Read Damage Control for Free Online Page A

the moment his job as a mystery writer was demanding its own kind of attention.
    “That’s a relief,” he said. “The reviewed copyedited manuscript needs to be in New York by Tuesday at the latest, and I could sure use some help with little troublemaker here in the meantime.” Butch helped himself to another piece of pizza, then he came over and kissed the top of Joanna’s head. “This is food for the gods, by the way,” he added.
    Joanna tried the bottle again. This time Dennis took it. The sudden silence in the kitchen was almost deafening. The pizza was calling to her, too, but with the baby in one hand and the bottle in the other, Butch’s double pepperoni would have to wait.
    “I do have some bad news,” Butch said. “The check bounced.”
    “What check?”
    “The renter’s check—from the ranch. It was due on the first and didn’t get here until the fifth. I deposited it yesterday. The bank called this afternoon right after I talked to you to say Bob Baker’s checking account was closed.”
    Between them, Butch and Joanna had two rental properties, a house he had rehabbed in Bisbee and the original house on High Lonesome Ranch, one Joanna and her first husband, Andy, had purchased from his parents. Over the course of the past few months they had learned that being landlords wasn’t a trouble-free proposition. Bob Baker had rented the property six months earlier, claiming he was putting together an important import/export company that would be based in Agua Prieta, south of Douglas.
    “Closed,” Joanna echoed.
    “So I loaded Dennis into his car seat and drove over there to raise hell with him. He’s long gone, Joey, and the place is a pigsty. I don’t know how long he’s been gone. It looks like illegals have been using it as a stopping-off place for quite some time. Infact, I’m starting to wonder if Bob Baker’s supposed import/export business wasn’t just a cover for whatever else he was really doing.”
    “You think he was a coyote?”
    In the parlance of southern Arizona’s law enforcement community, coyotes were more often the two-legged kind involved in smuggling illegal immigrants rather than four-legged ones, who were generally law-abiding.
    Butch nodded.
    “And he’s been using our property as a base for that kind of illegal activity?”
    “Right again,” Butch said. “I’d bet money on it. I locked the place up as best I could. We’ll have to bring in a whole crew to muck it out. Baker gave us a cleaning deposit along with his first and last month’s rent, but that’s not going to come close to covering the costs. And by the time we get it cleaned up enough to rent it again, I’m guessing we’ll be out another month’s rent, maybe even more.”
    “Great,” Joanna said.
    “And whatever that bill turns out to be,” Butch continued, “I want to go after him for it.”
    “Go after him?”
    “You bet,” Butch said. “I already called Dick Voland and asked him to do a skip-trace.”
    Richard Voland had once served as one of Joanna’s chief deputies. Since leaving the department, he had hung out his shingle and now worked as Bisbee’s only private investigator. Even though Voland’s going rate was far under what was being charged in Tucson and Phoenix, Joanna knew it wasn’t aninexpensive proposition. On the other hand, she couldn’t very well turn anyone from her own department loose on investigating something that was essentially a private matter, coyote or not.
    “Dick Voland’s a private eye. He’ll end up charging us way more than the cleaning is worth,” Joanna pointed out, “and more than you’ll ever get back from Baker, either.”
    “I don’t care,” Butch insisted. “It’s the principle of the thing.”
    Since Butch handled the rental properties, Joanna didn’t argue the point. And if Baker had been using their property as a cover for illegal activities, Butch was more than justified in being pissed at the man.
    “Fair enough,” Joanna