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

by J. A. Jance

  “Will you be coming by in person?”

  “No,” he said. “Someone will be in to pick it up.”

  “Fine. What report is it you need?”

  “The accident that happened on the Kitt Peak Road last Friday.”

  “Case number?”

  “I don’t have it with me.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No. That’s all.”

  “Very good. That’ll be one hundred fifty dollars, cash on delivery. Please place the cash in an envelope. We’ll have another envelope here waiting for you. What name should I put on it?”

  “Spaulding,” he said, suddenly unable to resist the joke. “Myrna Louise Spaulding. She’ll be in to pick it up around noon.”

  “Very good. Anything else?”

  “No, ma’am,” Carlisle responded cheerfully. “It’s a pleasure doing business with you.”

  Fat Crack brought Looks At Nothing home to his house where Wanda Ortiz, the younger man’s unfailingly cheerful wife, served them a dinner of chili, beans, and fresh tortillas. She was mystified about her husband spending so much time with the old medicine man, but she said nothing. As a good husband and provider, Gabe was allowed his little foibles now and then.

  “We will need some clay,” Looks At Nothing said, “white clay from Baboquivari to make the gruel.”

  Fat Crack nodded. “Right. I know where to find such clay.”

  “And the singers?” Looks At Nothing asked.

  “I know nothing at all about singers.”

  “The best ones for this come from Crow Hang. It will be expensive. You must feed them all four days.”

  Fat Crack nodded. “My aunt says she will pay whatever it costs from her basket money. The singers can stay here at my house. Wanda will do the cooking. I will see about them tomorrow when I pick my aunt up from the hospital to take her home.”

  “Your wife is a god woman,” Looks At Nothing said. “You are lucky to have her.”

  “I know,” Fat Crack agreed.

  They were sitting outside under the stars. Looks At Nothing lit another crooked cigarette from his seemingly endless supply. He took a puff and passed it. “Nawoj,” he said.

  “Nawoj,” Fat Crack replied.

  Far away from them, across the horizon, a bank of clouds bubbled with lightning. The rains were coming, probably before the end of the week.

  “You would make a good medicine man,” Looks At Nothing said thoughtfully. “You understood how the enemy could be both Apache and not Apache long before I did. Perhaps I am getting too old.”

  “You are old,” Fat Crack returned, “but not too old. Besides, in my religion I am already a medicine man of sorts, a practitioner.”

  “What kind of religion is this? White man’s religion?”

  “Christian Scientist.”

  “Christian I understand. This is like Father John. What is Scientist?”

  Fat Crack considered for a moment. “We believe,” he said, “that God’s power flows through all of us.”

  Looks At Nothing nodded. “You are not practitioner,” he insisted firmly. “You are a medicine man.”

  Fat Crack smiled into the night at the old man’s stubbornness. “Perhaps you are right,” he said laughing. “A medicine man with a tow truck.”

  16

  WITH BRANDON WALKER gone and Davy fast asleep in his room, Diana was wide awake and stewing. It had been easy to turn on the bravado when the detective was there, to act as though she were ten feet tall and bulletproof, but it was a lie. She was petrified.

  Having Walker confirm that he, too, believed Carlisle was coming for them gave form and substance to a once-vague but threatening specter. Walker’s fear added to Rita’s as well as her own created in Diana a sense of fear squared, terror to a higher power. What before had seemed little more than a fairy tale was now disturbingly real. Brandon Walker wasn’t in the business of fairy tales. Cops, particularly homicide cops, didn’t joke about such things.

  Diana went to bed and tried to sleep, but found herself tossing and turning, hounded by a series of waking nightmares, each more terrifying than the last. What was it like to die? she wondered. What did it feel like? Did it hurt? When her mother had died, it had been a blessing, a release from incredibly agonizing pain and worse indignity. But Diana wasn’t terminally ill, and she wasn’t ready to die. Not yet.

