Dance of the Bones

by J. A. Jance

  Everyone knows, nawoj, my friend, that Picacho Peak is very small, but it is also very steep, so steep that no one has ever climbed it.

  In the evening, Beautiful Girl’s brother returned to the house and found it empty. He waited and worried. Finally he went out into the village and told the ­people that his sister was gone, and the ­people agreed to help him find her.

  The next day the ­people followed Beautiful Girl’s tracks out into the desert. They found the place where she had stopped to gather plants, and they found her empty burden basket, but that is where her tracks stopped. The ­people held a council to decide what to do. Coyote came to the council and said that he’d been passing close to Cloud Peak that day and heard the noise of a woman crying. Ban knew that this was very bad trouble because the woman could not climb down.

  At last Beautiful Girl’s brother decided to ask I’itoi—­the Spirit of Goodness—­for help. He called for Messenger, Ah’atha. The brother dressed Messenger in white eagle feathers and sent him to see I’itoi. Spirit of Goodness listened to Messenger and decided to help. He took the seeds from a gourd and planted them at the base of the mountain, then he began to sing. Soon the seeds began to sprout. Before the end of the day the gourd vines had grown so tall that they covered the steep sides of the mountain. Beautiful Girl was able to climb down safely.

  WITH THE HELP OF SEVERAL glasses of Pig’s Nose scotch, Ava went to bed earlier that evening than she would have otherwise. Several hours later, she was awakened from a deep sleep by the sound of a cell phone clattering noisily across her bedside table. It was another of her burner phones, one that she always kept nearby with the ringer turned on silent and the phone set on vibrate.

  “Hello.” She didn’t need to ask who was calling, because there was only one person who had the number. “What’s up?”

  “He didn’t deliver the shipment.”

  Ava sat bolt upright in bed. “What do you mean, he didn’t deliver?” she demanded. “Didn’t the package make it across the border?”

  “It came across the border, all right, but our guy wants more money.”

  Ava was outraged. “Are you kidding me? He’s holding my damned diamonds for ransom?”

  “That’s how it sounds.”

  “How much does he want?”

  “Twenty thou.”

  “That’s highway robbery—­twice what we’ve paid him before.”

  “Well,” Ava’s caller replied with a chuckle. “You know what they say about no honor among thieves. He claims he needs the money. He says his mom is sick, and he’s looking after his younger brothers.”

  “Too bad for him,” Ava replied. “Turns out now he’s lost his job, too. I want you to take care of this.”

  “As in . . . ?”

  “As in take care of it!” Ava snapped. “As in make a statement. As in do whatever the hell you have to do to get the job done. As in let other ­people out on the res know that I am not to be trifled with. I want those three José boys wiped off the face of the earth.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’ll take care of it.”

  “Before you do,” she added, “I want you to make Carlos tell you what the hell happened to my diamonds. I want them back. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said again. “I certainly do.”

  As he hung up, Ava thought the poor man sounded a bit shocked and more than a little cowed. It must have been hard for him to imagine that she had so casually condemned three members of a single family to death. He shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, this wasn’t Ava Richland’s first rodeo, and it wasn’t the first time she had issued someone’s death sentence, either. In fact, now that she thought about it, this probably wouldn’t be the last time.

  Ava was relieved that she now had other ­people to do the dirty work for her, so it was no longer necessary for her personally to be the one pulling the trigger. Max José had worked for her for one reason only—­because he understood that what she was doing had no connection to the cartels. But if he was behind this and was directing his brothers to hold her up for more money, he had made a fatal error in thinking that she wasn’t every bit as dangerous as the cartels.

  Ava went into the kitchen and started the coffee. It was just after midnight. Harold wouldn’t awaken for several more hours. She knew that three-­fourths of the José problem would be handled, but now, while she had a little peace and quiet to herself, Ava needed to make some private phone calls and arrange to deal with Max. What’s more, once and for all, she needed to take care of John Lassiter.

