Queen of the Night

by J. A. Jance

  Remembering the tiny pair of tennis shoes he had seen on the floorboard of the Blazer, Dan hurried over to the vehicle, collected one of the shoes, and held it out to the dog long enough for Bozo to get the scent.

  “Find it,” he ordered.

  For the second time that evening, Dan released Bozo’s leash and the dog galloped away from him while his master, Beretta in hand, raced after him.

  This time, Bozo ran on a trajectory that took them straight from the cars toward the steadily glowing light. Unable to keep pace with the dog, Dan reached the source of the light—a battery-powered lantern sitting under a towering ironwood—just as a barefoot child, a little girl, darted out from beneath the tree, screaming.

  “Ban,” she sobbed, racing toward Dan with her arms outstretched. “Ban! Ban! Ban! Don’t let him eat me!”

  Dan managed to reholster his Beretta as the girl threw her body against his knees. He reached down and swung her up to his hip, where she clung to him like a burr.

  Dan knew enough Tohono O’odham to realize that she had mistaken Bozo for a coyote.

  “Sit,” Dan said to Bozo. To the girl, he added, “Not ban. This is a dog. Gogs. His name is Bozo. He won’t hurt you.”

  For this one child at least, Dan Pardee wasn’t ohb. He was her savior. She wrapped her arms around his neck and continued to sob, her tears soaking his shirt. There was blood on her arms and on her legs and feet. No doubt she had cut herself running barefoot through the rocks and brush. She was quaking, whether from fear or cold, he couldn’t tell.

  Dan was still standing under the tree holding her when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a hint of movement in the tree above them. He started to reach for his pistol again, but then, looking more closely, he realized that what he had seen was the light from the lantern reflecting off a flower—an immense white flower. An even closer inspection revealed that there were actually dozens of the huge white blooms glowing luminously along the ironwood tree’s sturdy trunk and winding their way up into the branches.

  The girl stopped crying abruptly, but her breath still came in hiccups. She was shivering. “That’s a dog?” she asked, pointing at Bozo. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure he’s a dog,” Dan told her reassuringly. He slipped off his windbreaker and wrapped it around her.

  “What’s his name again?”

  “Bozo.”

  “That’s a funny name,” she said.

  “He’s a funny dog,” Dan said. “Would you like to pet him?”

  He started to kneel down next to Bozo, but the little girl wasn’t totally convinced. Shrinking against him, she resumed her death grip around his neck.

  “What about you?” he asked. “Do you have a name?”

  She nodded and gave him a tiny shy smile. “Angie.”

  “Where’s your mommy, Angie?” he asked.

  Still trembling, she took a long shuddery breath. Her eyes were enormous. “Over there,” she said, pointing. “She’s sleeping. She won’t wake up.”

  “Did you see what happened?”

  Angie shook her head. “I was sleeping. When I woke up, the car wasn’t moving. Donald wasn’t there. Mommy was gone, too, but I saw a man, a Milgahn man, walking away from the car. He was carrying a gun.”

  Dan took a deep breath. The investigation into what had happened here had just taken a gigantic step forward. This massacre in the desert had a witness—an eyewitness.

  “This man with the gun,” Dan said, “did you know him? Is he someone you had seen before?”

  The little girl shook her head somberly.

  “No.”

  “Weren’t you scared?”

  Angie nodded. “A little,” she said. “Mommy always says when Bad People come around, you should be very still so they don’t notice you. That’s what I did. I was quiet, and pretty soon he went away. After a while, I went looking for my mommy. She’s sleeping. So is Donald, and those other people, too.”

  “Do you know the other people?”

  “I just know Donald,” she said.

  “And what were you doing here?”

  She shrugged. “We were on our way to the dance, but Donald said there was something he wanted to show us first. He said it was a big surprise and that we’d really like it, but that when we got there we’d have to get out of the car and walk.”

  Dan nodded. So the victims had come expecting a surprise. Instead they had unexpectedly driven into an ambush by an armed gunman. With that in mind, it surprised Dan to realize that Angie had been more scared of coyotes than she had been of someone carrying a gun.