  That hadn’t always been the case. In those first black days right after Gary’s death, she hadn’t much cared if she lived or died. She was so physically ill herself that sometimes death seemed preferable. That was before she found out the cause of her raging bouts of nausea, before she knew she was pregnant—newly widowed and newly pregnant.

  Max Cooper didn’t come to Gary’s memorial service for the simple reason that he and his second wife were neither notified nor invited. Gary’s folks flew in first class from Chicago and took over. Gary’s mother, Astrid, wanted a big funeral at home in her home church with all attendant pomp and circumstance. Diana respectfully demurred. All she could handle was an unpretentious and poorly attended memorial service at the faded funeral home on South Sixth. Afterward, Gary’s parents left for Chicago and the real production number of a funeral, while Diana skulked back home to the reservation and shut herself up inside the trailer.

  By the time the authorities finally got around to releasing the bodies, Gina Antone’s funeral was scheduled two days after Gary’s hurried memorial service. With no one to offer guidance, Diana Ladd spent the two days agonizing over what she should do about it. Should she go or stay away? Would her appearance be considered an admission of guilt or a protestation of Gary Ladd’s innocence?

  For Diana Ladd believed wholeheartedly in Gary’s innocence. She believed in it with all the ferocity of a child who clings desperately to his soon-to-be-outgrown belief in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. She could not yet look at who and what her husband really was. Accepting the burden of his guilt, the only option offered her by Brandon Walker, the detective on the case, would have forced the issue. Instead, she took the line of least resistance. Gary’s three-word, equivocal statement transformed itself into full-fledged denial. “I don’t remember,” became “I didn’t do it,” guilt became innocence, and fiction became truth.

  With all this boiling in her head, Diana peeked out between threadbare panels of drapes and looked across the muddy quagmire that separated the Topawa Teachers’ Compound from the village proper. The church parking lot was filling rapidly with cars and pickups as Indians gathered to pay their final respects. It was time for Diana to make a decision, and she did.

  Dressing quickly, she put on the same blue double-knit suit she had worn to Gary’s memorial service, the same suit he had picked out as her going-away dress for their honeymoon. She pulled her hair back in a bun and fastened it up with hairpins the same way Iona used to wear hers. Wearing it that way made Diana look older, much older. It made her look like her mother.

  Dressed in the suit, but with sandals on her feet because of the mud, Diana Ladd started across the hundred yards or so of no-man’s-land, the vast gulf between the Anglo Teachers’ Compound and the Indian village, between her home and Gina Antone’s funeral, between Diana’s past and what would become her future. Once she set foot on that path, there was no turning back.

  The mission church was filled to capacity, but people in the back row shifted aside just enough to let her in. She wanted to be small, invisible, but her arrival was greeted by an inevitable and whispered notice. Everyone knew she was there. She felt or maybe only imagined the stiffening backs of people around her. She flushed, sensing that they disapproved of her presence although no one had the bad manners to say so outright.

  Topawa mission itself was small and plain and reminded Diana of the church back home in Joseph, Oregon. There was no side room where Gina’s mourning relatives could have grieved in private. They sat stolidly, shoulder to shoulder, in the front row next to Rita. In addition to the grandmother, there were two couples, an older on
e and a younger. Were two of them Gina’s parents? Did they know she was here in church with them? Diana wondered. What would they do when they found out? Spit at her? Throw her out?

  The service started. Gradually, Diana allowed herself to be caught up in the familiar strains of the mass, the sounds and smells of which came back from the dim reaches of her childhood.

  Iona Anne Dade Cooper’s daughter, Diana Lee Bernadette, had been a devout child growing up in Joseph, but she had left the church without a backward glance in early adulthood, not only over the issue of birth control, but also over her marriage to a non-Catholic. Garrison Walther Ladd, III, the only son of staunch Lutherans, never would have consented to his child being brought up in the Catholic Church.

  Somehow, in a way Gary’s memorial service hadn’t, Gina’s funeral became a requiem for everything Diana had lost—her childhood as well as her marriage, her husband, and her mother. When the mass was over, instead of bolting out first as she had intended, she was too overcome to leave until after Rita and the others had already trudged down the aisle and were waiting at the door to greet the attendees.

