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

by J. A. Jance

  The dispatcher scribbled the phone number and address on another slip of paper and handed it over to Brandon just as the switchboard lit up again. Maddern turned to answer it, waving Brandon away. “Later,” he said.

  Brandon Walker didn’t return to his cubicle. Instead, he hurried directly out to the parking lot where his unmarked Ford Galaxy waited. It was almost dark, but the temperature inside the closed vehicle was still unbearably hot. Before leaving the lot, Walker rolled down all the windows. Switching on the air-conditioning was pointless since it didn’t work. Repairs on grunts’ cars got shunted to the bottom of the priority list when it came to departmental mechanics.

  The air conditioner was out of order, but the high-output, police-pursuit engine roared to life as soon as Walker turned the key in the ignition. He peeled out of the parking lot in a hail of loose gravel and headed for Gates Pass, driving on automatic, his mind occupied elsewhere.

  Diana Ladd. It had to be her. It didn’t seem possible that there would be two women in town by that same name. She had made a big impression on him. How long ago was it? June? Jesus, it had to be almost seven years ago since the first time he saw her. He had forgotten about her between times—had forced himself to forget because some things are too painful to remember.

  When had she moved to town? Not town exactly. The address on Gates Pass Road indicated an almost wilderness area well outside Tucson’s city limits. She would have had more company in the Teachers’ Compound in Topawa, living in the shabby mobile home where he had first met her. Had she stopped teaching on the reservation then? Maybe she had taken a job with District Number One in Tucson. God, she’d been pretty. Even six months pregnant she’d been pretty. And defiant.

  He remembered the last time he saw her as though it were yesterday. They were standing in the crowded hallway of the Pima County Courthouse after the judge announced Andrew Carlisle’s plea-bargaining agreement. The old Indian lady—what was her name?—was sitting on a bench off to the side. Diana Ladd came up to him, grasping his sleeve with one hand while the other rested on her bulging belly. He avoided her gaze, not wanting to see the betrayal and hurt in her eyes, but he couldn’t evade the accusation in her voice.

  “How could you let them do it?” she demanded, outraged, indignant. “How could you let them get away with it?”

  “There was nothing I could do,” he answered lamely. “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “We all have choices,” she’d returned icily.

  Drawing herself stiffly erect, she marched away from him, walking with the awkward dignity of the profoundly pregnant. She went straight to the bench and helped the old Indian lady to her feet. The two women walked past him, the younger carefully leading the elder, as though the old woman were blind or crippled or both.

  And Brandon Walker, left alone in the midst of a milling crowd, looked after them and wondered what he could have done differently. Of course, that was years ago now. He was no longer as green, as naive. He knew now that Diana Ladd had probably been right all along. There were things he could have done, arms he could have twisted, debts he could have called that might have made a difference.

  A golden sliver of moon peeked over the jagged-toothed canyon as he drove the winding road to Gates Pass. He had no delusions that Diana Ladd would appreciate his coming to find her and tell her the news. Hearing about the accident from someone she knew, even someone she didn’t like, would be less hurtful than hearing it from a complete stranger.

  In his gut, he understood that, but Brandon Walker wasn’t looking forward to the meeting. He knew Diana Ladd hadn’t forgiven him for what had happened, and that was no surprise. He hadn’t forgiven himself.

  At that time, long ago, Rattlesnake’s bite had no poison. The children laughed at him and played with him and tossed him in the air. Sometimes, for a joke, they would pull out all his teeth. This made Ko’oi, Rattlesnake, very unhappy.

  One day Ko’oi went crying to First Born. “The children are always teasing me and making me miserable. Please change me so I can go live somewhere else and be happy.”

  First Born had already changed many of the animals, so he took Rattlesnake, pulled out all his teeth, and threw them away. They fell in the desert, and overnight grew into the mountains we call Ko’oi Tahtami, or Rattlesnake’s Tooth.

