Just Deserts (Hetta Coffey Series, Book 4) Read Online Free PDF

upholstery was verboten, so I bought the VW for dog outings.
    Call me overly schmaltzy, or perhaps a dullard, but when the little station wagon was pulled from the estuary, I coughed up eight grand to a car restorer, and now I had it back, all brand spanking new. Since her restoration, I have dubbed her Holle, after an ancient woman who, depending on whose mythology you choose, is either a Goddess of renewal and transformation, or a mean old crone. Holle has elements of both and can be a cranky starter at times. I guess those automobile outfits can only do so much with a car that’s spent several days under salt water.
    All packed and ready for a new adventure, I gave Raymond Johnson a fond goodbye pat and wound my way over to San Carlos Bay during the morning so-called rush hour. Hundreds of worker bees in buses, cars, flatbeds, and on foot, headed for myriad construction projects springing up along the beaches and mountains to assuage Gringo baby boomers’ and retirees’ quests to own waterfront  property, even during an economic downturn.
    Not even the twin-peaked Tetakawi’s, San Carlos’s famed landmark, were spared the building boom. A new façade marked the entrance to a road cutting between the goat teats, where one can, for a mere million or so bucks, live in what I’ve dubbed the Casas de Cleavage. Or perhaps Domiciles de Décolletage.
    I stopped by Barracuda Bob’s for breakfast, got a sandwich to go. I had a two o’clock appointment in Cananea, and the coffee-swigging regulars at Barracuda Bob’s Table of Knowledge and Wisdom informed me that that last seventy-seven kilometers, a sinuous two-laner on Mex 2 from Imuris to Cananea, could easily eat up two hours.
    My handy conversion card revealed that seventy-seven kilometers is only 47.8455 miles, and divided by two hours is a whopping 23.9 miles per hour. I headed northward, knowing that getting stuck behind an overloaded, fume-belching truck on that treacherous piece of road plays hell with one’s driving schedule, unless, like me, you know the Mexican rules of the road.
    Creeping truckers traditionally turn on their left-hand turn blinkers, an indication for a following car to stomp the gas and pass, even though the passer can’t see past his front bumper. Overtaking in this manner, usually on a blind curve with a solid stripe, is not for sissies.
    Lucky for me, the VW Fox is a peppy little model. Made in Brazil in 1987, she had a four-cylinder fuel-injected engine that for some reason handles like a sports car. When jammed down a gear, and the accelerator stomped to the floorboard, this car is capable of whipping around a truck in time to avoid a head-on with an oncoming semi.
    Of course, while I’m doing this, I hope like hell the trucker who gave me the go-ahead blinker really isn’t meaning to turn left. Judging by the number of five-cross curves, many a driver failed to wait for the okay. This little game of turn-signal roulette leads many an unsuspecting Gringo to being T-boned when they foolishly turn on the blinker to indicate an intention to turn left. Silly buggers.
    Hoping against all odds that I wouldn’t end up with my own little white cross, I white-knuckled my way northeast, toward horsemeat.

Chapter 5
     
    An online search garnered the following on Wikipedia:
    Cananea, from the Apache term for “horsemeat,” is a city in the northern Mexican state of Sonora. The population of the town was 30,515 as recorded by the 2000 census. The population of the municipality, which includes rural areas, was 32,061. The total area of the municipality is 4,141.1 square kilometers.
    This is the location where the company The Cananea Consolidated Copper Company was founded in 1899 and was the protagonist in the Cananea Strike of 1906 that resulted in the death of 23 people in a fight between strikers and a posse led by Arizona Rangers.
    A corrido titled La carcel de Cananea—the Cananea Jail—written in 1917 became famous in Mexico.
    Sounds like