Hour of the Hunter

Chapter 6

This is detective Walker, Davy,” Diana Ladd said, introducing her son to Brandon when the session in the Indian Health Service examining room was finally over. “He’s giving us a ride back to Tucson.”

“Detective?” Davy asked. He looked warily up at Brandon Walker through long blond lashes. “Are you a real policeman?”

“Yes, I am.” The detective nodded. Little kids were usually dazzled once they understood they were talking to the genuine article. As far as children were concerned, detectives were something rare and wonderful who existed only in the exotic worlds of television or the comics.

“Not only that,” Walker added with a grin, “you’re going to get to ride back to Tucson in a real police car.”

David Ladd’s reaction was diametrically opposed to what Walker expected. The child scuttled away from both the detective and his mother, pausing only when he had planted himself firmly beside a bemused Dr. Rosemead, who was still standing in the doorway of the examining room.

“No,” Davy declared adamantly. “I don’t want to.”

“We have to,” his mother said. “You heard the doctor say you can’t stay here.”

Davy had listened while Dr. Rosemead explained why non-Indians couldn’t be treated by the Indian Health Service. The boy couldn’t understand why Big Toe Indians didn’t count since that’s what Rita said he was, but right then being a Big Toe Indian wasn’t his biggest worry. The alarming presence of a detective was.

“I’ll go in Rita’s truck,” Davy insisted. “I’ll go with my mom.”

“Rita’s truck is broken, remember?” Diana explained patiently. “And I didn’t bring my car.”

The boy glared up at the tall detective with the funny short red brush of mustache marching across his upper lip. “Are you going to take us to jail?” Davy asked.

“To jail? Of course not,” Brandon Walker answered. He wondered where Davy Ladd would have got such a strange idea.

Diana Ladd laughed outright. “Come on, Davy, don’t be silly. Detective Walker’s just going to give us a ride back home, then I’ll take you to the hospital in Tucson for stitches.”

Davy didn’t care about stitches. He remembered what the Indian women had said about him, speaking in Papago when they thought he didn’t understand. If it was true, if he really was Killer’s Child, then his mother must be a killer. This tall, scary detective was probably going to arrest her, take her away to jail, and keep her forever. If his mother went away, what would happen to him? Other kids had two parents. Davy didn’t. With his father dead and Nana Dahd hurt, how would he live? What would he eat? How would he take care of Oh’o?

Davy stood his ground, shaking his head and refusing to budge. Diana lost all patience. “Come on,” she ordered. “Now! It’s late, and I’m tired. This has gone on long enough.”

She held out her hand. Rita had taught Davy never to disobey an adult’s direct command. One tiny, reluctant step at a time, he inched toward her outstretched hand.

Dr. Rosemead smiled and nodded. “Good,” he said. “I’m sure he’ll be fine, but if you’re worried about a possible concussion, Mrs. Ladd, you can always wake him up every hour or so for the next twenty-four, just to be on the safe side. We’ll call on ahead so the doctors at St. Mary’s are expecting you.”

Diana and Davy led the way to the car, but Brandon could see that the boy was hanging back. He was clearly frightened, although the detective couldn’t imagine why. It offended him for little kids to be afraid of cops. Didn’t they teach kids that policemen were their friends? Wasn’t there some project called Officer Friendly working in the schools these days?

As he opened the car door, the detective tried once more to smooth things over with the boy. “Do you want to sit in front?” he asked.

“No,” the boy asserted stubbornly, shying away from the detective’s outstretched hand. “I’ll ride in back.”

Myrna Louise couldn’t stand to stay there in the hallway and watch the entire hair-cutting process. It was too hard on her, brought back far too many painful memories. Even though Andrew was almost fifty-he would be in a few months since she had already turned sixty-five-she still thought of him as her little boy, her baby.

All her husbands had said she spoiled Andrew rotten, except the last one, Jake. He’d never met Andrew. They’d fallen in love and married and almost got divorced while Andrew was-away. That’s how she always thought of it-away. She never allowed herself to think about Andrew’s last seven years in anything other than the vaguest of terms.