  In the morning, First Born gathered up a few small, sharp rocks from these mountains and threw them into some water. They grew sharp and white and long, just the way rattlesnake teeth are today. First Born gave them to Rattlesnake and said to him, “Here. Now the children will no longer torment you, but from this day on, you will have no friends. You must crawl on your belly and live alone. If anything comes near you, you must bite it and kill it.”

  And that, nawoj, my Friend, is the story of how Ko’oi, Rattlesnake, got his teeth.

  In a lifetime of serial matrimony, Myrna Louise Spaulding had worked her way through a list of last names far too numerous to remember. Like overly zealous Chicago voters, she cast her ballot in favor of marriage, voting early and often. She always married for love, never for money. She always divorced for the same reason—true love—which may have been true at the time but never lasted long. Myrna Louise wasn’t a risk-taker. She never slipped one wedding band off her much-used ring finger without having a pretty good replacement prospect lined up and waiting in the wings.

  Her son, Andrew Carlisle, found his mother’s peculiar penchant disturbing at first, humorous later, and ultimately boring. In his opinion, if Myrna Louise had been any good at the game, she would have seen to it that she picked up a few good pieces of change here and there along the way. But no. With one minor exception, she always targeted bums and ne’er-do-wells who were far worse off mentally and financially than she was.

  Her last husband, Jake Spaulding—who also happened to be her late husband—had managed to roll over and die before the divorce was final. Much to her stepchildren’s dismay, Jake died without first revising his will. He left Myrna Louise in sole possession of the little family house on Weber Drive.

  As a neighborhood, Weber Drive didn’t have much to recommend it, unless you liked the multicolored jack-in-the-box on the corner, but the house constituted a roof over Myrna Louise’s head for a change. On her meager pension and with the widow’s mite she had lucked into after Jake Spaulding’s timely death, she figured she’d barely be able to cover both taxes and utilities.

  A bit down-at-the-heels, Weber Drive still managed to be respectable enough, and even a bit self-righteous. Myrna Louise had made tentative overtures of friendship toward some of the neighbors. She was determined to fit in here, to really belong someplace at last. Her son’s unexpected arrival was a definite fly in the ointment. Those very same neighbors might well pull the welcome mat right out from under the mother of an ex-con.

  “Why, what in the world are you doing here?” a stunned Myrna Louise demanded, covering her dismay as best she could when the opened door revealed her son waiting on her doorstep.

  “I came to see my mama,” he said with a smile. “I thought you’d be glad to see me after all this time.”

  “Oh, I am. Of course I am. Come in. Come in here right now. But why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”

  “Because I didn’t know, not for sure, anyway. They like to keep people guessing until the very last minute. It makes for better control.”

  She dragged Andrew into the living room and stood looking fuzzily up at him. Myrna Louise should have taken to wearing glasses years before, but she usually couldn’t afford it, and besides, she was far too vain. A driver’s license might have forced her into glasses earlier, but she’d never owned a car, not until now. Jake’s car was still out in the garage. She planned to sell it if money ever got really tight.

  “So are you out on parole, or what?” she asked petulantly.

  “I’m out period, Mama. Free as a bird.”

  “Good,” she said. She paused uncertainly. “Andrew, I’d really like it if the neighbors
didn’t find out. About where you’ve been, I mean. Not that I’m ashamed or anything, it’s just that it’d be easier…”

  “I’m still your son,” he began.

  “Don’t let’s be difficult. You see, you’ve been having all that mail sent here, all those things for Phil Wharton, whoever he is. I’ve been saving them, keeping them here for you just like you said. Who is he anyway, a friend of yours or what?”

  “It’s a pen name, Mama. I couldn’t very well send things out with my own name on them, now could I.”

  “Thank goodness,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, that’s sort of what I’ve been pretending. That you were him, or at least that Phil Wharton was my son.”

  “You’ve been telling your friends that I’m Phil?”

  Myrna Louise cringed at the hard edge of anger in his voice. “I didn’t mean any harm, Andrew. One of the ladies was here when the mail came one day. She saw it on the table and asked about it. I told her that you’re a journalist who’s been out of the country working on assignment and that you’d be home soon.”

