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

by J. A. Jance

  “And the caterer?”

  “She’s having trouble locating servers.”

  “Don’t worry. She’ll find them. This party is a big deal for her, and we pay her a bundle of money during the summer when there’s not much else going on. She’ll come through. She always does.

  “What about the storyteller?” Abby asked.

  Abby had come to love the enduring Tohono O’odham legend about the wise old grandmother whose bravery had given rise to the Queen of the Night. Including that story in the annual festivities was one of the ways Abby had put her own distinctive stamp on the party. She insisted that each year some guest of honor would come to the event and recount the story that had struck a chord in her heart. It seemed to Abby that in saving her grandson, Wise Old Grandmother had saved Abby Tennant as well.

  “That’s handled,” Shirley reported. “Dr. Walker and her mother are planning to have lunch in the Tea Room this afternoon before the party starts. Unfortunately, she’s due back at work in the ER at the hospital in Sells by midnight. That means the last scheduled storytelling event can’t be any later than nine.”

  “Good,” Abby said. “Earlier is better than later.”

  “Are you going to stop by for a last-minute checklist?” Shirley asked.

  “No,” Abby said with a laugh. “I don’t think that’s necessary. It sounds as though you have everything under control.”

  TUCSON, ARIZONA

  SATURDAY, JUNE 6, 2009, 1:30 P.M.

  93º FAHRENHEIT

  Lani Dahd used her key to unlock the front door of her parents’ house. She stepped inside, with Gabe following close on her heel. He had been here before and was always astonished by the place.

  For one thing, the house, built of river rock, was bigger than any of the houses he knew on the reservation. Although the people who lived here were Milgahn, Anglos, the place was full of a rich profusion of baskets—Tohono O’odham baskets. There were yucca and bear-grass baskets on every available surface—on walls and tables and the mantelpiece. Gabe had been told that many of them had been made by his great-aunt Rita.

  “How did your parents get so many baskets?” Gabe had asked. “Are they rich?”

  Lani Dahd thought about that for a moment before she answered. By reservation standards, the Anglo couple who had adopted her when she was little more than a toddler were rich beyond measure.

  “Yes,” she said finally. “I suppose they are.”

  “But why?” Gabe asked.

  “Because my mother writes books,” Lani answered.

  “What about your father?”

  “He was a police officer.”

  “Why are they so old?” Gabe asked.

  Lani’s father was almost seventy. Her mother was in her mid-sixties. In the Anglo world that wasn’t so very old, but on the reservation, where people were often cut down by alcoholism and diabetes in their forties and fifties, that seemed like a very advanced age.

  “They just are,” she said.

  “Why do they have different names?” Gabe asked. “Mr. Walker and Mrs. Ladd. Aren’t they married?”

  “Yes, they’re married,” Lani explained, “but my mother was already writing books by then. It made sense for her to keep her own name instead of changing it to someone else’s.”

  This time Gabe was without questions as he followed Lani through the house. While she stopped off in a bathroom, Gabe walked on alone to the sliding door that he knew led to the patio.

  Damsel, the household dog, stood outside the sliding door. Gabe opened the door and leaned down to pet the dog. Looking away from Damsel, he saw Mrs. Ladd—an older Milgahn woman with pale skin and silvery hair—sitting in the shade of a little shelter on the far side of the pool. A very ugly blind man was sitting there with her.

  Once again the dog demanded Gabe’s attention. When he turned away from Damsel, Lani was stepping through the slider and coming outside. By then the man had disappeared. Gabe hadn’t heard him leave. He glanced around the backyard, looking for him. It seemed curious that he could have left so silently, but the man was nowhere to be seen. He was simply gone.

  “Mom,” Lani said, frowning when she noticed her mother’s bathrobe and bare feet. “Why aren’t you dressed?”

  “I am dressed,” Diana said. “What’s wrong with a robe?”

  “But I thought you were going into town with us—to Tohono Chul. The three of us have a reservation for lunch at the Tea Room, and then tonight there’s the night-blooming cereus party.”

  “I can’t,” Diana said. “I’m busy.”

