by J. A. Jance
“Hang on here a minute,” Mitch said to Quentin. “And if my food comes before I get back, you leave my hamburger alone.”
“Sure thing,” Quentin said.
Mitch walked out to the far corner of the parking lot where he had left the Subaru. There, he unlocked the tailgate, opened the wooden crate, and checked on Lani, who appeared to be sleeping peacefully. Putting on his rubber gloves, he removed Lani’s bike from the crate. Hurriedly he wheeled it over to the orange Bronco parked nearby, an orange Bronco with a temporary paper license hanging in the window next to a prominently displayed AS IS/NO WARRANTY notice. Predictably, the Bronco wasn’t locked. Mitch hefted the mountain bike into the spacious cargo compartment and then went over to secure the Subaru.
“Sweet dreams, little one,” he said to a sleeping Lani as he once again closed up the crate. “See you after your brother and I finish up at the house.”
When Mitch went back inside, the food had been served. Mitch ate his lousy hamburger and watched Quentin wolf his. There was something about the man that wasn’t quite right. There was a nervous tension in him that Mitch didn’t remember from the night before, but he put his worries aside. Whatever was bothering Quentin Walker, that little dose of scopolamine Mitch had dropped into Quentin’s first beer would soon take the edge off. In fact, Mitch’s only real concern was that Quentin was far more smashed than he should have been. With Quentin drunk, Mitch worried that even a little bit of Burundianga Cocktail might prove to be too much.
The overheated afternoon had cooled into a warm summer’s evening when Quentin and Mitch Johnson finally left the bar. Quentin blundered first in one direction and then in the other as he attempted to cross the parking lot. He finally came to a stop and leaned up against the Bronco to steady himself.
“Geez!” he muttered. “That last beer was a killer. Hey, Mitch,” he said. “You wouldn’t mind driving, would you? The food didn’t do me a bit of good. I’m having a tough time here. I can give you directions, no problem, but with my record, I can’t afford to be picked up DWI.”
“No problem,” Mitch said. “Where are the keys?”
It took time for Quentin to extract the keys from his pocket and hand them over.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Quentin whined.
Mitch shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “After all, friends don’t let friends drive drunk.”
Detective Dan Leggett was pissed as hell. “What do you mean, you’ve recalled him?” he demanded.
“Just that,” Reg Atkins, the night-watch commander, returned mildly. “We can’t send a team of crime techs out there until Monday morning. You know as well as I do that Sheriff Forsy the won’t authorize any overtime right now, at least not until the start of the new fiscal year. Overtime is to be scheduled only in cases of dire emergency. One busted Indian and a pile of bones don’t qualify, at least not in my book. And in case you’re wondering, the same thing goes for deputies. Brian Fellows is off the clock as of fifteen minutes ago and the guy you sent out to Coleman Road just got called to a car fire out by Ryan Field.”
Less than six months from retirement, Dan Leggett was a member of the old guard. As someone who still owed a good deal of loyalty to the previous administration, he was a pain in Sheriff Bill Forsythe’s neck. Anybody else in his position might have shut up and let things pass. Not Dan Leggett. He was an unrepentant smoker, a loner, and a rocker of boats.
“You called them off?”
“Damned straight. If you think we’re going to have a deputy camped out by a charco all weekend long, you’re crazy as a bedbug.”
“But I want those bones examined.”
“Well, go get them and bring them back to the lab yourself, if you’re so all-fired excited about them. There are plenty of people to work on them if you ever get them here.”
Without another word, Dan Leggett stormed out of Reg Atkins’s office. Ever since Brandon Walker had been voted out of office, this kind of shit had been happening—especially to older guys, the ones who had been around long enough to know the real score. He had been a rookie deputy toward the end of Sheriff DuShane’s term in office. There had been lots of crap like this back then. It looked as though things had come full circle.