  “So you’ve lied to them?”

  “Please, Andrew, I…”

  Andrew had her dead to rights, but the idea of his mother making up that kind of whopper was really pretty funny. He decided to let her off the hook. After all, it was his first night home.

  “It’s okay, Mama. The name’s Phil, remember?”

  Breathing a sigh of relief, Myrna Louise smiled gratefully. He was going to go along with it and not embarrass her in front of her friends. She wouldn’t be expelled from the morning coffee break after all.

  At once she switched into full motherly mode. “Have you had any dinner? Are you hungry?”

  Sure he was hungry. Why wouldn’t he be hungry? It had been a busy day, a trying day. Besides, hiking up and down mountains always gives a man one hell of an appetite.

  Diana waited until the sun went down before she tried going up on the roof to work on the cooler. No wonder people called them swamp coolers. The thick, musty odor was unmistakable, gagging. Diana climbed up the ladder armed with a bottle of PineSol. She raised one side of the cooler and poured several glugs of powerful disinfectant into the water. The oily, piny scent wasn’t a big improvement, but it helped.

  After returning the side of the cooler to its proper position, Diana stood for a few moments on the flat, graveled roof to survey her domain. The wild and forbidding front yard remained much as it had been when she first bought the place. An overgrown thicket of head-high prickly pear cast bizarre, donkey-eared shadows in the frail moonlight. She had spent far more effort in back, where both yard and patio were surrounded by a massive six-foot-high rock wall. The end result was almost a fortress. Inside that barrier, she felt safe and protected.

  The house and outbuildings, sturdily constructed in the early twentieth century and lovingly remodeled during the twenties, had originally belonged to one of Pima County’s pioneer families. When family fortunes fell on hard times and when surviving family members dwindled to only one dotty eighty-year-old lady, most of the land, with the exception of the house, cook shack, and barn, had been deeded over to the county as payment for back taxes. That had been during the late forties. The old lady, who wasn’t expected to live much longer anyway, had been allowed lifetime tenancy in the house, with her estate authorized to sell off the remainder after her death.

  The old lady confounded all predictions and lived to a ripe 101, refusing to leave the walled confines of the compound until the very end, but letting the place fall to wrack and ruin around her. She died, and the wreckage went up for sale at almost the same time Gary Ladd’s life-insurance proceeds came into Diana’s hands.

  After spending her entire childhood in housing tied to her father’s job, Diana Ladd wanted desperately to escape the mobile home in the Topawa Teachers’ Compound housing, to bring her baby home to a house that belonged to her rather than to her employer. She jumped at the chance to buy the derelict old house.

  The realtor had done his best to dissuade her, patiently pointing out all the things that were wrong with the place. It was full of garbage—of dead bread wrappers and empty tin cans and layers of old newspapers six feet deep. The plaster was falling off the lath in places, windows were cracked and broken, the roof leaked, and the toilet in the only bathroom had quit working. Throughout the house, failing wiring was a nightmare of jury-rigged repairs, but Diana Ladd was not to be deterred. She bought the place, warts and all, and she and Rita Antone set about fixing it up as best they could.

  Six years later, the remodel was stalled for lack of money. To solve that problem, Diana had temporarily set aside home-improvement projects in favor of finishing her book. Writing it was pure speculation, of course. She had made some preliminary and reasonably favorable inquiries, but the book wasn’t sold yet. She hoped that when she did sign a contract, she’d be able to hire a contractor to complete some of the heavier work.

  Standing on the roof, she watched the approach of an oncoming pair of headlights on the road overhead. Approaching her driveway, the vehicle slowed to a crawl and the turn signals came on. As the unfamiliar car turned off the blacktop, Diana Ladd suffered a momentary panic. For years, she had steeled herself against the possibility of Andrew Carlisle’s coming after her in the same way she had prepared herself for the possibility of a snakebite. With Carlisle, as with the neighborhood’s indigenous snakes, you assumed a certain amount of risk and did what you could to protect yourself.

