Kiss of the Bees

Synopsis:

Years after a serial killer visited horror and bloodshed on her family, Diana Ladd Walker again faces trauma when her adopted daughter disappears and all clues point to the return of the executed murderer.

KISS OF THE BEES

By

J. A. JANCE

Copyright © 2001 by J. A. Jance.

For Rita Pablo, Pauline Hendricks, and Melissa Juan

Prologue

JUNE 1976

There were three of them—a viejo—an older man—and two younger ones—trudging up the sandy arroyo, each lugging two gallon-sized plastic containers of water. Mitch Johnson watched them through the gunsight on his rifle, wondering should he or shouldn’t he? In the end, he did. He shot them for the same reason Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest—because they were there.

The older one was still alive and moaning when Johnson stopped his Jeep on the rim of the wash to check his handiwork. It offended him that one shot had been so far off, hitting the man in the lower spine rather than where he’d meant to. The Marines had taught him better than that. He had the expert rifle badge to prove it, along with a Purple Heart and a bum leg as well.

He slid down the crumbling bank of Brawley Wash. The sand was ankle-deep and powdery underfoot, so there was no question of leaving a trail of identifiable footprints. Besides, as soon as the rains came, the bodies would be washed far downstream, into the Santa Rita, eventually, and from there into the Gila. When the bodies showed up, weeks or months from now, Johnson figured no one would be smart enough to trace three dead wetbacks back to the son-in-law of a well-to-do cotton farmer with a prosperous place off Sandario Road.

The three men lay facedown in the sand. The one who was still alive lay with his fist clasped shut around the handle of the water bottle. In the hot mid-June sun, water meant life. Approaching them, Johnson held his rifle at the ready, just in case. He walked up and kicked the bottle, shattering its brittle white plastic. The water sank instantly into the sand, like bathwater disappearing down a drain. Then slowly, systematically, he kicked each of the other five bottles in turn, sending their contents, too, spilling deep into the parched earth of the wash bed.

Only when the water was gone did he return to the injured man. The guy was quiet now, no doubt playing dead and hoping there wouldn’t be another shot. And there wouldn’t be. Why bother? The man was already dead; he just didn’t know it. Why waste another bullet?

“Welcome to the United States of America, greaser,” Mitch Johnson said aloud in English. “Have a nice day.”

With that he turned and walked away—limped away—leaving the hot afternoon sun to finish his deadly work. What he didn’t see as he scrambled back up the side of the wash to his waiting Jeep was that he was not alone. There was one other person there in the wash with him—another wetback—armed with his own two gallons of water and with his own unquenchable belief that somehow life north of the international border would be better than it was back home in Mexico.

For several minutes after the Jeep drove off in a plume of dust the fourth man didn’t move, didn’t venture out of his hiding place. Juan Ruiz Romero had been resting through the hottest part of the day in the sparse shade of a mesquite tree when the other three men passed by. Because groups are always easier to spot and apprehend than a single man traveling alone, Juan had stayed where he was, hidden and safe under his sheltering mesquite, as the trio walked unwittingly to the slaughter. Lying there quietly, Juan alone had heard and seen the Jeep come wheeling up the dirt road on the far side of the wash.

Somehow, a strangled sob escaped his lips. Sure the gunman must have heard it and would turn on him next. Juan shrank back into the mesquite. He stayed there for some time, holding his breath and expecting another gunshot at any moment, one that would spill his own life’s blood deep into the thirsty, waiting sand.

With his heart beating a terrified tattoo in his chest, Juan watched the killer go up to each of the fallen men in turn, looking down at them, as if examining whether they lived or not. Juan saw the ferocity of the kicks that shattered the life-giving water jugs. He witnessed the killer limp back up the bank, climb into his waiting Jeep, and drive away.

For several long minutes after the Jeep had disappeared from view, a shaken Juan stayed where he was. At last, though, he ventured out, moving forward as tentatively as a spooked deer. By the time he reached the three motionless bodies, Juan was convinced that all three men were dead. How could they be anything else?

He was standing less than two feet away when one of them stirred and moaned. Juan started at the sound, leaping backward as if dodging away from the warning rattle of an unseen snake.

It took a moment for Juan to collect himself. Two of the men were dead then, he ascertained finally, when he could think clearly once again. One was still alive. One of the three still had a chance to live, and Juan Ruiz Romero was it.

He straightened up and peered out over the rim of the wash. Far to the north, a dust plume from the fast moving but invisible Jeep still ballooned upward. To the south, although Juan had done his best to avoid them, were other people, including numerous officers from the Border Patrol. A few miles that way as well lay a fairly busy blacktop road that ran east and west. Juan had waited until after dark the night before and had used the protection of a culvert to duck under the highway. And far off to the east was an airfield of some kind. Airplanes had been coming and going from there all morning long.

In those few moments, Juan was torn by indecision. The easiest thing for him—the cowardly thing—would have been to leave the dead and wounded where they were and walk away. All he had to do was turn his back on them and mind his own business. The old man would no doubt die anyway, no matter what someone did for him. He was old. Clearly his life would soon be over one way or the other. Juan’s was just beginning. He had a job waiting for him in Casa Grande—a job arranged by his mother’s second cousin—if only he could get there before the foreman gave it away to someone else.

But standing there, Juan had a flash of insight. He realized that what had happened to these three men was perhaps the very thing that had happened to Juan’s own father. Some fifteen years earlier, Ignacio Romero had left home for the last time. He had planned to walk across the border fence west of Nogales just as he had done countless times before. Other years when Ignacio had gone north to look for work, he had faithfully sent money back home to his wife and seven children. And eventually, after the season was over, Ignacio would return home as well.

On that last trip, though, Ignacio disappeared. There was no money, and no one ever heard from him again. He left behind an impoverished wife, seven starving children and a lifetime’s worth of unanswered questions.

Realizing this man, too, must have a family waiting for him back home in Mexico, Juan knelt beside him. Overhead, the broiling sun beat down on both of them, and Juan knew he had to hurry. He placed one of his own precious jugs of water well within reach of the other man’s hand and closed his fingers around the handle. Then, without a word, Juan stood up and went for help.

As he walked south, he knew full well what that foolhardy action meant and what it could cost him. He would probably be caught and deported, shipped back home without enough money to marry Carmen, the girl who was waiting for him there. He knew she would be disappointed. So was he, but he had to do it. He had no choice.

If nothing else, he owed his father that much. And for that reason, and that reason alone, only two men died that afternoon. The third one—Leon Morales—lived. Unlike Ignacio Romero, Leon returned to his family in Mexico eventually, to the little town of Santa Teresa in Sonora. He went home crippled and unable to walk but with a compelling story to tell.

When called upon to do so, Leon would relate the harrowing tale about how, as he and his grandsons had followed a wash north through the Arizona desert, they had been set upon by a bandido who shot them all, killing his grandsons and leaving Leon to die as well. He never tired of telling his enthralled listeners about how he had been saved that day by an angel who appeared out of nowhere, gave him water to drink, and then brought help. Leon always finished the tale by explaining how, in America, a federale—a gringo federale—had found the bandido. After keeping Leon in the States long enough to testify, his would-be killer had been sent off to jail.

Leon’s was a good story, and he told it well. Well enough that, on long evenings in Santa Teresa’s dusty cantina, a command performance of the old man’s shocking adventure up north was always good for a cerveza. Or maybe even two.

JULY 1988

It was dark and hot and long after lights-out in the Arizona State Prison at Florence, but Andrew Carlisle was wide awake and working. Since he was blind, the dark didn’t bother him. In fact, that was when he did most of his best work—after everyone else was asleep.

Careful to make no noise that might attract the attention of a passing guard, he pulled out a single sheet of paper, placed it on the clipboard, and then clamped it in place with the template he had devised and that his father’s money had allowed him to have built. The template consisted of a sheet of clear plastic that was large enough to cover an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch piece of paper. It was punched through with lines of small squares. In the far left-hand margin was a column of holes. By moving a peg down the side of the sheet as he worked, it was possible for Carlisle to keep track of which line he was working on. He had to be sure to keep the tip of his pencil in the proper box so as not to use the same one twice.

This process—laborious, slow, and cumbersome as it might have seemed to others—allowed Carlisle to write down his innermost thoughts with a privacy not to be had by users of the communal computers and typewriters available in the library.

One at a time he filled the squares with small capital letters. It bothered him that the system made no allowances for revisions. That reality had forced him to develop a very disciplined style of writing.

JUNE 18, 1988. AFTER YEARS OF DILIGENT SEARCHING, I BELIEVE I HAVE FINALLY FOUND A SUITABLE SUCCESSOR, ONE WHO WILL—WITH A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF GUIDANCE—GROW TO BE A KIND OF EXTENSION OF ME; ONE WHO WILL TAKE ON MY BATTLES AND MAKE THEM HIS OWN. IF I SHOULD SUCCEED IN MY ENDEAVOR TO CREATE A MODERN-DAY PYGMALION, I WILL TAKE A WORTHLESS LUMP OF CLAY AND MOLD IT INTO SOMETHING MAGNIFICENT. WISH ME LUCK, DIANA. IF IT WORKS, YOU AND YOURS WILL BE THE FIRST TO KNOW.

That said, Carlisle removed the paper from the clipboard and stashed it with a growing stack of similar sheets. The guards had long since grown accustomed to the fact that Andrew Carlisle kept a diary. They hardly ever asked to see it anymore. Still he resisted the temptation to be any more specific than that, just in case some nosy guard did decide to read through some of it.

With the diary entry made, Carlisle settled down on his cot and tried to sleep. At first the doctor’s words—his verdict, really—got in the way, but gradually, as he had done for years now, Carlisle used a daydream about Diana Ladd to help him conjure sleep. He saw her again as she had been that night when he forced himself on her in what should have been the sanctuary of her own bedroom. She was one of the last things Andrew Carlisle had seen before his vision was stolen from him, and he reveled at the image of her there on the bed—naked, terrified, and defeated. In those glorious moments, except for her stubborn silence, she had belonged wholly to him, just as all the others had—the ones who had gone before.

The memory of that godlike moment washed over him like a sustaining wave, carrying him along on the crest of it, buoying him up. The only thing that would have made that moment any better would have been if she had cried out when he bit her, if she had whimpered and begged for mercy. She had not done so in real life, but in Andrew Carlisle’s daydream, in these midnight recollections, she always did. Always.

Knowing no one was there to see him do so, he grasped himself and used that powerful remembered image to summon a solitary orgasm. When it was over, as he lay with his breath coming fast and with sticky semen dribbling through his fingers, he thought of how much it felt like blood. He only wished that it was hers. It should have been. That was what he had intended. Why hadn’t it worked?

As usual, in the aftermath of that remembered high came the crushing remembrance of defeat as well. The two experiences were like Siamese twins. One never came without the other.

The exact nature of his defeat—the how of it—was something that was never quite clear in Andrew Carlisle’s mind, but he never allowed himself to dodge it, either. One moment she had been under his control. In those still-golden minutes in the bedroom he could have sworn he owned her very soul and that she would have done anything he said, yet somehow—a few moments later—she had overcome the temporary paralysis of her fear and had fought back. She fought him and won.

