by J. A. Jance
“Why don’t you let me drive,” Brandon offered, motioning toward the far more powerful Galaxy. “We’ll make better time, especially if we use the lights.”
She wavered for a moment, vacillating between driving herself and accepting his offer of help.
“What did the doctor say?” Brandon pressed.
“That Davy will have to go on into Tucson for stitches.”
“See there? Let me drive. That way, you can take care of the boy.”
The detective’s good sense overcame Diana Ladd’s stubborn independence. Without another word, she headed for his car.
Later, as the Ford roared down the highway, lights flashing overhead, Diana noticed she was still holding the partially full bottle of PineSol. She clearly remembered putting it down when she used the phone, but in her frantic rush to leave the house, she must have unconsciously picked it up again. As unobtrusively as possible, she slipped the offending bottle out of sight under the seat of the speeding Galaxy. Diana Ladd was upset, and she didn’t want the detective to realize exactly how upset she was.
Fat Crack Ortiz owned the only gas station in Sells. He also owned the only tow truck. Consequently, he was the first member of Rita Antone’s family to be notified of the accident on Kitt Peak Road.
After towing the demolished Jimmy back to the station, he hurried straight to the hospital. One of a handful of Christian Scientists on the reservation, Fat Crack subscribed to neither medical doctors nor medicine men, but he was prepared to be open-minded as far as other people’s beliefs were concerned.
As soon as he turned up in the emergency-room lobby, one of the nurses, Effie Joaquin, recognized him. “Is it serious?” he asked.
Effie nodded. “It sure is. She’s ruptured her spleen and broken some ribs and one arm. There may be other internal injuries as well. She went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance. Do you want to see her before she goes into surgery?”
“If I can,” Fat Crack said.
The nurse ushered him into the emergency room. Rita, looking pale and shrunken, lay on a gurney with an IV bag draining into her flaccid right arm. The other arm was swathed in bulky, bloody bandages. He walked over to the gurney and bent close to Rita’s head.
“Ni-thahth?” he whispered gently in her ear, speaking the traditional words for his mother’s elder sister.
Her eyes fluttered open, darted around wildly for a moment, then settled on his face. “Ni-mad,” she returned. “Nephew.”
“I will pray for you,” he said, reaching out and touching her grasping fingers, feeling his own power flowing into her. His auntie did not believe according to his lights, but Fat Crack’s faith was strong enough for both of them.
“Olhoni,” she whispered.
Her nephew had not heard the name before. At first he didn’t understand what she was saying. He thought she was still worried about the spooked steer that had caused the accident.
“He’s fine,” Fat Crack reassured her. “You didn’t hit him at all.”
Rita shook her head impatiently and wet her parched lips. “The boy,” she said. “Davy. He’s outside. Stay with him. Until his mother comes.”
“Sure, Ni-thahth,” he told her. “I will see that he isn’t left alone.”
Rita’s eyes closed then as Effie came to get the gurney. “The operating room is ready now,” she said. “You’ll have to wait outside.”
“Yes,” Fat Crack said. “I will wait.”
Myrna Louise fixed her son a quick dinner of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast, washed down with a tumbler of her own rotgut vodka, then she showed him into the tiny second bedroom.
“Jake’s clothes are still in the closet there,” she said. “I haven’t gotten around to calling Goodwill to come pick them up. Maybe some of it will fit.”
Andrew Carlisle waited until his mother left the room and closed the door behind her before he hurried over to the bed. He groaned with disappointment. Three large self-addressed envelopes lay there on the chenille bedspread—manuscript-sized envelopes—each address, written in his own clear hand, said Mr. Philip Wharton.
Damn! So none of the three so-called literary agents had had balls enough to take it. He ripped open the envelopes one by one. A copy of his manuscript, A Less Than Noble Savage, was in each, along with three separate form letters saying thanks, but no thanks. For obvious reasons, he hadn’t used his old agent, but these jerks were treating him like a rank amateur.
