by J. A. Jance
THE RATTLE OF AUTOMATIC GUNFIRE echoing across the landscape startled Lani awake. The rest of the desert had fallen eerily quiet. Lani held her breath, listening, but she wasn’t the only one who sensed danger. So did the Little People—Ali-chu’uchum O’odham—and the insects fell quiet as well. It was oppressively dark. The fire had died down, and the moon had crossed over to the back of Ioligam, leaving that part of the mountain entirely in shadow.
Lani had heeded her husband’s advice. She had come on the campout armed and had slept with her Glock under her bedroll. Retrieving it, she stood up and crept over to the edge of the clearing. Concealed by the sheltering manzanita, she peered down at the desert below. For a time—she wasn’t sure how long—nothing happened. A long time later another blast of distant gunfire made its way up the mountain.
Lani darted to her backpack and dug through it until she found her cell phone. Although she had confiscated Gabe’s phone, she had kept her own, turned off and tucked securely in an outside pocket. It seemed to take forever for the device to finally come online, but when it did, there was no signal, as in zero. She tried sending a text to Dan, but it bounced back as undelivered. The population in this part of the reservation was too scarce to warrant the building of private cell towers, and the tribe couldn’t afford to install them, either.
Shaking as much from fear as from the cold, Lani wrapped the bedroll around her shoulders and returned to her lookout point. Even though the phone hadn’t worked, the bright light from the screen had momentarily left her night blind. Once she could see again, she spotted a pinprick of light, bouncing here and there in a back-and-forth movement across the desert landscape far below.
In the dark, Lani couldn’t be sure, but she suspected the action was in the neighborhood of Rattlesnake Skull charco. Pulling her eyes from the moving light—a flashlight, presumably—she stared off across the valley at a place where the lights from a single vehicle driving westbound on Highway 86 had just rounded the low-lying hill a mile or so from the reservation boundary.
Lani knew that a permanent Border Patrol checkpoint was situated another mile east of the hill, just before the bridge over Brawley Wash. She had heard the gunfire quite clearly, and she knew that sound travels a long way on a still desert night. But she also knew from things Dan had said that the checkpoint guys generally spent the long chilly nights huddled around a space heater inside their guard shack with their music turned to the max. The fact that there were no red lights flashing on the approaching vehicle indicated that this was most likely a private one rather than some kind of patrol car. Or, if it did happen to be an official vehicle—Border Patrol, Law and Order, or Highway Patrol—it was someone doing a routine patrol rather than responding to a specific incident.
As she watched, the flashlight was extinguished. A moment later, a pair of headlights bloomed in the desert on what she was now sure was the near side of Coleman Road, the Rattlesnake Skull village side of the road. She watched, puzzled, as the headlights seemed to move backward along what had to be Coleman Road. When the vehicle reached the intersection with the highway, she thought at first that it was turning right to head into Tucson. That was exactly what Lani wanted to see happen. She glanced at her watch. The illumined dial said 4:16. If the driver turned right and headed into Tucson, the cameras at the checkpoint would maintain an exact record of who had passed that way at that hour of the night.
Unfortunately, the vehicle backed onto the highway, then changed gears and drove in the opposite direction. The whine of rubber on blacktop as the vehicle gathered speed carried across the desert to Lani’s mountain perch. She watched and listened until first the headlights and finally the taillights were obscured by the bulk of Ioligam itself. Long after the lights disappeared, she could still hear the whine of tires. So he was driving in a forward gear now, but he had driven for the better part of a mile in reverse. Why would he have done that? Why?
As the sound faded, so did Lani’s immediate sense of danger. Whoever had been down there shooting off a weapon was gone now. She staggered back to the fire. As she sat down to warm herself, she was filled with a smothering sense of foreboding.