Thirteen years had passed since that night. In the intervening time what Diana Ladd had done to him on the kitchen floor of her house in Gates Pass had become the central issue of Andrew Carlisle’s life. More than anything, she was the one who got away. The fact that their battle had left him blind and with a mangled arm wasn’t as important as the simple fact that she had somehow escaped him.

However painful that realization might be, Andrew Carlisle never for even a moment allowed himself to forget it. She had been far tougher, far braver, and more resourceful than he had ever expected. Carlisle’s proxy would have to be warned, in no uncertain terms, not to underestimate this woman. After all, look what she had done to him! He was locked away in prison for the rest of his natural life—shut up with no chance of parole while she was still out there somewhere, free to do whatever she liked.

Still courting elusive sleep, Andrew Carlisle tormented himself with wondering where Diana Ladd was at that very moment and what she might be doing. Right then, in the middle of the night, she was probably in that same little house down in Tucson, sleeping next to that asshole husband of hers, and reveling in the fact that one of her puny, stupid books had managed to edge its way onto the New York Times Best Sellers list.

There was a special radio station, available to Carlisle because he was blind, that provided audio editions of newspapers on a daily basis. Carlisle listened to the broadcasts every day. Recently, one of those had contained a feature article on Diana Ladd Walker and her newly released book.

“I have a husband and kids and a career I love,” she had said. “Most of the time I feel as though I’m living in a dream.”

Andrew Carlisle had heard those words, and they had galvanized him to action. Diana Ladd Walker was living the kind of life that had been forever denied him—one she had robbed him of through her own personal efforts. He felt as though every ounce of her success had been built on his own failure. That was unforgivable.

You may think it’s a dream right now, he thought as he finally drifted off to sleep, but with any kind of luck, I’ll turn it into a nightmare.

1

They say it happened long ago that the whole world was covered with water. I’itoi—Elder Brother—was floating around in the basket which he had made. After a time, Great Spirit came out of his basket and looked around. Everything was still covered with water, so I’itoi made himself larger and larger until shuhthagi—the water—reached only to his knees.

Then, while I’itoi was walking around in the water, he heard someone call. At first he paid no attention, but when the call came the fourth time, Elder Brother went to see who was shouting. And so I’itoi found Jeweth Mahkai—Earth Medicine Man—rejoicing because he was the first one to come out of the water.

Elder Brother said, “This is not true.” He explained that he himself was first, but Jeweth Mahkai was stubborn and insisted that he was first.

Now I’itoi and Earth Medicine Man, as they were talking, were standing in the south. They started toward the west. As they were going through the water—because there was as yet very little land—they heard someone else shouting.

Ban—Coyote—was the one who was making all the noise. I’itoi went toward the sound, but Elder Brother went one way, and Ban went another. And so they passed each other. Coyote was shouting that he was the very first one out of the water and that he was all alone in the world.

I’itoi called to Ban, and at last they came together. Elder Brother explained to Coyote that he was not the first. And then the three—Great Spirit, Earth Medicine Man, and Coyote—started north together. As they went over the mud, I’itoi saw some very small tracks.

Elder Brother said, “There must be somebody else around.” Then they heard another voice calling. It was Bitokoi—Big Black Beetle—which the Mil-gahn, the Whites, call stinkbug. Bitokoi told I’itoi that he was the very first to come out of the water. I’itoi did not even bother to answer him.

And then the four—Elder Brother, Earth Medicine Man, Coyote, and Big Black Beetle—went on together toward the east because, as you remember, nawoj, my friend, all things in nature go in fours.

JUNE 1996

Dolores Lanita Walker’s slender brown legs glistened with sweat as she pumped the mountain bike along the narrow strip of pavement that led from her parents’ house in Gates Pass to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum several miles away. Lani wasn’t due at her job at the concession stand until 9 A.M., but by going in early she had talked her way into being allowed to help with some of the other duties.

About a mile or so from the entrance, she came upon the artist with his Subaru wagon parked off on the side of the road. He had been there every morning for a week now, standing in front of an easel or sitting on a folding chair, pad in hand, sketching away as she came whizzing past with her long hair flying out behind her like a fine black cape. In the intervening days they had grown accustomed to seeing one another.

The man had been the first to wave, but now she did, too. “How’s it going?” he had asked her each morning after the first one or two.

“Fine,” she’d answer, pumping hard to gain speed before the next little lump of hill.

“Come back when you can stay longer,” he’d call after her. Lani would grin and nod and keep going.

This morning, though, he waved her down. “Got a minute?” he asked.

She pulled off the shoulder of the road. “Is something the matter?” she asked.

“No. I just wanted to show you something.” He opened a sketch pad and held it up so Lani could see it. The picture took her breath away. It was a vivid color-pencil drawing of her, riding through the sunlight with the long early-morning shadows stretching out before her and with her hair floating on air behind her.

“That’s very good,” she said. “It really does look like me.”

The man smiled. “It is you,” he said. “But then, I’ve had plenty of time to practice.”

Lani stood for a moment studying the picture. Her parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary was coming up soon, in less than a week. Instinctively she knew that this picture, framed, would make the perfect anniversary present for them.

“How much would it cost to buy something like this?” she asked, wondering how far her first paycheck from the museum would stretch.

“It’s not for sale,” the man said.

Lani looked away, masking her disappointment with downcast eyes. “But I might consider trading for it,” he added a moment later.

Lani brightened instantly. “Trading?” she asked. “Really?” But then disappointment settled in again. She was sixteen years old. What would she have to trade that this man might want?

“You’re an Indian, aren’t you?” he asked. Shyly, Lani nodded. “But you live here. In Tucson, I mean. Not on a reservation.”

Lani nodded again. It didn’t seem necessary to explain to this man that she was adopted and that her parents were Anglos. It was none of his business.

“I’ve tried going out to the reservation to paint several times,” he told her, “but the people seem to be really suspicious. If you’d consider posing for me, just for half an hour or so some morning, I’d give you this one for free.”

“For free? Really?”

“Sure.”

Lani didn’t have to think very long. “When would you like to do it?” she asked.

“Tomorrow morning?”

“That would work,” Lani said, “but I’d have to come by about half an hour earlier than this, otherwise I’ll be late for work.”

The man nodded. “That’s fine,” he said. “I’ll be here. And could I ask a favor?”

Lani, getting back on her bike, paused and gave him a questioning look. “What’s that?”

“Could you wear something that’s sort of . . . well, you know”—he shrugged uncomfortably—“something that looks Indian?”

Lani grinned. “How about the cowgirl shirt and hat I wore for rodeo last year? That’s what Indians all wear these days—cowboy clothes.”

“Whatever you decide,” the man said. “I’m sure it’ll be just fine.”

“I have to go,” she told him, putting one foot on the pedal and giving the bike a shove as she hopped on. “Or else I’ll be late today, too. See you tomorrow then.”

“Sure thing,” he called after her, waving again as she rode away.

Once Lani was out of sight, Mitch Johnson quickly began gathering up his material and stowing it back in the car. Soon the Subaru was headed back toward Gates Pass and toward the lookout spot up over the Walker house where he would spend the rest of the morning, watching and pretending to draw.

How was that, Andy? he asked himself as he unpacked his gear once more and started limping up the steep hillside. It worked just the way you always said it would. Like taking candy from a baby.

The dream that awakened David Ladd shortly before sunrise on the morning he was scheduled to leave his grandmother’s house in Evanston was the same dream that had been plaguing him and robbing him of sleep for weeks. It had come for the first time the night before he was to take his last law school exam—his final final as he thought of it—although he knew that the hurdle of passing the bar was still to come.

The recurring nightmare was one he’d had from time to time over the years, but the last time was so long ago that he had nearly forgotten it. In the dream he was standing alone in the dark—a terrible soul-numbing blackness without even the comfort of a single crack of light shining under the door.

He listened, waiting endlessly for what he knew must come—for the sound that would tell him the life-and-death battle had begun, but for a long time there was nothing at all from beyond that closed door but empty, breathless silence. Once there had been other living people trapped in the dark prison with him. Rita Antone had been there with him, as had the old priest, Father John. But they were both dead now—dead and gone—and Davy Ladd was truly alone.

Finally, from outside the terrible darkness, he heard a faint but familiar voice calling to him from his childhood. “Olhoni, Olhoni.”

Olhoni! Little Orphaned Calf—his secret Tohono O’othham name—a name David Ladd hadn’t heard spoken in years. Only Rita Antone—the beloved Indian godmother he had called Nana Dahd—and his sister Lani—had called him that. For years Nana Dahd had used Davy’s Indian name only when the two of them were alone and when there was no one else to hear. Later on she used it in the presence of Davy’s baby sister as well.

Once again Nana Dahd’s song flowed through the darkness, bolstering him, giving him courage:

“Listen to me, Little Olhoni.

Do not look at me, but do exactly as I say.”

David Ladd held his breath, straining to hear once again the comforting chanted words of the Tohono O’othham song Rita had sung that fateful day while the life-and-death battle between his mother and the strange bald-headed man had raged outside that closed and locked root cellar door. The man who had burst into their home earlier that afternoon was Mil-gahn—a white, but in the song Rita had used to summon I’itoi to help them, she had called Andrew Carlisle by the word Ohb. In the language of the Tohono O’othham—the Desert People—that single word means at once both Apache and enemy.

Nana Dahd’s war chant had cast a powerful spell, instilling a mysterious strength in Davy and in other members of the embattled household. That strength had been enough to save them all from the Ohb’s evil that awful day. Davy, Rita, the priest, Davy’s mother, and even the dog, Oh’o—Bone—had all been spared. At least, they had all lived. And at age six going on seven, Mil-gahn though he was, it had been easy for Davy Ladd to believe that I’itoi—Elder Brother—had interceded on their behalf; that the Spirit of Goodness had heard Nana Dahd’s desperate cry for help; that he had descended from his home on cloud-shrouded Baboquivari to help them vanquish their enemy.

Twenty years later, that was no longer quite so easy to accept. Even so, a grown-up David Ladd strained to listen and to gather strength from Rita’s familiar but almost forgotten words. She had chanted the song in soft-spoken, guttural Papago—a language the evil Ohb hadn’t been able to speak or understand. Back then Nana Dahd’s war song had served the dual purpose of summoning I’itoi to help them and also of telling a terrified little boy exactly what he had to do—what was expected of him.

But at the point where Rita’s song should have been rising to a crescendo, it dwindled away to nothing. And now, with Nana Dahd gone, Davy was once again alone in the dark—a helpless, terrified child listening from one side of a door while on the other his mother fought for her life against the evil Mil-gahn intruder.

In his dream, David waited—for what seemed like hours—for the shocking roar of gunfire that would signal the beginning of the final stage of that deadly battle. But the gunshot never came. Instead, for no apparent reason, the door fell silently and inexplicably open, as though it had been unlatched by a ghost, or by a sudden stray gust of wind.

In real life, when the door had crashed open, the Ohb had been lying on the floor, screaming in rage and agony, with his face burned beyond recognition by a pan full of overheated bacon grease. His skin had blistered and bubbled, leaving his features horribly distorted like a strange wax mask that had been left to melt in the searing sun. Injured and bleeding, Davy’s mother had stood over the injured man, still clutching the smoldering frying pan in her one good hand.