  Lani had lived with her adoptive mother’s career as a reality all her life. From an early age she had understood how deadlines worked. When there was something to do with writing that had to be completed by a certain time, her mother was simply unavailable.

  “What?” Lani asked. “An emergency copyediting job? How come the deadlines always come from the publisher and never the other way around?”

  “Not copyediting,” Diana said. “Something else.”

  “Look,” Lani said. “It’s Saturday afternoon. You’ve already worked all morning. Let it go. I talked to Dad. He’s on his way to Casa Grande to see a friend of his. Take a break. Come with us right now. It’ll be fun. The blossoms start opening around eight. I’ll have you back home no later than ten-thirty. You can work all day tomorrow if you need to.”

  Diana thought about that for a moment. Finally, making up her mind, she picked up her computer. “All right,” she said. “I’ll go get dressed.”

  She stood up and walked into the house, closing the door behind her.

  “Who was that man?” Gabe asked. “What man?”

  “The man who was talking to your mother.”

  “I didn’t see any man,” Lani said.

  “He was right there,” Gabe said, “and then he was gone.”

  Lani glanced around the yard. Like Gabe, she saw no one. “Maybe he went out through the gate.”

  Gabe shook his head.

  “What did he look like? Was he young or old?”

  “Old,” Gabe said. “The skin on his face was all lumpy.”

  “Like wrinkled?”

  “No. Bumpy. Like a popover when you cook it.”

  In other tribes, popovers are called fry bread. Flattened pieces of dough are dropped into hot grease. As the dough cooks, the outside surface fills with air and puffs up.

  Despite the hot air around her, Lani Walker felt a chill. She knew of only one man whose face had puffed up like a popover when it was covered with hot grease thrown by her mother, but that had happened long before Lani was born. Lani knew about it not only because her brother, who had been there at the time, had told her the story. Lani also knew because she’d seen the photographs in her mother’s book, which had also mentioned that Andrew Philip Carlisle had been dead for years.

  “He’s not here now,” Lani said. “You must have been mistaken. Come on,” she added. “Oi g hihm.”

  Directly translated, that expression means “Let us walk.” In the vernacular of the reservation, it means: “Let’s get in the pickup and go.” Gabe evidently understood that this was one time when he’d be better off not asking any questions. Without a word of objection and with the dog at his side, he came into the house behind Lani, took a seat on the couch in a room filled with beautiful Tohono O’odham baskets, and waited patiently until it was time to leave.

  TUCSON, ARIZONA

  SATURDAY, JUNE 6, 2009, 1:00 P.M.

  93º FAHRENHEIT

  While the coffeepot burbled and burped, Dan dished up Bozo’s food—dry dog food along with a dollop of canned food for flavor. Dan couldn’t help but notice that the tinned dog food—beef with gravy—smelled more appetizing than some of the MREs he had encountered during his tour of duty in Iraq.

  Our tour of duty, Dan corrected himself mentally as he placed the dish of food in front of the salivating dog. He still remembered his first one-sided conversation with the dog no one had wanted.
/>   “Look,” he had said while Bozo listened to his voice with rapt, prick-eared attention. “Let’s get one thing straight. When we work, we work; when we play, we play, but you’ve got to know the difference.”

  “Hey,” one of the guys had said, pointing and laughing. “Looks like Chief here is turning into one of those dog whisperers. Is it possible old Bozo actually understands Apache?”

  From the time he was four, Dan had been raised by his grandparents on the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona, where Dan had been ridiculed for being half Anglo and half Apache. Back then he had coped with his tormentors by playing class clown, so maybe Bozo had a point. And maybe that’s one of the reasons Dan and Bozo had bonded. Daniel Pardee was in Iraq wearing his country’s uniform and doing his country’s job, but he was sick and tired of the constant jokes about his Apache background. Maybe Bozo was tired of the jokes, too.

  “I was just telling him that some of the people around here are jerks,” Dan replied. “I told him he needs to know who his friends are.”

