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

my kind of town.
    Why it was named Horsemeat I never learned, but since the first mining registry in 1760, Cananea has been a lightning rod for conflict. Some say the mining strike there in 1906 fomented the Mexican Revolution of 1910, and as I soon found out, little had changed. Not that anything like a little civil strife stops me from tackling a new project. My entire life I’ve always looked forward to fresh horizons and any new turn in the road promising adventure, usually because of some debacle I’d left in the ditch behind me.
    As I wound my way into the mountains, my spirits soared despite a small, dark suspicion that Wontrobski’s first candidate for the job didn’t really have a sick wife. Caught up in the euphoria of tackling a new undertaking, I drove to my date with Destiny. Luckily, Destiny was on a Mexican time clock, for a string of ten-mile an hour trucks that even I couldn’t pass put me behind schedule for my two o’clock meeting.
    Lunch, siesta, or both had emptied the mining office. Not a mouse in the house when I arrived at two-twenty, but someone had conveniently left a computer online, so I picked up my email, and then, under the auspices of furthering my Spanish skills, tried, fairly unsuccessfully, reading a few in-house memos, which were as boring as those in any language. I was checking out file names when two men walked in. Caught red-handed behind the desk, I closed out the file and said, “ Buenas tardes .”
    “Do you speak English?” one of them asked. I nodded.
    “Oh, good. We have a three o’clock appointment with the director.”
    “Yeah, well good freakin’ luck. I had a two o’clock and haven’t seen a soul.”
    “Let me guess, you gotta be Hetta Coffey.”
    “Guilty as charged. Who are you?”
    He produced a card with a logo I knew and loathed: Baxter Brothers Engineering, San Francisco, California.
    “Mining and Metals Division, huh? If you guys are here, why am I?”
    “Oh, we’re here on another matter, but Mr. Wontrobski asked us to look you up.”
    “You mean the Trob wanted you to make sure I showed up sober, right?”
    The Gringo looked genuinely perplexed by my question, or maybe it was that I called Fidel Wontrobski, a Baxter Brothers heavyweight, by a nickname. He was saved from answering by the arrival of a giggly flock of young women in ubiquitous Mexican secretarial uniforms, and two well-dressed men. As I was still ensconced in someone’s chair, I quickly rose and joined the Baxter guys. If anyone took exception to me being behind the desk, they certainly didn’t show it. Or maybe any concern was tempered by what I surmised were tequila fumes.
    The short Mexican, only slightly taller than my five four, stepped forward, grabbed a Baxter man’s hand and pumped it as he gave the rest of us a gander at his mouthful of yellow, malposed teeth. “Our apologies for being late. It is Maria’s birthday, so we took the señoritas to lunch.” His upper lip twitched as he gave the other men a beady-eyed wink that implied more than lunch was served.
    Something about this guy set my own perfectly straight and bleached teeth on edge. Perhaps it was my past experience with some short men who overcompensated their lack of stature with exaggerated swagger, or maybe it was his uncanny resemblance to that little rat-faced president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Whatever it was, he gave me the creeps.
    Creep boy didn’t do himself any favors, either, when he totally ignored me while fawning over Baxter boy. Twice, within a three-minute conversation, he managed to intimate he was somehow related to Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico, probably the world. The name-dropping further inflamed my already tweaking last nerve almost as much as his discounting the presence of my precious self.
    That just will not do.
    I took a giant MAY I? step forward, hoping to menace his personal comfort zone at least as much as he was pissing off mine. “Well, golly gee,” I said,