A terrified Davy had fled that awful scene. He had escaped through the slick, grease-spattered kitchen just as he had been ordered to do. Pushing open the sliding glass outside door, he had opened the way for his dog to get inside. Bone, outraged and bent on protecting his humans from the intruder, had hurtled into the room, going straight for the injured Ohb’s vulnerable throat.

Twenty years later in David’s dream, the heavy cellar door fell open silently on an equally silent kitchen. And on the floor, instead of a defeated evil Ohb, Davy saw his sister. Lani hadn’t even been born on the day Andrew Carlisle broke into the house in Gates Pass, and yet here she was, lying still and bloody, in the middle of the room. Without moving forward to touch her, without even emerging from the darkness of his cellar prison, David Ladd knew just from looking at her that Dolores Lanita Walker was dead.

He had awakened from the awful dream with his heart pounding and with his bedclothes soaked in sweat. He could barely breathe. For a while, he thought he was having a heart attack—that he was actually dying. Later that night, a jovial and not overly sympathetic emergency room physician told Davy that what had happened to him was an ordinary panic attack. Nothing serious at all, the doctor assured him. With the pressure of law school finals and all that, Davy was probably overstressed.

Nothing to worry about, the doctor said. He’d get over it.

The stress of those final exams was long gone. He had spent the last few weeks working around his grandmother’s place, painting the things that needed painting, refinishing furniture, clearing out dead tree branches, and generally making himself useful. He did it in no small part to repay his grandmother, Astrid Ladd, for the many kindnesses she had offered him during the years he had been in Chicago going to school. The whole time he had lived there, he had stayed in the small chauffeur’s apartment over his grandmother’s garage.

He had hoped that a few days of hard physical labor would help relieve whatever was causing the panic attacks, but as he lay in bed, gasping for breath that early Friday morning, he knew it hadn’t worked.

Brandon Walker was cutting wood. Cutting and stacking wood. Once a week—on Friday afternoons—a ramshackle old dump truck would arrive. Filled to the rim with a drying tangle of creosote, greasewood, palo verde, and mesquite, the truck would turn off Speedway, rumble down a steep incline, and then labor slowly up a rock-scattered sandy track that led to a house perched on a mountainside in Gates Pass west of Tucson, Arizona.

Out behind the house with its six-foot-high river-rock wall, the truck would disgorge another sorry load of doomed desert flora. For months now, Brandon Walker had waged a dogged one-man war, working to salvage the throwaway wood that had been bulldozed off the desert to make way for yet another thirsty golf course. He knew he was powerless to stop the burgeoning development that was eating away the beautiful Sonora Desert that he loved, but by cutting and stacking the wood, Brandon felt as though he was somehow keeping faith with the desert. In some small way he was keeping what the bulldozers destroyed from simply going to waste.

Late on those Friday afternoons, the empty dump truck would pull away, leaving behind its ruined mound of wood. Throughout the following week, Brandon would pull one log after another out of the snarl, saw it, and stack it. He had bought a gasoline-powered grinder that chewed up the smaller branches into chips. Someone had told him that those could probably be used as mulch, so each day he gathered the leavings into a growing mountain of shredded wood chips. The mound of drying chips and the stack of wood grew along the outside of the rock wall that stretched around the backyard perimeter of Brandon and Diana Ladd Walker’s secluded desert compound.

The hard physical labor was good for him. He had sweated off the flab that was the natural outgrowth of four four-year terms as sheriff. His blood pressure was down, as were his triglycerides and his cholesterol. He ignored the fact that some of his neighbors thought him peculiar. During the hours when other men his age and in his position might have been out whacking endless golf balls around artificially grassy courses, Brandon fought his solitary battle with himself and with that week’s messy jumble of wood, gradually bringing the dead mesquite and palo verde to order, even if he wasn’t able—with a chain saw and ax—to work the same miracle on his own life.

Brandon worked on the wood in the early morning hours while the sun was still relatively cool. He put in another shift in the late afternoons and evenings, just before sunset. During the middle of the day, he slept.

It was funny that he could go into the bedroom in the late morning after a quick shower, tumble onto the bed, and fall fast asleep. At night he tossed and turned, paced and thought, and did everything but sleep. At regular bedtimes, as soon as he lay his head on the pillow, his mind snapped into overdrive, tormenting him with every perceived or imagined flaw in his life. During the day, with the sun on his back and with the sweat pouring off his face, he knew how lucky he was. Diana’s increasing success meant that, after losing the election, there was no need for him to eat humble pie and go looking for another job. He’d even had offers. Roswell, New Mexico, had tried to entice him there with the job of police chief—a position he had been more than happy to turn down.

As soon as it was time to go to bed at night, however, his cup was half empty rather than half full. In the dead of night, Diana’s growing monetary success merely underscored his own overriding sense of failure, his belief that he had somehow not been good enough or provided well enough. Diana never said anything of the kind, of course. She never even hinted at it. In the cold light of day he could see that his nighttime torment was merely a replay of his mother’s and his ex-wife’s old blame-game tapes. At night, however, that clear-cut knowledge disappeared the moment he turned out the lights.

In the darkness he wrestled with the reality of being fifty years old and let out to pasture. On his fortieth birthday, he had counted himself as one of the luckiest men in the world. He had a wife who loved him and, according to his lights, a reasonably well-blended family—his two sons, Diana’s son, Davy, and the baby, Lani. The icing on the cake had been his job. The chance to be elected sheriff had fallen into his lap in a way he hadn’t anticipated, but the job had suited him. He had been damn good at it.

Now, ten years later, most of his “dream” life was gone, wiped out of existence as if it had never existed in the first place. The job had disappeared with the results of the last election. Bill Forsythe was the new Pima County sheriff now, leaving Brandon Walker as an unemployed fifty-year-old has-been. He still had Diana, of course, but there was a cool distance between them now—probably one of his own making and one he doubted they’d ever bridge again. Careerwise, she had moved beyond him—beyond anything either one of them had anticipated. She no longer needed him, certainly not the way she had in the beginning. As for the kids—the boys were pretty much lost to him. Tommy was gone—dead, most likely; Quentin was a lying, cheating, boozing ex-con; and Davy was off in Chicago being beguiled by his paternal grandmother’s money and the myth of his long-dead father. In this bleak landscape, Brandon Walker’s only consolation, his sole ray of sunshine, was Lani—the baby he had once argued fiercely against adopting.

Now, though, laboring over the wood, he felt the need to distance himself from her as well. She was sixteen and still dependent, but she wouldn’t be for long. She had a job now and a driver’s license. It was only a matter of time before she, too, would grow up and slip away from him.

And when that happened, Brandon wondered, would there be anything left for him, anything at all? Well, maybe that never-ending mountain of wood, waiting to be chopped and stacked and salvaged. There would probably always be plenty of that.

He worked until it was too hot to continue, then he went in, showered, and threw himself onto the bed. Only then, at eleven o’clock in the morning, was he able to fall asleep.

From his perch high up on the mountain, Mitch Johnson had a perfect view of the Walkers’ river-rock compound in Gates Pass. He liked to think of it as a God’s-eye view. If he’d had a rifle in his hand right about then instead of a damned stupid sketch pad, Brandon Walker standing out by his woodpile would have been an easy shot. Bang, bang, you’re dead. But as Andy had pointed out, killing Brandon Walker wasn’t the point. Destroying him was. If the United States was going to continue to survive as a nation, people who contributed to that destruction—people who helped the job-eating illegal scum—had to be destroyed themselves.

“Mr. Johnson,” Andy had asked him once, early on, “why do you suppose the cat toys with the mouse?”

Mitch Johnson had already learned that Andrew Carlisle was sometimes an irascible teacher. Even his most oddball question required a thoughtful response. “I suppose because it’s fun,” he had answered.

“For whom?” Andy had persisted.

“Certainly not for the mouse.”

“Don’t be so sure. You see, in those moments, the mouse must have some moments of clarity, when it may possibly see through its own terror and imagine surviving. Continuing. There’s a real beauty in that, a sort of dance. The mouse tries to escape. The cat blocks it. The mouse tries again, and the same thing happens. As long as the mouse keeps trying, it hasn’t lost hope. Once it does, the cat becomes bored and simply eats it. End of story.”

They lay on their bunks in silence for a while, Mitch Johnson in the upper bunk and Carlisle in the lower so he could get to the toilet more easily during the night.

Mitch didn’t want to seem stupid, but he couldn’t see where Andy was going on this one. “So what’s the point?” he finally asked.

“Did you enjoy shooting those guys in the back?” Andy asked.

A peculiar intimacy existed between the two men that Mitch Johnson was hard-pressed to understand. If somebody else had asked that question, Mitch would have decked the guy, but because it was Andy asking, Mitch simply answered. “Yes,” he said.

“But wouldn’t it have been better,” Andrew Carlisle asked, “if they’d had the chance to ask you—to beg you—not to do it and you did it anyway? Wouldn’t that have been more fun? Have you ever done it that way?”

“What do you mean?” Mitch said. “I did it the way I did it. I shot them and that’s it.”

“But it doesn’t have to be,” Andrew Carlisle told him. “You have a mind, an imagination. All you have to do is rewrite the scenario. Change your mind and change your reality. Close your eyes and see them walking again. Only this time, instead of pulling the trigger, you call out to them. You order them on their hands and knees. It was hot, wasn’t it? The middle of summer?”

“Yes, almost the end of June.”

“So imagine them on their hands and knees in the sand, with the hot earth blistering their skin. They’re going to beg you not to shoot them. Plead with you to let them stand up again so they’ll have the protection of their shoe leather between their skin and the sand. But if you wait, if you don’t let them up off their hands and knees, eventually, they’ll belong to you in the same way the mouse belongs to the cat, you see. In exactly the same way.”

In the upper bunk, Mitch Johnson closed his eyes and let Andrew Carlisle’s almost hypnotic voice flow over him. Mitch was right there again, standing on the bank of Brawley Wash, calling down to the wetbacks marching ahead of him.

“Stop,” he shouted at them, and they did.

“Down!” he ordered. “Get down on your hands and knees.” And they did that, too, all three of them groveling in the burning sand before him, all of them scraping their faces in the dirt. This must be what it feels like to be a king, Mitch thought. Or maybe even a god.

“Please,” the older one said, speaking to Mitch in English rather than in Spanish. “Please, let my grandsons be. I’ll do whatever you want. Just let my daughter’s boys go free. Let them go.”

“What would you do, old man?” Mitch asked him.

“Anything. Whatever you say.”

“Put the barrel in your mouth.”

For Mitch, that was such a sexually charged image that it almost broke the spell, but Andy’s voice, washing over the whole scene, kept the images in play. Reaching up tentatively, the old man took the barrel of the gun and lovingly, almost reverentially, put it into his own mouth. And with the grandsons cowering there on the ground, and with the old man’s eyes full on his face, Mitch Johnson pulled the trigger.

“And this time,” Andrew Carlisle finished, “you can be sure the bastard is dead. What do you think?”

Mitch opened his eyes, unsure of what had happened but with the tracks of a wet dream still hot on his belly and between his legs.

“It beats jacking off, doesn’t it?” Andrew Carlisle asked.

Yes, it does, Mitch meant to say, but, for some strange reason, he was already asleep.

