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

by J. A. Jance

  They sat together in silence for some time. “You are glad to be home?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry about my parents,” she said, “but I’m glad to be in Ban Thak. I do not like school or the people there.”

  Looks At Nothing reached out and took Dancing Quail’s small hand in his, holding it for a long moment before nodding and allowing it to fall back into her lap.

  “You will live in both worlds, little one,” he said. “You will be a bridge, a puinthi.”

  Dancing Quail looked up at him anxiously, afraid he meant Big Eddie would take her right back to Phoenix, but Looks At Nothing reassured her. “You will stay here for now. Understanding Woman will need your help with the fields and the baby.”

  “How do you know all this?” she asked.

  He smiled down at her. “I have lost my sight, Hejel Wi’ikam,” he said kindly, “but I have not lost my vision.”

  Fat Crack drove his tow truck south past Topawa on his fool’s errand. Rita had told him that Looks At Nothing still lived at Many Dogs Village across the border in Old Mexico.

  The international border had been established by treaty between Mexico and the United States without either country acknowledging that their arbitrary decision effectively divided in half and disenfranchised the much older—nine thousand years older—Papago nation.

  Because Many Dogs Village was on the Mexican side, Fat Crack would have to cross the border at The Gate—an unofficial and unpatrolled crossing point in the middle of the reservation. Once in Mexico, he would have to make his way to the village on foot, or perhaps one of the traders from the other side would offer him a ride.

  Supposing Fat Crack did manage to find the object of his search, how would he bring the old man back to Rita’s bedside in the Indian Health Service Hospital? According to Fat Crack’s estimates, if Looks At Nothing were still alive, he would be well into his eighties. Such an old man might not be eager to travel.

  The Gate was really nothing but a break in the six-strand border fence surrounded by flat open desert and dotted, on both sides, with the parked pickups of traders and customers alike. Owners of these trucks did a brisk business in bootleg liquor, tortillas, tamales, and goat cheese, with an occasional batch of pot thrown in for good measure.

  Fat Crack approached one of the bootleggers and inquired how to find Looks At Nothing’s house. The man pointed to a withered old man sitting in the shade of a mesquite tree.

  “Why go all the way to his house?” the man asked derisively. “Why not see him here?”

  Looks At Nothing sat under the tree with a narrow rolled bundle and a gnarled ironwood cane on the ground in front of him. As Fat Crack approached, the sightless old man scrambled agilely to his feet. “Have you come to take me to Hejel Wi’ikam?” he asked.

  Fat Crack was taken aback. How did the old man know? “Hejel Wi’ithag,” he corrected respectfully. “An old widow, not an orphaned child.”

  Looks At Nothing shook his head. “She was an orphan when I first knew her. She is an orphan still. Oi g hihm,” he added. “Let’s go.”

  Fat Crack helped the wiry old man climb up into the tow truck. How did Looks At Nothing know someone would come for him that day? Surely no one in Many Dogs owned a telephone, but the old man had appeared at The Gate fully prepared to travel.

  Devout Christian Scientist that he was, Fat Crack was far too much of a pragmatist to deny, on religious grounds, that which is demonstrably obvious. Looks At Nothing, that cagey old shaman, would bear close watching.

  Brandon Walker dreaded going home. He figured that after he’d spent the whole night AWOL, Louella would be ready to have his ears. He stopped in the kitchen long enough to hang his car keys on the pegboard and to pour himself a cup of coffee, steeling himself for the inevitable onslaught. Instead of being angry, however, when his frantic mother came looking for him, she was so relieved to see him that all she could do was blither.

  “It’s a piano, Brandon. Dear God in heaven, a Steinway!”

  “Calm down. What are you talking about?”

  “Toby. I worry about buying food sometimes, and here he goes and orders a piano. For his sister, the concert pianist, he told them. His sister’s been dead for thirty-five years, Brandon. What is Toby thinking of? What are we going to do?”

  “Did the check clear?”