But if Sheriff Bill Forsythe thought he was going to run Dan Leggett off a day before his scheduled retirement day, he was full of it. And he wasn’t going to be bamboozled out of properly investigating these two possibly related cases.
At the charco even though the deputy was long gone, nothing seemed to be disturbed. Since Deputy Fellows had already made plaster casts, Dan Leggett simply drove as close as he could to the pile of bones without getting stuck in the sand. After extracting a trouble light from the trunk, he examined the grisly pile by the trouble light’s eerie orange glow.
There was nothing but partial skeletal remains here now, but Detective Leggett realized this had once been a living, breathing human being. A person. Somebody’s loved one. As such, whoever it was deserved some respect, certainly more than being tossed haphazardly in the trunk of an unmarked patrol car.
“Sorry about this,” Dan said aloud, addressing the skull whose empty eyes seemed to stare up at him. “But this is the only way I can think of to find out who you are and what happened to you.”
After that murmured apology, he put on his disposable gloves and loaded the bones into three separate cardboard evidence boxes. It was the best Dan Leggett could do.
He took the boxes back to the department and then lugged the surprisingly lightweight stack into the crime lab. “What’s this?” the lab tech asked, opening the top box and peering inside.
“It’s what’s left of a body,” he told her. “When you take them out of the box, I want every single one of them dusted for prints.”
“Come on, Detective Leggett. Fingerprints?”
“I’m an old man who’s about to retire,” Dan Leggett told the thirty-something technician. “Humor me, just this once. And while you’re at it, fax a dental photo over to that BioMetrics professor at the U. Who knows, we might just get a hit on his missing Persons database.”
As tribal chairman, Gabe Ortiz could easily have gone straight to the head of the line at the feast house in Little Tucson. But that wasn’t Fat Crack’s style. Instead, an hour or so before the Chicken Scratch Band was scheduled to play, he and Wanda were standing in line waiting to be admitted to the feast house along with their bass-guitar-playing son, Leo, and everyone else who was waiting to eat.
Gabe could remember a time, seemingly not that long ago, when all the guys in the band had been old men. Times had changed. The problem was, the members of the band had always stayed pretty much the same—middle-aged. That was still true. What was different was that Gabe Ortiz was well into his sixties and one of the band members was his unmarried, thirty-eight-year-old son.
They filed into the feast house and took seats at the tables. Moments later, Delia Cachora herself showed up carrying plates. She set two plates down in front of Gabe and Wanda and then went back for more.
Leo caught his father’s eye. “When are you going to put in a good word for me with that new tribal attorney?” he asked.
“What do you want me to tell her?” Gabe asked. “That you’re a good mechanic? You’ve never worked on a Saab in your life.”
Leo laughed. “I could learn,” he said.
Delia Chavez Cachora had returned to the reservation driving a shiny black Saab 9000. In the reservation world where Ford and Chevy pickups ruled supreme, Delia’s car had created quite a stir—especially when word leaked out that the Saab’s leather seats were actually heated. In the Arizona desert, heated seats were considered to be a laughably unnecessary option. After months of driving in gritty dust, its once shiny onyx exterior had acquired a perpetually matte-brown overlay.
“Why don’t you talk to her yourself?” Wanda asked impatiently. “She won’t bite.”
“I knew her in first grade,” Leo said. “But I don’t think that cou
nts.”
Delia returned to the table with two more plates, one of which she put in front of Leo Ortiz.
“Delia,” Gabe said, “this is my son, Leo. He says you were in first grade together. He wants you to know that he’s a pretty good mechanic.”
Leo Ortiz shrugged. “You never can tell when you might need a good mechanic,” he said with a laugh. “Or a bass guitar player, either.”
Delia Cachora studied Leo Ortiz’s broad face as if searching for a resemblance between this graying, portly man and some child she had known in school thirty years earlier. “I’ll bear that in mind,” she said. Then she headed back to the serving line to collect more plates.
Wanda looked at her husband. “Are you going to talk to her?” Wanda asked.