  “My name is Dan,” he told her now. “Like I said before, this big guy here is my dog.”

  “Can I pet him?” Angie asked. Now that she’d been properly introduced to Bozo, she was evidently ready to be friends.

  “Sure.” Dan had been holding Angie. The night air was chilly, but Bozo was panting. Dan set the child down next to the dog. Bozo stood still as a statue while the tiny girl wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her bleeding face in the soft fur of his shoulder.

  “Bozo and I are here to help you,” Dan said. “Are you hungry?”

  Angie nodded.

  “Thirsty?”

  “Yes.”

  “My truck is back over there,” he said. “I have some sandwiches, some chips, and some sodas in a cooler. Would you like one of those?”

  “I’m not supposed to drink Cokes,” she said, frowning, “but sometimes I do. Will you wake my mommy?”

  “I’ll try,” he said. It was a lie, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances. “First let me get you back to my truck. Since you’re barefoot, I’ll carry you.”

  Without a word, she let go of Bozo’s neck and held out her arms to him. He lifted her up and carried her back the way they had come rather than back past the two vehicles and the four bloodied victims. As they walked, Angie’s face rested in the crook of his neck. He was glad she didn’t look up at his face right then because she would have seen he was crying, too.

  He had been in a scene similar to this one once before; only back then, Dan Pardee had been the child, and someone else—some other uniformed police officer—had been carrying a no-longer-innocent child away from a room filled with unimaginable carnage.

  Tucson, Arizona

  Saturday, June 6, 2009, 10:30 p.m.

  73º Fahrenheit

  As they drove back to the house in Gates Pass, Gabe fell asleep in the backseat. Lani was grateful for the break from his never-ending questions. It let her concentrate on worrying about her mother.

  For much of the day, Diana had been strangely silent, and Lani didn’t know what to make of her mother’s odd behavior.

  Lani had been back home for only a few months now, and she was living in the hospital housing compound out at Sells rather than at home with her parents in her old room. Since returning to the Tucson area, Lani had noticed that her parents had changed while she’d been away in Denver doing her residency. She supposed that part of the changes had to do with their getting older, but then so had she. She wasn’t the same person she had been when she graduated from high school or even when she had gotten her premed degree from the University of North Dakota. Since she had changed, it made no sense that she should expect her parents to remain the same.

  “You should get married,” Diana said now.

  “Married?” Lani repeated, nearly driving off the narrow road in surprise.

  That was the last thing she expected her mother to say. Lani had been focused on her career—on becoming the best possible physician she could learn to be and on bringing those skills back to her own people, where native-born doctors were in short supply and where doctors who were Tohono O’odham were completely nonexistent. But the question itself shocked Lani. She was still mulling a possible answer when her mother continued.

  “Yes, married,” Diana said. “I want to live long enough to have another grandchild.”

  She and Brandon Walker already had
one grandson. Davy and Candace’s son Tyler was nine now. As far as Lani was concerned, he was a spoiled brat and obnoxious besides. He hadn’t had the benefit of being raised by Nana Dahd, and it showed. There was something to be said for the old traditions in which the aunts and uncles supplied the discipline, but Candace had made it clear to all concerned that help with her son in that regard would not be welcome.

  “We barely see Tyler as it is,” Diana said. “And the minute the divorce is final, no matter what the custody agreement says, what’s-her-name is going to take him back to Chicago to her parents, and we won’t get to see him at all.”

  What’s-her-name? Lani wondered, repeating her mother’s phrase. Davy and Candace have been married for more than ten years, and Mom can’t remember her name? What’s going on?

  That’s what she thought, but it wasn’t what she said aloud. “Davy is an attorney,” Lani replied. “He’s not going to let that happen.”

  “The problem with Davy is that he’s a nice guy,” her mother corrected. “His wife’s been walking all over him for years. That’s not going to change, so you should get married.”

  Lani couldn’t see how one thing automatically led to the other, but she decided that it was better to treat the whole discussion as a joke rather than be distressed by what she couldn’t help but regard as an invasion of her privacy.