Diana Ladd Walker was at work in her study. On that Friday morning she was supposed to be writing, working on the outline for her next book, Den of Iniquity. What she was doing instead was fielding phone calls. The month before her previous book, Shadow of Death, had won a Pulitzer. Even though the book had been out for nine months, the whirl of publicity surrounding the prize had pushed the book into numerous reprints. Not only that, it was back on the New York Times Best Sellers list as well, sitting at number eight, for the third week in a row.

Which is why, at a time when Diana should have been writing, she had been sucked instead back into book-promotion mode. She had left her desk and was on her way to shower when the phone rang again.

“It’s me,” Megan Wright announced. Megan was a publicist working for Diana’s New York publisher, Sterling, Moffit, and Dodd. She was young—not more than twenty-five—but she was businesslike on the phone and brimmed with a kind of boundless energy and enthusiasm that suited her for the job.

“I’m calling with your weekend’s marching orders,” Megan continued. “I just wanted to double-check the schedule.”

Obligingly, Diana hauled out her calendar and opened it to the proper page.

“First there’s the University of Arizona Faculty Wives Tea this afternoon at two o’clock.”

“I know,” Diana observed dryly. “As a matter of fact, I was on my way into the bathroom to shower and dress when the phone rang.”

“I’ll hurry,” Megan said. “And then there are the two appointments for tomorrow. I’m sorry about filling up your Saturday, but I didn’t have any choice. Tomorrow’s the only time I could schedule the Monty Lazarus interview. Don’t forget, he’s the West Coast stringer for several different magazines, so it’s an important interview. My guess is he’ll be pitching the story to all of them.”

“Where’s that interview?” Diana asked. “I wrote down his name but not where I’m supposed to meet him.”

“In the lobby of the La Paloma Hotel at noon. I don’t have either an address or a map. Can you find it, or will you need a driver?”

Tucson may have been totally foreign territory to Megan, but Diana had lived in the Tucson area for more than thirty years. “Noon, La Paloma,” Diana repeated as she jotted the words into the correct slot on the calendar under the name, “Monty Lazarus.”

“And don’t worry about a driver,” Diana continued. “Believe me, I can find La Paloma on my own.”

“Mr. Lazarus likes to take his own pictures, so you’ll need to go prepared for a photo shoot. I warned him that he’ll have to finish up no later than four, though, so you’ll have time enough to get back home, change, and be at the El Dorado Country Club for the Friends of the Library banquet at six. Mrs. Durgan, your hostess for that event, called just a few minutes ago to make sure your husband will be attending. She wanted to know if she should reserve a place at the head table. Brandon is going, isn’t he?”

“He’ll be there,” Diana said grimly. “If he isn’t, I’ll know the reason why.”

“Good,” Megan said, sounding relieved. “I told her I was pretty sure he was planning to attend.”

When the phone call finally ended, Diana headed for the shower once more. On her way through the bedroom, she found Brandon sound asleep on the bed. She tiptoed by without waking him. No doubt he needed it. He barely slept at night these days, passing the nighttime hours prowling the house or pacing out on the patio. The midday naps he took between woodcutting shifts were pretty much the only decent rest he seemed to get.

Closing the door between the bathroom and bedroom, she undressed and then stood in front of the mirror, observing her reflection. She wasn’t that bad looking for being a couple of years over the half-century mark. The face and body reflected back at her bore an amazing resemblance to what her mother, Iona Dade Cooper, had looked like just before she got so sick.

In the past few years Diana had put on some weight, especially around the hips. Her softly curling auburn hair had two distinct streaks of white flowing away from either temple. But her skin was still good, and with the help of a little makeup she’d look all right, not only for today’s afternoon tea, but also for the photo shoot and banquet tomorrow.

Stepping into the shower, though, she was still chewing on what was going on between Brandon and her. It was too bad that if she was going to win some big prize that it had to be for Shadow of Death, a book Brandon had never wanted her to write in the first place. Not only that, it was unfortunate that what should have been her finest hour, the pinnacle of a writing career that spanned more than twenty years, should come at a time when Brandon, after being tossed out of office, was at his very lowest ebb.

The last month and a half, in fact, had been pure hell. She and Brandon had been at one another’s throats ever since the engraved invitation had arrived, summoning them both to the awards festivities in New York.

Brandon had backed away from the gold-embossed envelope with both their names on it as though that rectangular piece of paper were a coiled rattlesnake.

“No way!” he had declared. “No way in hell! I’m not going to New York for that, not in a million years!”

“Why not? It’ll be fun.”

“For you, maybe. People are interested in you; they want to meet you. And while you’re busy talking, someone will turn to me and say, ‘What is it you do, Mr. Walker? Are you a writer, too?’ And when I tell them I used to be sheriff but I don’t do anything anymore, their eyes will glaze over and pretty soon they’ll wander away. It’s a ball doing that. I love it.”

Diana had winced at the sarcasm in his voice, but she also knew the perils of playing second banana. She had felt the same way about attending political gatherings—the rubber-chicken luncheons and living room campaign coffee hours—back when Brandon had been a candidate for public office. But she had gone. She had kept her mouth shut, she had put on her good clothes and company manners, and she had gone. She had served as the proper political wife and had behaved the way political wives the world over are expected to behave.

Part of what had made that easy to do was the fact that she had believed so strongly in what Brandon Walker stood for. She had backed his plans for cleaning up the sheriff’s department, for getting rid of the crooks and putting an end to the graft and corruption.

To be fair, back when she was first published, he had been there for her, as well. Those first few book tours when he had sometimes been able to join her for a few days at a time had been a ball. Back then, his going to functions with her had been easier for him because he had been more sure of his own place in the scheme of things. The ego damage associated with losing the election—from being booted out of a job he loved—seemed to have knocked the emotional pins out from under him. It was almost as though there had been a death in the family, and the grieving process had left him lost and directionless.

But to Diana’s way of thinking, the main problem with the Pulitzer and everything associated with it was that the accolades were all coming to Diana over Shadow of Death, a book Brandon Walker had opposed from the very beginning.

“Don’t bring all that stuff up again,” he had warned her on the day Andrew Carlisle’s letter had arrived from the Arizona State Prison. “Let sleeping dogs lie.”

But she hadn’t followed his advice. She had gone ahead and written the book anyway. And now, based on that, Diana Ladd Walker’s stock had shot way up in the world of publishing. Sandy Hawkins, Diana’s editor at Sterling, Moffit, and Dodd, was downright ecstatic. Requests for interviews and public appearances were flowing in. Meanwhile, Diana’s marriage was in the toilet.

She and Brandon had argued bitterly over the trip to New York, with him citing any number of plausible but nonetheless phony excuses for not going. He didn’t have a tux. With only one of them working, he couldn’t see squandering all that money on his airfare. He hated being locked up in an airplane seat without enough room for his long legs. Most of all, in his opinion, Lani shouldn’t be left home on her own, not with the end-of-school party season heating up.

“Why don’t you say what you mean?” an exasperated Diana had demanded finally when she tired of arguing. “Why don’t you just admit it? You don’t want to go.”

Brandon complied at once. “You’re right,” he had said. “I don’t want to go.”

“Fine!” Diana had stormed. “Suit yourself, but one of these days you’re going to have to get over it, Brandon. One of these days you’re going to have to realize that losing that election was not the end of the world.”

She regretted her outburst almost immediately, but she had retreated to her office without an apology while Brandon had made tracks for his damned woodpile. And two weeks later, when Diana Ladd Walker flew off to New York, she had done so alone, with the quarrel between them still unresolved. A month and a half later, his role as “author consort” was still a bone of contention.

When the invitation came for her to speak at the annual Friends of the Library banquet, there had been yet another firefight. This time, though, Diana had dug in her heels.

“Look,” she had told him. “I can see your not going to the faculty tea. If I could get out of that one myself, I would. But the library banquet is something for the whole community, the community that elected you to office for sixteen years. People expect you to be there. I expect you to be there. We’re married, Brandon. I don’t want to spend my life out in public as one of those married singles.”

“But I hate all that crap,” he argued. “I hate standing around with a drink in my hand, looking like a sap, and listening to some little old lady talk about something I’ve never heard of.”

“Get over it,” Diana had snapped back at him. “If you were tough enough to face down armed crooks in your day, you ought to be able to stand up to any little old lady in the land.”

Stepping out of the shower, Diana stood toweling her hair dry. Suddenly, out of nowhere, something her mother had told her once came back to her as clearly as if she had heard the words yesterday instead of thirty years earlier.

Iona Dade Cooper had been at home in Joseph, Oregon, dying of cancer. Diana, away at school at the University of Oregon in Eugene, had finally been forced to drop out temporarily to care for her. Diana had been sitting in the chair next to her mother’s bed telling of her secret ambition not only to marry Garrison Ladd but also to become a writer.

“You can’t have it all, you know,” Iona had said quietly. “If you try to do too much, something is bound to suffer.”

Standing in the bathroom thirty years later, Diana had to swallow a sudden lump in her throat. She remembered arguing the point with her mother back then, telling Iona passionately exactly how wrong she was.

“These are the sixties,” Diana had said with the absolute conviction of a know-it-all twenty-one-year-old. “Women are moving into their own now, Mother. Everything is possible, you’ll see.”

Iona Dade Cooper had died a few months later without seeing anything of the kind. And Diana, now several years older than her mother had lived to be, was forced to acknowledge that Iona’s assessment was one hundred percent accurate.

Mom, you were right, after all, Diana Cooper Ladd Walker admitted to herself. You really can’t have it all.

2

Now in that long ago time the earth—jeweth—was not yet firm and still as it is today. It was shaking and quivering all the time. That made it hard for the four to travel. So Earth Medicine Man—Jeweth Mahkai—threw himself down and stopped the shaking of the earth. And that was the first land.

But the land was floating around in separate pieces. So Earth Medicine Man called to the Spider Men. Totkihhud O’othham came out of the floating ground and went all over the world spinning their webs and tying the pieces of earth together. And that is how we have it today—land and water.

Then I’itoi wanted to find the center of the earth. So he sent Coyote toward the south and Big Black Beetle to the north. He said they must go as fast and as far as they could and then return to him.

Bitokoi—Big Black Beetle—was back quite a while before Ban—Coyote—returned. In this way I’itoi knew that he had not yet found the center of the earth.

Then Spirit of Goodness took Bitokoi and Ban a little farther south and sent them off once more. Again Big Black Beetle came back before Coyote, so I’itoi moved still farther toward the south.

On the fourth try Bitokoi and Coyote came back to I’itoi at exactly the same time. In that way Elder Brother knew he was exactly in the center of the world. Because the Spirit of Goodness should be the center of all things, this was where I’itoi wished to be.

And this center of all things where Elder Brother lives is called Tohono O’othham Jeweth, which means Land of the Desert People.

Mitch Johnson waited on the hill, watching and sketching, until Brandon Walker went inside around ten-thirty. By then he had several interesting thumbnail drawings—color studies—that he’d be able to produce if anyone ever questioned his reason for being there.

“You see, Mitch,” Andy had told him years ago, “you always have to have some logical and defensible reason for being where you are and for doing whatever it is that you’re supposedly doing. It’s a kind of protective coloration, and it works the same way that the patterns on a rattlesnake’s back allow it to blend into the rocks and shadows of the land it inhabits.