On reflection, she supposed it was true-she had spoiled Andrew, whenever she got the chance. That was her one regret in life, that she had seen so little of him after she lost custody. She’d never forgiven her first mother-in-law for that, for encouraging Howie Carlisle to go to court to take her little boy away from her, to have her-Myrna Louise-declared an unfit mother. That was still a terrible blow even though the judge had softened it some by agreeing to let her see Andrew sometimes. When she had a decent place to stay, she’d been able to have him with her during the summers for as long as a month or so and maybe again around Thanksgiving or Christmas, but that was all. In her mind, she’d never functioned as a real mother.

Myrna Louise leaned back in her rocker and closed her eyes, remembering Andrew as he had been when he was little-so cute, so smart, so mischievous. “Full of the devil,” is what Howie used to call it.

Because of the tufts of soft gray hair spilling in a heap onto the bathroom floor, Myrna Louise recalled as if it were yesterday that long-ago time when Roger, her second husband, took her little boy to have his first haircut.

Roger was offended by Andrew’s headful of adorable blond curls. He insisted it was time the child have a real boy’s haircut, that the curls made him a sissy. Before the two of them left for the barbershop, Myrna Louise took her son aside and talked to him, telling him how he should behave.

“You mind your uncle Roger,” she said. “You do everything he tells you.”

“He’s not my uncle,” Andrew muttered stubbornly under his breath.

“What did you say?”

“He’s not my uncle. Granny said so.”

Any mention of her former mother-in-law threw Myrna Louise into unreasoning rage. “He most certainly is, too,” she insisted, “and that’s what you’re going to call him.”

“No,” Andrew said.

“Yes,” she returned.

“Say ‘Uncle.’”

“Uncle,” Andrew replied sullenly.

“Say ‘Roger.’”

“Roger.”

“Now say ‘Uncle Roger.’”

“I can say ‘Uncle,’” her son responded, “and I can say ‘Roger,’ but I can’t say ‘Uncle Roger.’”

And he never did. Not once.

Without humidity to hold it back, the heat peeled away from the desert floor like skin from a sun-ripened peach. Brandon and Diana tried driving with the Ford’s windows wide open, but it was too chilly on Davy, who had stretched out lengthwise in the backseat and fallen sound asleep, so they rode with the front windows barely cracked, making conversation possible.

“Davy’s a cute kid,” Brandon offered tentatively. Riding with this strangely silent woman still made him uncomfortable.

Diana nodded. “He takes after his dad.”

Walker had noticed Davy’s physical resemblance to his father, but he hadn’t wanted to mention it. The boy’s wide-set blue-gray eyes and blond good looks were a long way from his mother’s brown-eyed, dark-haired features. Brandon hoped, for Davy’s sake, that looks were all he’d inherited from his father. If genetics were destiny, then David Ladd was doomed.

“Sometimes he does funny things, bizarre things,” Diana mused, “and I wonder if it’s anything like the way his father was when he was a child, but I don’t have any way of knowing.”

“You don’t see your in-laws?”

Diana shook her head. “They wanted me to come back to Chicago and live with them, but I wouldn’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Rita,” Diana answered simply. “They didn’t understand about Rita. Since I couldn’t bring her along, we didn’t go.”

Diana’s in-laws weren’t the only ones who didn’t understand about Rita, Brandon Walker thought, about the strange bond that existed between the young Anglo woman and the much older Indian. It didn’t make sense to him, either.

“Davy’s grandparents don’t stay in touch?”

“They send Christmas presents. That’s about all.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It’s their loss,” Diana added.

Garrison Ladd told Diana Cooper about his parents that very first November afternoon during their three-hour coffee marathon at the I-Hop. “I don’t like them much,” he said. “Especially my dad.”

This was something about Garrison Ladd that Diana Lee Cooper could relate to. She knew all there was to know about hating your own father. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked.

“He’s brilliant for one thing, and expects everyone else to be the same. He’s worked his way up to being a big-cheese executive with Admiral back in Chicago. He started out in electrical engineering between the wars after graduating from the Armour Institute of Technology, with honors and two degrees. He was determined that I follow in his illustrious footsteps.”

Diana Cooper would have loved to have a father who was undeniably brilliant, someone who would encourage her to go on to school of any kind rather than being, like Max Cooper, a solid wall of resistance.

