by J. A. Jance
At last Gabe reached the spot where the rutted two-wheeled track intersected with Coleman Road. Walking was easier now because the bladed dirt surface was smoother. The problem, of course, was that it was also far more traveled. He had taken no more than a few steps when he heard the sound of a vehicle approaching from behind.
It wasn’t that late, only about ten or so, but still he worried. Some of the people out and about at this time of night could be dangerous. The best case would be for the car to be filled with a bunch of Indians, high school kids maybe, out partying in the desert. That wouldn’t be so bad. No doubt they would offer him a ride. But what if the people in the car turned out to be a bunch of smugglers? Gabe knew that the bad guys who brought drugs and people across the nearby border were often armed and dangerous.
Then, of course, there was the last possibility, that the approaching vehicle would belong to the Border Patrol. If one of the Shadow Wolves picked him up, they’d no doubt turn out to be friends of Lani’s husband, Dan Pardee. Questions would be asked and Gabe’s answers would no doubt lead to more derision about how the tribal chairman’s son had been picked up out in the middle of the desert, walking around wearing a ratty old Navajo blanket. That would be good for a laugh, especially from Luis Joaquin.
Not wanting to risk that, Gabe vaulted over the low dirt berm that lined either side of the road and ducked down into a patch of mesquite. Losing his balance, he fell backward against a clump of cholla that had been invisible inside the mesquite. When his full weight landed on the cholla, three-inch-long spines shot through the blanket into his shoulder, backside, and back. Spears of pain took his breath away, and it was all Gabe could do to keep from screaming.
Covering his mouth with his hand, he managed to stifle himself and waited through the agonizing time—the better part of a minute or so—that it took for the vehicle, a green-and-white Border Patrol SUV, to finally reach him and drive past. Once the SUV was gone, Gabe struggled to his feet. The ends of some of the cholla spines still jutted out through his clothing. He pulled out the ones he could reach, then turned his attention to the blanket.
A foot-long branch of cholla along with a dozen smaller balls of thorns were embedded in the tightly woven wool. Without the blanket to keep out the cold, Gabe was already shivering. He needed the blanket’s protection, but first he had to remove the spikes. In the dark, with his hand shaking from the cold, that was far easier said than done. He found some rocks and used those to chisel away as much of the cholla as he could. The rocks worked fine on the bigger pieces—the ones he could see—but it would take light and a pliers to remove the spines that remained.
Giving up, Gabe flung the blanket over his shoulders and resumed his painful journey, wincing with every step, as first one spine then another bit into his flesh.
Damn Lani Pardee anyway, he thought. It was all her fault that he was out here in the middle of the night with cactus spikes stuck in his butt. And damn I’itoi, too! If he was the Spirit of Goodness, why hadn’t he kept Gabe from tumbling into that patch of cholla?
More alone than he’d ever been, to say nothing of hurt and angry, Gabe Ortiz stumbled on through the night, but he knew what he was going to tell his parents as soon as he saw them—that Lani Walker-Pardee wasn’t his godmother anymore. After all, he was almost a grown-up now, and grown-ups didn’t need godparents.
CHAPTER 8
AFTER OLD MAN RETURNED WITHOUT heat, the Indians held another council. This time they asked the Thah O’odham, the Flying People, for help. Oriole—S-oam Shashani—was listening, and he said he would go. The next morning Oriole started off very early. He did not return until very late, and when he did, he was changed. Some of his feathers had turned the color of the sun and others were black. He said that when he came too close to Tash, some of his feathers started to burn. He had to find some water and dive into it. That is why, even to this day, some of Oriole’s feathers are black and others are yellow.
After that, several more birds were sent, but none of them could bring heat. The Indians decided that since the small birds could not bring heat, they should try the big birds.
Nuwiopa—Buzzard—was floating around in the sky and listening to the People talking. The Indians called to him and told him that he flew so well that it would be a small thing for Buzzard to go to the home of Tash and bring back some fire. Nuwiopa, too, thought this would be very easy. The next morning he started out. All the people were sure that this time Buzzard would succeed, and so they stopped work and waited.
About noon they saw a tiny black speck, high in the sky. When Buzzard came down, the Indians saw that all his feathers, which had been brown, were now burned black and his head had no feathers at all. It was all covered with blood. The People did what they could to help poor Nuwiopa, but that is how Buzzard is even to this day. He is covered with black feathers and has a head the color of blood.
BATHED IN THE WARMTH OF the overhead heaters and with Bozo snoring contentedly beside him, Brandon Walker savored the quiet and let his mind wander back to the point where Amos Warren and John Lassiter had first come to his attention.
Brandon couldn’t remember the exact year—sometime in the late ’70s. He and Diana had married by then, but Lani had not yet come into their lives. Whenever it was, he’d been a detective for some time, but it had been a grudging promotion, done over Sheriff Jack DuShane’s strenuous objections. Yes, he was a detective, but he was still on DuShane’s shit list. That meant Brandon still worked the crap shifts and was given the crap assignments, and that had included his first encounter with what would eventually become the Amos Warren homicide investigation.