“The mask that allowed me to do that was writing. Writing takes research, you see. Calling something research gave me a ticket into places most people never have an opportunity to go. Drawing can do the same for you. You’re lucky in that you have some innate ability, although, if I were you, I’d use some of the excess time we both seem to have at the moment to improve on those skills. You’ll be surprised how doing so will stand you in good stead.”

That was advice Mitch Johnson had been happy to follow, and he had carried it far beyond the scope of Andy’s somewhat limited vision. Claiming to be an artist had made it possible to park his RV—a cumbersome and nearly new Bounder—on a patch of desert just off Coleman Road within miles of where Andrew Carlisle had estimated it would most likely be needed. The rancher he had made arrangements with had been more than happy to have six months’ rent in advance and in cash, with the only stipulation being that Mitch keep the gate closed and locked.

“No problem,” Mitch had told the guy. “I’m looking for privacy. Keeping the gate locked will be as much of a favor to me as it is for you.”

And so, Mitch Johnson—after sorting through his catalog of fake IDs—took up residence on an electricity-equipped corner of the Lazy 4 Ranch under the name of M. Vega, artist. He was there, he told his landlord, to paint the same scenes over and over, in all their tiny variations through the changing seasons of the year.

The Bounder had been parked on the ranch for two months now. Long enough for locals to accept that he was there. He worried sometimes that he might possibly run into someone who had known him before, in that old life, so he mostly stayed away from the trading post and did all his shopping—including buying periodic canisters of butane—at stores on the far northeast side of town.

And that’s where he headed that particular morning—to Tucson. If he was going to have company for a day or two, he needed to have plenty of supplies laid in—extra food and water both.

“It’s a good plan, Mitch,” Andy had told him. “My part is to make sure you have everything you need to pull it off and to get away afterward. Yours is to follow that plan and make it work.”

When Andy’s voice came to him out of the blue like that, so clearly and purposefully, it was hard to remember the man was dead. It took Mitch back to countless nighttime conversations when their quiet voices had flowed back and forth in the noisy privacy of their prison cell. That was when and where they had first crafted the plan and where they had refined it.

And now, putting that long-awaited plan into action, Mitch Johnson felt honor-bound to do it right. The emotional turmoil about to be visited upon Brandon and Diana Walker’s complacent lives would make a fitting memorial for Andy Carlisle, the only real friend Mitch had ever had. It would mean far more than any marble slab Mitch might have had erected in a cemetery.

Sitting up on the mountain, watching Brandon Walker labor over his wood, Mitch wished it would be possible to burn it up, to turn all that carefully stacked wood into a spectacularly blazing inferno. But even as the thought passed through his mind, Mitch dismissed it. Doing that would be too much like firing a warning shot across a ship’s bow.

Brandon Walker deserved no such advance notice from Mitch Johnson, and Diana Ladd wouldn’t be getting one from Andy, either. One day their lives would be going along swimmingly, and the next day everything would turn to shit. That was one of the basic realities of life—something that happened to everyone sooner or later.

The last time Mitch saw Andrew Carlisle had been some eight months earlier. The man was too weak to walk by then, so the guard had brought him back to the cell in a wheelchair.

“Here’s some company for you, Johnson,” the guard said, opening the barred door and shoving the chair into the cell. “We’ve got so many cases of flu in the infirmary right now, the doc thought he might be better off here than there. Can you handle it?”

“It’s not exactly news,” Mitch told the guard. “Of course I can handle it.”

The guard had left the wheelchair just inside the door. Mitch had pushed it over next to the bunk and lifted Carlisle out of the chair and onto the narrow bed. Illness had ravaged his body so there was very little left of him. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds.

“I hear you’re getting out,” Carlisle croaked. “Congratulations.”

Mitch shook his head. It was difficult for him to speak. He hadn’t expected that he and Andy would become friends, but over the years they had. Now he felt a sudden sense of grief at the prospect of losing that friend not just to Mitch’s own release, but also to death. Andrew Carlisle was clearly a dying man.

“When do you leave?” Andy asked.

“Tomorrow,” Mitch said. “I’m sorry,” he added. “Sorry to leave you alone after all this time.”

“Oh, no,” Andy told him. “Don’t be sorry about leaving. I’ll be out, too, before very long. They gave me two consecutive life sentences, but I’m going to fool the bastards. I’m only going to serve one.”

Mitch laughed at that. One of the things he had always enjoyed was Andy’s black humor.

“As for leaving me alone,” Andy added cheerfully, “I spend so much time in the infirmary anymore that it hardly matters. Besides, the sooner I go, the sooner you’ll be able to get our little job done and get on with your own life.”

They were both quiet for a long time after that. Mitch was thinking about Andy’s veiled reference to his trust fund monies. Maybe Andy was, too. Andrew Carlisle was the one who broke the silence.

“You will keep your end of the bargain, won’t you, Mitch?” The voice was soft and pleading. The two men had lived side by side, sharing the same cell, for seven and a half years. In all that time, through years of terrible illness and unremitting pain, Mitch Johnson had never heard the man beg.

“Yes, Andy,” Mitch answered quietly. “I gave you my word, and I intend to keep it.”

“Thank you,” Andrew Carlisle said. “So will I.”

Mitch Johnson had known from the beginning that Andrew Carlisle was HIV positive, since that day in 1988 when Warden Clint Howell had called him into his office, sat him down in a chair, and offered him a cup of coffee. Inmates didn’t usually merit that kind of hospitality, but Johnson had brains enough not to question it aloud.

“We’ve got a little problem here,” Howell said, leaning back in his chair.

More than one, Mitch thought, but again he said nothing. “It’s one I think maybe you can help us with,” Howell continued.

The indiscriminate use of the words “we” and “us” reminded Mitch of his first grade teacher, Mrs. Wiggins, back home in El Paso, Texas.

“What’s that?” Mitch asked, keeping his tone interested but properly deferential.

“One of our inmates has just been diagnosed HIV positive,” Howell told him. “He wants you to be his cellmate.”

“Like hell he does!” Mitch returned. “I’m not going anywhere near him.”

“Please, Johnson,” Howell pleaded. “Hear me out. He’s specifically asked for you, but only if you’re willing.”

“Well, I’m not. Can I go now?”

“No, you can’t. We’re too overcrowded here for him to be left in a cell by himself, and if I put more than one HIV-positive prisoner in the same cell, then those damned bleeding-heart lawyers will be all over me like flies on shit. Cruel and unusual punishment and all that crap.”

“What about cruel and unusual punishment for me?” Johnson asked.

“Do me a favor,” Howell said. “Talk to him here in my office. I’ll have him brought in, and the two of you can discuss the situation. After that, you decide. Wait right here.”

Moments later, a guard led Andrew Carlisle into the room. Johnson had never met him before, but as soon as he saw the blind man with his one bad arm in a permanent sling, he knew who it was. Andrew Carlisle was legendary in Florence for being the best jailhouse lawyer in the joint. Other people had to look up the points of law and read them to him aloud, but when it came to writing up paperwork, no one could top him.

“Hello, Mr. Johnson,” Carlisle said, as the door closed behind the departing guard.

“I won’t do it,” Mitch said. “Go fuck yourself.”

“We’re not here to discuss sexual gratification, Mr. Johnson. I asked for you specifically because I have a business proposition which I believe will be of some interest to you. I believe I can offer you something that you want.”

“What’s that?” Mitch Johnson asked.

“An education, for one thing,” Andrew Carlisle answered calmly. “And revenge, for another.”

“Revenge?”

“Against Sheriff Brandon Walker and his wife, Diana.”

A brief silence followed that statement. Mitch was taken aback. He hadn’t made a secret of his long-simmering hatred of Brandon Walker. The case against Mitch Johnson had been built by Walker while he was still an ambitious homicide detective in the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Sending Mitch Johnson to prison had made Walker’s reputation in the local Hispanic community.

For twenty-some years Sheriff Jack DuShane’s political machine had called the shots. Anglos killed Mexicans and Indians with relative impunity. The way cases were investigated dictated how they were prosecuted as well. More often than not, Anglos—especially ones who could afford to pay the freight—got off or were charged with reduced offenses. Non-Anglos usually couldn’t afford the bribes.

The tide had started to turn with Andrew Carlisle’s second trial. Everybody knew by then that the former professor had gotten away with murdering the drunk Indian girl, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. Except maybe use him as an example. A year later, when DuShane tried to intervene on Mitch Johnson’s behalf, Walker had blown the whistle on all of it. In the process of shipping Mitch Johnson off to prison for fifteen years to life, Walker had won himself a reputation as a crusading and even-handed lawman. When the next election came around, he won office in a landslide, collecting an astonishing eighty percent of the county’s non-Anglo vote in the process.

“Who told you about that?” Mitch asked finally.

Carlisle smiled. “I make it my business to know what goes on in this place. I’ve been keeping track of you for years, for as long as you’ve been here. From everything I’ve been able to learn about you, I’d say you’re a very smart man—smart enough to know a good deal when you see one.”

“What kind of a deal?”

“I may be a prisoner here,” Carlisle said, “but I’m also relatively well off. I inherited my father’s entire estate, you see. And since I’m not using any of the money—interest or principal—it’s accruing at an amazing rate. I can show you the figures if you want. When I die, I can either leave the whole thing to charity or I can leave it to you.”

“Why would you give any of it to me?”

“Because I think you’ll agree to my terms.”

“Which are?”

“Number one, that you agree to be my cellmate for the remainder of whatever time we both have here together.”

“And number two?”

“You become my star pupil. I’m a teacher, you see, not only by training, but also by virtue of personal preference. I have a good deal of knowledge that I would like to impart to someone before I die, a philosophical legacy in addition to the monetary one. Then, once I’ve taught you what I know, you go out into the world and use that knowledge on the two people who are responsible for sending us both here.”

“What exactly do you mean?”

Carlisle sighed. “Don’t be obtuse, Mr. Johnson. Brandon Walker and his wife, Diana. Walker cost you your wife, your son, and your standing in the community. The woman who is now Walker’s wife, Diana Ladd Walker, is responsible for the loss of both my sight and the use of one of my arms. Once I was locked up in here, I eventually contracted AIDS, so before long, she’ll be costing me my life as well. I don’t see how it could be any clearer than that. I want them to suffer, in the same way you and I are suffering.”

“You want me to kill them?”

“Oh, no, Mr. Johnson. Not at all. I firmly believe that between the two of us, we’ll be able to devise something much better than that, something far more imaginative.”

“What’s number three?”

“There is no number three, Mr. Johnson. Only numbers one and two. What do you think, or would you like to see some of the accounting figures before you make your decision? I can show you what’s involved right now, although there’s no way to tell how much money there will be in the long run. Obviously we have no idea how long this will take, do we?”

Again there was a long silence. “This is on the level?” Mitch asked finally.

“Absolutely,” Carlisle answered. “I could hardly be more serious.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“Then, Mr. Carlisle,” Mitch Johnson said, “you’ve got yourself a deal.”

What had started out way back then as a straight business deal had become for Mitch both a point of honor and pride. By the time he completed the project it would seem to all the world that Andrew Carlisle had somehow returned from the grave to wreak his revenge on the people who had destroyed him. It would give Andy the kind of immortality he had always craved in life.

