The Killing Tide (An Alexa Chase Suspense Thriller—Book 2)

CHAPTER ONE A ranch house in the Sonora Desert, five miles east of Benson, Arizona July 3, 11 p.m. Judge Antonio Rodriguez sat in his armchair going through some paperwork as a sports channel chattered in the background. It was a Saturday night and he shouldn’t have been working, but a judge could never catch up on all the paperwork the job buried him in. At the moment he was prepping for a murder case. Even though it wasn’t due in his court for another week, he still had a mountain of paperwork to get through. Defense statements. Police records. The prosecution’s statements. The evidence. It seemed endless. In a way it was endless, because he had six minor cases to get through before then, all with their associated piles of paperwork, and the work after the murder trial was beginning to pile up too. While the regular, run of the mill criminal element such as drunk drivers and shoplifters gave him enough paperwork, it took a library to try a murder case. The phone on the side table buzzed. He picked it up. A message from Carmen, his wife. He opened it and laughed. A photo showed Carmen and her friends on the deck of a cruise ship, wearing sun dresses and straw hats and raising glasses of some colorful, fruity cocktail. A brilliant blue ocean shone in the background. Judge Rodriguez ran his thumb lovingly over the image of the smiling woman, still bright and pretty despite her 62 years. Marrying her and sitting on the bench had been the two smartest things he had ever done. He texted her back. “Looks like your traditional Fourth of July cruise is going well. Don’t get pecked by a parrot like last year.” A text came back almost immediately. “Enjoy the game with the boys tomorrow. And STOP WORKING! It must be eleven there.” Judge Rodriguez laughed again. After a lifetime together, she knew all his tricks. He emojied back a blushing face. “Emojied” was the right word, wasn’t it? He’d have to ask his kids, both recent graduates and living in Albuquerque where there were more opportunities. Benson was a small town. All the kids left when and if they got a chance. Still had its share of criminals, though. Carmen was right. Enough work for the night. He set his papers aside and turned up the volume on the TV. It was about time for his favorite commentators to give their view on how tomorrow’s game would shape up. The doorbell rang. “What the—?” A visitor? At this hour? Maybe Larry down the way was having trouble getting his car started again. He’d had to jump start Larry’s old banger three times in the past month. Or maybe Irene, a bit further along the lane, was having trouble with the baby’s colic. The houses in this neighborhood were scattered wide, everyone having several acres of desert to enjoy, but people still knew one another and gave a helping hand. Judge Rodriguez lifted his heavy frame out of the armchair and walked out of his living room, past photos of his family at various stages of their lives, and into the front hall, flicking on the light as he did. “Coming!” he called out. The doorbell did not ring a second time. He unlocked the door, because even in rural Arizona it was wise to lock one’s door, and opened it. No one stood outside. His porch light was on, a few moths circling around the light, but within its pool of radiance there was no other movement. The front yard, the gravel driveway, and the dimly visible desert beyond were all empty. A chill ran through him. Quickly he shut the door and locked it. Something wasn’t right. The kids in the area were all too small or too big for such pranks. Which meant an adult had done it. Judge Rodriguez switched off the front hallway light and, from the dim illumination coming from the living room, moved to a bureau near the front door where he kept a snub-nosed .38. Carmen hated him having a g*n in the house. She was a big-city girl from Phoenix, and wasn’t used to that aspect of country living. He could grab the shotgun he used for coyotes, but that would be too cumbersome to use inside and was all the way across the house in his bedroom closet. Gripping the g*n, he slowly backed away from the door, his mind wavering between concern and dismissal. It could simply be a prank from some teenagers passing through, like the time some young punks had painted one of the saguaro cacti on the street to look like a p***s. Or it could be something more serious. He had put a lot of bad people away, after all. It was probably nothing, he thought. Heck, it might have even been an electrical problem. This house had been built in the Sixties. It had its little problems with aging just like he did. A creak came from the back of the house, the unmistakable sound of his back door opening. He had forgotten to lock it. Judge Rodriguez broke out in a cold sweat. What to do? His phone lay on the side table in