Something was terribly wrong. That sense had been with her since she was first jolted awake, but it was only as the fire flared up with newly added wood that she allowed that terrible misgiving to turn into a cohesive thought. Gabe! What about Gabe? When he stormed off the mountain, he must have passed that way, but surely that was hours ago. He couldn’t possibly have been involved in whatever had just happened down there. Surely not.
Shortly after the sounds from the one vehicle disappeared, Lani heard another one approaching and slowing. She stood up again and peered down the mountain as this new vehicle turned onto Coleman Road. Searchlights mounted on the roof sprang to life and probed the surrounding landscape. It seemed to her that some of the rays were pointed toward the same spot from which the gunfire had come, but by then the bad guys were gone. There was nothing left to see. In any case, the unsuspecting vehicle continued southward to Coleman Road.
With nothing else to be done, Lani heated a pot of water and made herself a cup of prickly pear tea. Then she sat with her trembling hands cupped around the metal cup, hoping the heat from that would help settle her. At last, seeking reassurance, she reached for her medicine basket.
Her first inclination was to open the pouch that held the wiw, the sacred tobacco, but she didn’t. Her throat, unaccustomed to smoking, was still raw from the night before. Instead, she located her divining crystals. Had things gone differently that night, she might have given them to Gabe. Since they were still in her possession, she spilled them into the palm of her hand and then, one by one, she held them up, peering at the flickering flame through each hunk of crystal.
She wasn’t sure if what she saw was in the crystal itself or if it was only in her mind’s eye, but it was the same image she had seen in the sacred smoke—a woman, a Milgahn woman who, despite being Anglo and not susceptible to Staying Sicknesses, was also a Dangerous Object.
Lani understood this even though she couldn’t explain it. And without knowing what kind of Dangerous Object the woman was, it was difficult to tell what kind of treatment might be required.
And so, warmed by the fire, and with Morning Star gleaming in the east, Lani closed her fist around the stones and began to sing:
Oh, I’itoi who is also Spirit of Goodness and Elder Brother,
Please hear me as your daughter calls to you
Asking for your help. A dangerous object is loose in the world.
A dangerous object with silver hair and white skin.
I do not know who this woman is, but she is a danger,
A danger to a boy named Gabe Ortiz who is the son of my heart.
Help me to see my way to find this evil woman.
Help me understand why she is a danger.
Help me to protect Gabe, Elder Brother,
In the same way Nana Dahd protected Davy,
In the same way Betraying Woman protected me.
We need your help so the ghostly woman does not win.
As the sun came up over the distant Tucson Mountains in the east, Lani sang the song over and over, always in sets of four, because four is a magic number all by itself; because all of nature goes in fours.
“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU mean, one of them got away?” Ava demanded into the phone. “How is that even possible?”
“Sorry. I was struggling with Paul, and the youngest one got loose. I’m looking for him now.”
“Sorry my ass! You should be way more than sorry. What about the diamonds? Did you find them?”
“Not yet, but once I catch up with Tim . . .”
“He’s what, twelve years old? Thirteen? You just let him take off and now you can’t find him?”
“I know which way he went. I’ll find him.”
“You’d better,” Ava said. “I want my diamonds back, and I want that damned kid taken out. Those asshole Indians stick together like dog shit on a shoe.”
“What about Max?”
“What about him?”
“Once he hears about what’s happened . . .”
“Don’t worry about Max. You take care of the kid and retrieve the diamonds. I already told you, I’ll handle Max.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the man said. “I hear you loud and clear.”
Bristling with anger, Ava closed the phone. She heard the nurse out in the kitchen, banging around, starting another pot of coffee, and fixing Harold’s breakfast. Ava didn’t usually put in an appearance until all that had been handled. Right now, she needed to make sure the Max José problem would be handled sooner rather than later.
The crew she had in Florence had come in handy on more than one occasion. One was a guard; the rest were inmates—lifers, mostly, with nothing more to lose. When they did a job for her, she made sure that all payments went to family members who were far enough removed from the action that nothing could be traced back to the actual doers or traced back to her, either.