Fat Crack nodded. “After,” he said.
Wanda sighed, then she turned her attention on her son. “I don’t know why you’re so interested in her,” she sniffed disapprovingly. “Julia Joaquin, her auntie, tells me Delia can’t even make tortillas.”
Leo caught his father’s eye and winked. “Plenty of women can cook,” Leo said, “but I’ll bet Delia Cachora can do lots of other things.”
Gabe Ortiz laughed at his son’s gentle teasing, but it surprised him somewhat that Delia Cachora would turn out to be the kind of woman who would interest either one of his two sons, who, at thirty-eight and forty, respectively, were both thought to be aging, perpetual bachelors. If Leo did in fact find Delia attractive, by the time Gabe finished telling her about Davy Ladd’s upcoming arrival, Leo’s chances would be greatly reduced from what they were right then. Gabe had put the unpleasant task off for far too long already. It was time.
He waited until that group of feast-goers had finished eating. Then, on his way out, Gabe stopped by the dishwashing station where the tribal attorney stood over a steaming washtub of water with soapy dishwater all the way up to her elbows.
“Delia,” Gabe said quietly. “I need to talk to you.”
“Right now?”
“Whenever you have time,” Gabe answered. “I’ll wait outside.”
Wanda walked over to the dance floor with Leo while Fat Crack lingered outside the door to the feast house. Several minutes later, Delia Cachora joined him.
“Is something wrong?” Delia asked anxiously. “You look worried.”
Gabe was worried. The business with Andrew Carlisle had kept him awake for most of two successive nights now. His only regret was that his state of mind showed so clearly to outside observers.
Fat Crack shook his head. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said. “But there is something I need to talk to you about.” He led her away from the feast house, through the lines of parked cars, through groups of people gathered informally around the backs of pickups, laughing and talking. When they reached the Crown Victoria, Fat Crack opened the door and motioned her inside.
“Whatever it is, it must be serious,” Delia said.
“Not that serious. I wanted to talk to you about a friend of mine. A sort of cousin, actually. My aunt’s godson. His name’s David Ladd.”
In the world of the Tohono O’othham—where even the most direct conversational route is never a straight line—this was a straightforward way of beginning.
“What about him?” Delia asked.
“I’ve offered him a job.”
The car was silent for a moment. “David Ladd,” Delia repeated at last. “That doesn’t sound like a Tohono O’othham name.”
“It isn’t,” Fat Crack admitted. “Davy is Mil-gahn. He was my aunt Rita’s godson—a foster son, more or less.”
“Why are you telling me about this?” Delia asked. “Is there some legal problem?”
Gabe Ortiz took a deep breath. “I’ve offered him an internship,” he said. “In your office. He just graduated from law school at Northwestern. He’ll be home sometime next week and able to start work the week after that. I’ve hired him as your special assistant while he’s studying for the bar exam. As an intern, we won’t have to pay him all that much, and I thought that while you’re preoccupied by negotiations with the county, he’ll be able to help out with some of the day-to-day stuff.”
Delia’s reaction was every bit as bad as Gabe Ortiz had expected. “Wait just a damn minute here!” she exclaimed, turning on Gabe with both eyes blazing. “Are you saying you’ve hired an Anglo to come work in my office without telling me and without even asking my opinion?”
“Pretty much.”
“My understanding was that the tribal attorney always hires his or her own assistants,” Delia said.
“The tribal attorney works for me,” Gabe reminded her impassively. The fact that he was using his tribal council voice on her infuriated Delia Chavez Cachora even more.
“But you already told me, he’s Mil-gahn,” she objected. “An Anglo.”
Gabe Ortiz remained unimpressed. “So? Are you prejudiced against Anglos, or what?”
At thirty-eight, having fought her way through years of prejudice in Eastern Seaboard parochial schools, Delia Cachora knew about racial prejudice firsthand. From the wrong end.