“Your father doesn’t sound so bad,” she ventured.

“Oh yeah? This man doesn’t understand the word vacation. All he does is work, work, work, and make money. He’s probably richer than Midas by now. He and my mother live in this fantastic house on the shores of Lake Michigan. They have all these smart friends, but they’re boring as hell, and they don’t have any fun. They don’t know how.”

“That still doesn’t sound so bad,” Diana ventured.

“Why? What does your father do?” Gary Ladd asked, leveling that disconcerting blue-eyed gaze of his on her.

Diana flushed, both because he was looking at her and because of the question. She knew that particular question would come eventually, and she dreaded it. When she told him about Max, would Gary Ladd stalk out of the restaurant and leave her to pay for her own coffee? Sick at heart but incapable of doing anything else, Diana felt obliged to answer straight from the hip. If, after she told him, Garrison Walther Ladd, III, walked out and left her sitting there alone at the table, then all she’d be out was a single cup of I-Hop coffee.

“He’s a garbageman,” Diana replied.

Garrison slammed his cup into the heavy china saucer, slopping coffee. “You’re kidding!”

“No.”

“This is a joke, right?”

“It’s no joke. My dad runs the garbage dump in Joseph, Oregon.”

“Joseph? Where’s that?”

“In the Willowa Mountains. On the other side of the state, a town at the end of a road. You might say I’m a dead-end kid.”

It was easier for Diana to make fun of herself and Joseph first, rather than waiting for other people to do it. From his initial reaction, she couldn’t tell if Garrison was making fun of her or not. He seemed intrigued.

“Fascinating. How many people live in Joseph?”

“Eight hundred, give or take.”

“My God! That’s amazing.”

“What’s amazing about it?”

“Look, I’m from Chicago. When I came here, I thought Eugene was small, but eight hundred people? Jeez, that’s wonderful.”

“It doesn’t seen particularly wonderful to me.”

“Just think about it,” Garrison Ladd continued, his face alight with enthusiasm. “It’s hard to believe that there are still places like that in this country, wide-open spaces.”

“It’s wide open, all right,” Diana returned dryly. “It’s so open there’s nobody there.”

“So what do people do?”

“For a living? Farming, ranching, logging.”

“No mining?” he asked.

“No mining.”

Garrison Ladd folded his arms across his chest, shook his head, and grinned at her. He had a very engaging grin. “Too bad,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Did you ever listen to Stella Dallas, or are you too young?”

“Who’s Stella Dallas?”

“That’s what I get for messing around with younger women. Stella Dallas used to be on the radio back in Chicago when I was growing up. They said she was a girl from ‘a small mining town in the West.’ I always told my mother that Stella Dallas was the kind of girl I was going to marry. Right up until you told me there was no mining in Joseph, I thought maybe I’d marry you.”

At that preposterous statement, Diana Lee Cooper burst out laughing. She couldn’t help it. The few other patrons in the restaurant that afternoon, the ones who weren’t at home glued to their television sets, regarded her disapprovingly. This was a day of mourning, a day of national tragedy, as citizens of the country, regardless of political leanings, began to come to grips with the bloody drama playing itself out in Dallas. It was not a time for levity, but Diana laughed anyway.

Kennedy was dead, Johnson was president, and Diana Lee Cooper was falling in love.

Rita slept, and so did most of the Indian children, stacked like so much cordwood on the sweltering, screened-in wooden porch of the outing matron’s red brick home. The children had been there for varying lengths of time, from several days to only one or two, while Big Eddie completed his annual boarding-school roundup. The children from Coyote Sitting were the last to arrive. They lay in a miserable huddle at the far end of the long room.

As before, it was noisy in Chuk Shon, far too noisy for Dancing Quail to sleep. Just then another huge wainomi-kalit rumbled down the metal tracks a few blocks away. The whole house shook, and Dancing Quail did, too. She shivered and clutched her grandmother’s precious medicine basket close to her chest. The sound terrified her. The other children had told her that the monster was called a train and that the next night they would travel to Phoenix riding on that huge, noisy beast.

