Mojave Desert Sanctuary

by Gary J George

  Kiko smiled.

  “I’m very flattered, Aeden. And since you’ve told me your dream, I’ll tell you mine. It’s not as different from yours as you might think. My dream was I’d live forever at Pinto Mountain with John Stonebridge. And you and Joe Medrano would always be around. And the four of us would always be safe and secure, far from the rest of the world. We’d have those marvelous, long evenings for the rest of our lives. Out on the veranda in the summer and in my room in front of the fire in the winter.”

  There were tears in her eyes.

  “It’s been a privilege to know all three of you.”

  She stopped.

  I put my hand over hers.

  “The next time you’re out that way, give John and Joe my love. I owe my very life to the three of you.”

  We sat for a while without speaking.

  The silence grew very long. There was so much I wanted to say before she left that I didn’t know where to start. I pointed at her empty cup to give me time to put my thoughts in order.

  “Let me get you a refill.”

  “Thank you.”

  I took both cups to the counter and got refills and a couple of cinnamon rolls.

  When I turned around, she was gone.

  I set everything down and ran outside.

  Her car was pulling away from the curb. I saw her brake lights blink when she stopped at the intersection. Then she turned and was gone.

  Chapter 23

  Tokyo, Japan

  1968

  Aeden Snow

  Six years later, I went on R&R during my tour in Vietnam. Most guys took R&R in Hawaii, but I went to Tokyo. I got a phone book and looked up all the Kiko Yoshidas. There were lots of them. I called them all, but none of them responded when I said, “This is Aeden Snow. I’m calling for Kiko.”

  Silly, I know. She would not be in the phone book. She probably wasn’t even using the same name.

  I spent the rest of my leave walking the streets of that huge city, looking for her. Of course, I never saw her.

  But I took comfort that neither would anyone else seeking her there.

  I hope you enjoyed this novel. If you did, I would be very grateful if you would write a review. Independent Authors don’t have the resources of the publishing houses. We rely on our readers to promote our books by posting reviews. Please locate the book on Amazon. Near the bottom of the page, just above the “More About the Author” Section, you will see a gray button that reads “Write a customer review.” Please click on it and leave your thoughts about the book

  This book is a companion to three other books in the Smoke Tree Mystery Series. The first is “The House of Three Murders”, the second is “Horse Hunts”, and the third is “Death on a Desert Hillside”. All three books are available on Amazon. Lieutenant Caballo and Aeden Snow are important characters in the first book. The second book introduces the enigmatic Chemehuevi Joe, and Lieutenant Caballo and Chemehuevi Joe team up again in the third.

  Here is the prologue and first chapter of “Death on a Desert Hillside.”

  I hope you enjoy it.

  Gary J. George

  Prologue

  The wind was blowing toward them out of the east. In the ghostly gray light of the cold, pre-dawn December day, the pack neared the end of a night of hunting as it approached the broad mouth of the sandy wash. The hunt had been unsuccessful. The dogs were hungry. The previous night had been only marginally better, yielding only one small dog and a cat. Not nearly enough to feed the massive alpha male and the three other dogs.

  The pack was beginning to turn west to run close to the edge of the steep, southwest escarpment when the alpha caught the scent. Meat. Smoky meat. He stopped. Saliva began to dribble from his jaws as he turned his head from side to side to pinpoint the source.

  There!

  The big dog bolted at a dead run. The three smaller dogs followed in his wake, struggling to keep pace.

  In a few minutes, the dogs saw the source of the scent.

  It was a man.

  The smaller dogs slowed to a tentative trot.

  Men were dangerous. Men should be avoided.

  But the alpha male did not slow. He continued over the soft ground, throwing up great gouts of sand with every leap forward. His thick chest heaved with each ragged gulp of cold air, but he managed to summon a final burst.

  The man suddenly heard the huge dog. He turned his head in alarm and took flight. He dug hard toward a stairway leading upward from the desert floor.

  The dog caught him on the fourth step, but his enormous jaws closed mostly on cloth. The cloth ripped as he tried to pull the man down. The man jerked free. He pounded to the top of the stairs and disappeared through a door.

  With the meat.

  With the delicious, smoky meat.

  The alpha male howled in frustration and hurled himself over and over again against the door while the other dogs milled and whined below.

  CHAPTER 1

  DESERT DOG PACK

  Lieutenant Carlos Caballo, known throughout the Lower Colorado River Basin in the tri-states area simply as “Horse,” loved his job. Except for the paperwork. He was grinding his way through a stack of it early on a Monday morning in December of 1961 when his dispatcher’s voice came over the intercom.

  “Lieutenant, Deputy Chesney has a problem he’d like to talk to you about.”

  Delighted to have an excuse to get out from behind his desk, he went into the outer office. The dispatcher turned his chair over to his boss.

  “Go, Andy.”

  “Lieutenant, I’m out here at the rodeo grounds with Willy Gibson. He’s real upset about something, and I’m making it worse because I can’t understand him. Over.”

  “Any idea at all what he’s trying to tell you? Over.”