  “No. Of course not. Do you know how much Steinways cost? The store called me and said there must be some mistake. I told them it was a mistake, all right.”

  “Where’s Dad now?”

  “Inside. Taking a nap. He said he was tired.”

  “Let’s go, Mother,” Brandon ordered. “Get your car.” This time he wasn’t going to allow any argument.

  “The car? Where are we going?”

  “Downtown to the bank. We’ll have to hurry. It’s Saturday, and they’re only open until noon. We’re closing that checking account once and for all.”

  Louella promptly burst into tears. “How can we do that to your father, Brandon, after he’s worked so hard all these years? It seems so…so underhanded.”

  “How many Steinways do you want, Mom?” His position was unassailable.

  “I’ll go get my purse. Do you think he’ll be all right here by himself if he wakes up?”

  “He’ll have to be. There’s no one else we can leave him with. We’ll hurry, but we’ve both got to go to the bank.”

  It wasn’t until he was left alone with the young deputy that Ernesto Tashquinth realized exactly how much trouble he was in. Come to think of it, the Pinal County homicide detective had been asking him some pretty funny questions: Why did he go up the mountain to check the spring in the first place? What was the woman’s name again? How long had he known her? How well did he know her?

  Ernesto tried to be helpful. He patiently answered the questions as best he could. The buzzards, he told them. He had seen the circling buzzards, and he was afraid if something was dead up there, the smell might come down to the picnic-table area and get him in trouble with his boss.

  But now the detective had gone up the mountain to oversee the removal of the body, and Ernesto was left with a young hotshot deputy who couldn’t resist swaggering.

  “How come you bit that poor lady’s boob off, Big Man? Do you know what happens to guys like you once you’re inside?”

  Ernesto didn’t need the deputy to draw him any pictures. He remembered all too well a former schoolmate from Sacaton who, accused of raping a white woman, had turned up dead in a charco, suffocated on his own balls.

  “I want a lawyer,” Ernesto said quietly. “I don’t have to say anything more until I have a lawyer.”

  “The judge will be only too happy to appoint you one, if you live that long,” the deputy told him with a leering grin. “He’ll do it by Monday or Tuesday at the latest, but it’s a long time between now and then, chief. If I were you, I’d be good—very, very good.”

  They brought squares of Jell-O for lunch, and Juanita tried to feed them to her, but Rita shook her head and closed her eyes once more.

  The next years passed happily for Dancing Quail, although no one called her that anymore. She became Understanding Woman’s ehkthag, her shadow. Dancing Quail kept busy caring for her little sister, looking after the fields, and helping her grandmother make baskets and pottery. At age six S-kehegaj herself went off to school, taking her turn at riding to Chuk Shon in Big Eddie’s wagon. Pretty One thrived in the new environment. She returned home the following summer wishing to be called only by her new Anglo name, Juanita, and refusing to part with her stiff leather shoes.

  When Dancing Quail’s young charge went off to school, no one thought to send her. People forgot that Dancing Quail was little more than a child herself. By then, her grandmother was so frail that she needed someone with her most of the time. Dancing Quail was happy to be that someone. She spent all her waking hours with Understanding Woman, caring for her and learning whatever lessons her grandmother cared to teach.

  Dancing Qua
il was fourteen and had passed her first menstruation with all due ceremony the summer Father John rode into her life. He had hair the color of autumn grass and funny red skin that sometimes peeled and flaked off in the hot sun.

  Father John came to Ban Thak because the sisters at Topawa had sent him. They worried that Alice Antone’s orphaned daughter was growing up too much under her grandmother’s pagan influence. The girl never came to church anymore, not even at Christmas and Easter. The sisters sent Father John in hopes that by offering the girl a cleaning job at the mission in Topawa, they might also coax her back into the fold.

