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

by J. A. Jance

  Glancing around the room, Daisy wondered if someone else had slipped into the store unnoticed, but there was no one with the boy except an ancient, withered crone of an Indian woman. It wasn’t right. It just wasn’t.

  Daisy leaned down until her face and Davy’s were or almost the same level. He looked dirty, with a ring of chocolate milk circling his mouth. The sharp odor of wood smoke emanated from his hair and clothing. Was there such a thing as a blond Indian?

  “Hello there, young man. Where’d you come from?”

  The woman wore bright red lipstick that made her mouth look like an angry red gash across a pale, skinny face. Her darting green eyes reminded Davy of a lizard he’d seen once.

  Without answering, Davy shrank away under the woman’s nosy gaze and groped behind him for the comforting reassurance of Rita’s callused hand.

  “He’s with me,” Rita said.

  “Oh?” Daisy replied. “What’s the matter with him? Can’t he talk? By the way, you still owe for his milk.”

  Once more Rita counted out exact change. Without a thank you, Daisy Raymond shoved the money into the register drawer.

  “Oi g hihm,” Rita said softly to Davy.

  Literally translated, the words mean “Walk,” but Davy understood the accepted current usage as “Let’s get in the pickup and go.”

  Needing no second urging, he hurried to the door, relieved to escape the close confines of the trading post and the Anglo woman’s prying eyes. He clambered up into the pickup and settled back contentedly on the frayed plastic seat. Rita opened the door. With a grunt of effort, she heaved herself into the truck.

  “Are we going to the feast now?” Davy asked.

  Nana Dahd shook her head. “Not yet. A few stops first, then the feast.”

  Had Pima County homicide detective Brandon Walker been a drinking man, he would have left his morning vehicular homicide investigation, stopped off at the nearest bar on his way back to town, and got himself shit-faced drunk. He hadn’t, but now, back in his cubicle at the Pima County Sheriff’s Department and looking at the fanfold of messages in his hand, he wished he had. Just this once.

  A day earlier, Aaron Monford, a seventy-five-year-old shade-tree mechanic, had been changing a tire in his front yard when he was struck from behind by a tipsy neighbor lady on her way home from a weekly luncheon bridge game. Monford’s head had been crushed nearly flat between the chrome-plated bumpers of his own jacked-up Dodge Dart and that of the neighbor’s speeding Buick. He had died instantly, without ever being transported to a hospital. The driver, drunk and suffering from chest pains, had been taken to St. Mary’s Hospital.

  Early that morning, Brandon had spent two hours with the now-sober driver and her solicitous and well-paid attorney. Then, from nine o’clock on, he had been in the Monfords’ posh Tucson Estates mobile home listening to Aaron’s devastated widow, Goldie, bewail the end of what she had expected to be their “golden years.”

  Low-key and polite, Brandon had worked patiently, diligently gathering the necessary information despite Goldie’s periodic outbursts: How could Ari do this to her? Why had she let him go out to change the tire right then? Why hadn’t he waited until evening when it was cooler like she had told him? Why had he left without giving her a chance to say good-bye?

  Every time Goldie Monford opened her mouth, Brandon wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her head. He wanted to tell her that she should fall down on her knees and thank God that she was one of the lucky ones and so was Aaron. There was more than one way to be robbed of your golden years. In Walker’s opinion, a quick death was far preferable to a slow one. Slow deaths were the real heartbreakers.

  But Brandon Walker didn’t berate Goldie Monford, and he didn’t stop off to get drunk, either. He left the widow wallowing in her grief and drove straight back to the office. Now, standing in his dingy cubicle, he thumbed through his messages. Those ominous yellow slips of paper weighed down his soul, telling him once more that he was right and Goldie Monford was wrong.

  There were six messages in all. The clerk had nodded sympathetically as she handed them to him. “Your mother,” she said.