  “Can’t make heads or tails of it. He got so frustrated he started growling at me. Lieutenant, you can understand him better than anybody. Any chance you could come out here? I know it would help. Just now when he heard your voice on the radio, he stopped growling and sat down on the ground. Over.”

  The Lieutenant’s face lit up.

  “Sit tight, Andy. I’m on my way. Clear.”

  He hurried to his office, pulled his gun belt off the back of his chair and jammed his Stetson on his head. He was buckling on his gun as he headed for the substation door.

  “You’ve got the fort, Fred. Unless it’s World War Three, I don’t want to hear about it until I get back.”

  He started his unit and drove down the long driveway to Highway 95 and turned left toward Smoke Tree. At the stop sign where Route 95 merged with Route 66, he turned on his light bar and hit his siren to create a break in the traffic so he could get onto 66. As soon as he was in the stream, he turned them both off. A half mile later he dropped down the hill into town. As he drove along the section of the highway with the Santa Fe tracks on his right and a string of gas stations and old, one story motor courts on his left, he thought about Willy Gibson.

  Carlos Caballo was sixteen the first time he saw Willy. Carlos was walking across the little park in front of the Santa Fe Depot in Smoke Tree. A cold, winter wind was kicking hard across the stiff, brown, dormant Bermuda grass in the park, flinging trash and dust and yellow leaves from a giant cottonwood into the air. In the middle of the park, he saw a man having a conversation with the World War One field gun that sat on a raised, concrete slab enclosed by a wrought iron fence.

  As he got closer, he realized the skin on the man’s face was a mass of scar tissue. It looked like melted tallow stained with red ochre and flecked with bits of iron oxide had been poured over a dented oval. His ears had been badly burned and were curled tightly against the side of his head. They were the size, shape and color of tiny, dried apricots. He had neither eyebrows nor any other hair on his head. The only unmarked features of his face had a singular beauty: kind, clear, gray eyes and oddly full and girlish lips that looked like they belonged on someone else’s mouth.

  He was a
small man. He was stooped, and his shirt hung loosely on his frame. He was so thin, in fact, that a pair of suspenders, incongruously covered with pink polka dots, helped a wide belt keep his worn, khaki pants from sliding down over his hips. But in spite of the narrow torso, his forearms strained the fabric of his shirt and his wrists were so thick the sleeves were unbuttoned. At first Horse thought it was because the man had just a thumb and one finger on one of his badly scarred hands and only a ring finger and pinky on the other and could not do up the buttons. But then he realized the rest of the buttons on the blue flannel shirt were done up, including the small collar button.

  Whatever the man was saying to the gun seemed very important to him. And apparently the gun was answering because he kept pausing to listen and nod his head. When he noticed a boy had stopped to look at him, the man included the boy in the conversation.

  “Guh!” he said, loudly.

  Even though he was practically shouting, Carlos was not afraid of the man with the scars, the missing fingers on his bent and twisted hands and the disheveled clothing. He did think it was a little strange the man was having a conversation with a gun Carlos had walked past hundreds of times without really seeing. But Carlos didn’t leave, and perhaps just as importantly, he didn’t look away. He thought he knew what the man was saying.

  “That’s right,” said Carlos. “Gun.”

  There was suddenly a delighted smile on the man’s face.

  “Oom!” he shouted. Then he pursed his full lips and came out with a loud, high-pitched whistle that gradually descended in pitch until it ended in another “Oom!”

  “Boom!” said Carlos.

  The man was so happy he started dancing from foot to foot. Then he stopped and pointed at himself and said something that sounded like “Weeyee.”

  Carlos realized the man was giving his name. Carlos had never heard of anyone named Weeyee. Then something clicked, and Carlos understood.

  “Willy?” asked Carlos, pointing at the man.

  The man’s smile grew even bigger. The rest of his badly burned face did not move when his lips and eyes smiled.

  Carlos pointed at himself.

  “Carlos.”

  The man stopped dancing and gestured at Carlos.

  When he tried to say the name, it came out as “ahr yos.”

  When Carlos nodded, the man stuck out his right hand, the one with a finger and a thumb on it.

  Carlos hesitated, but only briefly, and then extended his own. The small man lightly squeezed the boy’s hand between his thumb and middle finger. Then he withdrew the hand and bobbed his head.

  “Bah!” he shouted.

  “Bye,” said Carlos

  The man walked off across the park, turning twice to wave and smile.

  In the months that followed, Carlos often encountered Willy Gibson, sometimes in Smoke Tree, sometimes in the desert outside of town and sometimes sitting above the Colorado River watching the water flow. Over time, the man and the young boy became friends. In a way Horse could not define, the man reminded him of his father, the father who had not returned home from the Pacific in World War II. Perhaps it was the kindness Carlos saw in Willy’s eyes. And for Willy, young Carlos was someone who wasn’t frightened by Willy and, more importantly, didn’t make fun of him.

  Carlos soon understood that Willy could not make hard sounds like “k” and “d” and “t”. He also had trouble with “l” and “r” sounds, but he could approximate them. Once Carlos understood the limitations of Willy’s speech, he could usually parse what the man was trying to say.

