by J. A. Jance
And twenty years later, Diana Lee Cooper Ladd pushed aside her typewriter, put her head down in her arms, and cried because it wasn’t worth it.
What good had it done to escape her ignorant father, to flee the brutal prison that had been her home in Joseph, Oregon? There was still no joy in her life. No joy at all.
Rita carefully maneuvered the truck down the winding road. It was a thirty-minute, twelve-mile drive, most of it with the road perched precariously on the steep flank of the mountain. She kept the truck in low gear to save the brakes. While Rita drove, Davy, more quiet than usual, hunkered down in his corner of the seat.
“What is it, Olhoni?” Rita asked.
“Will I be an Indian when I grow up?”
His question mirrored her own concern, but she tried to laugh it off. “You already are,” she told him.
“Really?” He brightened at once. “What kind? Papago, like you?”
Rita shook her head. “Big Toe,” she said, smiling to herself because she knew the old joke would be new to Davy.
“I never heard of Big Toe Indians,” he countered. “Where are they from?”
“All over,” she answered.
“Are you sure?”
“They’re people with so little Indian blood that the only thing Indian about them is their big toe.”
“You’re teasing me,” he said, pouting.
She nodded. “That’s one of the reasons I’itoi chose us for his people. We tease and laugh and make jokes. So does he.”
“But I still want to be an Indian,” Davy insisted.
At the bottom of the mountain, the road straightened abruptly, dropping through the foothills on a stretch of reservation-owned open range.
Rita had driven on open range all her life, and she wasn’t driving fast. They were nearing the junction with Highway 86 when a startled steer came crashing up onto the roadway out of a dry wash. With no warning, there was barely enough time to react. Rita jammed on the brakes. The pickup swerved to one side, avoiding the animal by inches, but the right rear tire caught in the soft sand of the shoulder.
The GMC rolled over onto its side and then rolled again, end over end, coming to rest lying on its roof in the other lane, its hood facing in the wrong direction. Without knowing precisely what had happened or how he got there, Davy found himself standing upright in the middle of the road.
He couldn’t see anything. There was a terrible shrieking noise ringing in his ears, and another noise as well—a car’s horn, honking one long, terrible wail.
Davy gasped for breath and realized that the first sound came from him—his own voice screaming. He put his hands to his face and brought them away bloody, but he could see again, could see the dust still flying, the tires still spinning uselessly in the air. The engine was still running, and the horn wouldn’t quit. The blaring noise seemed to be all around him, coming up out of the desert floor, raining down on him from the very sky itself.
“Nana Dahd,” he shouted. “Where are you? Are you all right?”
There was no answer, only the horn—the terrible horn. He scrambled over to the pickup and peered inside. Nana Dahd lay with her body crushed against the steering wheel, which jutted far into the cab. Blood gushed from a gaping wound on her left hand.
“Nana Dahd!” Davy shouted again, but she didn’t hear him, didn’t stir.
Just then a pair of strong hands gripped his shoulders and dragged him away from the truck. Davy looked up to see that an Anglo man, a stranger, was holding him. He fought the hands with all his might, kicking and screaming, “Let me go! Let me go!” But the man held him fast.
A second man was there now, crawling on his hands and knees, peering into the truck. He reached inside across Nana Dahd’s still body and switched off the engine, then he tugged at some wires under the dash. The wailing horn was instantly stilled, and the sudden silence was deafening.
“Can we get her out, Joe?”
The man by the truck shook his head. “I don’t think so. She’s pinned. We’ve got to get a tourniquet on this hand, then find some help. How far back to that little trading post?”
“Three Points? A long way. What about the other direction, toward Sells?”
“Up there!” Davy told them, pointing back up the mountain, but the men didn’t hear him. After all, he was only a little kid. What did he know?
“You stay with her,” one man was saying to the other, letting Davy go and heading back toward his car, a shiny red Grand Prix. The two men had been traveling past the turnoff on the highway just in time to see the GMC perform its spectacular series of acrobatics.
