Free Rattlesnake Crossing by J. A. Jance Page A

it."
    Joanna nodded. "Me, neither."
    "Did you see the expression on her face when she finally figured out that you were in charge?"
    "I saw it, all right," Joanna said. "Unfortunately, I don't think I handled the situation in the best possible fashion. Dr. Daly got under my skin almost as much as I got under hers. While you're down in the crawl space working with her, Jaime, see what you can do to smooth things out."
    "I'll try," Jaime Carbajal replied cheerfully, "but I'm not making any promises. From what I saw of Fran Daly, she doesn't look like the kind of person where smoothing is going to work."
    "Sheriff Brady?"
    Joanna turned to see who had called. Lance Pakin, the deputy she had seen arrive with Dick Voland, came jogging toward her from the back of Clyde Philips' property.
    "Did you get the door open?" Joanna asked.
    "Yes, ma'am," Pakin replied. "But Chief Deputy Voland wants you to come there right away."
    The urgency in Pakin 's voice made Joanna’s heart fall.
    She had visions of another previously undiscovered victim rotting on the gun-shop floor. "Not another body," she said.
    "No," Pakin said. "Nothing like that."
    "What, then?"
    "They're empty."
    “What's empty.”
    "The shop out back and the truck, too. If either one of them used to have guns in them, they don't now. Chief Deputy Voland thinks you'd better come take a look."

 
    CHAPTER FIVE
     
    Compared to the harsh August heat outside, the interior of Clyde Philips' fortresslike gun shop was downright cold. Consisting of two rooms, the shop had a large showroom and a back room with a door marked OFFICE. The place was lit by ceiling-mounted shop lights. The outside walls of the showroom area were lined with glass-enclosed, locking gun racks. Now all of those glass-doored cabinets stood wide open, with the slots inside them totally empty. In the middle of the room stood a series of glass-topped display-case counters, also open and empty. In the dust left behind on the glass shelving were the imprints of missing handguns and holsters as well.
    Seeing the ghostly shadows of those missing weapons, Joanna felt a wave of gooseflesh spread across her body. That icy reaction owed far more to simple dread than it did to the droning presence of Clyde Philips' air-conditioning unit up on the shop's roof.
    Joanna glanced away from the missing guns and caught Dick Voland staring at her with a look of undisguised longing on his face. In the months since the collapse of Dick Voland's marriage, Joanna's working relationship with her chief deputy had become more and more complicated. At this point, she would have welcomed a dose of Voland's early and outspoken opposition, rather than the puppylike (if unspoken) devotion with which he now sometimes regarded her. Clearly, the fifteen years' difference in their ages and the fact that his feelings weren't reciprocated made no difference.
    Joanna had no quarrel with the man's professionalism. He had never once said anything out of bounds. In the easy give-and-take of the office, he was fine. In public, in fact, he still tended to be overbearing and patronizing on occasion. But in private, unguarded moments like this one, the man wore his heart on his sleeve. Joanna sympathized with him, but she needed a working, full-fledged chief deputy far more than she did a lovesick schoolboy suffering from an unrequited crush.
    Joanna's eyes met his over the top of one of the display cases. Quickly, Dick Voland looked away. "How many guns do you figure walked out of here?" she asked.
    Blushing visibly in the sallow light, he shrugged his shoulders. "No way to tell for sure," he said gruffly. "But even if the cases held only one or two guns apiece, it's way too many to have them running around loose. They would still amount to enough guns to supply a small army."
    "Peachy," Joanna said. "Any sign of a break-in?"
    "None whatsoever," Voland replied in a brisk, business-like fashion. "Whoever did this came in with a key to the front door and