To calm herself, she slipped her fingers inside the basket. On the way to Chuk Shon, Dancing Quail had examined each of the precious items in Understanding Woman’s basket. For the Tohono O’odham, four is a powerful number, and there were four things in the basket-a single eagle feather, a shell Understanding Woman’s dead husband had brought back from his first salt-trading trip to the sea, a jagged piece of pottery with the sign of the turtle etched into the smooth clay, and half a round rock that looked like a broken egg.

The outside shell of the rock was rough and gray, but inside it was alive with beautifully colored cubes. The cubes reminded Dancing Quail of the sun setting behind dark summer rain clouds that sometimes wrapped themselves around Ioligam.

Now, as the iron beast’s whistle once more screeched through the night, Dancing Quail’s groping fingers closed tightly around the rock. She held it and willed herself not to cry. Gradually, a feeling of calm settled over her. Somehow she knew that this mysterious rock was the most important gift in Understanding Woman’s basket. Nothing on the coarse gray outside hinted at the beautiful secret concealed within. That was her grandmother’s secret message for her-to be like the magic rock, tough on the outside but with her spirit hidden safely inside.

No matter what the stern, tall woman with her fiery red hair said, no matter what strange name the Mil-gahn woman called her, Dancing Quail would still be Dancing Quail.

With the geode clutched tightly in her fingers, the child drifted into a fitful sleep.

“Look,” Brandon said, as they sped around the long curve at Brawley Wash just before Three Points. “Why go all the way out to the house for your car? You’ll have to drive on into town by yourself. I’d be happy to drive you to the hospital and bring you back home afterward.”

“You’ve done enough already,” Diana responded. “More than you should have.”

But Brandon Walker didn’t want the evening to be over, didn’t want to go home to the house where his father, who didn’t have a brain tumor and who didn’t have anything definite wrong with him that the doctors could point to, sometimes didn’t recognize his own son’s face.

“The boy’s asleep,” Brandon continued. “If you change cars, you’ll wake him up.”

“I’ll have to wake him up in half an hour anyway. That’s what the doctor said.”

“By then we’ll already be at the hospital. Besides, you must be worn out.”

Diana surprised herself by not arguing or insisting. “All right,” she said, leaning back in the car and closing her eyes. It felt good to have someone else handling things for a change, to have someone taking care of her. That hadn’t happened to her for a long time, not since her mother died.

With her daughter away at school, Iona Dade Cooper avoided telling anyone she was sick. Once Diana found out about it, Iona brushed aside all alarmed entreaties that she go someplace besides La Grande for tests, that she utilize one of the big-city hospitals in Spokane or Portland with their big-city specialists.

“Too expensive,” Iona declared firmly. “Besides, I wouldn’t want to be that far away from your father.”

Diana had bitten back any number of angry comments. As usual, her father was a bent reed, not strong enough for anyone else to lean on. Max Cooper had refused to come to the little community hospital in La Grande the night before his wife’s exploratory surgery, claiming that being around hospitals made him nervous.

“Well, stay here then!” Diana had flared at him. “For God’s sake, don’t go out of your way!”

In the old days, Max would have backhanded his daughter for that remark, but not with Gary, his brand-new son-in-law, standing there gaping.

“I have an idea, Mr. Cooper,” Gary Ladd said soothingly, stepping into the fray.

Max loved the fact that his son-in-law insisted on calling him “Mr. Cooper.” No one in Joseph accorded the Garbage Man that kind of respect.

“Diana can go down to La Grande to be with Iona tonight, and I’ll stay here. That way, neither one of you will be alone.”

Max nodded. “I appreciate that, Gary. I really do.”

So Diana spent the night in the hospital with her mother, sitting on a straight-backed chair near the bed, talking because her mother was too frightened to sleep despite the doctor-ordered sleeping pills.

“You’ll look after your father when I’m gone, won’t you, Diana?” Iona asked.

“Don’t talk that way, Mom. It’s going to be fine. You’ll see.”

But Iona knew otherwise. “He’ll need someone to take care of the bills. No matter what happens, as soon as you get back to Joseph, go down to the bank and have Ed Gentry put you on as a signer on both the checking and savings accounts.”