  There was no written message, only a check-mark beside “Please call,” but Brandon clearly read between the lines to what hadn’t been said. One way or another, they were all about his father—about what Toby Walker either had or hadn’t done. Brandon had learned to dread his mother’s calls—hourly ones, it seemed at times—giving him constant updates on Brandon’s father’s latest transgressions; checks that had bounced or how Toby had once again lost his way driving home from the store—the same store they’d been going to for ten years, for God’s sake! What was the matter with him? What was he thinking of?

  Brandon felt sorry for both his parents. His father’s erratic behavior seemed to bother his mother far more than it did Toby himself. Louella Walker was someone who prided herself on keeping things “under control.” In this case, it wasn’t working. She vacillated between rage and despair. Sometimes she made excuses, saying that there was nothing at all wrong with Toby, that he just needed a little extra help. If Brandon were any kind of a decent son, he wouldn’t begrudge his father that much. At other times, she raged and railed that Toby was deliberately trying to drive her crazy.

  If there was a middle ground in all this, Brandon wasn’t able to find it. The role of parental peacemaker and crisis manager at home was a painful one. He didn’t want to call home and hear either his mother’s panicked tattling or her self-pitying whine. It was no surprise that Detective Walker hid out in his work. He wanted to be left alone, to go about living his life in a reasonable semblance of peace and quiet, to do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.

  The cubicle was far homier than home was. He would stay late at the office again tonight, doing whatever mundane tasks he could dredge up to do, coming home long after dinner and hopefully long after his parents had gone to bed as well. That way he wouldn’t have to listen either to his mother, who talked more and more, or watch his father, who spoke less and less.

  With a sigh, Brandon dropped the six messages into his trash can. Telling the clerk to hold all his calls, he pulled out the half-completed form he had started filling out earlier that morning, the one that recounted the unexpected death of Aaron Monford. Once, not so long ago, these very same reporting forms would have been anathema to him, something to be avoided entirely or put off as long as possible. Now, they were a refuge.

  There were blanks on the paper—finite, measurable, boxed blanks on sturdy white paper—where clear-cut answers to simple questions were all that was required. He took more care with his penmanship these days, as though neatness and legibility were somehow next to godliness, as though his third-grade teacher might rise up from her grave and look over his shoulder again, checking the slant of each individual letter and measuring the crosses on each t.

  Even as he was doing it, Brandon Walker was smart enough to step back and know why.

  In a world where fathers become children again, writing a report is sometimes the only thing that makes sense.

  2

  WITH A JOLT, the pickup lumbered over the rough cattle guard that marked the reservation boundary. Davy sat up straight, eager to see one of his favorite landmarks—a faded billboard advertising the tribal rodeo. Rita had taken him twice.

  “Can we go again this year, Nana Dahd?” he asked, pointing at the sign. “It’s fun.”

  “We’ll see,” she answered, shifting down while the pickup lurched drunkenly to one side.

  “How come my mom stopped liking rodeos?” Davy asked. “She used to like them, didn’t she?”

  Nana Dahd looked at him shrewdly. “Why do you ask that?”

  The boy shrugged and bit his lip, thinking about the picture that hung in the hallway. Smiling and surprisingly beautiful, his much younger mother was dressed up like a cowgirl with a jeweled tiara overlaying the feathered hatband of her Stetson. Looking at the picture,
it was easy for Davy to imagine that long ago his mother had been a princess—a rich, happy princess. Of course, they weren’t rich now, and his mother didn’t seem to be very happy, either. He wondered sometimes if her unhappiness was all his fault.

  “I saw her boots once,” he added after a pause. “Pretty ones with diamonds on them. Bone and I found them in the back of her closet. They’re gone now.”

  The last was said matter-of-factly, but Rita heard the hurt beneath the words. Rhinestones, she thought to herself, not diamonds, but rhinestones. And yes, the boots were gone now, put away in one of the stacked boxes in the root cellar off the kitchen where Davy wouldn’t see them again and be tempted to ask more questions. Only Olhoni’s impassioned pleading had spared the picture of his mother as a seventeen-year-old rodeo queen from disappearing into the same box.