  There was no escape. As soon as she stood up, the people parted around her as though she were a carrier of some contagious, dread disease. And that was how she arrived hi front of Rita Antone, isolated and alone, in the midst of the crowd.

  The old Indian woman held out a leathery hand and grasped Diana’s smooth one. The younger woman looked up and met Rita’s fearsome bloodshot gaze. “I’m so sorry,” Diana whispered.

  Rita nodded, pressing her hand. “Are you coming to the feast?” the old woman asked.

  “The feast?” Diana stammered uncomprehendingly.

  “At the feast house after the cemetery. You must come. We will sit together,” Rita said kindly. “You see, we are both hejel wi’ithag.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “We are both left alone. You must come sit with me.”

  Behind them, people in line shifted impatiently. Stunned by such kindness and generosity, Diana could not turn it down. “I’ll come,” she murmured. “Thank you.”

  Detective G. T. Farrell arrived in Florence in the late evening and set about putting the Arizona State Penitentiary on notice. Farrell was a man unaccustomed to taking no for an answer. When one person turned him down, he automatically moved up to the next rung on the ladder of command and turned up the volume. By two o’clock in the morning, he had done the unthinkable—Warden Adam Dixon himself was out of bed and working on the problem. When the warden discovered that Ron Mallory’s home phone was either conveniently out of order or off the hook, he sent a car to fetch him.

  Ron Mallory made his way into the warden’s well-lit office feeling distinctly queasy. Obviously, he should have paid more attention to the guy on the phone, the one who had been looking for Andrew Carlisle earlier, because whoever was looking for him now had a whole lot more horses behind him.

  “What seems to be the problem?” Mallory asked, putting on as good a front as possible.

  Carlisle’s the problem,” Warden Dixon growled. “Where the hell is he?”

  “Tucson, as far as I know, sir,” Mallory answered quickly. “We put him on the bus to Tucson.”

  “Where in Tucson?”

  “He had rented an apartment, down off Twenty-second Street somewhere, but that fell through the day of his release. The landlord called me while I was waiting for a guard to bring in the prisoner. The guy told me Carlisle couldn’t have the apartment he wanted after all. Since he was already half signed out, there wasn’t much I could do but let him go. He said he’d check hi as soon as he found some other place to stay.”

  “Has he?”

  “Not so far as I know, sir. I glanced at my messages on the way in. I didn’t see anything from him, although I’ll be glad to go back and check.”

  “You do that,” Warden Dixon said. “You go check, and if you don’t find it, you might consider cleaning out your desk. Come tomorrow morning, you’re going to find yourself back on the line, mister. I kid you not.”

  In the cell-blocks? Mallory’s jaw dropped. “I don’t understand. What’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s going on. This detective here thinks Carlisle went on a rampage within minutes of checking out of this facility. Do you hear me? Within minutes! We’ve got one woman dead so far, a dame over by a Picacho Peak with her tit bitten in two. Does that ring any bells with you, Mr. Mallory? Because if it doesn’t, it by God should?”

  Mallory took a backward step, edging toward the door.

  “Furthermore,” Dixon added ominously, “you shake up whatever clerks there are on duty around here and you start them looking through every goddamned record we have for any name or address that might give this detective a lead. You’re hi charge, Mallory. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, sir. Perfectly.”

  “Get moving then.”

  Mallory bolted from the room. As he panted toward his soon-to-be-former office, he swore under his breath. If he ever got his hands around Andrew Carlisle’s neck, Assistant Superintendent Ron Mallory would kill the bastard himself. Personally.

  Diana fell asleep at last and dreamed about Gina’s funeral, except it wasn’t Gina’s at all, it was her mother’s. The two were all mixed up somehow. Instead of being in the mean funeral home in La Grande where Max had held the funeral in real life, with half the mourners having to stand outside the doors because there was no more room, it was in the mission church at Topawa. Even the graveside part was in Topawa.