One of the two men started toward the car, but Davy ran after him, attaching himself to the man’s knee like a stubborn cocklebur. The force of his tackle almost brought both of them down.
“Up there!” Davy insisted desperately. “We’ve got to go up there!”
“Let go, kid. Don’t waste time.”
“But there’s an ambulance up there. I know. I saw it!”
Finally, the boy’s words penetrated. “An ambulance? On the mountain?”
“Yes. Please.”
“No shit! I’m going, but you stay here. You’re hurt, too.”
Beating him off with a club was all that would have kept Davy Ladd from clambering into the Grand Prix. He sat in the front seat, not crying but shaking silently, his bloody face pressed to the inside of the windshield as the car raced up the steep mountain road, straightening the curves, clinging to the pavement on the outside edges.
At one point, the man tossed him a white handkerchief. “Christ, kid, use this, will you? You’re getting blood all over my car.”
When they reached the top of the mountain, the car screeched to a stop in the parking lot.
“Which way?”
Wordlessly, Davy pointed toward the garage. The door was closed, the now-clean ambulance inside and invisible. The man raced toward it while Davy scrambled out of the car and ran toward the gift shop. It was after four and the place was closed, but Davy pounded on the side door, the one Nana Dahd had used earlier. When Edwina Galvan finally opened it, he flung himself at her.
“It’s Nana Dahd! You’ve got to help her. She’s hurt bad.”
“What happened?”
The dam broke. Suddenly, Davy Ladd was sobbing so badly he could barely talk. “A cow,” he mumbled. “A cow in the road.”
“Where?” Edwina demanded, but he didn’t answer. She grabbed his shoulders and shook him. “Where did it happen?”
“Down on the flat. Almost to the highway.”
Just then a piercing alarm sounded all over the complex at the top of the mountain. The man from the Grand Prix dashed out of the garage followed by the ambulance. Two other men appeared from nowhere and ran for the ambulance.
“It’s at the bottom of the mountain,” one of them shouted back at Edwina. “Radio Sells for another ambulance.”
Edwina nodded and turned to go back inside. Holding Davy’s hand, she intended to take him with her, but he pulled free and darted away, climbing back into the front seat of the Grand Prix just as it started out of the parking lot behind the speeding ambulance.
No matter what, Davy Ladd’s place was with Nana Dahd.
The pain was bigger than she was and hotter than the sun. It burned through her, seared through her, until she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe.
Where’s Olhoni? she wondered. She had called for him, but he didn’t answer. Where was he? Was he dead? No. That was impossible. That couldn’t be, but where was he?
She asked the man, a man who was there trying to talk to her through the mangled window of the truck, but she could no longer translate the funny Mil-gahn words. The only words that made sense to her now were those of her childhood, the Papago ones. The man shook his head helplessly. He didn’t understand, either.
“Where is Olhoni?” she murmured again and again. “Where is my bald-headed baby?”
There were other cars now, other people. Rita could hea
r them, could see feet where faces ought to be. Were they upside down or was she? What had happened? And where was Olhoni?
And then the pain. The pain that was bigger than she was grew even larger. It was a pain bigger than the stars and the sky and the universe. The pain was everything.
She heard a noise and realized that someone had cut a hole in the door of the truck. Her body was flowing out through that hole—her body and her blood.
They were moving her now, moving her out onto the ground and strapping her down to a board or a stretcher of some kind. That was when she started to fight them. The heavy white strap locked her to the board just as another strap long ago had once locked her to a bed.
She fought them like a smart cow fights when she knows she’s being led to the slaughter. The pain was blinding, but she fought through it, fought beyond it. She might have won, too, but suddenly Olhoni was there, kneeling at her side, pleading with her to be still.
“Let them help you, Nana Dahd,” he begged. “Please let them help you.”
She looked up then and saw that beyond Olhoni some of the other faces swarming above her were Indian faces. She wondered where they’d come from, or if they had been there all the time.