In the meantime, Mitch Johnson would be left alone, free to walk off into the sunset and disappear. That kind of heroic image appealed to Mitch. It was one of the time-honored icons of the Old West.

He had no difficulty casting himself in the mold of one of those old-fashioned hired guns. None of them would ever have turned their backs on a friend in need, regardless of whether that needy friend happened to be dead or alive.

Neither would Mitch Johnson. After all, a promise is a promise unless, as in this case, it turned into a mission.

Gabe Ortiz, tribal chairman of the Tohono O’othham Nation, left Sells early in the morning for an all-day meeting with the Pima County Board of Supervisors. At issue was the county’s most recent set of requirements designed to delay the next scheduled expansion of the tribe’s booming casino. Gabe’s appearance would be more ceremonial than anything, since most of the actual arguing would be handled by Delia Chavez Cachora, the recently appointed tribal attorney.

Gabe’s main responsibility would be to sit there looking attentive and interested, which might prove difficult in view of the fact that he’d had so little sleep the night before. It was times like this when the countervailing pressures of being both tribal chairman and medicine man proved to be almost more than he could handle.

Before the blind medicine man, S-ab Neid Pi Has—Looks At Nothing—had died, years earlier, the canny old shaman had taught Gabe “Fat Crack” Ortiz a number of important things, including the meaning of those particular words, medicine man—mahkai. Looks At Nothing had explained the obligations involved as well.

As a confirmed Christian Scientist, Gabe initially had been prepared to pass off most of what the old man said as superstitious nonsense. As the months went by, however, Looks At Nothing had taught Fat Crack to listen to the voice inside himself, to pay attention, and then to act on the resulting knowledge.

It was through using what Looks At Nothing taught him that Gabe’s business and political ambitions had prospered. Most of the time the guidance that came to him was in the form of a gentle nudge, but in the case of Diana Ladd’s book, it had been more like the blow of a hammer.

Wanda had bought him a copy of Shadow of Death at a book-signing in town. Diana had autographed it, wishing Gabe a happy birthday in her personalized inscription. And then Wanda had taken the gift-wrapped book home and kept it put away until Gabe’s sixty-fifth birthday.

She had given it to him at a small family birthday party at their daughter’s home in Tucson. As soon as Gabe held the book in his hand, even before he unwrapped it, he knew something was wrong. Something evil seemed to pulsate from inside the gaily wrapped package. Breaking the ribbon and tearing off the paper, a sense of dread seemed to fill the whole room, blurring the smiling faces of his children and grandchildren, obscuring Wanda’s loving, watchful eyes.

“Diana signed it for you,” Wanda said.

Gabe fumbled the book open to the title page and read the words that were written there in vivid red ink. “Gabe,” the inscription said. “Happy Birthday. Here’s a piece of our mutual history. I hope you enjoy it. Diana Ladd Walker.”

“Do you like it?” Wanda asked.

“Yes.” Gabe managed a weak smile, but as soon as possible, he put the book down. When the party was over and as he and Wanda were getting ready to leave, the grandkids had gathered up the presents and what was left of the birthday cake for Wanda and Gabe to take back home to Sells with them. Five-year-old Rita, the baby, had come racing to the door carrying the book. Afraid that whatever evil lurked in the book might somehow infect her, Gabe had reached down and snatched it from her hand.

Tears welled in her eyes. “I only wanted to carry it,” she pouted. “I wouldn’t drop it or anything. I like books.”

“I know, baby,” he said, bending over and giving the child a hug. “But this one is very special. Let me carry it, okay?”

“Okay,” she sniffed. “Can I carry your hat then?”

For an answer, Gabe had put his huge black Stetson on her head. It had engulfed the child, falling down over her eyes, covering everything down to her lips, which suddenly burst into a wide grin.

“I can’t see anything,” she said.

“That’s all right,” Gabe had said, reaching out and taking her hand. “I’ll lead you to the car.”

“What’s wrong?” Wanda asked, once they were in the Ford. “You got mad at Rita for just touching the book.”

“I wasn’t mad,” Gabe returned, although his protest was useless. After all their years together, Wanda knew him far too well for him to be able to get away with lying.

“It’s the book,” he said. “It’s dangerous. I didn’t want her near it.”

“How can a book be dangerous?” Wanda asked. “Rita’s just a little girl. She can’t even read.”

Gabe did not want to argue. “It just is,” he said.

“So what are you going to do?” Wanda asked. “Take the book to some other medicine man and have him shake a few feathers at it?”

With that, Wanda had squeezed her broad form against the door on the far side of the car. She had sat there with her arms crossed, staring out the window in moody silence as they started the sixty-mile drive back to Sells. It wasn’t a good way to end a birthday party.

Looks At Nothing had taught Gabe Ortiz the importance of understanding something before taking any action. And so, in the week following the party, he had read the book, Shadow of Death, from cover to cover. It was slow going. In order to read it he had to hold it, and doing that necessitated overcoming his own revulsion. It reminded him of that long-ago day, when, as a curious child, he had reached into his Aunt Rita’s medicine basket and touched the ancient scalp bundle she kept there.

Ni-thahth Rita had warned him then about the dangers of Enemy Sickness. Told him that by not showing proper respect for a scalp bundle he could bring down a curse on her—as the scalp bundle’s owner—or on some member of her family. She had told him how Enemy Sickness caused terrible pains in the belly or blood in the urine, and how only a medicine man trained in the art of war chants could cure a patient suffering from that kind of illness.

It was late when Fat Crack finally finished reading. Wanda had long since fallen asleep but Gabe knew sleep would be impossible for him. He had stolen outside, and sat there on a chair in their ocotillo-walled, dirt-floored ramada. It was early summer. June. The month the Tohono O’othham call Hahshani Bahithag Mashath—saguaro-ripening month. Although daytime temperatures in the parched Arizona desert had already spiraled into triple digits, the nighttime air was chilly. But that long Thursday night, it was more than temperature that made Gabe Ortiz shiver.

It was true, he had known much of the story. In the late sixties, his cousin, Gina Antone, his Aunt Rita’s only grandchild, had been murdered by a man named Andrew Carlisle. Diana Ladd, then a teacher on the reservation, had been instrumental in seeing that the killer, a once well-respected professor of creative writing at the university, had been sent to prison for the murder. Six years later, when the killer got out and came back to Tucson seeking revenge, he had come within minutes of killing both women—Diana Ladd and Rita Antone—and Diana’s son, Davy, as well.

That much of the story Gabe already knew. The rest of it—Andrew Carlisle’s childhood and Diana’s, the various twists of fate that had put their two separate lives on a collision course—were things Fat Crack Ortiz learned only as he read Diana’s book. Knowing those details as well as the background on Andrew Carlisle’s other victims made Fat Crack feel worse instead of better. Nothing he read, including the knowledge that Andrew Carlisle had died of AIDS in the state penitentiary at Florence a few months earlier, did anything to dispel his terrible sense of foreboding about the book and the pain and suffering connected with it.

Gabe Ortiz was a practical man, given to down-to-earth logic. For an hour or more he approached the problem of the book’s danger through the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy. When, at the end of several hours of consideration, he had made no progress, he walked back into the house. Careful not to disturb Wanda, he opened the bottom drawer of an old wooden teacher’s desk he had salvaged from the school district trash heap. Inside one of the drawers he found Looks At Nothing’s buckskin medicine pouch—the fringed huashomi—the old medicine man had worn until the day he died.

In the years since a frail Looks At Nothing had bequeathed the pouch to Gabe, he had kept it stocked with sacred tobacco, picking it at the proper time, drying, storing, and rolling it in the proper way. Gabe had carefully followed the sacred traditions of the Peace Smoke, using it sparingly but to good effect, all the while hoping that one or the other of his two sons would show some interest in learning what the medicine man had left in Gabe’s care and keeping. Unfortunately, his two boys, Richard and Leo, nearly middle-aged now, were far more interested in running their tow-truck/auto repair business and playing the guitar than they were in anything else.

Back outside, seated on a white plastic chair rather than on the ground, as the wiry Looks At Nothing would have done, Gabe examined the contents of the bag—the medicine man’s World War II vintage Zippo lighter and the cigarettes themselves. He had thought that he would light one of them and blow the smoke over the book, performing as he did so the sacred act of wustana, of blowing smoke with the hope of illuminating something. But sitting there, he realized that what was needed for wustana was a living, breathing patient. Here he had only an object, the book itself.

Rather than waste the sacred smoke, Fat Crack Ortiz decided to try blowing from his heart instead. He remembered Looks At Nothing telling him once that the process was so simple that even an old woman could do it.

Holding the book in his hands, he began the chant, repeating the verses four times just as he had been taught.

I am blowing now to see what it is that lives here,

What breathing thing lies hidden in this book.

There is a spirit in here that sickens those around it,

That is a danger to those around it.

I want to see this strength so I will know what kind of thing it is.

So I will know how to draw it out of where it is hiding

And how to send it away to that other place,

The place where the strength belongs.

As Gabe did so, as he sang the words of the kuadk—observing the form and rhythms of the age-old chant of discernment—he began to figure it out. As time passed, he began to see the pattern. Without quite knowing how, he suddenly understood.

The evil Ohb—Fat Crack’s Aunt Rita’s enemy—was back. The wicked Mil-gahn man who, twenty-one years earlier, had somehow become a modern-day reincarnation of an ancient tribal enemy, was coming once again. Somehow the dreaded Apache was about to step out of the pages of Diana Ladd Walker’s book and reenter their lives.

Gabe remembered reading in a newspaper article several months earlier that Andrew Carlisle was dead. That meant that if he was not coming in person, certainly the strength of the Ohb was coming, bringing danger to all of those people still alive who had once been connected with Diana Ladd and with Rita Antone—the woman Gabe called Ni-thahth, his mother’s elder sister—in that other, long-ago battle. The fact that Carlisle was dead meant nothing. His spirit was still alive, still restless, and still bent on revenge.

Time passed. When Gabe at last emerged from his self-induced trance, the stars were growing pale in a slowly graying sky. Stiffly, Gabe Ortiz eased his cramped body out of the uncomfortable plastic chair. Before going back into the house to grab a few hours of sleep, he limped out to where the cars were parked and put both Looks At Nothing’s deerskin pouch and Diana Ladd’s offending book in the glove compartment of the tribal chairman’s Ford sedan.

Once, long ago, when Looks At Nothing had first told him that Gabe had the power to be a great shaman, Gabe had teased the Gohhim O’othham—Old Man. He had laughed off the medicine man’s prediction that one day Fat Crack, too, would be a great mahkai—a medicine man with a tow truck. That idea had struck him as too funny, especially since it came from a man who clung stubbornly to the old ways and who looked down on all things Anglo—with the single notable exception of that aging Zippo lighter.

Looks At Nothing had much preferred walking to riding in a truck. Gabe wondered now what the old shaman would say if he knew his deerskin pouch and sacred tobacco would be riding to town the next day in a two-year-old Crown Victoria. Looks At Nothing would probably think it was funny, Gabe thought, and so did he.

A few minutes later, still chuckling, he eased himself into bed. As he did so, Wanda stirred beside him.

“It’s late,” she complained. “You’ve been up all night.”

“Yes,” Gabe said, rolling his heavy body next to hers, and resting one of his hands on her shoulder. “But at least now I can sleep.”