The initial call had come in on a hot Sunday afternoon in the middle of August. Brandon had been sprawled on the living room floor teaching the game of checkers to a pair of towheaded nine-year-olds who looked like they could have been brothers but weren’t. One was Brandon’s stepson, Davy, and the other was Brian Fellows. His own sons, Quentin and Tommy, had zero interest in checkers.
Brandon had served in Vietnam, far enough from the front lines that he didn’t wake up at night quaking from dreams of the war, but close enough to understand the concept of collateral damage. Brandon thought of Brian as the opposite of collateral damage.
Brandon had been devastated when his wife, Janie, had divorced him, taking his two sons, Tommy and Quentin, with her. In the divorce proceedings, she had claimed that her husband neglected her and that she was tired of coming in second to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. The whole “neglect” issue turned out to be nothing but a ruse. Brandon learned later that, long before the divorce came along, Janie had been playing around behind Brandon’s back. She was also pregnant with another man’s child, a guy who skipped out as soon as he heard a baby was on the way. Brian was born a scant six months after Janie’s divorce from Brandon became final.
Brandon had lost the house in the divorce and almost everything else as well. He never missed a single one of his child support payments, but his meager salary at the sheriff’s department didn’t stretch far enough for him to buy or even rent someplace decent to live. He’d ended up moving back home to live in his old bedroom with his ailing father and his incredibly bossy mother.
Living at home, however, meant that on visitation days, he could splurge and take Tommy and Quentin out to do special stuff. He took them to U of A Wildcat baseball games, which were the ones he could best afford. They also went bowling and saw movies. On those Saturdays when he’d go to pick up his boys, it had broken his heart to see Brian standing sad-eyed and alone as they drove away. One day, on a whim, he’d asked Brian to join them, and the poor neglected little kid had been overjoyed. Much to Tommy’s and Quentin’s dismay, their annoying half brother became a regular on those visitation excursions with their father.
Three and four years older than their half brother and Brandon’s new stepso
n, Davy Ladd, Tommy and Quentin had as little to do with the younger boys as humanly possible, but Davy and Brian became fast friends. And Brandon, having missed out on much of Tommy’s and Quentin’s childhoods, enjoyed having a do-over of sorts with Brian and Davy.
On that Sunday afternoon, Brandon had no way of knowing that this second chance at fatherhood would be far more successful than his first attempt with his own sons, and that Brian—a boy who was no blood relation—would one day follow Brandon’s footsteps into the world of law enforcement.
“It’s for you,” Diana said, passing him the phone. “It’s the department.”
Brandon levered himself into a sitting position. “Detective Walker here,” he said.
“Got a dead one for you,” Luke, the Dispatch operator said. “A couple of hikers just called in saying they found human remains out near Soza Canyon on the far side of the Rincons. It’s probably some Indian who’s been dead for a hundred years or so, but it’s your problem now.”
“Where’s Soza Canyon?” Brandon asked. “I’ve never even heard of it.”
“Not surprised,” Luke said. “I hadn’t heard of it earlier, either. As I said before, it’s on the far side of the Rincons. According to my topo map, the spot they’re referring to is just barely inside the county line. Soza Canyon evidently drains into the San Pedro River, somewhere east of where the hikers found the body.”
“And how do I get there?”
“Drive to the end of Tanque Verde and keep on going. That’ll put you on Redington Road, which will take you up over the pass. Just keep following that until you get there.”
“How far?”
“The people who called it in said they’d meet you somewhere along the way. They had to drive all the way to Pomerene to find a phone. The first call they made was to the Cochise County sheriff, but someone there pointed out that Soza Canyon is in Pima County, not Cochise. Anyway, they’re driving a blue Toyota Land Cruiser. They’ll park it alongside the road and lead you in from there.”
“Great,” Brandon muttered.
“And you’d better bring your hiking boots and some galoshes, too,” Luke told him. “They’re predicting rain for later on this afternoon, heavier in the mountains than down here.”
“What about the M.E.?” Brandon asked.
“I know they’ve been called, but there’s been a fatality MVA up around Marana. They’ll send someone out when they can.”
Much of southern Arizona is made up of relatively flat or hilly terrain with occasional sections of steep mountain ranges jutting skyward here and there. The Catalina Mountains are generally to the north and east of Tucson, and the Rincons southeast. The two distinct ranges are separated by a low-lying dividing line known as Redington Pass. Heavy summer rains could send devastating flash floods roaring through the gullies and washes that ran in veins down the mountainsides and into the valleys below.
As a detective, Brandon was allowed to take his car home. His ride was a respectable Plymouth Fury sedan with a police pursuit engine that made it fine for chasing down crooks on long stretches of open highway. But on a muddy, rain-flooded road out in the middle of the boonies, the front-wheel-drive vehicle wouldn’t be worth squat.
“Any chance of coming in and picking up a four-wheel drive?”
“Nope,” Luke answered. “I already asked. They’re all checked out for the weekend.”
Something jarred Brandon out of his nighttime reverie. He listened, wondering if he’d heard some distant sound, but when Bozo didn’t stir, Brandon didn’t, either.