Ava’s operation was small enough not to attract attention from the cartels, and deadly enough that people usually did exactly as they were told. As for the guy who’d just called her? He was a dead man walking even if he didn’t know it yet. Once he recovered her diamonds, he’d be gone, too. The desert was a big place with plenty of hidey-holes where dumped bodies would never be found.
Ava finished her calls, knowing she’d done all she could for the time being, then she went back to bed, hoping to grab a little more sleep. It was going to be a busy day.
SOME TIME LATER, AFTER SUNRISE, Lani was startled out of her contemplations by yet another gunshot—a single one this time. Once again, she peered off the mountain, scanning the desert for any signs of life. No vehicles were visible. Was this related to what had happened earlier? In the silence that followed the gunshot there was no way to tell.
Leo Ortiz arrived a couple of hours later, at ten past eight. By then Lani had packed up her stuff and Gabe’s as well. She’d also doused the fire with the remainder of her water and carefully buried the ashes. She heard Leo’s powerful pickup growling its way up the mountain long before the man himself appeared outside the clearing.
Lani had considered hiking down the trail to meet him, but in the end, she simply sat beside the backpacks and waited. When Leo finally showed up, he was panting with exertion. He looked around the clearing and frowned. “Where’s Gabe?” he asked.
That was not the question Lani was expecting. Her heart fell. Her stomach clenched. “Isn’t he home?”
“He wasn’t when we got home this morning. Why isn’t he here?”
“He got mad at me and left,” Lani admitted. “He said he was going home.”
“You let him walk off just like that?” Leo demanded accusingly. “You should have called. It was just a dance. I would have left there in a minute to come get him.”
Lani didn’t lie and claim she had tried to call. Instead, she held up her useless cell phone. “No signal,” she said.
“There’s a radio in the truck,” Leo said. “I can call home on that.”
The trip down to the truck was made in heavy silence. Leo was naturally quiet, but he was also angry, and Lani knew it. As for Lani? If Gabe wasn’t home, if he had been the target of some of those gunshots . . . She couldn’t bear to consider it.
Leo flipped the two packs he was carrying into the bed of the truck, then went straight to the radio. “He’s home,” Leo said a moment later. “Delia said he just woke up and scared her to death because she had no idea he was there. He was in his bedroom with the door closed. We didn’t bother checking his room when we got home because he wasn’t supposed to be there.”
Sick with relief, Lani leaned against the passenger door. Gradually her legs seemed to give way beneath her. She slid slowly down onto her haunches until she was sitting propped on the Tundra’s narrow running board.
Leo came around to where she was sitting. “Sorry,” he said. “He’s a teenager and a boy. I shouldn’t have blamed you. Come on. Let’s get back.”
Lani stood up and tossed her own pack into the truck. “There’s one more thing we need to do,” she said when she again felt capable of speech.
“What’s that?”
“I want to stop by the charco.”
“What charco?” Leo asked.
“That one,” she said, nodding down the mountainside.
“Rattlesnake Skull?” he asked. “How come? People say that place is haunted.”
Lani knew that all too well, and one of the haunting spirits was no doubt the soul of Gabe’s murdered second cousin, Gina Antone, but Lani didn’t feel like going into any of that right then.
“It’ll only take a few minutes,” she said. “I’m curious about something.”
“Don’t they always say curiosity killed the cat?” Leo said, letting go of his anger and giving her one of his easy grins.
“Maybe so,” Lani said. “But I still want to go. You can stay in the truck if you want. I can hike in and out.”
“And let you call me a ’fraidy cat?” Leo replied. “No way.”
When they neared the charco, Lani directed him to drive past the turnoff and stop on the shoulder of the road.
As they climbed out of the truck, Leo shot her a questioning look. “What’s going on?” he asked. “You look like something’s wrong.”
“I’m not sure,” Lani said. “Let’s wait and see. I want to follow the tracks.”