The sentence ended with a contented snore. Within minutes, Wanda fell asleep once more as well.

Lani had told the man that she would be late for work if she arrived any later than seven. That wasn’t entirely true. The first two hours she spent at the museum each day, from seven to nine, were strictly voluntary. She went around on the meandering paths, armed with a trash bag and sharp-pronged stick, picking up the garbage that had been left behind by the previous day’s visitors.

During those two hours, doing mindless work, she was able to watch the animals from time to time and simply to be there with them. Working by herself, without the necessity of talking with anyone else, she remembered the times she had come here with Nana Dahd and with her brother Davy.

Nana Dahd. Dahd itself implies nothing more than the somewhat distant relationship of godmother, but for Davy and Lani both, Rita Antone had been much more than that. Diana Ladd Walker may have owned the official title of “Mother” in the family, but she had come in only a distant second behind the Indian woman who had actually filled the role.

Ambitious and forever concentrating on her work, there was a part of Diana Ladd Walker that was always separate from both her children. While Diana labored over first a typewriter and later a computer, the child-rearing joys and responsibilities had fallen mainly on Rita’s capable and loving shoulders.

By the time Lani appeared on the scene, Davy was already eleven years old and Rita’s health was becoming precarious. Had Davy not been there to pitch in and help out, no doubt it would have been impossible for Nana Dahd to look after a busily curious toddler. In a symbiotic relationship that made outsiders wonder, the three of them—the old woman, the boy, and the baby—had made do.

Long after most males his age would have forsaken the company of women, Davy stayed around. He, more than anyone, understood what it was Nana Dahd was trying to do, and he was willing to help. Whenever he wasn’t in school, he spent most of his waking hours helping the woman who had once been his baby-sitter care for his little sister.

When the three of them were alone together in Rita’s apartment—with the old woman in her wheelchair and with Lani on her lap while Davy did his homework at the kitchen table—it seemed as though they existed in a carefully preserved bubble that was somehow outside the confines of regular time and space.

In that room they had spoken, laughed, and joked together, speaking solely in the softly guttural language of the Tohono O’othham. It was there Lani learned that Nana Dahd’s childhood name had been E Waila Kakaichu, which means Dancing Quail. Rita Antone’s dancing days were long since over, but Lani’s were only beginning. The child danced constantly. Her favorite game consisted of standing in the middle of the room, twirling and pretending to be siwuliki—whirlwind. She would spin around and around until finally, losing her balance, she would fall laughing to the floor.

Just as Rita had given Davy his Indian name of Olhoni—Little Orphaned Calf—Nana Dahd gave Lani a special Indian name as well, one that was known only to the three of them. In the privacy of Rita’s apartment, the Tohono O’othham child with the Mil-gahn name of Dolores Lanita Walker became Mualig Siakam. Rita told Lani that the words mualig siakam meant Forever Spinning.

There in Nana Dahd’s room, working one stitch at a time, Rita taught Davy and Lani how to make baskets. Davy had been at it much longer, but Lani’s tiny and surprisingly agile fingers soon surpassed her elder brother’s clumsier efforts. When that happened, Davy Ladd gave up and stopped making baskets altogether.

Rita taught Davy and Lani the old stories and the medicinal lore Rita had learned from her own grandmother, from Oks Amichuda—Understanding Woman. Had Rita been physically able, she would have taken her charges out into the desert to show them the plants and animals she wanted them to understand. Instead, the three of them spent hours almost every weekend at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, with Davy pushing Nana Dahd’s chair along the gently graded paths and with Lani perched on the old woman’s lap.

For Rita, every display in the museum was part of her comprehensive classroom. As they went from one exhibit to another, Rita would point out the various plants and tell what each was good for and when it should be picked. And on those long afternoons, if it was still wintertime, so the snakes and lizards were unable to hear and swallow the storyteller’s luck, Rita would tell stories.

Each animal and plant came with its own traditional lore. Patiently, Nana Dahd told them all. Some tales explained the how of creation, like the spiders stitching together the floating pieces of earth. Others helped explain animal behavior, like the stories about how I’itoi taught the birds to build their nests or how he taught the gophers to dig their burrows underground. There were stories that did the same thing for plants, like the one about the courageous old woman who went south to rescue her grandson from the warlike Yaquis and was rewarded by being turned into the beautiful plant, the night-blooming cereus. And there were some, like the stories of how Cottontail and Quail both tricked Coyote, that were just for fun.

As the children learned the various stories, Rita had encouraged them to observe the behavior of the animals involved and to consider how the story and the animal’s natural inclination came together to form the basis of the story. What was observable and what was told combined to help the children learn to make sense of their world, just as those same stories had for the Tohono O’othham for thousands of years.

Rita—her person, her stories, and her patient teaching—had formed the center of Lani Walker’s existence from the moment the child first came to Gates Pass, from the time before she had any conscious memory. When Rita Antone died, the day before Lani’s seventh birthday, a part of the child had died as well, but there on the paths of the museum the summer of her sixteenth year—wandering alone among the plants and animals that had populated Nana Dahd’s stories—Lani was able to recapture those fading strains of stories from her childhood and breathe life into them anew.

And each day at nine o’clock, when she finished up with one shift and had an hour to wait before the next one started, she would make sure she was near the door to the hummingbird enclosure. For it was there, of all the places in the museum, where she felt closest to Nana Dahd. This was where she and Davy had been with Rita on the day Lani Walker first remembered hearing Rita mention the story of Kulani O’oks—the great Medicine Woman of the Tohono O’othham.

“Kulani,” Lani had repeated, running the name over her tongue. “It sounds like my Mil-gahn name.”

And Rita’s warm brown face had beamed down at her in a way that told Lani she had just learned something important. Nana Dahd nodded. “That is why, at the time of your adoption, I asked your parents to make Lani part of your English name. Kulani O’oks and Mualig Siakam are two different names for the same person. And now that you are old enough to understand that, it is time that you heard that story as well.”

Whenever Lani Walker sat in the hummingbird enclosure, all those stories seemed to flow together. Kulani O’oks and Mualig Siakam were one and the same, and so were Dolores Lanita Walker and Clemencia Escalante.

Four different people and four different names, but then Nana Dahd had always taught that all things in nature go in fours.

Fat Crack and Wanda Ortiz, Rita Antone’s nephew and his wife, had stopped by the Walker home in Gates Pass on their way home from Tucson that warm September day. Wanda Ortiz, after years of staying at home with three kids, had gone off to school and earned a degree in social work from the University of Arizona. Her case load focused on “at risk” children on the reservation, and she had ridden into town earlier that day in an ambulance, along with one of her young charges.

“It’s too bad,” Wanda said, visiting easily with her husband’s wheelchair-bound aunt in Diana Walker’s spacious, basket-lined living room. “She has ant bites all over her body. The doctor says she may not make it.”

At seventy-one, Rita Antone could no longer walk, having lost her left leg—from the knee down—to diabetes. She spent her days mostly in the converted cook shack out behind Diana and Brandon Walker’s house. The words “cook shack” hardly applied any longer. The place was cozy and snug. It had been recently renovated, making the whole thing—including a once tiny bathroom—wheelchair-accessible. Evenings Rita spent in the company of Diana and Brandon Walker or with Davy Ladd, the long-legged eleven-year-old she still sometimes called her little Olhoni.

On that particular evening, Brandon had been out investigating a homicide case for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Diana excused herself to go make coffee for the unexpected guests while Davy lay sprawled on the floor, doodling in a notebook and listening to the grown-ups talk rather than doing his homework. Rita sat nearby with her owij—her awl—and the beginnings of a basket in hand. She frowned in concentration as a long strand of bear grass tried to escape its yucca bindings.

“Ant bites?” Rita asked.

Wanda Ortiz nodded. “She was staying with her great-grandmother down in Nolic. Her father’s in jail and her mother ran off last spring. Over the summer, the other kids helped look after the little girl, but they’re all back in school now. Yesterday afternoon, the grandmother fell asleep and the baby got out. She wandered into an ant bed, but her grandmother is so deaf, she didn’t hear the baby screaming. The other kids from the village found her in the afternoon, after they came home on the bus.

“Someone brought her into the hospital at Sells last night, but she’s still so sick that this morning they transferred her to TMC. I came along to handle the paperwork. By the time I finished, the ambulance had already left, so Gabe came to get me.”

“How old is the baby?” Rita asked.

“Fifteen months,” Wanda answered.

“And what will happen to her?”

“We’ll try to find another relative to take her, I guess. If not . . .” Wanda Ortiz let the remainder of the sentence trail away unspoken.

“If not what?” Rita asked sharply. It was a tone of voice Davy had seldom heard Nana Dahd use. He looked up from his drawing, wondering what was wrong.

Wanda shrugged. “There’s an orphanage up in Phoenix that takes children. If nobody else wants her, she might go there.”

“Whose orphanage?” As Rita asked the question, she pushed the awl into the rough beginning of her new basket and set her basket-making materials aside.

“What do you mean, whose orphanage?” Wanda asked.

“Who runs it?” Rita asked.

“It’s church-run,” Wanda replied. “Baptist, I think. It’s very nice. They only take Indian children there, not just Tohono O’othham children, but ones from lots of different tribes.”

“But who’s in charge?” Rita insisted. “Indians or Anglos?”

“Anglos, of course,” Wanda said, “although they do have Indians on staff.”

Diana walked back into the living room carrying a tray. “Indians on staff where?” she asked as she distributed cups of coffee. In view of the fact that Rita Antone made her home with a Mil-gahn family, Wanda Ortiz was a little mystified at Rita’s obvious opposition to the idea of Indian children being raised by Anglos. After all, Rita had raised Davy Ladd, hadn’t she?

“Running an orphanage for Indians,” Wanda Ortiz told Diana. “We were talking about the little girl I brought to TMC this morning. Once she’s released, if we can’t find a suitable relative to take care of her, she may end up in a Baptist orphanage up in Phoenix. They’re really very good with children.”

“Do they teach basket-making up there?” Rita asked, peering at her nephew’s wife. “And in the wintertime, do they sit around and tell I’itoi stories, or do they watch TV?”

“Ni-thahth,” Gabe objected, smiling and respectfully addressing his aunt in the formal Tohono O’othham manner used when referring to one’s mother’s older sister. “The children out on the reservation watch television, and those are kids who still live at home with their parents.”

“Someone should be teaching them the stories,” Rita insisted stubbornly. “Someone who still remembers how to tell them.”

After that, the old woman lapsed into a moody silence. By then Rita Antone and Diana Ladd had lived together for almost a dozen years. Diana knew from the expression on the old woman’s face that Rita was upset, and she quickly went about turning the conversation to less difficult topics. She wouldn’t have mentioned it again, but once Gabe and Wanda left for Sells and after Davy had headed off to bed, Rita herself brought it up.

“That baby is Hejel Wi i’thag,” Rita Antone said softly. “She is Left Alone, just like me.” Orphaned as a young child and then left widowed and with her only son dead in early middle age, Rita had been called Hejel Wi i’thag almost her whole life.

“And if they take her to that orphanage in Phoenix,” Rita continued fiercely, “she will come back a Baptist, not Tohono O’othham. She will be an outsider her whole life, again just like me.”