  The man had already had two separate trials. If Ava Richland had her way, he sure as hell wouldn’t have a third one.

  AFTER GABE LEFT, LANI SAT by the fire for hours, wrapped in her bedroll and gradually feeding the remaining pieces of wood into the flames. Her work as an ER physician meant that she was accustomed to working odd hours, especially nighttime hours. So she didn’t try to sleep. Instead, she stayed awake, thinking. For a while she let herself meander through the old stories, the ones she had learned from Nana Dahd and from Fat Crack. And since Gabe wasn’t present to hear them, she told them to herself—­the story of Bat bringing fire as well as the story of Beautiful Girl who would eventually become Evening Star.

  Finally, though, her thoughts drifted to Gabe. She wandered through her collection of memories about him, remembering the things about him that had endeared him to her as a child, starting with the night he was born.

  Lani and Delia Cachora hadn’t exactly been friends back then. When Delia first arrived back on the reservation, the fact that Fat Crack had chosen, doted on, and mentored both of them had caused an odd kind of sibling rivalry to grow between the two young women. They were still wary of each other at the time of Fat Crack’s death.

  On the day of his funeral, after the nightlong feast in the village of Ban Thak—­Coyote Sitting—­Delia’s water had broken. Lani was still in medical school, but she had realized at once that the baby was coming too fast to make it to the hospital before he was born. That was how Gabe Ortiz became the first baby Lani Walker ever delivered, turning the backseat of Diana Ladd’s fully restored Buick Invicta into a makeshift delivery room.

  Wanda Ortiz, Fat Crack’s widow and the baby’s grandmother, had taken the squalling child and dried him on clean towels from the feast house. Then, after wrapping him in one of his father’s immense flannel shirts, she had handed him to Lani, who had in turn passed him along to Delia.

  Lani still remembered how she had felt in that moment. The baby was a gift through time. He had been passed down from Nana Dahd’s grandmother, Understanding Woman, to the next generation, to Rita Antone and Looks at Nothing. They had passed the gift on to Rita’s nephew, Fat Crack, who had done the same, passing the baby along to the next generation—­Lani and Delia. It had seemed to Lani then, and still did, that the Elders, Kekelimai, had entrusted the care and keeping of this precious child to new hands, with the expectation—­the requirement—­that he be kept safe.

  Gabe had just turned eight when Lani first became aware of how different the little boy was. Lani’s mother had been dealing with some health issues, and the mental symptoms had been far more troubling than the physical ones. Although Lani and her father never came right out and discussed the situation, they were both convinced that Diana was losing it—­that she was drifting into some kind of dementia situation or perhaps starting down the slippery slope into early-­onset Alzheimer’s.

  The real culprit had been a simple matter of adverse drug interactions, but it was Gabe who had helped Lani understand that Diana was having hallucinations—­that she was carrying on long heart-­to-­heart chats with Andrew Philip Carlisle, the crazed convicted killer who had once tried to murder her and who also happened to be dead. Lani’s dad had always credited her medical skills with sorting out Diana’s situation, but Lani herself knew that it was Gabe—­born long after Carlisl
e had gone to what she hoped was his just reward—­who had brought the matter to her attention.

  Instinctively being able to suss out something like that was a medicine man kind of thing. For the next three years, Gabe had followed Lani around like a puppy dog. On Tuesdays and Thursdays after school he would come to the hospital’s dialysis unit, where he seemed to function in the dayroom as a pint-­sized medicine man, singing the healing chants Lani had taught him and reciting the ancient stories and legends for the patients. Long boring hours in the dialysis unit could be shortened by hearing the stories and legends of I’itoi someone remembered hearing long ago as a child living in one of the villages—­in Ge Oithag, Big Fields, or Komlick, Big Flat Place.

