Hour of the Hunter: With Bonus Material: A Novel of Suspense

by J. A. Jance

  He waited patiently while Davy proudly showed his mother the shaved spot on his head and the straight line of caterpillar-leg stitches that marched from his temple down one cheek.

  “Ready?” Brandon asked at last.

  “Yes,” Diana said. “Would you mind carrying him again? You’re right. He really is too heavy.”

  “I can walk all by myself,” Davy said. “The doctor said I was real brave. I was, wasn’t I?” He looked up at Brandon for confirmation.

  “Yes, you were. You barely cried at all.”

  They walked to the waiting Ford three-abreast, with the boy between them holding each of their hands.

  “Can I sit in the front now?” Davy asked, while they waited for Brandon to unlock the door.

  “You bet,” Brandon Walker replied. “Any kid with twelve stitches in his head ought to get to ride in the front seat.”

  In La Cantina, a dive of a bar in Rocky Point, Mexico, the driver of a red Grand Prix was sipping tequila and telling a buddy of his about the tough little boy he’d met earlier that day after a spectacular auto accident.

  “That kid was something else,” the man was saying. “Here he was with all kinds of blood pouring out of his head, but all he could think about was this poor old Indian broad who was still pinned in the truck. I was about to take off in the wrong direction to get help, but he wouldn’t let me. He kept dragging on my leg and insisting there was an ambulance up on top of the mountain, for Chrissakes. Damned if he wasn’t right. If we hadn’t gone up the mountain after it right then, I don’t think she would have made it. Maybe she didn’t, for that matter.”

  “You say the woman was an Indian and the kid was an Anglo?”

  “A regular towhead,” the man answered. “And cute as a button.”

  “I wonder if there isn’t a story in this,” his buddy said. “You know, human interest. I’ll talk to my features editor about it when I go back tomorrow. Maybe it’s something we can use next week. Once it gets hot around here, feature stories are tough to come by.”

  The speaker drained his shot glass, licked a patch of salt off his hand, and took a bite from the lime on a napkin on the bar in front of him. “Ready for another?”

  “You tell me. Is the Pope Catholic?”

  7

  BRANDON WALKER, STRETCHED out full length on Diana Ladd’s long but sagging couch, wasn’t sure which of the two woke him—the boy or the dog. When the detective opened his eyes, a pajama-clad Davy Ladd sat cross-legged on the floor next to the coffee table, munching on a rolled-up flour tortilla and sharing an occasional bite with a grateful, tail-thumping dog. Bone lay with his bristly, spike-haired head resting comfortably on the child’s knee. Both the boy and the dog were staring intently, watching Brandon Walker’s every move.

  “Did your mom let you sleep over?” Davy asked.

  The question brought Brandon Walker fully awake and put a rueful smile on his lips. “Not exactly.”

  By now, his mother would have discovered her thirty-four-year-old son’s overnight absence and would be absolutely ripped. Louella had never come to terms with the idea that her son was a fully grown man.

  Brandon had returned to the family home as a temporary measure in the bleak financial aftermath of his divorce. Because of his father’s failing health, that stopgap measure had stretched into a more or less permanent arrangement. There was no longer any discussion about Brandon moving into his own place, and most of the time he didn’t mind. After all, his parents needed him—his physical presence as well as his regular financial contributions. The only major drawback was the fact that his mother continued to treat him like an errant teenager.

  “If your mom didn’t let you, how come you’re here then?” Davy asked thoughtfully.

  “Because of your mom,” Walker answered. “She was worried about you and asked me to stay.”

  Just then the tiny travel alarm clock Diana had placed on the coffee table beside him went off with a shrill jangle. Brandon quickly silenced it, hoping not to waken Diana. They’d both had very little sleep.

  “What’s the clock for?” Davy asked.

  “To wake me up,” Brandon replied. “So I could wake you.”

  The detective sat up and put both feet on the floor. At once Bone raised his head and regarded the man warily. Remembering the dog’s violent attack on the Galaxy, Brandon reminded himself not to make any sudden or unexpected moves.

