Desert Heat

He came into the living room wearing a robe and still dripping wet. He padded over to the couch and sat down, leaving a trail of wet footprints on the thick white carpeting. Angie placed the morning newspaper on the marble-topped coffee table next to the break-fast tray. Without a word she backed away to the recliner in the corner. Tony Vargas didn’t like to talk to anybody until after he had eaten breakfast, read the fu

Angie sat and observed him while he ate, listening to the hollow crunch of cereal in his mouth and wondering if her father, who had once worked on the bagging line in Battle Creek, had helped make that particular batch. She didn’t even know if her father was still alive, and she didn’t much care one way or the other.

“What are you staring at?” Vargas demanded, glowering at her over the top of his newspaper.

“We’re almost out of cereal,” she said woodenly. “And toilet paper.”

“I’ll take you to the store this afternoon. Switch on the set would you? It’s almost time.”

The television had a remote control, but it was broken. Angie wondered sometimes if Tony had broken it deliberately so he’d have something else to tell her to do, another reason to order her around. She turned on the set and switched the cha

Angie didn’t watch the news itself. Like prisoners everywhere whose very existence is dictated by the moods and whims of their keepers, she watched Tony’s face to see how he was reacting to whatever was showing on the screen. She had learned to recognize the danger signals, items that would throw him into towering fits of rage-elections sometimes affected him that way, and the arrests of various people on various charges. Angie had noticed that some of those arrested, especially ones co

Today, Tony didn’t appear to be paying that much attention until, just before the commercial, they mentioned that the next item would be about an injured sheriff’s deputy from somewhere down around Bisbee, wherever that was. When they made the pre-commercial lead-in a

She was holding her breath as the commercial ended, and there was Do

“Tony!” Angie exclaimed.

Her remark was totally involuntary. Angie had pla

“Don’t you say a word to me, cunt. Not one word! Get off your dead ass and clean up the mess! Call somebody and tell them to send somebody out here tomorrow or the next day to fix the set. And if they can’t do the work here, tell ‘em to bring a loaner. You got that?”

Angie was left nodding while Tony stalked from the room. Numbly, she went about cleaning up the mess. Bringing a plastic garbage ran from the kitchen, she picked up the shards of broken crystal and glass. Then, armed with a damp sponge, damp towels, a brush, and spray bottle of carpet cleaner, she set about cleaning up the sticky sprays of grapefruit juice that seemed to be everywhere. While she worked, she heard Tony making a series of phone calls from the bedroom. She was still working on the carpet on her hands and knees a few minutes later when he emerged from the bedroom fully dressed.

“I’m going out,” he a

She nodded mutely, grateful that for once she hadn’t been the target. He left, unlocking the deadbolt, taking the key, and locking it again from the outside.

Motionless as a light-blinded deer, Angie waited until she heard the car start up. Gravel sprayed against the outside of the house as he churned out of the driveway into the street. Only then did she get to her feet.

She stumbled into the bathroom and heaved her guts out into the toilet. When it was over, when the shivering finally stopped and her teeth no longer chattered, Angie went back to the living room and finished cleaning up the mess.

In the begi

Because she had been watching so closely, Angie knew exactly what had provoked his rage-Do

Working with wet towels and the vacuum cleaner, it took Angie forty-five minutes to finish cleaning up the mess in the living room to a point where it would pass Tony’s inspection. Then she hurried into the kitchen, got out the phone book, and started looking for a television repairman.

She figured it wasn’t going to be easy to find a repairman who would be willing to match an appointment with Tony’s schedule, so she figured she’d better get started.

SEVEN

Seven miles away at the Arizona I

For the first time, she remembered what Dr. Sanders had said much earlier in the day when he had warned her about the reporters camped out in the lobby waiting to talk to her. Maybe, she thought hopefully, this man was one of those. After all, he hadn’t tried very hard to conceal the fact that he was following her.

While she was eating her sandwich, she had caught him looking at her several times. The last time, he stared at her openly. She couldn’t escape the feeling that she had seen him somewhere before, that he was someone she knew but couldn’t quite place.

She observed that he hadn’t bothered to eat anything. He drank only a glass of iced tea while she wolfed down her sandwich and two cups of coffee. When the waiter dropped off his ticket, the man stood up immediately. Joa