HALF AN HOUR OR SO of walking later, as Gabe was finally approaching Highway 86, he heard the distant hum of an oncoming vehicle. When the turn signal indicated that a pickup—an older-model dual-cab Silverado—was turning onto Coleman Road, Gabe once again ducked out of sight, this time checking behind him for any patches of marauding cactus.
He listened to the sounds of doors opening and closing, of men laughing and joking and relieving themselves. Gabe caught enough of the back-and-forth chitchat to learn that these were Indians—a group of guys who had gone into town to buy some beer and were now headed back to the village of San Miguel for a weekend of partying. Gabe could tell that the men weren’t kids. They were older—maybe his father’s age. They might even be friends of his father’s, but just because they knew Leo Ortiz didn’t mean they knew Gabe.
Gabe took a deep breath and stepped out into the open. His sudden appearance startled the others, but he had a plausible story at the ready.
“My friends left me here,” he said plaintively. “Can you give me a ride?”
“Hebai?” the man closest to the driver’s door asked. “Where?”
The fact that the man spoke Tohono O’odham rather than English meant that the men in the group were most likely far older than Gabe’s parents. From Gabe’s point of view, that was all to the good.
“Komikch’ed e Wah’osithk,” Gabe answered.
The men exchanged surprised glances. They probably hadn’t expected that he would answer the question in their native tongue and use the traditional name, Turtle Got Wedged, rather than the Milgahn name of Sells.
There was a small pause, then the driver nodded. “Oi g hihm,” he said.
Literally translated, “Oi g hihm” means “Let us walk.” In the everyday vernacular of the reservation it means “Let’s get in the pickup and go,” and that’s exactly what Gabe did—climb in—but before he did so, he took off the spine-riddled blanket and tossed it into the bed of the pickup, where it landed on a tarp-covered load that was most likely several cases of illicit beer.
Squeezed into the backseat between two massive men, Gabe had no choice but to sit there and suffer. There were still sharp bits of cholla spines stuck in his jeans that made squirming in any direction an agony.
To his immense relief, the drive into Sells was done in almost complete silence. Without a stranger in their midst, the men had been jovial and talkative, but now Gabe’s presence seemed to have stifled any desire to talk. As soon as they crossed the low pass just before Sells, Gabe broke the silence.
“Ihab,” he said, meaning “Let me out right here.” The truck pulled over at the road that led to the high school. From here it was probably a mile or more to the house, but on the off chance one of these guys did know Gabe’s parents, Gabe wanted to be dropped off as far as possible from both his father’s garage and the Ortiz family compound.
Gabe was warm when he climbed down from the cab of the truck, but that soon changed. He retrieved his prickly blanket, but even with that slung over his shoulders, he was cold within a hundred yards or so. By the time he reached the house, he was shivering.
With all the windows dark, the house was forbidding rather than welcoming. Gabe wasn’t at all surprised that his parents weren’t home yet. As part of Delia’s duties as tribal chairman, she tried to attend at least one village dance each weekend. The long hours of sitting around fires, dancing, and standing in food lines at feast houses allowed Delia to stay in touch with her constituents, the ordinary people who weren’t necessarily sitting on the tribal council. Most of the time, Gabe would have gone to the dance with them.
Gabe stepped onto the poured concrete slab that served as a front porch and walked forward, ready to slip his key into the lock. Before he reached the door, however, he tripped over something and almost fell. Righting himself, he reached down and picked up a small paper bag. When he carried it inside and switched on a light, he saw that the bag held a Costco-sized jar of Skippy peanut butter. Since peanut butter sandwiches were his father’s lunch-pail favorite, Gabe’s first assumption was that his mother had asked someone who was going into town to pick up a jar for her. At the bottom of the bag, however, Gabe spotted a hand-scribbled note:
Please keep this for Carlos. I’ll explain later.
Tim
Curious, Gabe took the jar over to the kitchen counter, pulled out a tablespoon, and dug a heaping spoonful of peanut butter out of the jar. As he did so, something that was definitely not a piece of peanut caught the light. He put the spoon with the peanut butter inside a wire mesh strainer and used hot water and dishwashing detergent to clear away the peanut butter. What was left in the bottom of the strainer were four brightly glittering glasslike pieces of rock. They reminded him of Lani’s pieces of crystal, but he knew at once what they really were—diamonds. Diamonds in a peanut butter jar!
He plucked one of the gems out of the strainer to study it. It seemed as though the diamond worked exactly the same way as Lani’s divining crystals. Focusing on the jewel, Gabe realized what was going on. Carlos José and maybe Max, too, had been caught up in some kind of smuggling operation. If that was the case, it meant Lani was right and the Josés were part of the Bad People. It was even possible Tim himself was part of it.
Gabe understood that if his parents found out he was involved in any of this, they would kill him. That was especially true for his mother. The problem was, Tim was Gabe’s friend, and he had asked for help. Gabe couldn’t just turn his back on his friend. No, tomorrow Gabe would take the jar back to Tim and tell him he’d need to ask someone else for help. In the meantime, though, the jar, the bag, and the note all needed to be kept out of sight. He carried them into his bedroom.