Damn them all straight to hell anyway! Who the hell did they think they were, turning him down with nothing more than a form letter? Not even a personal note? They didn’t know what they were missing—who they were missing—but he’d show them.
Hands trembling with suppressed rage, he tore each of the rejection slips into tiny pieces and threw the resulting confetti into the garbage. Those stupid bastards didn’t know good writing when they saw it. They were too busy selling the public on half-baked, vapid fantasy/mysteries written by limp-wristed creeps who never once bloodied their own hands.
What had Andrew Carlisle always drummed into his students’ heads? Write what you know. If you want to know how it feels to be a murderer, try choking the life out of something and see how hard it is, how much effort it takes, and see how you feel about it afterward.
He felt a sudden stirring in his groin as he remembered Margaret and how it had felt to drain the life out of her. He knew now, from going through her purse and car, that the blonde’s name was Margaret, Margaret Danielson—Margie for short.
The pulsing urge came on him suddenly. He forced himself to undress and lie on the bed and just think about her. He allowed himself to masturbate until he found release, because it was far too soon for him to do anything else.
Rita opened her eyes. A brilliant white light was shining above her. Around the periphery of her vision, several people in green caps and face masks stood over her. All she could see were eyes—eyes and a few anxious frowns, no one she recognized, no one she knew.
A man leaned over her. She smelled the sharp, pungent odor of aftershave. He patted her arm gently. “It’s going to be fine, Rita. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Dr. Rosemead meant his reassuring touch and softly uttered words to offer his patient some comfort. They had exactly the opposite effect. She shrank away from his fingers, her whole body convulsing and struggling against the restraints that bound her to the operating table even though every movement sent sharp stabs of pain through her body.
“Anesthetic!” Dr. Rosemead ordered sharply. “For God’s sake, give her something!”
Davy sat quietly in the busy waiting room next to the mountain of a man he knew to be Nana Dahd’s nephew. The cut on his head had mostly stopped bleeding, although his hair was still sticky in spots where more blood had oozed out since the last time someone had cleaned it off. One of the nurses had said he would probably need stitches. He wondered if they used a sewing machine or maybe just a needle and thread.
His head ached, and when he tried to move around, he felt dizzy, so he sat still. The man next to him spoke to him briefly in Papago when he first sat down, then he seemed to go away completely. His body was there, but his mind seemed far, far away. It made Davy think of the way his mother was sometimes when she was working, so he contented himself with sitting and watching.
Being in that room was almost like being invisible. The people around him glanced at him and then looked quickly away. They spoke to one another in Papago, and the things they said made him realize they didn’t know he understood what they were saying. They called Rita by another name, Hejel Wi’ithag, which means Left Alone. They called him by another name, too—Me’akam Mad, or Killer’s Child. He couldn’t understand why they called him by such a strange, mean name, or why they seemed not to like him.
Davy was tired, and his head hurt. He wanted Rita, but the nurses said she was in surgery. They said she was badly hurt. And where was his mother? Why wasn’t she here? Just thinking about it made fat tears try to leak out the
corners of his eyes. He squinted hard to keep that from happening. He sighed and tried to swallow the huge lump in his throat.
For the first time in more than an hour, the huge man next to him stirred and looked down at the little boy. Then, raising his broad, bare arm, he pulled Davy against him.
At first Davy started to resist, but only when he was resting against the enveloping warmth of the man’s massive chest did the boy realize how cold he was and how tired. He stopped struggling and let his eyes close.
Pillowed against Fat Crack Ortiz’s massive bulk, Davy Ladd fell fast asleep.
5
THE CAR WINDOWS were open, allowing in the cool night air as well as a noisy, windy roar that made conversation impossible. That was fine with Diana. She had no desire to talk to Brandon Walker, whose very presence unleashed the disturbing flood of memories now surging through her awareness. Blind to the nighttime desert flowing by outside the speeding Ford, Diana was totally preoccupied with pieces of the past that jerked like disjointed figures caught in the brilliant flashes of a strobe of recollection. The spinning figures danced in her mind’s eye without order or definition.
