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appearance of the corporate offices belied the multimillion-dollar contracts that routinely found their way into High Noon’s in-box.
    B. would have happily married Ali, anytime, anywhere, but she wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment. She had yet to recover from the emotional damage left behind by the multiple betrayals of her previous husband, Paul Grayson, a serial philanderer who had cheated on her five ways to Sunday. In addition to Ali’s trust issues, there was also the fifteen-year age difference between her and B. The idea of being labeled a cradle-robbing cougar was more than Ali could handle, although the label was out there anyway, wedding or no.
    For now having pizza together was fine. Having fun together was fine. As for getting married? Not so much.

5
    8:00 P.M ., Friday, April 9
Nogales, Arizona
    Deputy Jose Reyes squirmed in the driver’s seat of his idling Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department Tahoe, trying to find a comfortable position. He had the heat turned down, but with his uniform and Kevlar vest on, it was way too warm in the front seat of his patrol unit.
    It was an unusually quiet night. He turned the thermostat down one more notch, leaned back on the headrest, and closed his eyes. It was hours before his shift was due to end, and Jose was more than a little bored.
    He would have preferred to be on the prowl for some of the real bad guys in Santa Cruz County, the drug and people smugglers who had turned Nogales—both Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, in Mexico—into booming homicide centers. Instead, he was following orders from headquarters and hanging out on the far side of the Kino Ridge Country Club, waiting to see if he could pick off a likely-looking DUI suspect who would help him meet his moving-violation quota for the week.
    Not that Jose had a quota, at least not officially. Unofficially? That was another story, and the retirees who frequented the relatively lowbrow Kino Ridge were more likely than the more upper-crust folks at Amado or Rio Rico to shut up and pay their fines than they were to hire criminal defense attorneys. Every deputy in the department had been told—off the record, of course—that when fines got paid without involving costly court cases, it helped keep the fiscal wheels turning in the Santa Cruz county government.
    In southern Arizona, where border security was a top priority, it was also an incredibly divisive issue. People lined up on either side of the illegal-immigrant divide. Some wanted a completely airtight border, while others wanted to open the floodgates. Jose’s boss, Sheriff Manuel Renteria, had staked his claim on the tiny sliver of middle ground between the two opposing factions.
    As a relatively new officer on the force, Jose chafed under Renteria’s “majoring in the minors” approach. He had campaigned for office as a law-and-order man, with a small L and a small O. It seemed to Jose that Renteria was far more concerned with keeping the state roads free of speeders and drunk drivers than he was with stopping the drug or people smugglers. The sheriff wasn’t as interested in making a big name for himself as he was in maintaining the status quo by doing the little jobs of law enforcement rather than the big ones. Renteria had let it be known that problems related to the somewhat diminished flood of illegal immigrants and drug cartel smugglers flowing across the border and making their way up and down I-19 were Homeland Security’s problem, not the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department’s.
    Jose wasn’t wild about his agency’s low-key serve-and-protect focus, but he went along with the program, quietly and without a whole lot of enthusiasm. Nearly three years out of the academy, he had plenty of people counting on him, including a wife and two preschool-aged stepdaughters as well as a boy due to be born within the next few weeks. That meant Jose was grateful to have a job. Lots of the people he knew from the academy