  Rattlesnakes rattle a warning before they strike, and so had Andrew Carlisle. The last time she had seen the man in the hallway at the courthouse, he had mouthed a silent threat at her when his accompanying deputy wasn’t looking. “I’ll be back,” his lips had said noiselessly.

  Over the years, she had learned to live with that threat, treating it seriously but keeping her fear firmly in the background of her consciousness. Most of the time, anyway, but the arrival of unfamiliar cars always brought it to the forefront.

  The tires bounced down the rough, rocky road, and the headlights caught her in a piercing beam of light, blinding her, trapping her silhouetted against the night sky. She stood there paralyzed and vulnerable, while fear rose like bile in her throat.

  From near the base of the ladder, she heard Bone’s low-throated warning growl. The urgency of the sound prompted her to action, jolted her out of her panic. The headlights moved away. In sudden pitch darkness, she scrambled clumsily toward the ladder.

  “Bone,” she called softly, hoping to reach the ground in time to catch the dog’s collar and keep him with her, but the tall, gangly hound didn’t wait. Still growling, he raced to where the rocky, six-foot wall with its wooden gate intersected the corner of the house. The wall would have stopped most dogs cold, but not the Bone, a dog with the size and agility of a small mountain goat. Bounding from rock to rock, he scrambled up several outcroppings to the top, then flung himself off the other side.

  As the car pulled to a stop in the front drive, the dog hurled himself out of the darkness toward the car, lunging like a ferocious, tooth-filled shadow at the front driver’s side tire. Using the dog’s attack as cover, Diana slipped into the house unnoticed. She was already in the living room when the trapped driver laid on the horn.

  Cranking open the side panel of the front window, she called, “Who is it?”

  The driver must have rolled down his window slightly, because the dog left off attacking the tire and reared up on his hind legs at the side of the car, barking ferociously.

  “Call off this goddamned mutt before he breaks my window!” an outraged voice demanded.

  “Who is it?” Diana insisted.

  “Detective Walker,” the voice answered. “Now call off the dog, Diana. I’ve got to talk to you.”

  As soon as she heard the name, Diana recognized Brandon Walker’s voice. A sudden whirlwind of memory brought the buried history back, all of it, robbing her of breath, leaving her shaken,
unable to speak.

  His voice softened. “Diana, please. Call off the dog.”

  She took a deep breath and hurried to the door. “Oh’o. Ihab,” she ordered in Papago, stepping out onto the porch. “Bone. Here.”

  With a single whined objection and a warning glare over his shoulder at the intruding car, the dog went to her at once and lay down at her feet.

  Brandon Walker switched off the headlights and the engine. Cautiously, he opened the door, peering warily at the woman and dog waiting on the lighted porch.

  “Are you sure it’s all right? Shouldn’t you tie him up or something? That dog’s a menace.”

  “Bone’s all right,” she returned, making no move to restrain the animal. “Why are you here? What do you want?”

  “I’ve got to talk to you, Diana. There’s been an accident.”

  “An accident? Where? Who?”

  “Out on the reservation. Your son David’s been hurt. Not bad, but…”

  “Davy? Oh, my God. Where is he? What’s happened?”

  Hearing the alarm in Diana’s voice, the dog rose once more to his feet with another threatening growl. Diana grabbed Bone’s collar and shoved him into the house, closing the door behind him.

  With the dog safely locked away, Brandon Walker moved closer. “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” he reassured her quickly, “but the Indian Health Service doctor can’t do anything about either treating him or letting him go until they talk to you. Your phone isn’t working.”

  Diana’s hand went to her throat. She looked stricken. “I forgot to put it back on the hook when I quit working.” She started toward the house, leaving him standing there.

  “Wait. Where are you going?”

  “To call the hospital and get my car keys,” she said. Two minutes later, she emerged from the house and headed toward her car, a tiny white Honda.