  “Why?” the boy asked. “I’m already awake.”

  “I noticed,” Brandon Walker responded, struck by Davy’s precociousness. The boy had to be around six, but he sounded older. His long, lank hair, so blond it was almost white, flopped down over one eye in sharp contrast to the other side with its round pink patch of bare skin and ladder of stitches. The combination gave him an almost comic appearance, but the expression on his face was serious.

  “How come you did that?”

  “Did what?”

  “You and Mom, woke me up all night?”

  “The doctor said not to let you sleep too long, or you might not wake up.”

  “He was wrong,” the boy pointed out. “Are you hungry? There’s tortillas in the kitchen.”

  “Sure,” Walker told him. “A tortilla sounds great.”

  The boy and dog trotted off to the kitchen, while Brandon Walker stumbled into the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. He was happy not encountering Diana anywhere along the way. He was puzzled by what had happened between them during the night, and he wasn’t sure what to say to her when next they met.

  Davy was back in the living room sitting on the couch with the dog at his feet when Brandon returned from the bathroom. A rolled tortilla on a paper towel lay on the coffee table.

  “Hope you like peanut butter,” Davy said. “That’s what I like for breakfast. Tortillas with peanut butter.”

  Brandon tried a bite. The tortilla—delicious, delicate, and thin—was as transparent in spots as a piece of tissue paper.

  “Will Rita be okay?” Davy asked.

  Brandon tried to answer, but the very first bite of peanut butter had glued itself to the roof of his mouth. At the same time, a stony-eyed Diana Ladd entered the room on her way to the kitchen. “Coffee?” she asked on her way past.

  Much to his dismay, all Brandon Walker could do was nod helplessly and point to his mouth. There’s nothing like making an awkward moment impossible, he thought miserably. Nothing like it at all.

  When Hunter returned, once more looking like a human being, the people were afraid of him. For a time, Hunter and his sister lived together in peace, but then the people went to Wind Man, a powerful medicine man, and asked him to do something to Hunter. Wind Man blew and blew until he made a mighty dust devil.

  Hunter’s sister was out gathering firewood when Wind Man’s dust devil caught her and took her far away. Hunter waited for his sister for a long time. Finally, he went looking for her, but he couldn’t find her anywhere.

  Hunter called to his uncle Buzzard for help. Buzzard looked for her for four days. He couldn’t find her either, but he told Hunter that he had heard something strange up on Cloud-Stopper Peak, which the Mil-gahn call Picacho.

  The next day Hunter and Buzzard together went to the mountain. The woman was up there, but she was crying. The mountain was very steep, and she didn’t know how to get back down. When he heard that, Buzzard remembered that there was a medicine man in the east who was good at getting women. He flew off and returned with Ceremonial Clown.

  Clown called to the woman. He looked so funny and said such funny things that the woman stopped crying and started laughing. Then Clown got some seeds out of his medicine bag, planted them, and he began to sing. While he sang, the seeds began to grow into a gourd plant, which grew up the side of the mountain. After four days, when it was tall enough, Clown climbed up it and carried the woman down.

  So Hunter had his sister back, and the people who hated them stayed away. But one day Hunter said, “Let’s go far away from this place. I wil
l become Falling Star. When people see me, the earth will shake, and people will know something terrible is going to happen.”

  His sister agreed. “I will be Morning Star, and come up over there in the east. If people are alert and industrious, they will be up early enough to see me and say to each other, ‘It is morning. Look, there is the morning star.’ ”

  And that, my Friend, is the story of Falling Star and Morning Star.

  Like Margaret Danielson, Ernesto Tashquinth had been laid off six months earlier from the Hecla mining operation on the Papago Reservation southwest of Casa Grande. The bottom had dropped out of the copper market. Mines all over Arizona were closing for good.

  From the time he was a baby, Ernesto’s mother, a Papago married to a Gila River Pima from Sacaton, had called her son S-abamk or Lucky One. Stories about Ernesto Tashquinth’s continuing good fortune followed him everywhere—through his sojourn at the Phoenix Indian School and during his stint in the army. That luck was once again holding true back home on the reservation.