  Before long, Carlos realized whatever had happened to Willy had damaged his mind as well as his body. Some days were better than others. Some days his eyes were clear, and he seemed alert. But some days, Willy seemed to look at the world around him without comprehension. As if he weren’t sure exactly where he was. On those days, it sometimes took Willy a while to recognize Carlos. In fact, in those first few months, Willy sometimes introduced himself again; going through the same routine he had that day by the field gun.

  But after the first year, Willy no longer made that mistake. There was a mind at work behind those gray eyes; a mind struggling to make sense of the world; a mind that longed to communicate with and be accepted by others. Once, after Carlos had known Willy long enough to be sure Willy could understand him completely, Carlos asked Willy if he could write, thinking that would be a way for the two of them to communicate. It was on one of Willy’s better days: a day when he seemed to be in touch with his surroundings. Willy held up both of his badly twisted and burned hands and shook his head. He looked as if he were going to cry.

  It was all Carlos could do to keep from crying himself.

  By the time Carlos graduated from high school, he and Willy had forged a lasting bond. Carlos often went out of his way to seek the man out and make sure he was all right. Willy was always glad to see him. And it made Carlos angry when people treated his friend badly. People stared and pointed at Willy as if he were an exhibit of some sort. And they laughed at him.

  Then the Smoke Tree Police officers joined in the fun. In a late-evening ceremony behind the station, they pinned a dime store badge on Willy’s shirt and gave him an old STPD hat. They strapped a holster to his waist that held a revolver so badly rusted the cylinder wouldn’t turn and gave him a big flashlight.

  Willy took it all very seriously. Late at night, he would walk the downtown armed with his rusted revolver, wearing his badge, hat, and star and carrying his flashlight. He would go to every business that had closed for the night and rattle the doors to make sure they were locked. Then he would shine his flashlight through the windows before he moved to the next place.

  It wasn’t long before news of the ceremony and Willy’s self-appointed role reached the town’s two barbershops. That’s all it took. Soon, everyone in town knew Willy on sight, although very few of them ever spoke to him.

  Carlos thought the whole thing was mean-spirited. But Willy seemed completely unaware the cops were laughing at him behind his back. And he only wore the badge and the hat and carried the gun and flashlight when he did his rounds. No one knew where he stored them once he had completed his nightly routine.

  As Horse drove through town, he noticed the Smoke Tree Chamber of Commerce had tacked wreaths on the streetlight poles and hung a few sparse strands of tinsel and strings of Christmas lights over the highway. Many of the big city people travelling through Smoke Tree probably saw the decorations as tacky and pathetic. Horse thought they were perfect. The worn decorations felt just right for Christmas in a hardscrabble, blue collar town in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Anything finer would have been out of place.

  Horse left the motels and gas stations of town behind and continued north on Highway 66. There were discarded beer cans and bottles and other trash on both shoulders of the road. In fact, discarded trash lined 66 from at least Holbrook, Arizona to the bottom of Cajon Pass in San Bernardino. For most people, that was all the desert represented: a place to throw beer cans. Horse sometimes pictured the highway from far above: a band of junk extending ten yards from both sides of the road, bleeding into a clean and untrammeled desert just beyond the tossing range of thoughtless motorists.

  Before he reached the turnoff that led to the rodeo grounds, he saw a sheriff’s department unit parked partway up the dirt road. Horse turned on his light bar and hit his siren to create a traffic break and turned west onto the road.

  He pulled in behind Andy Chesney’s cruiser. Andy was leaning against his unit. When Horse got out, Andy walked toward him.

  “Mornin’, Lieutenant.”

  “Good morning, Andy. Where’s Willy?”

  “Sitting over by the car.”

  As Horse walked over, Willy got up.

  “Hello, Willy.”

  “Orse!” yelled Willy, looking relieved.

  “Willy’s been calm ever since I told him you were on your way.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

 
“Well, sir, I was coming in toward town when I saw Willy down there by the highway. It almost seemed like he was waiting for me. Anyway, he started waving his arms and jumping up and down, so I pulled onto the shoulder. He was beside my door before I could get my unit stopped. I persuaded him to follow me onto the dirt road so he wouldn’t get hit by the traffic.

  He really, really didn’t want to follow me very far up the road. In fact, right here was as far as I could get him to go. As soon as I got out, he started yelling at me.

  I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but I couldn’t understand him. The harder he tried to tell me something, the more upset he got. And so I called you.”

  “You did right.”

  Horse turned to Willy.

  “What were you trying to tell Andy?”

  “Og!” shouted Willy.

  “What kind of dog?”

  Willy made large gestures with his injured hands.

  “Big dog?”

  Willy nodded.

  “And what about this big dog.”

  Willy shook his head and started making slashes in the air.

  “More than one dog?”

  “Ehss.”

  “How many, Willy. Two, three?”

  Willy made a ‘keep going’ motion.

  “Four?”

  Willy held both hands up, palms out.

  “Four big dogs?”

  Willy shook his head and held up a finger.

  “One big dog?”

  “Ehss.”

  “How big were the other three?”

  Willy indicated a medium size with his crippled hands.

  “Where did you see them last?”

  Willy pointed west with his thumb.

  “How far?”

  “Roh eee oh.”