  “I’ll think about it,” Lani said, laughing. “But don’t hold your breath. I don’t see many prospects for matrimony walking into my life any time soon.”

  She hoped that was enough to put the discussion to bed. Unfortunately, the next topic of conversation was even worse.

  “What did Mitch Johnson do to you?” Diana asked.

  “Mitch Johnson?” Lani repeated. “Why bring him up after all these years?”

  “Tell me,” Diana urged. “He must have done something to you. What?”

  “You know what he did to me,” Lani answered. “He kidnapped me and tried to kill me.”

  That was the obvious part. Drugging her, kidnapping her, and torturing her when Lani was sixteen years old had been yet another move in Andrew Carlisle’s and Mitch Johnson’s ongoing war with Diana Ladd and Brandon Walker. The ultimate goal had been to rob them of everything they held most dear—their children. Mitch had planned to kill both Lani and Brandon’s son Quentin.

  In this conversation, Lani knew exactly what Diana really wanted to know. It was one of Lani’s darkest secrets. Fat Crack had known about it, but as far as she knew, he was the only one.

  Mitch Johnson had burned her. He had heated up kitchen tongs and then he had clamped the red-hot metal on the tender flesh of her breast. She understood that, in performing that particularly barbarous act, Mitch had been functioning as Andrew Carlisle’s instrument and doing his master’s bidding. The scar he had left on Lani’s body mimicked the mark Andrew Carlisle’s teeth had left on her mother during his attack on Diana years before Lani was born. At least two of Carlisle’s other victims had been defiled in the same fashion.

  As a child Lani had seen the scar on her mother’s body, and she hadn’t questioned it. In fact, when Lani was five, in an attempt to be more like her mom, she had gone so far as to use her mother’s concealer to draw a similar pale circle on her own body.

  Nana Dahd had been a constant presence in Lani’s young life, and that was the only time she remembered Rita Antone being angry. She had ordered Lani to scrub the offending makeup from her body and never to talk about it, lest someone do the same thing to her.

  Years later, when it had happened, when Mitch had burned her in just that way, Lani had been ashamed because she believed she had brought it on herself—that she had somehow attracted this terrible thing and caused it to come to her.

  After that, Mitch had taken Lani and a still-drugged Quentin to a limestone cavern under Ioligam, I’itoi’s sacred mountain, which the Anglos call Kitt Peak. Deep in the cavern, Lani had managed to outwit her would-be killer by turning the darkness to her advantage. In a desperate game of hide-and-seek, she had managed to stay tantalizingly out of reach and had fooled him into chasing her into a darkened passageway where he had plunged to his death.

  The Tohono O’odham are a peace-loving people who kill only to feed themselves or in self-defense. When a warrior kills an enemy in battle, tradition dictates that he undergo e lihmhun, a sixteen-day-long purification ceremony that includes both fasting and solitude.

  For that whole time, Lani had stayed on the mountain by herself, with Fat Crack Ortiz, tribal chairman and medicine man, as her only companion. Each day he would bring her that day’s single meal of salt-free food. It was to Fat Crack, and only to him, that Lani had confided the full extent of her injuries.

  Fat Crack had been a reluctant joiner of the medicine-man circle. Before being tapped to assume that mantle by an old blind medicine man named Looks at Nothing, Fat Crack Ortiz had been blithely living his life as a practicing Christian Scientist. Although he still believed in the tenets of Mary Baker Eddy, he had not inflicted his own beliefs on Lani. Instead, Fat Crack had driven into Tucson, stopped at the nearest Walgreens, and purchased salves and ointments to soothe the burns on her breast.

  By the time the sixteen days were up, the wound had healed enough that Lani hadn’t bothered to mention it to either of her parents. She had spent the rest of her high school and college years assiduously avoiding naked showers in PE or dormitories. Her roommates in North Dakota had teased her about being a prude, but the scar, faded now with the help of a scar reducer, was Lani’s secret. Fat Crack had been dead for years. She had told no one else, but now her mother was asking her about it. Why?

