Apache Country Read Online Free Page B

staff returned to their
duties, Easton followed Joe Apodaca into his office. The sheriff
threw himself into his chair, angrily spinning it left and then
right.
    “Jesus, that guy!” he gritted, blowing out
his breath gustily. “Why is he always such an asshole?”
    “And you caught him on his good day,” Easton
said.
    Joe managed a grin. “You know, there was a
moment back there I thought Tom Cochrane was going to spit in his
eye.”
    “There was a moment back there I thought you
were,” Easton said, and waited. Joe got around to things at his own
speed. He got up from his chair, poured coffee into two mugs and
handed one over.
    “Been thinking,” he said, drawing it out. “I
figure someone ought to go over and see Ellen Casey.”
    Easton frowned. “RPD already talked to her,
Joe. She’ll have told them everything she knows.”
    “Ye-es,” Joe said, as if reluctant to say
more.
    “She’s probably in shock. The whole family,
come to that,” Easton pointed out. “It would be an intrusion.”
    Apodaca looked up, his eyes unreadable. “I
know. But I thought maybe you could, you know, talk to her, get
some sense of what was going on in her world.”
    The penny dropped. “Let me see if I’m getting
this right,” Easton said. “What you mean is, go out there and be
supportive and understanding and tell her how much we all hate to
intrude on her grief, then sort of slip in a couple of personal
questions, like was Casey cheating on her or was she cheating on
him, that sort of thing?”
    “Yeah, that sort of thing,” Joe said, not
looking at him. “You and Ellen used to be pretty close, didn’t
you?”
    But not any more, Easton thought. That line
of Scott Fitzgerald’s about the rich being different came back to
him. No matter how often they welcomed you into it, you never
became a part of their world unless you were rich, too. The game
was too expensive. The numbers were too big.
    “No way,” he said flatly.
    Joe shrugged. “Then I’ll have to send someone
else. Jack Basso, maybe.”
    “You’d do it, too,” Easton said. “You
bastard.”
    “Knew I could count on you,” Joe smiled.

Chapter Three
    Easton was about halfway down Country Club
Road on his way to the Casey home when the radio crackled and the
dispatcher patched Joe Apodaca through. His voice was tense with
excitement.
    “Get your ass back here pronto,” he rasped.
“State cops just told us, yesterday they arrested a guy who looks
good for the Casey killing.”
    “What?”
    “Some guy called Ironheel.”
    “Ironheel?”
    “Native American. Apache.”
    “What?” Easton couldn’t keep the disbelief
out of his voice.
    “I know, bizarre,” Joe rasped. “But this
looks like our guy, Dave. Blood on his clothes, Casey’s billfold in
his pocket. Damned near killed two State cops who tried to arrest
him. So get back down here.”
    “On my way,” Easton said as he flicked on the
siren and did an illegal one-eighty at the next junction.
    Avoiding the six o’clock traffic by using
Atkinson, which ran parallel to Main north and south, he was back
downtown inside ten minutes. He was still trying to get a handle on
what Joe had told him. Robert Casey and his grandson murdered by an
Apache? The word ‘impossible’ kept floating into his mind.
    Pulling into his slot in the storm-fenced
parking lot behind the courthouse, he saw satellite vans parked
along Virginia and a bunch of reporters milling on the ramp leading
to the entrance to the old jail; it hadn’t taken long for the
vultures to smell blood. Or maybe McKittrick had tipped them off.
Olin loved headlines, especially when they had his name in
them.
    To make sure none of the reporters saw him,
Easton walked all the way around the front of the building and
crossed the street a block up, going into the Sheriff’s Office
building by the rear entrance.
    He could feel the contained tension in the
air as he hurried through to Joe’s office. Gloria Fresquez, Joe’s
secretary and