A few of the men were trying to pick up the stretcher with her on it. She could tell from the looks on their faces that they thought she was too heavy. For some reason, this seemed funny to her, but when she tried to laugh, another searing pain shot through her.
One of the men tried to pry Davy away from her hand, but he clung to her and refused to budge.
“Let him come,” one of the attendants said. “He’s hurt, too.”
Could that be? Olhoni hurt? Rita tried to look at him, to see what was wrong, but she blacked out then. The next thing she knew, she was riding in the ambulance, or rather on top of it. Over it somehow. She could see the two attendants huddled over a strangely familiar figure lying flat on a stretcher.
Olhoni was sitting off to one side. Rita called to him, but he didn’t look up, didn’t hear her. His eyes never left the face of the old woman on the stretcher. There was a bottle with some kind of liquid in it hanging above her. A plastic tube led from the bottle to a needle pressed into the flesh of the woman’s arm.
Suddenly, there was a flurry of activity. “We’re losing her! We’re losing her!” one of the attendants shouted.
Ruthlessly, the other man shoved Olhoni aside, pushing him roughly up into the front seat. The boy didn’t protest. He went where he was told and sat there, with his hands clutching the dashboard, staring out the window in front of him.
And that was when Rita saw the buzzards, three of them, sitting in a row on three separate telephone poles, their huge wings outstretched to collect the last warming rays of sunshine. Those buzzards, their heads still naked and bloody after I’itoi scalped them in punishment for betraying him, sat there soaking up the sun on their coal-black living wing tips.
The buzzards were alive and wanted to be alive. Suddenly, so did Rita. Olhoni still needed her. I’itoi did not.
Clawing her way, hand over hand, Rita scrambled down from the roof of the moving vehicle, fought her way back inside the ambulance until she stood peering curiously down at the shrunken form still strapped to the stretcher. For some time, she gazed dispassionately at the body, amazed by how terribly ancient that old woman seemed, by how worn and wrinkled and used-up she was, but not yet ready to be dead.
With a terrifying jolt, the electrical current passed through her body, hammering her heart awake once more, and she was home.
Andrew Carlisle took his time coming down the trail. He searched back and forth, combing the mountainside until he found the two empty beer cans they had dropped on the way up. No sense in leaving a set of identifiable fingerprints. He knew from what he’d learned in Florence that the chances of homicide cops finding a “stranger” assailant were slim as long as the stranger was reasonably smart and played it cool.
The waning afternoon sun scorched the ground around him. No one had yet ventured into the deserted rest-area parking lot by the time he returned to his victim’s car. He helped himself to another beer—still cold, thank God—and started the Toyota. He turned off the air-conditioning and drove down the freeway with the windows open, letting the hot desert air flow freely over his body. It was outside air. He was free.
Fortunately, there was plenty of gas in the car, so he didn’t have to stop before he got to Phoenix. He drove straight to the Park Central Mall in Phoenix proper and parked in an empty corner of the lot. There, as afternoon turned to evening, he went through the woman’s purse and removed all the cash, over two hundred dollars’ worth. Beneath the seat he discovered a gun, a Llama .380 automatic. He had planned to take nothing that belonged to his victim, nothing that could tie him back to her, but the weapon was more temptation than he could resist. Trying to purchase a weapon if he wanted one later might cause people to ask questions. So he pocketed the gun.
Carefully, systematically, he went over every surface in the vehicle, wiping it clean of prints. Then he did the same to the beer cans and jewelry before he took them to a nearby trash can. The clothing he ditched in another can, this one at Thomas Mall on his way to the airport.
Sky Harbor was his last stop. Once there, he pulled into the long-term lot and took a ticket. One last time he wiped down everything he remembered touching since Park Mall—the door handle, steering wheel, gearshift, window knob, and keys. Then, placing the newly wiped keys back in the ignition, he got out of the car and walked away.
It was dark by then and much cooler. In the hubbub and hurry of the airport, no one noticed him walk away. It would be a five-mile hike to his mother’s new house in Tempe, but he wasn’t afraid of walking. In fact, walking that far would be a real treat.