“That’s crazy, and you know it. Daddy’ll never agree to having me as a signer on his bank account.”

“He’ll have to,” Iona replied. “He’ll need someone to write the checks for him.”

“Write the checks?” Diana echoed stupidly.

“Your father doesn’t know how to read or write, Diana,” Iona explained. “He never learned. He never wanted you or anyone else to know, but if something happens to me, if I die, he’s going to need someone to look after him.”

Diana was dumbstruck. “Daddy can’t read?”

“I tried to teach him years ago when we first got married, before you were born, but the letters were always jumbled and funny. He couldn’t do it.”

“If he can’t read, how did he keep his job all these years?”

“He’s always been able to do math in his head, so nobody ever knew. When there were receipts that had to be written up or reports of some kind, I always handled those.”

“Will he lose his job?”

Iona nodded. “Probably, and the house, too. I’m worried about what will happen to him.”

“I’ll take care of him,” Diana promised. “I don’t know how, but I will.”

Iona lapsed into silence. For a while, Diana thought maybe her mother had fallen asleep. Diana sat there stunned, still grappling with the sudden knowledge that her father was illiterate.

She remembered his angry tirade when she had told him she was going to go to the University of Oregon to learn how to be a writer.

“A writer!” he had roared. “You, a writer?”

“Why not?” she had spat back at him, daring him to hit her but knowing that he wouldn’t because the rodeo was just days away. Max Cooper couldn’t afford to give his daughter a black eye just before the Chief Joseph Days Parade and Rodeo.

“I’ll tell you why not. You’re a woman, that’s why not.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Was Shakespeare a woman?” he demanded. “Were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John women? I’ll say not. They were all men, every last one of them, and let me tell you, sister, they’re good enough for me!”

She remembered the conversation word for word, and all the time that lying bastard had been berating her about how good Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were, he couldn’t read a one of them. Sitting there in the darkened hospital room, Diana felt doubly betrayed, not only because her father had fooled her, but because her mother had helped him do it.

“I’m glad you married Gary,” Iona said at length. “He seems like a very nice boy.”

“He’s not a boy, Mom. He’s twenty-five, five years older than I am.”

“Well, I just wish you’d start a family soon. I so wanted to have grandchildren.” Iona’s eyes filled with tears, which she wiped away with a corner of the sheet.

Diana didn’t have the heart to tell Iona that her good Catholic daughter was a mortal sinner who had been taking birth-control pills for a year now, ever since the first week of December of 1963. Gary had just happened to know of a doctor who wasn’t averse to giving single girls prescriptions for the Pill.

Now that they were married, she and Gary had agreed it wasn’t time yet for them to consider starting a family, especially not until he finished his master’s degree. He was thinking about applying for a creative-writing program in Arizona. Diana still had two more semesters to go before she’d have her teaching credential.

“He’s a lot like your father, isn’t he?” Iona said.

Diana was offended by the question and didn’t answer. Gary wasn’t at all like her father. She’d gone to great lengths to find someone as different from Max Cooper as he could possibly be. Gary was smart. He had a good education and a sense of humor, and he had never once raised a hand against her in anger. Maybe he was a little lazy. If there was a right way to do something and an easy way, Gary would choose the easy way every time. Maybe in that regard there was a certain similarity between her husband and her father, but other than that, Garrison Walther Ladd was as different from Max Cooper as day from night.

“Does he treat you nice?” Iona asked.

“He treats me fine, Mom. Don’t worry.”

Relieved, Iona Cooper finally relaxed enough to fall asleep. They did the surgery early the next morning. When the doctor came looking for Diana in the small waiting room, his shoulders sagged under the weight of the news. As soon as she saw the haggard look in his eyes, Diana knew the prognosis wasn’t good.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Very bad, Diana. I’m sorry. It’s already metastasized. Completely inoperable. There’s nothing to do but take her home and make her as comfortable as possible.”

“How long does she have?”

“I don’t know. A few months maybe. A year at the most.”

Iona was still under sedation and wasn’t expected to come out of it for several hours. In tears, Diana fled the hospital and drove like a maniac along the twisting road from La Grande to Joseph, wanting to fall into Gary’s arms, to have him hold her and tell her that everything would be fine.