  Lani had taught Gabe that the I’itoi legends in particular were winter-­telling tales and were only to be told between the middle of November and the middle of March. Most of the time Gabe was careful to abide by that rule. Sometimes, when it was July and someone who would not live to see another November wanted to hear the story of Old White-­Haired Woman or the story of the Peace Smoke, Gabe would tell the story anyway. It didn’t seem to him that I’itoi, the Spirit of Goodness, would mind that in the least.

  Only when requested to do so did Gabe visit the rooms of individual patients—­the injured, ill, and dying. Even though he had not yet reached cheojthag—­manhood—­and was not yet a fully grown medicine man, the families of patients told Lani that there were times when having Al Siwani—­Baby Medicine Man—­visit their loved one was better than having no medicine man at all.

  Lani had marveled at how, sitting in quiet hospital rooms and without even having access to her sacred divining crystals, Gabe had often known long before anyone other than the doctors about who would live and who would die. He talked to Lani about those things sometimes, but even then he had instinctively known to keep from mentioning them to the ­people involved. And when Lani had asked how he knew those things, he could never explain it other than shrugging his shoulders and saying, “I just know.”

  Then, for reasons the divining crystals couldn’t or wouldn’t tell her, Gabe had started pulling away. He had stopped coming to the hospital. He had started distancing himself from her. And now, much to Lani’s despair, her connection to Gabe seemed to be severed. He had walked away down the mountain, leaving her behind along with her last-­ditch chance to save him from whatever was pulling at him. It was easy, sitting on the mountain, to ascribe what was happening to the Bad ­People—­PaDaj O’odham—­who had come up out of the South to steal the Tohono O’odham’s crops and eventually to do battle with I’itoi himself.

  So was that what this was all about? Lani wondered. Were the four José brothers with all their family troubles—­a dead father and an ailing mother—­the cause of all this? Were they somehow a modern-­day equivalent of the PaDaj O’odham? And, if so, what did Lani have to do to extricate Gabe from their grasp?

  Tossing one more piece of wood onto the fire, Lani slipped into her bedroll. Staring up at the stars, she remembered the story Nana Dahd had told her—­the one about the terrible time when Andrew Carlisle, the evil ohb, had captured both Nana Dahd and Lani’s brother, Davy, and held them prisoner in the root cellar. While there, Nana Dahd had summoned I’itoi to help them by singing a chant—­a healing chant—­speaking in the language of the Tohono O’odham. Lani had heard the chant often enough that she remembered every word, the same way one remembers a cherished lullaby. And it made her smile to know that while the song had been totally opaque to Andrew Carlisle, Davy had heard the words, understood them, and acted upon them:

  Do not look at me, little Olhoni.

  Do not look at me when I sing to you

  So this man will not know we are speaking,

  So this evil man will think he is winning.

  Do not look at me when I sing, little Olhoni,

  But listen to what I say. This man is evil.

  This man is the enemy. This man is ohb.

  Do not let this frighten you.

  Whatever happens in the battle,

  We must not let him win.

  I am singing a war song for you,

  Little Olhoni. I am singing

  A hunter’s song—­a killer’s song.

  I am singing a song to I’itoi,

  Asking him to help us and guide us in the battle

  So the evil ohb does not win.

  Do not look at me, little Olhoni,

  Do not look at me when I sing to you.

  I must sing this song four times

  For all of nature goes in fours.

  But when the trouble starts,

  You must remember all these things

  I have sung to you in this magic song.

  You must listen very carefully

  And do exactly what I say.

  If I tell you to run and hide yourself,

  You must run as fast as Wind Man.

  Run fast and hide yourself

  And do not look back.

  Whatever happens, little Olhoni,

  You must run and not look back.

  Then, as seamlessly as if it were a new track on a much-­loved CD, the next war chant returned to her as well, with every word and every nuance intact. And as Lani recalled the words, she was once again inside Betraying Woman’s hidden cavern beneath Ioligam, trapped there with her own personal evil ohb. Mitch Johnson, deputized by Andrew Carlisle to kill her, had been waiting for Quentin Walker—­the brother who was not her brother—­to return. It was while she and Mitch waited in an ugly, lingering silence that Lani had finally understood what would happen: once Quentin returned, Mitch Johnson would kill them both.