  By the time Dan’s deployment neared its end, he had pretty much resigned himself to leaving Bozo behind. By then Bozo’s reputation was such that the other guys were clamoring to take him on. That was when Ruthie’s “Dear John” letter arrived. He and Ruthie Longoria had been childhood sweethearts and had dated exclusively all through high school. The idea that they would marry eventually had been a foregone conclusion, but the ending had been all too typical. Somehow Dan had known what was up before he even opened the envelope. For one thing, she had sent it via snail mail rather than over the Net.

  “We’re too young to make this kind of commitment,” she had told him. “We both need to see other people, but we can still be friends.” Yada yada yada.

  Sure, like that’s going to happen! It was long after Dan had come back home that he finally learned the truth. Ruthie had already found a new man before she ever cut Dan loose.

  Still, at the time he read the letter, he was pissed as hell—more angry than sad—but he was also grateful. He understood that he had dodged a bullet as real as any of the live ammunition on the ground in Iraq. If that was the kind of woman Ruthie Longoria was, he was better off knowing about it before the wedding rather than after—a wedding and honeymoon he’d been dutifully saving money for the whole time he had been in the service.

  With that monetary obligation off the table, however, Dan decided to cut his losses. If he couldn’t keep his woman, he would sure as hell keep his dog. So Dan took the money he had set aside to pay for a wedding and paid Bozo’s way home instead. It took all the money he’d had and more besides. His maternal grandfather had helped, and so had Justin Clifford’s family. Finally all the effort paid off. After months of paperwork and red tape and after being locked in quarantine for weeks, Bozo came home—home to Arizona; home to San Carlos; home to being a half-Apache dog.

  With the wedding in mind, Dan had lined up a post-military job with a rent-a-cop security outfit in Phoenix, but that was because Ruthie loved Phoenix and wanted to live there instead of on the reservation, and that’s exactly where she and her new boyfriend—now husband—had gone to live.

  Dan did not love Phoenix—at all. Instead of taking that security job, he went back to the reservation, stayed with Gramps, as he called Micah Duarte, his widowed grandfather, the man who had raised him. Sitting in the quiet of Gramps’s small but tidy house, Dan had tried to figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. At age twenty-nine it had seemed that he was too old to go back to college, even though his veteran status would have made that affordable. After the excitement of Iraq, Dan was bored, and so was Bozo. And even though Gramps never said a word, Dan worried that he and his dog were wearing out their welcome.

  Then one day two years earlier, when they were eating breakfast at the kitchen table, Gramps put a newspaper in front of him.

  “Here,” he said, pointing. “Read this. It sounds like something you’d be good at.”

  That article, in the Arizona Sun, told about a special group of Indian trackers, the Shadow Wolves, who worked homeland security on the Tohono O’odham Nation west of Tucson by patrolling the seventy miles of rugged reservation land that lay next to the Mexican border. Members of the elite force came from any number of tribes and were required to be at least one quarter Indian. Dan qualified on that score, with a quarter to the good since he was half Indian and half Anglo. Shadow Wolves needed to be expert trackers, and Dan qualified there, too.

  His taciturn grandfather, who had spent all his adult life working on a dairy farm outside of Safford, may not have been long on language skills, but he had taught his grandson how to ride, hunt, and shoot, occasionally doing all three at once.

  Micah Duarte counted among his ancestors one of the Apache scouts who had trailed Geronimo into Mexico and had helped negotiate the agreement that had brought him back to the States. In other words, being a tracker was in Daniel’s blood, but Micah Duarte had translated bloodlines into firsthand experience by teaching his grandson everything he knew.

  Together Dan and Gramps had hunted deer and javelina, usually with bow and arrow rather than with firearms. Hunting with a bow and arrow required being close to your quarry, and getting that close meant you had to be smart. You had to be able to read the animals’ tracks and know exactly what was going on with them and with their neighbors.

  Once, when Dan was in his late teens, he and Gramps had been deer hunting in southeastern Arizona. Toward the end of the day they had spotted a jaguar and followed the big cat back to its lair, not to kill it—just to see it. At the time, Dan had been astonished to learn that jaguars still existed in the States.