  Father John, fresh out of seminary, was an earnest young man on his first assignment. When he saw Rita with her long black hair flowing loose and glossy around her shoulders, when he saw her dancing brown eyes and bright white teeth against tawny skin, he thought her the loveliest, most exotic creature he had ever encountered. He was intrigued by the fact that, despite the heat, she didn’t wear shoes. When he rode into the village in his dusty, coughing touring car, she ran beside it barefoot, along with the other village children, laughing and making fun of him because they could run faster than he could drive.

  He spoke to Understanding Woman that afternoon as best he could. Unable to communicate in a common language, they were forced to call upon Dancing Quail to translate in her own inadequate English. She giggled as she did so.

  Father John trotted out all his best arguments, including the one he thought would make the most difference. “If you work at the mission,” he said, “the sisters will pay you money so you can buy nice things for yourself and for your grandmother.”

  “Where?” she asked. “Where will I buy these things? The trading post is far from here. I have no horse and no car.”

  “I could give you a ride sometimes,” he offered.

  “No,” Dancing Quail said decisively. “I will stay here.”

  “What did he say?” Understanding Woman asked anxiously. There had been several exchanges during which Dancing Quail had translated nothing.

  “He wants me to work at the mission. I told him no. My place is here with you.”

  “Good,” Understanding Woman said, patting her young granddaughter’s hand. “It is better that you stay in Ban Thak.”

  A Mormon missionary, dressed in a stiffly pressed white shirt and wearing a carefully knotted tie, brought word to Rebecca Tashquinth that her son, S-abamk, the Lucky One, was being held in the Pinal County jail in Florence and that he would most likely be charged with the brutal murder of Margaret Danielson. It was thought, the missionary reported dutifully, that the woman had been raped as well, but no one knew that for sure. Not yet.

  Rebecca was well aware of the kinds of lawyers local judges appointed for Indian defendants, particularly those accused of serious crimes against Anglos. She didn’t waste time on a useless trip to Florence. The guards at the jail wouldn’t have let her see her son anyway. Instead, she got in the car and drove to Ahngam, Desert Broom Village, to speak to her father.

  Eduardo Jose was a man of some standing in the community, a man with both livestock and a thriving bootleg-liquor business. Eduardo knew how to deal with Anglos. He had even hired himself an Anglo lawyer once to help him when the cops had caught him transporting illegal tequila across nonreservation land to the annual O’odam Tash celebration in Casa Grande.

  If anyone could help her son in all this, Rebecca’s father was the man who could do it.

  Diana was still angry with Rita when she got to the hospital. She resented Davy’s questions about his father, questions he had never asked before. She blamed Rita for bringing all that ancient history back to the foreground, but when she saw the old woman, seemingly shriveled in the bed and swathed in bandages, she forgot her anger.

  Rita’s sister, Juanita, was sitting by the bed when Diana entered the room, but she rose at once and went out into the hallway. Diana knew Juanita didn’t like her, and she had long since ceased worrying about it. If Gary’s parents didn’t understand why she and Rita were inseparable, why should Rita’s relatives do any better?

  Rita opened her eyes when Diana stepped to the head of the bed and touched her good hand.

  “How’s Davy?” Rita asked.

  “He’s fine. He has a few stitches in his head, that’s all.”

  “Is he here? Can I see him?”

  “The doctor won’t let him come into the room. He’s too young. You have to be sixteen.”

  Rita reached for her water glass and took a tentative sip through the straw. “Yesterday was the anniversary,” she said quietly. “Davy went with me. He may ask questions.”

  Diana laughed uneasily. “He already has, Rita. It’s all right. I’m getting a lot closer to being able to answer them.”

  “He’ll want you to put up a cross. For his father, I mean. A cross with a wreath and some candles.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  In Diana Ladd’s mixed bag of fallen-away Catholic religion, suicides were never accorded full death benefits. She had told Gary’s parents to bury him wherever they liked, but as far as she was concerned, Garrison Ladd still didn’t qualify for a memorial wooden cross and never would.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were a virgin?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  Diana Lee Cooper and Garrison Ladd cuddled together on Diana’s narrow three-quarter bed nestled like a pair of stacked teaspoons. With his back pressed against the wall and his head propped up on one elbow, Gary’s other hand glided up and down Diana’s slender back. He liked the feel of smooth skin stretched taut over backbone and rib and the gentle curve of waist that melted into the small of her back. He liked fingering the matching indentations of dimples that marked the top of her buttocks. Most of all, he liked the fact that she didn’t warn his hand away from places most other girls wouldn’t let him touch.