4
AROUND SEVEN, BRANDON Walker emerged from his cubicle and ventured down the hallway hoping to bum a cigarette and some company from Hank Maddern in Dispatch.
“Who knows…” Brandon began by way of greeting, walking up behind the dispatcher’s back.
“…what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” Maddern finished without turning. Both men laughed.
The intro to the old radio show The Shadow was a private in-crowd joke, shared among the grunts of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Professional police officers called themselves Shadows to differentiate between themselves and the political hacks who, with plum appointments, held most key jobs.
Sheriff DuShane, reelected over and over by comfortable margins, had himself one hell of a political machine, to say nothing of a lucrative handle on graft and corruption. One outraged deputy had printed up and distributed a bumper sticker that said, SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SHERIFF. GET A MASSAGE. He had been all too right; he was also no longer a deputy.
DuShane may have been crooked, but he was also nobody’s fool. He knew the value and necessity of real cops to do the real jobs. That’s where the Shadows came in. They did all the work, got none of the glory, and most of them wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Hank Maddern, who had reigned supreme in Dispatch for more than ten years, held the dubious honor of being the most senior Shadow. He worked nights because he preferred working nights.
“Hey, Hank, got a smoke?” Brandon asked.
Maddern pulled a crumpled, almost-empty pack from his breast pocket and tossed it across the counter. “Didn’t quit smoking, just quit buying?”
“I’ll even up eventually,” Brandon said, shaking out the next-to-last cigarette.
“Right. You working on a case or hiding out?” Hank Maddern knew some of what went on in Brandon Walker’s home life because he often fielded Louella Walker’s calls.
“Hiding out,” Brandon admitted, breathing the smoke into his lungs. “Too bad it’s so quiet.”
“Give it time. It’s Friday. Things’ll heat up.”
As if on cue, the switchboard buzzed, and Maddern picked up the line. Brandon, with the cigarette dangling almost forgotten between his
fingers, lounged against the counter. He gazed off into space, letting his mind go blank. He wasn’t ready to go back to his cubicle, and he sure as hell wasn’t ready to go home.
Maddern, listening intently on his headset, made a series of quick notes. “What was that name again? L-A-D-D, first name Diana?”
Immediately, Brandon Walker’s attention was riveted on Maddern. Even after six years, Diana Ladd’s name was one he remembered all too well. What was going on with her now?
“The boy’s name is David,” Maddern continued. “Yeah, I’ve got that, and you’re Dr. Rosemead? Repeat that number, Dr. Rosemead, and the address, too.”
Maddern reviewed his notes as the doctor spoke, verifying the information he had already been given.
“Sure,” he said. “I understand, it’s not life-threatening, but you’ve got to talk to the mother. Right. We’ll get someone on it right away. You bet. No problem.”
He dropped the line and reached for the duty roster, running his finger down the list, checking the availability of cars and deputies.
“What’s going on?” Brandon asked.
“Car accident. Out on the reservation. A kid’s been hurt, but not seriously. Needs a few stitches is all. Unfortunately, they took him out to the Indian Health Service in Sells. The doc there can’t lift a finger because the kid’s an Anglo. They’ve tried reaching the mother by phone. Ma Bell says the line’s off hook.”
“I’ll go,” Brandon Walker offered at once.
“You? How come? You’re Homicide. I already told you, the kid’s not hurt bad.”
“I’ll go,” Walker insisted.
“You really don’t want to go home, do you? But don’t bother with this. I’ve got a car out by Gates Pass right now.”
“Gates Pass?” Brandon said. “Doesn’t she still live in Topawa?”
Maddern did a double take. “You know the lady?”
Walker nodded grimly. “From years ago.”
“If you want to take her the bad news, then, be my guest,” Maddern continued. “But the address they gave me doesn’t say Topawa. It’s out by Gates Pass somewhere. The telephone number is a Tucson exchange.”