Free The Old Blue Line: A Joanna Brady Novella (Joanna Brady Mysteries) by J. A. Jance Page A

apologized that he’d already eaten his TV dinner and didn’t have any food to offer. I said I knew a place where we could find some grub if we needed it.
    Later, as we were leaving, Pop gripped my hand with both of his. “Aggie would be so happy about this,” he said, “so very happy.”
    And I knew it to be true. Grandma Agatha Hudson would have been pleased as punch.
    I took Charlie back to the Roundhouse and treated both of us to the biggest and best steaks we had in the kitchen. When I came upstairs, much later, there was no sound from the guest room and no sign of a light under the door, either. I tiptoed past, hoping not to disturb Harold Meeks. He had worked his tail off for me that day, and he deserved a good night’s sleep.
    It turns out, so did I. I crawled into bed and slept like a baby. It was ungodly early when I woke up the next morning. Staring at the clock, I saw it was 5:30 A.M. What had awakened me was the unaccustomed sound of people talking away in my apartment. Out in the main room I discovered Harold Meeks was up, dressed in his preferred courtroom attire, and chatting up an enthralled Matty, who had just brought his breakfast up from the kitchen—two fried eggs and a double helping of bacon along with his own pot of freshly brewed coffee.
    “It’s about time you showed up,” Harold growled at me. “We’ve got places to go and things to do.”
    “I’ll need to see if I can rent a car,” I said. “I didn’t have time to do that yesterday.”
    He shook his head as though dealing with a recalcitrant toddler. “I’ve got a driver and a limo,” he said. “We’ll take that. And when we leave here, I’d like you to bring along my two suitcases. By later this afternoon I think we’ll have this little difficulty well in hand and I’ll be able to go back home.”
    T HE NEXT FEW days passed in a blur. Just as Charlie Rickover had predicted, once Harold pointed Jamison and Shandrow in the right direction, they ran with it. The woman named Marina Ochoa never came back to clean my apartment. She and Jeffrey Jones were arrested the following Wednesday. They fought extradition, but it didn’t work, despite the fact that they had hired a high profile defense guy from California. It wasn’t a surprise that Jeffrey suddenly had to liquidate his real estate holdings in order to pony up attorney’s fees.
    Life seemed to get back to normal at the Roundhouse Bar and Grill. I hired a new cleaning lady—the sister-in-law of one of my dishwashers. (No, Helena isn’t an illegal, and her English is just fine, thank you very much.)
    After jumping through all kinds of hoops, I finally got my Honda sedan back, and wished I hadn’t. The bloody bat had been found in the trunk, almost in plain sight, but the CSIs had torn the whole interior of the car to pieces looking for trace evidence. The car was already old before that happened. When the insurance adjustor looked at it, he shook his head, said it was totaled, and gave me a check that was just enough to buy myself a slightly used Honda Gold Wing.
    Shortly after that, a new batch of police officer recruits turned up at the police academy next door. One day a couple of weeks later my life changed forever when a little red-haired ball of fire named Joanna Brady—the newly minted Sheriff of Cochise County—marched into the Roundhouse, stepped up to my bar, and ordered herself a Diet Coke.
    While attending the academy, she was also in the process of looking out for some poor guy from Douglas, a guy name Jorge, who was about to be given the shaft.
    As soon as I met her, I was done for. She may have been a lot slower to come around, but as far as I was concerned, it was love at first sight. The fact that she went out on a limb to bail Jorge out of a pot of hot water didn’t hurt things, either, at least not for me. Having recently been bailed out of my own pot of hot water, that was one thing about her that I really appreciated.
    But what is it they say