Diana Lee Cooper was hard at work in the ditto room that Friday morning when the news came. Everyone in the English Department was so stunned that they all abandoned ship without anyone thinking to come tell her, and she was far too busy to notice.
In addition to the regular batch of departmental quizzes and outlines, Dr. Hunsington, the diminutive head of the English Department, had a twenty-five-page syllabus to put out—seventy-five copies of each. Once she finished running off Halitosis Hunsington’s syllabus, it had to be collated and stapled.
Well after noon, she finally completed the last of the stapling and emerged into a strangely deserted hallway. Laden with an armload of slippery paper, she was surprised to find the door to the English Department closed and locked. A hastily hand-penciled note tucked in one corner of the darkened window announced, CLOSED UNTIL MONDAY. H. F. HUNSINGTON.
“Closed?” she demanded of the inexplicably darkened window and empty hallway. “What do you mean, closed?”
Diana looked around and found herself absolutely alone. Where had everyone gone? Her first reaction was that maybe her father’s dire predictions of nuclear holocaust had come true, and everyone had disappeared into bomb shelters, but she quickly talked herself out of that one. Had nuclear warfare broken out, surely she would have heard sirens or some other kind of audible warning. There had been nothing.
As a dollar-an-hour, fifteen-hour-a-week work-study student, Diana Cooper had no key to the University of Oregon’s English Department office. What was she supposed to do with all the dittos she had run off, she wondered, take them home with her? On her bike?
That was crazy. The office had been full of people earlier when she left for the ditto room—Dr. Hunsington, his secretary, the receptionist, and a whole collection of professors, instructors, and teaching assistants, all milling around the receptionist’s desk, waiting to collect their daily quota of departmental mail to say nothing of their semimonthly pay checks. So where were they now?
She started to leave the dittoed papers by the locked door while she went to find someone with a key. She quickly discarded that idea. Several exams had been entrusted to her for dittoing purposes that morning. Diana took her charge of exam security very seriously, and she was unwilling to let the tests out of sight for even a moment. Taking the entire stack with her, she started down the hall.
Halfway down the long corridor, she heard the echo of solitary footsteps coming up the stairs at the far end. Diana was immensely relieved when Gary Ladd, one of the teaching assistants, materialized out of the stairwell. He turned immediately and started toward his office in the T. A. bullpen at the far end of an adjacent wing.
“Mr. Ladd,” Diana called. “Yoo-hoo.”
He stopped, turned, and came back toward her, his head cocked questioningly to one side. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “I thought everybody went home.”
Garrison Walther Ladd, III, was by far the best-looking male teaching assistant in the English Department’s stable. With aquiline, tanned good looks and lank blond hair, he wore expensive but rumpled clothing with offhand, upper-class ease. Garrison Ladd knew he was hot stuff. Breathless coeds who came within his sphere of influence found him irresistible. They tended to hie themselves off in search of obliging physicians willing to issue prescriptions for birth-control pills.
This was Diana’s second year as an undergraduate student assistant in the English Department at the U. of O. During that time she, too, had admired Gary Ladd, but only from afar. For one thing, she had convinced herself that someone from Joseph, Oregon, could never be in Gary Ladd’s league. For another, he was a graduate student while she was only a lowly sophomore.
He looked at her now with his tanned brow furrowed into a puzzled frown. “Why didn’t you go home when everybody else did?”
“I’m working,” she said. “At least I’m trying to work. I’ve got this whole stack of papers to deliver, but the door to the office is locked. Do you have a key? Where’d everybody go?”
Gary Ladd reached into a jacket pocket, extracted a key ring, then took two steps down the hallway before stopping and turning on Diana. “Nobody told you, did they?”
“Told me what?” she returned. “I’ve been in the ditto room. When I came out, everything was closed up. Even the classrooms are empty. What’s going on?”
“Somebody shot President Kennedy.”