  Lani had closed her eyes then, making the darkness of the cavern even darker. And now, sitting outside by the fire, she closed her eyes again. As she did so, all the sensations of that long-­ago time came spooling back to her along with the words to the chant. She could smell the sharp, acrid stink of Mitch Johnson’s sweat; she could feel the calming touch of the damp soil against her skin; she could hear, somewhere in the far distance, the tiny drip of water; then suddenly and overhead, she felt the gentle touch of a bat’s wing, ruffling her hair and telling her what she must do:

  Oh, little Nanakumal who lives forever in darkness,

  Oh, little Nanakumal who lives forever in I’itoi’s sacred cave,

  Give me your strength so I will not be frightened,

  So I will stay in a safe place where the evil ohb cannot come.

  For years Betraying Woman has been here with you,

  For years your Bat Strength has kept her safe,

  Waiting until I could come and set her free

  By smashing her pottery prison against a rocky wall.

  Keep me safe now, too, little Nanakumal,

  Keep me safe from this new evil ohb.

  Teach me to be juhagi—­resilient—­in the coming battle

  So this jiawul—­this devil—­does not win.

  Oh, little Nanakumal who lives forever in darkness,

  Whose passing wings changed me into a warrior,

  Be with me now as I face this danger.

  Protect me in the coming battle and keep me safe.

  Even as Lani had sung those words long ago, with Mitch Johnson listening and not comprehending, she had realized that the chant had contained words that were hers and not hers, all at the same time. Her ­people believed in singing for power, and her words had come unbidden from some ancient magic place, the same place Rita Antone had tapped into as she sang her warrior chant to Davy Ladd even longer ago. It was no surprise that the words gave Lani comfort now—­the same kind of comfort and strength they had given her in that earlier time. Somehow she knew that in I’itoi’s world, those two other times and this time were all the same.

  Realizing she was growing drowsy, Lani looked at the fire and resi
sted the temptation to add another log. The fire had burned long enough that there would be plenty of coals to last until morning. Then she snuggled into her bedroll. The ground may have been hard beneath her body, but she was too tired to notice.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE BROTHER OFFERED TO PAY I’itoi for saving his sister, but all the Spirit of Goodness asked for was a bobcat skin to hold arrows. Then Beautiful Girl and her brother went back home. Before many days passed, Coyote came once more to the home of Beautiful Girl with another message from Big Man, saying that the girl must marry Big Man. This time the brother was in the house and heard what Coyote said. The brother told his sister to pay no attention to that no-­account Coyote and to get rid of him because he might have mange.

  This made Coyote very angry. He said that if Beautiful Girl did not marry Big Man, then the man would come along with the ­people from his village and kill both Beautiful Girl and her brother. Then Coyote went away.

  The brother and sister talked things over. Beautiful Girl said she did not want to marry Big Man. She said she did not want to marry anyone. She said that if trouble came, she would run away to the Eastern Sky—­Si’al tahgio Kahchm. She said that she would stay up there in the Eastern Sky and only show herself to those who rose early in the morning to do their work. She said she would smile on the ­people who rose early and make them smile in return.

  The brother, too, said he would rather live in the air, but he said that sometimes he would like to come back to the earth. He said he would like to come back with a bounce and a shake so ­people would know he was there.

  When Coyote went back to the village and told his story, Big Man was very, very angry. He called all his friends together. The next day Big Man and his friends took their bows and arrows and went looking for Beautiful Girl and her brother. The girl saw them coming and tried to warn her brother, but he didn’t seem to care very much.

  As Big Man and his friends came closer, Beautiful Girl saw there was no hope, so she hurried off to the Eastern Sky just as she had said she would do.