Late on Tuesday afternoon, Sheriff Joanna Brady sat at her
desk, stared at the pages of her calendar, and knew that
Butch Dixon, her husband, was absolutely right. She was
overbooked. When he had mentioned it at breakfast that
morning, she had done the only reasonable thing and denied
it completely.
Coffeepot in hand, Butch had stood looking at the week's
worth of calendar he had finally convinced Joanna to copy
and tape to the refrigerator door in a vain attempt at
keeping track of her comings and goings.
"Two parades on Friday?" he had demanded, studying the two
pages of copied calendar entries she had just finished
posting. "According to this, the parades are followed by
appearances at two community picnics." Butch shook his
head. "And you still think you'll be at the fairgrounds in
time for Jenny's barrel-racing event, which will probably
start right around four? You're nuts, Joey," he concluded
after a pause. "Totally round the bend. Or else you've
picked up a clone without telling me about it."
"Don't worry," she told him. "I'll be fine."
Butch had poured coffee and said nothing more. Now,
though, late in the afternoon and after putting in a full
day's work, Joanna studied her marathon schedule and
worried that maybe Butch was right. How would she cover
allthose bases?
The Fourth of July had always been one of Joanna's
favorite holidays. She loved going to the parade, hosting
or attending a backyard barbecue, and then ending the
evening in town watching Bisbee's community fireworks
display.
But this wasn't a typical Fourth of July. This was an
election year, and Joanna Brady was an active-duty sheriff
trying to do her job in the midst of a stiffly contested
reelection campaign. Rather than watching a single parade,
she was scheduled to participate in two of them - driving
her Crown Victoria in Bisbee's parade starting at eleven
and in Sierra Vista's, twenty-five miles away, starting at
twelve-thirty. She was also slated to appear briefly at
two community picnics that day - in Benson and St. David.
The day would end with her making a few introductory
remarks prior to the annual fireworks display eighty miles
from home in Willcox. Stuffed in among all her official
duties, she needed to be at the Cochise County fairgrounds
outside of Douglas at the stroke of four o'clock.
After years of practicing around a set of barrels
positioned around the corral at High Lonesome Ranch,
Jennifer Ann Brady had declared that she and her sorrel
quarter horse, Kiddo, were ready for their public barrel-
racing debut. That Fourth of July would mark Jenny's first-
ever competition on the junior rodeo circuit. Joanna's
showing up for the barrel-race rodeo had nothing at all to
do with politics and everything to do with motherhood.
Be there or be square, Joanna told herself grimly.
Looking away from her calendar, Joanna walked across to
the dorm-sized refrigerator Butch had brought back from
Costco in Tucson and installed in her office. She
retrieved a bottle of water. Taking a thoughtful drink,
she stared out the window at the parched hills surrounding
the Cochise County Justice Center. The thermometer perched
in the shade under the roof of a covered parking stall
just outside her office door still hovered around 103
degrees. Summertime temperatures in and around Bisbee
seldom exceeded the low nineties, so having the
temperature still that hot so late in the afternoon was
bound to be a record breaker.
Inside Joanna's office, things weren't much better. The
thermostats at all county-owned facilities were now set at
a budget/energy-conscious 80 degrees - too warm to think
or concentrate. She had a fan in her office, too, but she
hated to use it because it tended to blow loose papers all
over her desk - and there were always loose papers. The
radio, playing softly behind her desk, switched from music
to bottom-of-the-hour news where the weather was a big
concern. All of Arizona found itself in the grip of a
severe drought and what was, even for July, a fierce heat
wave.
The radio reporter announced that flights in and out of
Phoenix's Sky Harbor airport had been grounded due to
concerns that the heat-softened runways might be damaged
by planes landing and taking off in the record-breaking
126-degree temperatures. The announcer's running gag about
its being a dry heat didn't help Joanna's frame of mind.
Bisbee, situated two hundred miles southeast of Phoenix,
was a couple of thousand feet higher than Phoenix and more
than twenty degrees cooler, but that didn't help, either.
Deciding to ignore the weather, Joanna switched off the
radio and returned to studying her calendar and its self-
inflicted difficulties.
Months earlier, one of her least favorite deputies,
Kenneth W. Galloway, had officially announced his
intention to run against her. Bankrolled by a wife with a
booming real estate business in Sierra Vista, Ken, Jr.,
had resigned from Joanna's department within weeks of
announcing his candidacy. Minus the burden of a regular
job, Galloway had been on the stump ever since. He spent
every day on the campaign trail, crisscrossing the county
with door-belling efforts and public appearances.
And that was where he had Joanna at a disadvantage. With a
department to run, she couldn't afford to doorbell all day
long. She had done her share of rubber-chicken banquets
and pancake-breakfast speeches for local civic
organizations, but she'd had to squeeze them in around her
regular duties. Which was why she had said yes to
appearing at all those various Fourth of July events.
She'd be able to cross paths and shake hands with far more
people at those holiday get-togethers than she would have
been able to see under ordinary circumstances ...
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