  Davy lapsed into uncharacteristic silence, his endless stream of questions quieted for the moment. Rita understood that many of the boy’s questions were still too painful for his mother to face or answer, but it was time they were asked.

  “You’ll have to talk to your mother about that,” Rita said.

  Davy sighed. If Nana Dahd wouldn’t tell him, he might never know. “I did ask her,” he said. “She was too busy.”

  The truck’s turn signals hadn’t worked for years. Rita stuck her arm out the open window, signaling for a lefthand turn. Davy sat up straight and peered out the window. “Where are we going now?” he asked.

  “Up this road,” Rita replied, turning onto a rutted, hard-packed dirt track that led off through the underbrush. Barely one car-width wide, the narrow trail wound through thick stands of newly leafed mesquite and brilliantly yellow palo verde, up a slight rise, and then down through a dry, sandy wash. As the tires caught in the hubcap-deep sand, the steering wheel jerked sharply to the left. Rita clung to it with both hands and floorboarded the gas pedal, barely managing to maintain the truck’s forward momentum.

  Engine rumbling, the pickup emerged from the wash. Ahead of them, the road gave little evidence of day-to-day use. Whatever faint tire tracks may have preceded theirs had long since been obliterated by the hoofprints of wandering herds of cattle. A second dip in the road took them through a second dry wash. Beyond that, the faded ghost of another road forked off to the left and meandered along beside an empty streambed through clumps of brittle, sun-dried grass and weeds.

  They drove past a place where the remnants of several adobe houses were gradually melting back into the desert floor. “Did this used to be a village?” Davy asked.

  Rita nodded. “It was called Ko’oi Koshwa.”

  “Rattlesnake Skull?” Davy asked.

  The old woman smiled and nodded. The Anglo child’s quick grasp of Rita’s native language always pleased her.

  “Where did the people go?” he asked.

  “Long ago, the Apaches came here. They surprised the village and destroyed it. They took most of the women and children away, although two—a boy and a girl—escaped. They hid in a cave up there in those hills.”

  Rita pointed to where the base of the mountain Ioligam, Kitt Peak, abruptly thrust itself out of the flat desert floor.

  “After that, people said this was a bad place, a haunted place. No one wanted to live here anymore. When they made the reservation, they left the charco which once belonged to the village outside the boundary.”

  Davy immediately began looking for the charco, a man-made catchbasin used by the Papagos to catch the nutrient-rich summer-rain flash floods. For centuries, water captured in these isolated charcos irrigated Indian fields and watered livestock.

  “But why are we going to a charco, Nana Dahd? I thought we were going to a dance.”

  Rita stopped the truck where a barbed-wire gate barred their way. “To the charco first. Go open the gate,” she said.

  Proud to be assigned such an important task, Davy did as he was told. He stood to one side, holding the gate until Rita had driven through. Once the gate was closed and he was back in the truck, they continued to follow the faint track, stopping at last just outside a shady grove of towering cottonwoods clustered around the man-made banks of an earthen water hole.

  Hard-caked mud, baked shiny by an unrelenting sun and shot through with jagged cracks and the hoofprints of thirsty cattle, was all that remained from the previous summer’s life-sustaining rainstorms. It was June and hot. Both people and livestock hoped the rains would come again soon.

  Davy looked around warily. For some reason he couldn’t explain, he didn’t like this place. “Why are we stopping here?”

  “We have work to do, Olhoni. Come. Bring the rake and shovel.”

  Carrying the wreath and the candle with her, Nana Dahd slid heavily out of the pickup and trudged toward the base of the largest of the cottonwoods.

  The rake and shovel, half again as tall as Davy himself, were unwieldy and difficult for a six-year-old to carry, but he struggled manfully with them, making his way without complaint over the rough track from the truck to where Nana Dahd stood staring down at the ground.

  It wasn’t until Davy reached her side that he saw what she was looking at—a shrine of sorts, although he didn’t know to call it that. In the middle of a circular patch of barren ground stood a small wooden cross. On it hung a faded plastic wreath, and before it sat a smoky glass vase that had once contained a candle. Both cross and glass were framed by a broken circle of smooth white river rocks.