  They pulled into the driveway outside Brandon and Diana’s home. A motion-activated floodlight came on, illuminating the whole area. Moments later, the porch light came on as well. Lani’s father opened the door.

  The silence between mother and daughter had gone on far longer than it should have.

  “Well?” Diana insisted.

  “Mitch Johnson tried to kill me and he failed,” Lani said. “End of story.”

  Except Lani knew that wasn’t the end of the story at all. Something else was going on here. She wished she could sit down with her father and talk to him about it. Between them they might be able to figure out what was happening with Lani’s mother, but that wasn’t possible, not tonight.

  Brandon walked over to the passenger side of the Passat, opened the door, and helped his wife out of the vehicle.

  “It’s about time you brought her home,” he said, smiling across the now-empty seat in Lani’s direction. “I was about to come looking for you or send out a posse.”

  Lani was grateful for his teasing. It gave her exactly what she needed just then—a change of subject.

  In the backseat, Gabe’s eyes opened and he sat up straight. “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Dropping my mother off,” Lani answered.

  “I’m going to sit up front then,” he said.

  Lani waited until he had clambered into the front seat and buckled himself in.

  “Oi g hihm,” he said, smiling at her. “Let’s go.”

  “By all means,” Lani said, grateful to escape. “Let’s.”

  Seven

  Highway 86, West of Tucson, Arizona

  Saturday, June 6, 2009, 11:00 p.m.

  73º Fahrenheit

  Lani drove toward Sells with the full moon rising behind the fast-moving Passat. Once she entered the open-range part of the highway, she slowed down in order to keep an eye out for wandering livestock that might be crossing the road in the moon-bright semidarkness. As she passed the turnoff for Little Tucson, she saw flashing lights in her rearview mirror. She pulled over and let the police vehicle speed past.

  She recognized the Pima County logo painted on the side of the vehicle. That probably meant that there was a wrecked car somewhere out here in the night. She didn’t doubt that she’d know the details soon enough when ambulances brought the dead and dying into her ER at the hospit
al in Sells.

  Back on the road, Lani kept going over her mother’s strange question. She also continued thinking about what Gabe had told her much earlier in the day about an old man with strangely puckered skin sitting by her parents’ swimming pool, a man whose presence Diana had absolutely denied. Now Lani wondered if Gabe had been right and if Andrew Carlisle had, against all odds, made an unwelcome ghostly appearance in the house at Gates Pass.

  Lani more than anyone understood that Gabe Ortiz was a spooky kid. He often seemed to know things he wasn’t supposed to know, but that wasn’t surprising, because Lani still did that occasionally, too.

  Fat Crack Ortiz had suffered from diabetes, an ailment so common on the reservation that it was sometimes referred to as the Papago Plague. He had refused all treatment for the disease, both medicinal and traditional, and eventually the disease had killed him.

  The feast held at Ban Thak, Coyote Sitting, the night of his funeral was one of the biggest ones in recent memory. The women in Fat Crack’s life—his widow, Wanda, their daughters-in-law, Christen and Delia, along with the women from the village—had worked long into the night. Lani Walker and Diana Ladd had been there, too. Later, after cleaning up and as they were getting ready to leave, Delia’s water had broken. When it became apparent that there was no time to get the mother to a hospital in time for the delivery of her baby, Lani had stepped in to assist. Thus Gabe Ortiz had been born on the Tampico red leatherette of Diana Ladd’s prized Invicta convertible.

  Holding the newborn child in those first few moments of life, looking down at a wrinkled new face that resembled a wrinkled old face, Lani had also understood that Gabe would be more than just his grandfather’s namesake. He would be a medicine man, a siwani, like the others who had gone before him—like Fat Crack, Looks at Nothing, Understanding Woman, and Lani Walker herself.

  That knowledge about Gabe’s real destiny, like the scar on her own breast, was another of Lani Walker’s treasured secrets. It was why she spent so much time with the boy—why she made such a concerted effort to teach him fully all the things he needed to know.