. The trailer sat about fifty feet off the road and was the only house for several miles. Boxes and old bedsprings and tires and every kind of worthless junk Josie could imagine were piled around the base of the trailer
“I think it’s gotten worse,” Otto said. “I hope we don’t have to go inside. My stomach can’t take the smell today.”
“That’s what you get. Too many dumplings.”
They exited the jeep and a woman in her fifties with fuzzy gray hair walked outside, leaning on a cane.
“Morning, Agnes,” Josie called.
“Hello, hello,” she said. “Give me a minute.”
Agnes hobbled down the lopsided concrete-block steps and Josie cringed, afraid her cane would get caught in a crack and send the woman tumbling down.
“I hear you had some excitement out here yesterday,” Josie said.
“That man is taunting me. He makes me feel dirty in my own backyard.”
“Why don’t you tell us what happened?” Josie said.
“As you probably know, I’m a birder. I can show you the photographs in my house. I’ve spotted black phoebes, kingfishers, the great kiskadee. And my prize, the Colima warbler.”
“Were you looking for birds when you saw the man crossing the river?” Otto said.
“I wasn’t looking for birds,” she said, scowling at Otto. “There’s a difference between looking out your kitchen window at the birds in your backyard, and actually birding. I have journals filled with notes of my trips, and—”
“My apologies,” he said. Otto raised a hand in the air and spoke slowly. “Were you birding outside when you saw the man in the river?”
“Yes. I was. I’d walked out into the backyard and had traveled maybe a few hundred feet down toward the river. It’s a hard walk for me through the thicket with my cane, so I’m slow and quiet. I had my eye on a painted bunting. A real beauty. Blue and red and green. A little bird that looks like it’s straight out of the tropics.”