But when she got home, the house was deserted. She couldn’t find the men anywhere. After waiting one long half hour and doing two days’ worth of dirty dishes that had been allowed to accumulate in the kitchen sink, she finally thought to go check the bomb shelter behind the house. Dug into a hillside, the shelter was Max Cooper’s pride and joy. He had built it himself, cinder block by cinder block, with plans he had ordered by mail and which his wife had patiently helped him decipher.

And that was where Diana found them, both of them, father and husband, passed out cold on two of the three army cots. A litter of empty beer bottles covered the floor around them.

Sick at heart and without waking them, Diana turned on her heel and drove back to La Grande. She never told Gary she’d seen them like that, and if either one of them noticed that someone had come into the house and done the dishes while they were drunk and passed out, no one ever mentioned it.

“We’re here,” Brandon said quietly, pulling up under the brightly lit emergency-room canopy at St. Mary’s Hospital. Diana jerked awake from an exhausted sleep. She started to waken Davy, but Brandon stopped her.

“You go on inside and start filling out paperwork. I’ll park the car and carry Davy in. He’s way too heavy for you.”

The detective eased the child out of the backseat, hoisting him up to his chest and wrapping his arms around the narrow, bony shoulders. The child stirred enough to look at him once, but he was far too tired to object. With a weary sigh, Davy snuggled his head against Brandon Walker’s neck. Scents of an improbable mixture of hospital disinfectant and wood smoke drifted up from Davy’s sweaty hair, reminding Brandon of something missing from his own life-little boys and Cub Scout camp-outs.

Battling the lump in his throat, the detective carried Davy Ladd inside and sat with the boy cradled in his arms while Diana talked to the emergency room clerk. Walker missed his own boys right then with a gut-wrenching, almost physical ache. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d actually held either Tommy or Quentin like this.

The boys were tiny when he went off to Nam, and Janie had taken them with her when she moved out and divorced him four years ago, claiming she was tired of playing second fiddle to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Louella Walker had raised her son right. Brandon was only too happy to sop up all the guilt Janie dished out. He agreed completely that the failure of their marriage must have been all his fault, accepting as gospel the idea that he had somehow let Janie and the boys down.

That, of course, was before he heard about the new addition his former wife was expecting, about his own sons’ soon-to-be half brother, Brian, a nine-pounder who was born a scant six months after Janie left home. Brian’s birth was also a full year and a half after Brandon Walker’s vasectomy. Later, when he was back at the house getting it ready to sell, a neighborhood busybody had told him that Janie and her second husband had been playing around the whole time Brandon had been off doing his duty to God and country in Vietnam.

He saw Tommy and Quentin sometimes, but not often enough. Eight and nine years old now, they barely knew him. He was the obliging stranger who showed up on the front porch periodically to take them to ball games or movies or to the Pima County Fair. Now that little Brian was old enough, he wanted to go along, too.

At first Brandon said absolutely not. No way! He did his best to hate the little bastard, but he wasn’t able to keep that up forever. The sweet little sad-eyed guy, left crying on the porch once too often, had worn down Brandon’s resistance. More of Louella Walker’s guilt, perhaps, but after all, it sure as hell wasn’t the kid’s fault that his parents were a matched pair of creeps. So lately, Brian was usually the fourth member on the infrequent Saturday afternoon outings.

Afterward, Brandon would sometimes kick himself for being a patsy, for being too goddamned easy, but that’s just the way he was. Besides, Brian appreciated going to ball games even more than Tommy and Quentin did.

When Andrew Carlisle finished shaving his head, his tender scalp was screaming at him, but as he examined himself in the mirror, he knew a sore head was well worth it. He looked like a new man, felt like somebody else completely. He’d have to be careful to wear a hat the next few days so he didn’t blister his bare head, but no one would put this smooth-headed man-Phil Wharton, Andrew told himself-together with the bushy-haired Andrew Carlisle who had been released from prison early that afternoon. The previous afternoon, he corrected, glancing at his watch-Jake Spaulding’s watch, which was his now.