  Diana Lee Cooper lay on her side, head on a pillow, with one arm dangling loosely off the edge of the bed. Unsure of herself, Diana worried that perhaps it hadn’t been all Gary had expected. “Was I all right?” she asked.

  Garrison Ladd laughed out loud. “It was more than all right.” He kissed the back of her neck. “The boys in Joseph must not have been paying attention.”

  “The boys in Joseph called me names,” Diana replied grimly.

  “You’re kidding.”

  She shook her head. The boys had called her names, but they were pikers compared to her father. Max Cooper was the champion name-caller of all time.

  She turned so she could look Gary Ladd full in the face. Maybe this man who, like her, also hated his father, could help her decode her own, help her understand that looming darker presence who even now reached out across the state and attacked her with bruising words far worse than his punishing fists.

  “My father was the worst,” she said, carefully controlling her voice. “ ‘Cunt’ happened to be his personal favorite.”

  Gary Ladd shook his head in disbelief. “Your father called you that to your face?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She suspected it was because calling her that robbed her of her books and dignity and cut her down to size. While she still mulled the question, Gary Ladd lost interest in the conversation. He rolled Diana over on her back so he could caress her full breasts and run his hands up and down the ladder of ribs above her smoothly flat abdomen. He twisted the curly auburn pubic hairs around the tips of his fingers and touched what lay concealed beyond those curiously inviting hairs.

  He waited to see if she would object and move his probing fingers away. Some girls did, even after screwing their brains out, but Diana didn’t. She lay with her eyes closed, her body quiet and complacent beneath his touch. Diana Ladd was the girl of his dreams. How could he have been so lucky?

  “What brought you to Eugene?” he asked, wanting to delay a little before taking her again. “How’d you get here?”

  “By horse,” she answered.

&nb
sp; He checked her expression to see if she was joking, but her face was unsmiling, impassive.

  “Come on. You’re kidding. You rode all the way across Oregon from Joseph to here on a horse?”

  “My mother got me the horse, a beautiful sorrel quarter horse,” she said. “His name was Waldo. Waldo was my ticket out of town.”

  Diana came home from school carrying an armload of books, half of them textbooks and the others from the library. She found old Mr. Deeson’s pickup, with horse trailer attached, parked in front of their house. The presence of a neighbor’s pickup wasn’t particularly unusual. Chances were, Mr. Deeson had stopped off to unload some garbage, and her mother had invited him in for a cup of coffee or freshly baked cookies. She often encouraged customers to stop by for half an hour or so in order to stave off her ever-present loneliness.

  Diana hurried past the trailer with its stamping load of horseflesh. In the kitchen, she found George Deeson and her mother chatting over coffee, just as she’d expected. What she hadn’t expected was the sudden silence occasioned by her arrival.

  “There you are,” Iona said eagerly. “We’ve been waiting for you to come home. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  “What kind of surprise?”

  “Out front. I thought you’d want to unload him yourself.”

  For a moment, Diana wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. “Unload him?” she repeated. “You mean the horse? That’s the surprise?”

  “Your Granddaddy Dale did me a favor once way back when,” George Deeson drawled. “I never did quite get around to paying him back once I got on my feet. My brother gave me this here horse out yonder, and Waldo—that’s his name by the way—was just standing around in my pasture, taking up room and eating my hay.

  “The girl who had him before, my niece, I’m sorry to say, didn’t do justice by him a’tall. All she ever did was race barrels. Take him out, run him around those barrels hell-bent-for-election, and then lock him right back up in his stall. A good horse needs more than that, needs some companionship, needs some time off. Know what I mean?”