  “Not many Apaches have done that,” Micah had told Dan later that evening as the two of them sat by their campfire. “I’m not a medicine man, but I think perhaps it is a sign.”

  The comment wasn’t said in a boastful way, but the quiet dignity of the statement had somehow infected the impressionable teenager who had cut his teeth watching Star Wars movies and who knew far more about Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader than he did about Apache warriors like Geronimo and Victorio or even about his own forebears. That experience more than any other had prompted him to enlist in the army after graduating from high school.

  Now, after Iraq, the more Dan read about the Shadow Wolves, the more they intrigued him, especially since they were a part of ICE and the Border Patrol, so his previous work experience in the military would be a point in his favor.

  That was the start of it. Dan had applied for the Shadow Wolves, where he had been accepted into the training program and where he had aced every test. The job paid well enough that, even though he was unmarried, he was able to use his VA benefits to buy his first house. It was still a sparsely furnished home on Tucson’s west side, but it came with a spacious fenced backyard where Bozo had the run of the place. Best of all, unlike so much rental property, it didn’t come with a lot of rules, including the dreaded no pets allowed prohibition.

  Yes, this was a place both Dan and Bozo could call home.

  Once on board with the Shadow Wolves, Dan found it easy to prove his worth. He loved the work and he was good at it. As the weeks passed, however, with Dan going off to work and with Bozo staying home, he could see that the dog was growing more and more depressed. Bozo understood work. He knew that Dan was working and he wasn’t, and the dog didn’t like being left behind. Bozo demonstrated the extent of his separation anxiety by chewing up any number of expensive items—shoes, boots, holsters, and drywall—anything that was within easy reach.

  Dan knew the dog well enough to understand the problem. He had two choices—either lock the dog in a pen outside and leave him there all day long or else put the dog to work, too. Talking Bozo’s way into Shadow Wolves hadn’t been easy.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, Wolves don’t need K-9 units,” Captain Meecham told him. “Period. Besides, as near as I can tell, Bozo is definitely not an Indian.”

  Meecham’s bloodlin
es and face said Kiowa even if his name did not.

  “Let me show you what he can do,” Dan had offered. “Wouldn’t it make sense if we knew in advance if a vehicle was carrying illegal drugs as opposed to just illegal aliens? Get yourself a bag of grass from the evidence room and hide it in one of the cars outside in the parking lot. Let’s see how long it takes Bozo to find it.”

  Dan had taught Bozo that little trick at their newly purchased, once foreclosed, home in Tucson. As a target, he had salted his own car with a small amount of grass he had taken off one of his neighbors’ junior-high-school-aged kids who was standing on a nearby street corner selling it to his classmates. Dan didn’t arrest the kid because what went on inside the Tucson city limits was outside Dan’s jurisdiction, but he knew he had scared the hell out of that pint-size dealer.

  It took Bozo less than five minutes to transform Aaron Meecham into a believer. Once turned loose in the parking lot, Bozo had trotted purposefully up and down the aisles before stopping and vaulting into the back of Aaron’s immense Toyota Tundra and barking wildly at the stainless-steel tool chest where Aaron had hidden the weed.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’m impressed. I suppose we can try it for a while, unofficially, that is.”

  Aaron had gone back inside then. As Dan walked Bozo through the parking lot and back to his vintage Camaro, the dog alerted two more times—at other vehicles, at coworkers’ cars.

  “They’re working here and using weed themselves?” Dan asked the dog. “It’s a good thing Captain Meecham didn’t hang around long enough to see that. If he had, there’d be hell to pay.”

  Now, a year after that test run, Bozo rode shotgun in the front seat of Dan’s green-and-white Border Patrol SUV every time Dan went out on patrol. He loved it. So did Dan. Because of the rough terrain and the possibility of high-speed chases, Dan had found a dog harness that allowed him to fasten Bozo’s seat belt and keep him secure.

  The dog was almost eight years old now. He had started limping a little again. The vet said that he had developed a bit of arthritis in his left rear leg, the one that had been damaged by the IED, and that maybe it was verging on time for Bozo to retire, but Dan didn’t want to think about that, not yet.