  “What is this, Nana Dahd?” Davy asked. “A grave? Is this a cemetery?”

  He looked up. Nana Dahd’s usually impassive face was awash with emotion. A single tear glistened in the corner of her eye. In all his six years, Davy Ladd had never before seen his beloved Nana Dahd cry. Tears were precious and not to be spilled without good reason. Something must be terribly wrong.

  “Let’s go,” he begged, reaching up and tugging at her hand. “Let’s leave this place. It’s scary here.”

  But Nana Dahd had no intention of leaving. His touch seemed to jar her out of her reverie. Patting his shoulder, she reached into the pocket of her apron and brought out a huge, wrinkled hanky. She blew her nose and wiped her red-rimmed eyes.

  “I’m okay, Olhoni. We will leave, but after, not right now. First we work.”

  Nana Dahd showed Davy how animals had scattered some of the white border stones into the brush. She directed him to find and rearrange as many as he could. Meanwhile, she retrieved the hoe and began scraping the small circle clean of all encroaching blades of grass and weed. As soon as the clearing satisfied her, she carefully removed the faded wreath from the cross and replaced it with the new one.

  It was summer, and the harsh early afternoon sun beat down on them as they worked. Davy rebuilt the stone circle as best he could. Rita nodded with approval as he moved the last piece of border into place.

  “Good,” she said. “Now for the candle.”

  While Davy watched, she placed the new candle before the cross, bracing it around the base with a supporting bank of rocks and dirt.

  “This is to keep the candle from falling over by accident,” she explained. “It would be very bad if our candle started a range fire.”

  Finished at last, she knelt before the cross one last time and examined their handiwork. It was good. She motioned for Davy to join her.

  “Light the candle, Olhoni,” she said gravely, handing him a book of matches.

  Davy scratched his head in exasperation. How could grown-ups be so stupid? “But, Nana Dahd,” he objected. “It isn’t even dark yet. Why do we need a candle?”

  “The light is for the spirits, Olhoni,” she told him. “It’s not for us.”

  Davy had used matches a few other times, but always in the house, never outside. It took three sputtering attempts before his small fingers managed to strike a match and keep it burning long enough to touch the flame to the wick of the candle. Nana Dahd watched patiently and without criticism, allowing the child to learn for himself of the need to shelter the match’s fa
ltering flame from unexpected breezes.

  At last the wick caught fire. Davy glanced at Nana Dahd to see what he should do next. When she bowed her head, closed her eyes, and crossed herself, Davy did the same, listening in rapt silence while the old woman prayed.

  To most Anglos that prayer, murmured softly in guttural Papago, would have been incomprehensible, but not to Davy, not to a child whose first spoken word, uttered almost five years earlier, had been a gleeful shout of “gogs”—Papago for dog—on the day Nana Dahd brought home an ungainly, scrawny puppy. She called the pup “Oh’o,” Papago for “Bone.”

  From that small beginning, Davy had learned other Indian words at the same time he learned the English ones. He spoke his godmother’s native language with almost the same ease as his mother’s English.

  Listening now, he heard Nana Dahd’s prayer, a fervent one, for the immortal soul of someone Davy didn’t know, someone named Gina. The child listened quietly, attentively. When the prayer was finished, the old woman discovered that her legs and feet were painfully swollen. She had to ask Davy to untie her shoes and help her to her feet.

  Once standing, Rita reached over and picked up the rake and hoe. “I’ll take these. Get the old wreath, Olhoni. If we leave it here, hungry cattle may try to eat it.”

  He gathered the wreath and the empty candle glass, then followed the limping woman to the truck, straggling a few thoughtful paces behind her.

  Only then, as they walked, did he ask the question. “Who’s Gina, Nana Dahd?”

  “My granddaughter, Olhoni. She died around here.”

  Surprised, Davy paused and looked back at the grove of trees. “Here?”

  Rita nodded. “Seven years ago today. Each year, on the anniversary, I decorate her cross to let her know she’s not forgotten.”