  Ernesto had been laid off from the mine along with many others at a time when job opportunities were scarce, but he had somehow managed to finagle his way into a position with the Arizona Highway Department. It wasn’t a particularly wonderful job by some standards, but it paid reasonably well, and the work was steady. With truck and tools provided for him, Ernesto’s job was to clean rest rooms, tidy up the grounds, and empty trash cans at rest areas along I–10 between Tucson and Cottonwood.

  Ernesto much preferred this kind of solitary work to the dusty hubbub of the open pit mine. He enjoyed being by himself and setting his own pace. Of all the rest areas on his route, he liked the one at Picacho Peak best. For one thing, it was off the road by a few hundred yards. Without such easy access, it was usually less crowded than the others. Occasionally, the parking lot stayed empty the whole time Ernesto was working there. When that happened, he was free to let his mind wander back through the old stories his great-grandfather used to tell him, especially tales about Cloud-Stopper Mountain.

  During those hot early summer days, while cleaning up other people’s garbage and wiping down the shit they sometimes smeared on rest-room floors and walls, Ernesto Tashquinth was dealing with some pretty heavy shit of his own. Straight out of high school, he had been drafted into the army and shipped off to Vietnam as an infantryman. The fact that he had returned home without so much as a scratch on his body had also been attributed to his incredibly good luck.

  Unlike some of his buddies, Ernesto hadn’t been physically hurt, but he had seen plenty. His scars, none of which were visible, came in part from luck—from being one vital step away from the land mine that had blown away his best pal’s limbs and life. They came from seeing a tiny dying child, enemy or not, burned to a crisp by napalm. They came from the sounds and smells of a faraway war that still haunted his dreams and disturbed his sleep.

  As the year’s summer sun warmed the Arizona desert, it warmed Ernesto as well—cleansing him somehow, driving the horrors he had experienced out of his heart and mind, gradually singing his spirit back to life. There was much to be said for the old ways his great-grandfather had told him about, and much to be learned from them as well.

  By midmorning that June Saturday, Ernesto finished cleaning the two rest rooms and was coming outside to empty the trash when he saw a pair of buzzards circling high over one of the springs near the base of the mountain. As his desert forbears would have done, Ernesto wrinkled his nose and sniffed the air. If something was dead or dying up there on the mountain, the odor had not yet reached the picnic area. That was good. It would be better for him to go investigate now, to find whatever it was and get rid of it right away, rather than waiting until someone told his supervisor about it.

  Assuming the carrion to be from a dead animal, Ernesto armed himself with a shovel and a large plastic trash bag. He had played on this mountain as a child, and knew the series of hidden springs that dotted Picacho Peak’s forbidding and seemingly barren flanks. He hurried to the concealing grove of trees with no trouble. Reaching them, he was surprised to find there was still no identifiable odor.

  That told him the kill was relatively fresh. If the putrid odor of dead flesh had permeated the hot desert air, those buzzards would no longer be circling.

  The first thing Ernesto saw through the sheltering curtain of mesquite trees was a glimpse of bare, sunburned leg. Thinking he’d stumbled upon a devoted sunbather, Ernesto’s first instinct was to turn quickly and go back the way he’d come, but something about the leaden stillness of that bright pink leg told him otherwise.

  “Hello?” he called. “Anybody here?”

  There was no response, no answering movement. Puzzled, he pushed his way through the leaves until he could see more clearly. A naked woman lay faceup on the rocks before him, empty eyes open to the sky, her skin burned a fierce red by the blistering sun.

  In a rush, all the horror of Vietnam flooded back over Ernesto Tashquinth. Sickened, he wasn’t able to look again for several long moments. When he did, he found himself unable to turn away. He moved toward the body like a sleepwalker—staring, mesmerized. Not only was she sunburned, her whole body was a mass of wounds. Industrious ants crawled across her, following orderly, seemingly well-marked trails like hordes of tiny cars negotiating rush-hour freeway traffic. Flies swarmed and hovered in the heavy air above her, hoping to find some appropriately still-damp place in which to lay their eggs.