He went into the living room and checked on his mother. Myrna Louise was sound asleep in the rocker, head resting on her chin, mouth open, a thin string of spittle dribbling from one comer of her mouth. He waved his hand in front of her face to be sure she was asleep, then he went back into the bathroom and shaved his legs.

When he finished with that, he returned to his room and retrieved the gun, Margaret Danielson’s automatic. Long ago, Myrna Louise had been known for going through her son’s things. Andrew didn’t want to take any chances.

Besides, she had given him the keys to Jake’s old Valiant. She told him the tags were still good and he was welcome to use it anytime he wanted. He went out to the little one-car garage and slipped the gun under the base of the jack in the trunk’s spare-tire well. That way it would be safely out of the house should he need it.

The other key his mother had given him was to his storage locker, the place where he had directed her to leave all his furniture and belongings once she emptied his house in Tucson before selling it. At the time, Myrna Louise had questioned what he was doing with all that camping equipment in storage and what did he keep in the huge metal drum? He had reassured her that his survivalist gear was nothing more than a harmless interest in camping, a hobby he might want to take up again once he got out.

Andrew was reasonably certain all his equipment was there, at least most of it. He’d have to go down to Tucson as soon as possible and do a thorough inventory to make sure everything he needed was in good working order. Once he finished that, he’d be ready to go hunting again.

He could hardly wait.

After what she’d been through with her mother, the last thing Diana Ladd expected to happen in the emergency room was for her to get queasy when the doctor started to put stitches in Davy’s head. The doctor asked her if she’d be all right, and she confidently assured him that she would be, but that was before she knew that they wouldn’t be able to deaden it, that the stitches would have to be done with only ice cubes as anesthetic.

As Davy winced and cried out under the needle, she felt herself getting weak-kneed and woozy. A nurse helped her from the room. While she sat in the lobby with her head dangling between her knees feeling both foolish and helpless, Brandon Walker hurried into the emergency room and held Davy Ladd’s hand while the doctor sewed the little boy’s scalp back together.

It didn’t seem like that big a deal, really, but when Brandon Walker carried a wide-awake Davy back out of the emergency room and delivered him into his mother’s waiting arms, Diana’s tearful gratitude warmed his heart. No matter what Louella said, maybe Brandon wasn’t such a poor excuse for a human being after all.

He waited patiently while Davy proudly showed his mother the shaved spot on his head and the straight line of caterpillar-leg stitches that marched from his temple down one cheek.

“Ready?” Brandon asked at last.

“Yes,” Diana said. “Would you mind carrying him again? You’re right. He really is too heavy.”

“I can walk all by myself,” Davy said. “The doctor said I was real brave. I was, wasn’t I?” He looked up at Brandon for confirmation.

“Yes, you were. You barely cried at all.”

They walked to the waiting Ford three-abreast, with the boy between them holding each of their hands.

“Can I sit in the front now?” Davy asked, while they waited for Brandon to unlock the door.

“You bet,” Brandon Walker replied. “Any kid with twelve stitches in his head ought to get to ride in the front seat.”

In La Cantina, a dive of a bar in Rocky Point, Mexico, the driver of a red Grand Prix was sipping tequila and telling a buddy of his about the tough little boy he’d met earlier that day after a spectacular auto accident.

“That kid was something else,” the man was saying. “Here he was with all kinds of blood pouring out of his head, but all he could think about was this poor old Indian broad who was still pinned in the truck. I was about to take off in the wrong direction to get help, but he wouldn’t let me. He kept dragging on my leg and insisting there was an ambulance up on top of the mountain, for Chrissakes. Damned if he wasn’t right. If we hadn’t gone up the mountain after it right then, I don’t think she would have made it. Maybe she didn’t, for that matter.”

“You say the woman was an Indian and the kid was an Anglo?”

“A regular towhead,” the man answered. “And cute as a button.”

“I wonder if there isn’t a story in this,” his buddy said. “You know, human interest. I’ll talk to my features editor about it when I go back tomorrow. Maybe it’s something we can use next week. Once it gets hot around here, feature stories are tough to come by.”

The speaker drained his shot glass, licked a patch of salt off his hand, and took a bite from the lime on a napkin on the bar in front of him. “Ready for another?”

“You tell me. Is the Pope Catholic?”