Lani had picked up some skill as a tracker from her husband, who had learned that ancient art from his grandfather Micah. Using what Dan had taught her, Lani walked along the road until she saw a place where a single set of tire tracks led off into the brush. A few feet beyond that, she saw evidence of what looked like a struggle and signs of several people walking off into the brush.
“We’ll go this way,” she said, “but stay to the side of the tire tracks and of the footprints, too.”
Just then a shadow passed overhead. Lani looked skyward and saw a single buzzard circling high above them. The morning sun may have been warm, but a chill passed through her body. Having Nuwiopa show up at a time like this was always a bad sign. Buzzards meant death, and the bodies weren’t hard to find.
They lay just beyond a parked blue Jeep Cherokee, one Lani suspected might belong to one of the José brothers. The two victims were clearly male. Both bodies had been shredded by bullets. Their hands were bound in front of them with tie wraps, and their heads were covered by paper grocery bags. Both were secured to the base of a nearby cottonwood tree by lengths of cable that looked like those used to lock down bicycles.
Once Lani spotted the bodies, there was no reason to go any closer. It was clear from the cloud of swarming flies that both victims were dead. She stopped in her tracks so abruptly that Leo literally plowed into her from behind. He grabbed her with both arms to keep her from pitching forward and then was startled when she turned in his arms, buried her head in his ample chest, and wept. They stood like that for several moments, with Leo awkwardly patting her shoulder and trying to comfort her.
Leo probably thought Lani was horrified at being confronted by those two bloodied and mangled bodies, but that wasn’t it at all. She was weeping in gratitude because neither of the dead victims was Gabe. He was home and safe. Right then, that was all that mattered.
At last she straightened up, wiping her nose and eyes on her shirtsleeve. “I’m okay now,” she said.
Letting go of her, Leo started toward the bodies.
“No,” she said, grasping his arm. “Leave them.”
“But shouldn’t we at least check on them?”
Lani shook her head. “This is a crime scene,” she said. “I can
see from here that they’re both dead. There’s nothing we can do for them, except call the cops.”
CHAPTER 14
BIG MAN AND HIS FRIENDS came to the house. They called out to the brother, and he came out. Everybody aimed their arrows at him, but as the arrows flew, Brother jumped in the air. None of the arrows hit him. The people laughed at him and asked him where his feathers were. They told him he should have wings.
But when Brother came back to earth, the people noticed that the earth trembled under his feet. Three times the people shot their arrows at Brother, and three times, when he came down, the ground shook.
The fourth time the people shot their arrows, Brother jumped into the sky, but this time he did not come down.
And so, nawoj, my friend, when you are in the land of the Desert People and look toward the Eastern Sky early in the morning, you will see Beautiful Girl, smiling at you from the sky. The Tohono O’odham call her Mahsig Hu’u—Morning Star.
And sometimes—not often—when you feel the earth tremble, the Milgahn—the Anglos—may call it an earthquake, but you and I will know that it is only Beautiful Girl’s brother who has come back to visit.
WHEN BRANDON WALKER OPENED HIS eyes, Diana was standing in the doorway of the bedroom with a cup of coffee in hand. “Up and at ’em, lazybones,” she said. “You said you’d be driving Miss Daisy today, and if we want to get to the Second Street garage in time to find a parking place, you’d better get a move on.”
Brandon turned over and stared blearily at the clock. It said 8:30.
“What time’s your first panel?”
“Ten of the A.M., so we need to head out soon.”
Brandon scrambled out of bed, shaved, showered, and dressed. As he slipped his car keys into his jacket pocket—the same jacket he’d worn to the dinner the night before—his fingers encountered the business card Oliver Glassman had given him. Brandon pulled it out and looked at it. He had spent the better part of the night mulling over his own involvement with John Lassiter. Before he got any more deeply involved and before he brought TLC into play, he needed a whole lot more information.