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Ali’s window, startling her out of her long reverie. “Pilot car’s here,” he said, pointing. “Get moving.”
    When Ali finally arrived at the Congress substation, both of the deputies she had been scheduled to meet—Deputies Camacho and Fairwood—were nowhere around. The only person in attendance was a clerk named Yolanda, who looked so young that Ali wondered if she was even out of high school. The clerk may have been young, but when Ali introduced herself, Yolanda had the good grace to look embarrassed.
    “Are you kidding?” she asked. “When they left, I reminded them you were coming today. They said they’d call and let you know they’d been called out and that you probably shouldn’t bother.”
    Ali understood that it wasn’t Yolanda’s fault that the two deputies she was stuck working with happened to be a pair of jerks who had deliberately stood Ali up.
    “They probably got busy and forgot,” Ali said easily, excusing them and thereby letting Yolanda off the hook. “Don’t worry about it. But since I’m here anyway, where did they go?”
    “A rancher busted some cactus smugglers down along the Hassayampa River a few miles north of Wickenburg,” Yolanda answered. “We have a lot of that around here. It takes a long time to grow saguaros—like a hundred years or so. That’s why people try to steal them.”
    “Tell you what,” Ali said. “Why don’t you get their location for me? This sounds like something that would make an interesting press release.”
    She wasn’t sure that releasing information about a cactus-rustling ring would do much to bolster Sheriff Maxwell’s image in the community, but it was a start. While Yolanda waited for information from Dispatch, Ali put on a winning smile and plied her for more information.
    “When did all this go down?” she asked. “And how did it happen?”
    “Earlier this morning. The rancher is an old guy named Richard Mitchell. His deeded ranch is up by Fools Canyon, but he leases a lot more BLM land to run his cattle.
    “Anyways, he was out checking fence lines on his Bureau of Land Management lease this morning and came across two guys in a rental truck loaded with cactus. He told them to stop, but they didn’t. When they tried to make a run for it, they, like, ended up getting stuck in the middle of the river.”
    Ali thought about her days working in the east. People unfamiliar with the desert southwest might have jumped to an immediateand erroneous conclusion at hearing the term “middle of the river.” If you grew up near the Mississippi or the Missouri rivers, for example, you would most likely assume that someone “stuck” in the middle of any river would be over their head in water and swimming for dear life.
    That wasn’t true for the Hassayampa. As the sheriff had said a day or two ago, “It’s a white horse of a different color.” For one thing, most of the time the riverbed was bone dry. There was no water in it—not any. A few times a year, during the summer monsoon season or during winter rainstorms, the river would run for a while. If it rained long enough or hard enough, occasional flash floods coursed downstream, liquifying the sand and filling the entire riverbed with fast-moving water that swept away everything in its path. People in Arizona understood that their very lives depended on heeding warning signs that cautioned, Do Not Enter When Flooded.
    On the other hand, when longtime Arizonans saw the highway sign in Wickenburg that stated, No Fishing from Bridge, they understood that was an in-crowd joke, because there hadn’t been fish in the bed of the Hassayampa for eons.
    In this instance, six weeks or so from the first summer rainstorms, Ali knew that the term “middle of the river” really meant “middle of the sand.” No one would be drowning, but in the heat of the day, if people had ventured into the desert with an insufficient supply of water, they could very well be dying of