  And that, too, was like Gina’s. Instead of a mortuary’s canopy, four men from Joseph had stood as corner-posts holding up a sheet to provide shade while someone else, she couldn’t tell who, intoned a prayer. Although he hadn’t attended Iona’s real funeral, one of the four sheet-holders was George Deeson, her rodeo-queen mentor, another was Ed Gentry from the First National Bank. There was Tad Morrison from Pay-and-Tote grocery, and George Howell from Tru-Value Hardware.

  At Gina’s graveside, an old blind man in Levi’s and cowboy boots had offered a long series of interminable Papago prayers that, out of deference to Diana, the only Anglo in attendance, were translated into English by someone else. This was true in her dream as well, except instead of a blind man in cowboy boots, the main speaker was a priest praying in what seemed to be Latin. After that, they moved on to the feast.

  Like the rest, this, too, was a strangely muddled mixture of Topawa and Joseph, of near past and far past, of Anglo and Indian. Instead of traditional Indian fare, the food was like the food at the Chief Joseph Days barbecue, with grilled steaks and corn on the cob, homemade rolls and fresh-fruit pies. People were dressed in their Chief Joseph Days finery, including Diana in her rhinestone boots and her coronation Stetson with its rhinestone tiara.

  Diana was visiting with someone, an old lady, when her father came striding over to her, grabbed her hat, and held it just out of reach while she tried desperately to reclaim it.

  “Couldn’t you find something better than this to wear?” he sneered down at her, shaking the hat but still holding it well beyond her fingertips. “Did you have to come to your mother’s funeral all tarted out in your hussy clothes?”

  “I’m not,” she said. “I’m not a hussy. I’m the queen. I get to wear these clothes. You can’t stop me.”

  “You’re not the queen,” he leered back at her. “Not really. You cheated. You cheated. You cheated.”

  Diana woke up drenched in sweat with the hateful words still ringing in her ears. Her father had shouted those words at her in real life and left them echoing forever in her memory, but not then, not at her mother’s funeral. When was it? When had it been?

  “It would sure as hell be nice if I had a little help with the chores around here of a Saturday morning,” Max Cooper had grumbled. “I’m sick and goddamned tired of you getting all tarted up and taking off every goddamned weekend.”

  “Dad,” she said, “I’m the queen, remember. I have to go. I signed an
agreement saying that I’d represent Joseph in all the rodeo parades around here.”

  “I’m the queen,” he mocked, imitating her. “My aching ass you’re the queen! Like hell you are! You’re no more the queen than I am. You cheated.”

  “Max,” Iona cautioned.

  “Don’t you ’Max’ me. How long are you going to go on letting her believe she’s Little Miss Highness, God’s gift to everyone? How long?”

  “Max.”

  He turned on her then. Diana knew he wouldn’t hit her. Not anymore. He’d only really come after her once after George Deeson—that “goddamned coffee-drinking Jack Mormon,” as Max called him—appeared on the scene. It happened early on in the course of Waldo and Diana’s training. George was just coming up the outside steps that led to the kitchen to collect his morning coffee and biscuits when all hell broke loose.

  Diana never remembered what that particular fight was about and it didn’t matter really. She said something to her father, and Max hit her hard across the mouth with the back of his hand, sending her spinning into the corner of the kitchen. She waited, head down, expecting the next blow, which never came. When she finally dared look, George Deeson had a choke hold around her father’s collar, holding him at arm’s length with a knot of fist twisted into her father’s protruding Adam’s apple.

  “Don’t you ever do that again, Max Cooper, or so help me God, I’ll kill you!” George was old enough to be Max’s father, and he didn’t raise his voice when he said it, but Max went stomping out of the house like a whipped dog, while George calmly sat down to butter his biscuits and drink his coffee.

  Evidently, Max Cooper took George at his word. He never struck Diana again, not once. Not ever, although he tried the night she came home with her clothes torn to pieces.

  Later, much later, in the hospital in La Grande when her mother was dying, Diana had asked Iona about it. Why had her father called her a cheater?