Read Just Deserts (Hetta Coffey Series, Book 4) for Free Online Page A

something done.
    “Also, Maria, I’d like a jobsite tour, get my bearings. Oh, and do I need a pass, or sticker, or something to come and go at the main gate?” I didn’t add, Just in case the old guard and his dog should regain consciousness.
    “I will have the operations manager give you the tour in about an hour, and I shall arrange a pass for your car window. You have a car, yes?”
    “Oh, yes,” I beamed. Most folks might not think much of my twenty-year-old VW, but I love her.
    “ Bueno . Now, if you will excuse me, I must take refreshments into the men of your company.”
    “Not my company. I own my own consulting firm and contract myself out to Baxter. Oh, before you go, can you give me a key to the office? I tend to work odd hours.”
    She looked a little perplexed, but shrugged. “As you wish, but we never lock the door. No need, for everyone must pass through the main gate.”
    “Oh, of course. Security.” I hid a grin.
    She made to leave, then turned back. “I have made a reservation for a room tonight, but, well, perhaps we should change it?”
    “I definitely need a room.”
    “Miss Café, Cananea is a working town, with limited accommodations. The good hotels are both full and when I booked your room, I did not know you were…alone.”
    “You did not know I was a woman.”
    “Well, yes.”
    “What, they don’t allow lone women in the hotels here?”
    “Yes, of course they do. It’s only that the hotel I was able to put you in is not so…good.”
    “So, what do you suggest?”
    “Perhaps you would prefer to go to Douglas, or Bisbee, for the night?”
    “I’m pretty tired. You don’t think I’ll be safe at the hotel here?”
    “Oh, you will be very safe. It is just not the best hotel in town.”
    “I’m beat. I’d settle for a couch tonight.”
    She smiled uncertainly, then left to get the guys some coffee, which evidently they were incapable of doing themselves. Was I gonna have fun here, or what?
     
    The hotel thing reminded me that unless I’m working in a very large city I don’t blend in. Even if I scored the best room in town I’d still be relegated to a crappy social life. I can’t hang out with the guys without raising eyebrows and it was plainly clear that I wasn’t gonna be bosom buddies with the women working at the mine. I’d need a house and even then I’d be a curiosity not to be trusted with the male population, and inaccessible to the female. Dang, why can’t they build mines in places like downtown Paris?
    Sighing at remembrances of past outposts like this one, I ventured once again into that back room and surveyed with dismay what would be my office as soon as the HAZMAT team moved out. Gingerly unrolling a curl of drawings marked PLOT PLAN, I walked outside to orient myself. Off in an azure sky to the north, some kind of blimp glinted white above a mountain range. At least ten or twenty thousand feet high in the deep blue sky, I reckoned.
    Sweeping vistas lay in all directions, some marred by old strip mining scars. Didn’t look like much mining going on now, though. On the way into town, I got the definite impression of a fading economy. Maybe the results of my little job here would give the place a much-needed shot in the old pocketbook.
    North, under that blimp, mountain ranges flanked a wide valley, itself dissected by a stand of huge leafless trees that I’d bet my bottom dollar were cottonwoods. From a previous project I did back in San Carlos, I remembered the San Pedro River, the only river running north from Mexico into the States. And one of the last free-running rivers in the U.S.
    “ Señorita Café,” a timid voice called out from the office. One of the other secretaries stuck her head out the door.
    “Yes?”
    “Do you wish for some, uh, café ?” She giggled at her inadvertent joke.
    “No, gracias.” I pointed at the blimp.“What is that?”
    Misunderstanding me, she said, “Sierra Vista, Arizona. She is our sister city and,”