the living room. That might as well be a million miles away. He could move over there, but the intruder might hear him and he’d end up in the only lit portion of the house. Better to stay here. From his vantage point he could see down the half-lit hall and into the kitchen. Since there was no light on in there and a light shining between him and that room, he couldn’t see much of it. He couldn’t see anything at all beyond. The little hall to the rear bathroom and back room, where the back door was, was out of sight around the corner. Judge Rodriguez’s ears strained to hear any sound of movement. He had become a bit hard of hearing in recent years, probably from thirty years of guilty criminals screaming at him in the courtroom, not to mention the heavy metal his younger son had been into in his teens and early twenties. So he didn’t hear a thing, although that didn’t mean there was nothing to hear. Judge Rodriguez waited. A trickle of sweat ran down his brow. His heart pumped hard in his chest but the hand that gripped his pistol did not waver. Still, no sound or movement came from the back of the house. Had he imagined it all? He was tired and, as Carmen constantly told him, overworked. The doorbell might have been a prank, and then his imagination made up the sound of the back door opening. Well, he wasn’t going to wait here forever and hope the answer just came to him. Slowly he began to creep down the hallway toward the kitchen. Every few steps he stopped, ears alert for any sound of movement. Still nothing. He was becoming more convinced that his mind had played tricks on him. A burglar would not target a house that had a light on, the TV making noise, and a car parked out front. A d**g addict looking for something to steal so he could get his next fix would have made a heck of a noise. And neither would have rung the doorbell. Judge Rodriguez had ruled over a lot of cases of break-ins, and he couldn’t recall a single one where the intruder had made himself known before breaking in. So yes, this was probably all in his imagination. He kept his finger on the trigger just in case. Getting to the kitchen doorway, he popped his head around the corner, looking around its dim interior. No one. The short hallway leading to the rear bathroom and back room was almost black. He stood there for a moment, peering into the dark and wishing he wasn’t such a stickler for wasting electricity. Most people left more lights on. Should he turn on the kitchen light? No, that would only alert the intruder, if there was an intruder. Judge Rodriguez had done a pretty good job of moving quietly. The intruder probably thought he was still in the living room watching TV. Judge Rodriguez took a slow, silent breath, and began to creep across the kitchen, which smelled faintly of the frozen lasagna Carmen had left for him to heat up for tonight’s dinner. He got to the far doorway and paused. Still no sounds. Peering around the corner, he made out the dark outlines of the bathroom and the back-room doors, both open, on the left side of the hallway. The back door opened onto the back room, which had little except a few potted plants and some boxes of old files. Nothing worth stealing. He did not feel a breeze coming from there, so the door was closed. Had the intruder gotten cold feet and left? Most likely there wasn’t an intruder at all. He had to check, though. Judge Rodriguez took a step into the hallway. A flash to his left. A dark bulk rushing out of the bathroom. The brief, faint glint of light on metal. Then a burning pain in his wrist. The pistol dropped to the floor. Judge Rodriguez cried out, backing up into the kitchen. The dark figure followed, making another swipe with the knife. Just barely managing to raise his arm in time to protect his face, Judge Rodriguez felt another streak of hot pain on his forearm. He cried out, turned and ran for the hallway, hoping to get to the front door and out into the street where he could shout for help. He barely made it two yards. Another s***h across his back. He gasped, staggered, and kept going, making it halfway down the hallway, just opposite the lit living room before another, deeper s***h made him fall on his face. He rolled over. The figure loomed over him, coming into the light from the living room. Judge Rodriguez froze. He recognized that face. In an instant he remembered everything about that case, and knew he could not hope for mercy. The knife flashed down, stabbing. The knife came up, trailing blood, and came down again. And again. And again. Within two minutes, Judge Antonio Rodriguez of Benson, Arizona, lay wide-eyed in a pool of his own blood, staring at the ceiling as the world faded around him. The last thing he heard after the back door slammed shut was his phone buzzing in the living room. He would never see the photo of his wife blowing him a goodnight kiss.