“What if I am?” she asked. “I’m sure there are plenty of Indian law school graduates we could hire while they’re waiting to pass the bar exam. Besides, I can’t hire anyone anyway. We talked about that a couple of months ago. I’m already over budget.”
“I’m hiring Davy Ladd out of a special discretionary fund,” Gabe said. “One that comes straight from my office. The money to pay him won’t be coming out of your budget, it’ll be coming out of mine.”
“In other words, he’s coming, like it or lump it.”
Gabe Ortiz nodded. “I suppose that’s about it,” he said. “But wait until you meet him. He’s an unusual young man. I think you’ll like him.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Delia muttered. She opened the car door. “In fact, I wouldn’t count on that at all.”
Delia started out of the car and would have walked away, but just then a tow truck, red lights flashing, followed by a Law and Order patrol car, pulled up and stopped directly in front of the Crown Victoria. Gabe’s other son, Richard, climbed down from the truck.
“Here they are,” he was saying to the officer piling out of the patrol car.
As Gabe climbed out of the Crown Victoria, he immediately recognized Ira Segundo, a young patrol officer for the Tohono O’othham tribal police. “What’s the matter, Ira?” Gabe asked.
“I’m looking for Mrs. Cachora,” Ira said. “Baby told me she might be here with you.”
“I’m Delia Cachora,” she said, stepping forward. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s about your dad,” Ira Segundo said. “There was a problem over off Coleman Road. He’s been hurt.”
A curtain of wariness more than concern settled over Delia’s face. Since she had returned to the reservation, her father and her younger brother, Eddie, had only come to see her to ask for money. “What about him?”
“It happened at a charco over by where Rattlesnake Skull used to be—”
“By Rattlesnake Skull?” Gabe Ortiz interrupted.
Ira nodded. “We think maybe there was a fight of some kind. He must be hurt pretty bad. They air-lifted him to TMC.”
“You should be telling my brother this instead of me,” Delia said. “He’s the one who lives with him, but he’s probably off drunk somewhere. I’ll go get my car.”
“No, Delia,” Gabe said. “Get in. I’ll give you a ride.” Gabe Ortiz turned to his son. “Richard, I’m leaving you to take your mother home from the dance when she’s ready to go. Ira. I want you to put on your flashers and lead us into town.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Ortiz,” Ira said.
Still angry, Delia wanted to object, but something about the way Gabe issued the orders stopped her. She did as she was told and climbed back into the Crown Victoria. “I don’t know why you’re doing this,” she said, once Gabe was back inside and had started the engine. “It’s my father, and I’m perfe
ctly capable of driving myself.”
Already Gabe was threading his way through the army of parked cars. In the reflected glow of the dashboard lights, Delia was surprised by the grim set of his face.
“You’ve been away from the reservation a long time,” he said, sounding suddenly tired. “Have you ever heard of Rattlesnake Skull?”
“Never,” she said. “I gather from what he said that it’s a deserted village.”
They were out of the parking lot now, and the lights on the patrol car were flashing in front of them. “Right,” Gabe said. “It is deserted, but a lot has happened there over the years. Before you go see your father and before you meet Davy Ladd, you should hear about some of it. I’m probably the only one who can tell you.”
When the banquet was finally over, Brandon and Diana Walker drove west across town. The evening had been surprisingly fun, and Diana was still giggling.
“You were absolutely great,” she told Brandon. “I don’t know why you’ve ever been spooked at the idea of talking to little old ladies. You charmed the socks off every one that got within spitting distance of you.”
Brandon grinned. “There’s nothing like a little sex in the afternoon to give a guy’s sagging ego a boost. But it turns out they were a pretty nice bunch of little old ladies…”
“And men,” Diana added.
“And a few men,” Brandon corrected. “The difference between the people we met tonight and most people is that the ones at the banquet all think I’m lucky to be able to be retired at age fifty-four. Everybody else thinks I’m either crazy or some kind of laggard.”