“No!”
The very idea was incredible, unthinkable. Assassinations happened in other parts of the world—wild, terrible, jungle-filled places like South America or Africa—but not here in the good old U.S. of A. “Where?” she managed to stammer. “When?”
“This morning. In Dallas. They already caught the guy who did it.”
“Is he all right?”
Garrison Ladd looked mystified. “He’s fine. They’ve got him in jail.”
“No, not him. I mean President Kennedy. Is he all right?”
Gary Ladd shook his head, while his gray-blue eyes darkened in sympathy. “He’s dead, Diana. President Kennedy is dead. They just swore in LBJ on the plane headed back to Washington. Come on. Let’s go drop off your papers. They must be heavy.”
An Indian Health Services nurse hovered over Rita’s bed-bound form, but the old woman’s mind was far away in another time and place.
Dancing Quail hid behind her mother’s full skirts as the horse-drawn wagon pulled up beside the low-slung adobe house. It was the end of Shopol Eshabig Mashad, the short planting month. For days the children of Ban Thak had worried that soon Big Eddie Lopez, the tribal policeman, would come to take many of them away to boarding school.
Seven-year-old Dancing Quail didn’t want to leave home. She didn’t want to go to school. Some of the other children had told her about it, about how they weren’t allowed to speak to their friends in their own language, about how they had to dress up in stiff, uncomfortable clothing.
Her parents had argued about school. Alice Antone, who sometimes worked for the sisters at Topawa, maintained that education was important. Joseph Antone disagreed, taking the more traditional view that all his daughter really needed to know was how to cook beans and make tortillas, how to carry water and make baskets—skills she would learn at home with her mother and grandmother and not at the boarding school in Phoenix.
But when Big Eddie’s horse plodded into Ban Thak, Joseph Antone was miles away working in the floodplain fields. Big Eddie came over to the open fire where Alice stirred beans in a handmade pottery crock.
He wiped the sweat from his face. “It sure is hot,” he said. “Where is your husband?”
“Gan,” Alice said, nodding toward the fields. “Over there.”
“Will he be home soon?” Big Eddie asked.
“No,” she answered. “Not soon.”
“I have come for the children,” Big Eddie announced. “To t
ake them to Chuk Shon to catch the train.”
Dancing Quail had been to Tucson once with her mother and had found the town noisy and frightening. They had gone to sell her grandmother’s ollas—heavy, narrow-necked pottery crocks that kept water sweet and cool even through the heat of the summer. Alice had walked the dusty streets carrying a burden basket piled high with ollas, while Dancing Quail had trailed along behind. Once home in Ban Thak, the child had not asked to go again.
Quietly now, Dancing Quail attempted to slip away, but Alice stopped her. “Ni-mad. Daughter, come back. Go quickly and get your other dress. You are to go with this man. Hurry. Do not make him wait.”
The huge policeman looked down at Dancing Quail with considerable empathy. He, too, had been frightened the first time he left home for school. Dancing Quail was one of those children who would have to be watched closely for fear she might run away before they could put her on the train. It would be better if Dancing Quail weren’t the first child he loaded into the wagon.
“Give her something to eat,” Big Eddie said. “I will go get the others. It won’t be so bad if she’s not the only one.”
He climbed back into the wagon and urged the waiting horse forward. Alice turned to her daughter, who still hadn’t moved. “Go now,” she said. “Roll your other dress in your blanket.”
“Ni-je’e,” Dancing Quail began. “Mother, please…”
Alice stopped her with a stubborn shake of her head. “The sisters say you should go. You will go.”
Dejectedly, but without further argument, Dancing Quail did as she’d been told.
Her grandmother, Oks Amichuda, which means Understanding Woman, had lived a full, busy life before coming to live, in her old age, with her son and daughter-in-law. No longer able to work and cook, Understanding Woman, like other old women, had taken to sitting, either in the shade or the sun, depending upon the weather, and making pottery and baskets, which Alice was able to sell or trade.