  But what fascinated and at the same time appalled Ernesto Tashquinth, what held his eyes hostage, were the naked, sunburned, upturned breasts, especially the right one. Something was wrong with it. He moved closer until he saw that the entire right nipple was missing—not missing exactly, but hanging loose, attached to the body by a single shred of flesh and skin.

  The gray shadow of a soaring bird glided overhead, an ominous cloud passing between Ernesto and the sun. A buzzard had done that to her, he assumed at once, looking up at the patiently circling bird. A buzzard had inflicted that gross indignity on the dead woman’s body.

  Ernesto was grateful that he had arrived in time to interrupt the grisly process. There was nothing to be done about the flies and ants, but he could keep the birds away. Whoever she was, at least he could spare her that.

  Bent on protecting the body, Ernesto tore the trash bag open until he had a flat strip of black plastic three feet wide and eight feet long. He covered her feet first, using rocks to hold the corners of the plastic in place. It wasn’t until he approached the woman’s crimson face that he realized he knew her, that she was someone he had worked with at the mine.

  Margie Danielson, one of the white ladies at Hecla, had worked in payroll. She had given him his pink slip only two weeks before issuing her own.

  After he recognized her, Ernesto Tashquinth knelt there silently for a moment before covering her face. His mother was right after all, he decided. He really was lucky. Ernesto Tashquinth was still alive and kicking. Margie Danielson wasn’t.

  In Rita’s leaden dream it was night, and the train station was hot and dusty. It should have been dark, but the wavering gas lights of downtown Chuk Shon gave everything an eerie glow. Thirty or so Indian children stood huddled together in a silent, apprehensive group at the far end of the platform.

  Under one arm, Dancing Quail carried a blanket with her clothing and Understanding Woman’s precious medicine basket rolled safely inside. In her other hand, clutched tightly in a sweaty fist, she carried her magic rock. The little girl stood with the others, her feet blistered and sore in the stiff secondhand or thirdhand leather shoes the outing matron had given her.

  The train pulled into the station, causing the very ground to tremble. Dancing Quail looked to the sky. Falling Star always signaled the shaking of the earth, but above her the sky was hazy with Chuk Shon’s dust and smoke. If Falling Star tried to warn them just then, no one could have seen him.

  The youngest child in the group, Dancing Quail watched in amazement as peopl
e climbed down from the train using steps a man had placed in front of the doors. They emerged carrying small cases and boxes. They looked all right. Dancing Quail had worried that whoever stepped inside that huge, smoking iron monster would be instantly devoured, eaten alive, but these people hadn’t been. Maybe she wouldn’t be, either.

  Other people came out on the platform now and began boarding the train, taking the places of those who got off earlier. Soon it would be Dancing Quail’s turn. She clutched her magic rock and asked I’itoi for courage.

  At last the outing matron motioned the children to move out, but not toward the doors of the train through which the other people had disappeared. Instead, they were herded back along the platform almost to the end of the train, where they were ordered up a straight metal ladder on the outside of one of the cars.

  Faced with the unfamiliar ladder, Dancing Quail drew back in dismay. She knew how to climb rocks and cliffs, but she had never seen a ladder before. She watched while one of the older boys pulled himself up it. How could she climb that way and still hold on to her rock and her blanket? Dancing Quail edged her way to the back of the line, hoping to escape notice. With the other children all on top of the car, Dancing Quail found herself being pushed forward by the outing matron.

  There was no alternative. Dancing Quail stuck the magic rock in her mouth and gripped it between her teeth while she started up the ladder. She was terrified climbing up, and even more terrified once she reached the top and looked back down. The ground was far away. What would happen to her if she fell?

  Following the example of the other children, she dropped to a sitting position just as the whistle shrieked and the train lurched forward. Wrapping her legs around the rolled blanket, she held on to a metal rail with both hands. Wind whipped her hair across her face, blinding her. At first she was afraid the wildly rushing air would pry her loose. It was a long time before she dared let go with one hand long enough to remove Understanding Woman’s precious rock from her mouth.