Diana could see that her friend was haunted by the specter of what might happen to this abandoned but unknown and unnamed child. “Don’t worry,” Diana said, hoping to comfort her. “Wanda said she was looking for someone—a blood relative—to take the baby. I’m sure she’ll find someone who’ll do it.”

Rita Antone shook her grizzled head. “I don’t think so,” she said.

A week later, Fat Crack Ortiz was surprised when his Aunt Rita, who usually avoided using telephones, called him at his auto-repair shop at Sells.

“Where is she?” Rita asked without preamble.

“Where’s who?” he asked.

“The baby. The one who was kissed by Ali-chu’uchum O’othham—by the Little People, by the ants and wasps and bees.”

“It was ants, Ni-thahth,” Fat Crack answered. “And she’s still in the hospital in Tucson. She’s supposed to get out tomorrow or the next day.”

“Who is going to take her?” Rita asked.

“I’m not sure,” Gabe hedged, even though he knew full well that Wanda’s search for a suitable guardian for the child had so far come to nothing.

Rita correctly interpreted Fat Crack’s evasiveness. “I want her,” Rita said flatly. “Give her to me.”

“But, Ni-thahth,” Gabe objected. “After what already happened to that little girl, no one is going to be willing to hand her over to you.”

“Why?” Rita asked. “Because I’m too old?”

“Yes.” Fat Crack’s answer was reluctant but truthful. “I suppose that’s it. Once the tribal judge sees your age, she isn’t going to look at anything else.”

Rita refused to take no for an answer. “Give her to Diana, then,” she countered. “She and Brandon Walker are young enough to take her, but I would still be here to teach her the things she needs to know.”

Gabe hesitated to say what he knew to be true. “You don’t understand. Diana and Brandon are Anglos, Rita. Mil-gahn. They’re good friends of mine as well as friends of yours, but times have changed. No one does that anymore.”

“Does what?”

“Approves those kinds of adoptions—adoptions outside the tribe.”

“You mean Anglos can’t adopt Tohono O’othham children anymore?”

“That’s right,” Gabe said. “And it’s not just here. Tribal courts from all over the country are doing the same thing. They say that being adopted by someone outside a tribe is bad for Indian children, that they don’t learn their language or their culture.”

There was a long silence on the telephone line. For a moment or two Fat Crack wondered if perhaps something had gone wrong with the connection. “Even the tribal judge will see that living in a Baptist orphanage would be worse than living with us,” Rita said at last. After that she said nothing more.

Through the expanding silence in the earpiece Fat Crack understood that, from sixty miles away, he had been thoroughly outmaneuvered by his aunt. Anglo or not, living with the Walkers was probably far preferable to living in a group home.

“I’ll talk to Wanda,” he agreed at last. “But that’s all I’ll do—talk. I’m not making any promises.”

Mitch Johnson drove to Smith’s, a grocery store on the corner of Swan and Grant. Once there, he stood in the soft-drink aisle wondering what he should buy. With one hand in the pocket of his jacket, he held one of the several vials of scopolamine between his fingers—as if for luck—while he tried to decide what to do.

What do girls that age like to drink early in the morning? he wondered. Sodas, most likely. He chose several different kinds—a six-pack of each. Maybe some kind of juice. He put two containers into his basket, one orange and one apple. And then, for good measure, he threw in a couple of cartons of chocolate milk as well. Andy had warned him against using something hot, like coffee or tea, for instance, for fear that the boiling hot liquid might somehow lessen the drug’s impact.

And it did have an impact. Mitch Johnson knew that from personal experience.

One day in August of the previous year, Andrew Carlisle had returned from another brief stay in the prison infirmary holding a small glass container in his hand.

“What’s that?” Mitch had asked, thinking it was probably some new kind of medicine that would be used to treat Andrew Carlisle’s constantly increasing catalog of ailments.

“I’ve been wondering all this time exactly how you’d manage to make off with the girl. I think I’ve found the answer.” Andy handed the glass with its colorless liquid contents over to Mitch. He opened it and took a sniff. It was odorless as well as colorless.

“I still don’t know what it is,” he said.

“Remember that article you were reading to me from the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago? The one about the Burundianga Cocktail?”

“That’s what the drug dealers down in Colombia used to relieve that diplomat of his papers and his money?”

Carlisle smiled. “That’s the one,” he said. “And here it is.”

Over the years, Andy had clearly demonstrated to Mitch that sufficient sums of money available outside the prison could account for any amount of illegal contraband inside.

“Where did you get it?” Mitch asked.

“I have my sources,” Andy answered. “And you’ll find plenty of it with your supplies once you’re on the outside. It isn’t a controlled substance, so there were no questions asked. But it made sense to me to make a single large buy rather than a series of small ones.”

“But how exactly does it work, and how much do I use?”

“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it,” Andy had replied. “There may be a certain amount of trial and error involved. You should use enough that she’s tractable, but you don’t want to use so much that she loses consciousness or even dies as a result of an overdose.”

“You’re saying we should do a dry run?” Mitch asked.

“Several dry runs might be better than just one.”

Mitch thought about that for a moment. Andy’s health was so frail that he certainly couldn’t risk taking anything out of the ordinary.

“I guess I’d better be the guinea pig then,” Mitch said. “No telling what a shot of this stuff would do to you.”

Andy nodded. “We won’t give you that much,” he said reassuringly. “Just enough to give you a little buzz so you’ll know exactly what it feels like.”

“When should we do it?”

“This afternoon. You’ll have a soda break with a little added kick.”

That afternoon, at three o’clock, Mitch Johnson had served himself up a glass of scopolamine-laced Pepsi. They used only half the contents of that one-ounce bottle. From Mitch’s point of view, it seemed as though nothing at all happened. He didn’t feel any particular loss of control. He remembered climbing up on the upper bunk and lying there, feeling hot and a little flushed, waiting for the effects of the drug to hit him. The next thing he noticed was how everything around him seemed to shrink. Mitch himself grew huge, while a guard walking the corridor looked like a tiny dwarf. When Mitch came to himself again, he was eating breakfast.

“What happened to dinner?” he asked Andy irritably. “Did something happen and they skipped it?”

“You ate it,” Andrew Carlisle told him.

“The hell I did. I lay down here on the bed just a little while ago . . .” Mitch stopped short. “You mean dinner came and went, the whole night passed, and I don’t remember any of it?”

“That’s right,” Andy said. “This stuff packs a hell of a wallop, doesn’t it? Since the girl is physically so much smaller than you are, you’ll have to be careful not to give her too much. It makes you realize why some of those scopolamine-based cold medicines caution against using mechanical equipment, doesn’t it?”

They had been silent for some time after that. Mitch Johnson was stunned. Fifteen hours of his life had disappeared, leaving him no conscious memory of them.

“Did I do or say anything stupid while I was out of it?”

“Not stupid,” Andy replied. “I found it interesting rather than stupid.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve always wondered whether or not those three wetbacks were the first ones. And it turns out they weren’t.”

Mitch shoved his tray aside. “What the hell do you mean?”

“You know what I mean, Mitch. I’m talking about the girl. The ‘gook,’ I believe you called her. The one you raped and then blew to pieces with your AR-sixteen.”

Mitch Johnson paled. “I never told anyone about that,” he whispered hoarsely. “Not anyone at all.”

“Well,” Carlisle said with a shrug. “Now you’ve told me, but don’t worry. After all, what are a few secrets between friends?”

3

After I’itoi found the center of the world, he began making men out of mud. Ban—Coyote—was standing there watching. I’itoi told Ban that he could help.

Coyote worked with his back to I’itoi. As he made his men, he was laughing. Because the Spirit of Mischief is always with him, Coyote laughs at everything.

After a while I’itoi—the Spirit of Goodness—finished making his mud men and turned to see why Coyote was laughing. He found that Ban had made all his men with only one leg. But still Coyote continued to laugh.

At last, when they had made enough mud men, I’itoi told Coyote to listen to see which of all the mud men would be the first to speak.

Ban waited and listened, but nothing happened. Finally he went to I’itoi and said, “The mud men are not talking.”

But I’itoi said, “Go back and listen again. Since the Spirit of Mischief is in your men, surely they will be the first to speak.”

And this was true. The first of the spirits to speak in the mud men was the Spirit of Mischief. For this reason, these men became the Ohb, the Apaches—the enemy. According to the legends of the Desert People, the Ohb have always been mean and full of mischief, just the way Coyote made them.

When all the mud men were alive, I’itoi gathered them together and showed them where each tribe should live. The Apaches went to the mountains toward the east. The Hopis went north. The Yaquis went south. But the Tohono O’othham—the Desert People—were told to stay in that place which is the center of things. And that is where they are today, nawoj, my friend, close to Baboquivari, I’itoi’s cloud-veiled mountain.

And all this happened on the First Day.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, Gabe Ortiz climbed into his oven-hot Crown Victoria, turned on the air-conditioning, and sat there letting the hot air blow-dry the sweat on his skin. He loosened his bola tie and tossed his Stetson into the backseat, then he leaned back and closed his eyes, waiting for the car to cool.

All the back-and-forth hassling was enough to make Gabe long for the old days, before the election, when most of his contacts with the whites, the Mil-gahn, had been when he towed their disabled cars or motor homes out of the sand along Highway 86 and into Tucson or Casa Grande for repairs.

Why was it that Anglo bureaucrats seemed to have no other purpose in life than seeing that things didn’t happen? Delia Chavez Cachora was a fighter when it came to battling the guys in suits, but even she, with her Washington D.C.-bureaucrat experience, had been unable to move the county road-improvement process off dead center. Unless traffic patterns to the tribal casino could be improved, further expansion of the facility, along with expansion of the casino’s money-making capability, was impossible.

Delia was bright and tough—a skilled negotiator whose verbal assertiveness belied her Tohono O’othham heritage. Those traits, along with her D. C. experience, were what had drawn Gabe Ortiz to her during their first interview. He was the one who had championed her application over those of several equally qualified male applicants. But the very skills that made Delia an asset as tribal attorney and helped her forward tribal business when it came to dealing with Anglo bureaucracies seemed to be working against her when it came to dealing with her fellow Tohono O’othham.

Gabe had heard it said that Delia Chavez Cachora sounded and acted so much like a Mil-gahn at times that she wasn’t really “Indian” enough. She was doing the proper things—living with her aunt out at Little Tucson was certainly a step in the right direction—but Gabe knew she would need additional help. He had developed a plan to address that particular problem. Delia just didn’t know about it yet, although he’d have to tell her soon.

Davy Ladd was a young man, an Anglo who had been raised by Gabe Ortiz’s Aunt Rita. A recent law school graduate, Davy was due back in Tucson sometime in the next few days. By the time he arrived, Delia would have to know that Gabe had hired Davy to spend the summer months and maybe more time beyond that working as an intern in the tribal attorney’s office.

Gabe thought it would be interesting to see how Delia Chavez Cachora dealt with an Anglo who spoke her supposedly native tongue far better than she did. Not only that, Gabe was looking forward to getting to know the grown-up version of his late Aunt Rita’s Little Olhoni.

Next to his ear, someone tapped on the window. Gabe opened his eyes and sat up. Delia herself was standing next to his car, a concerned frown on her face. “Are you all right?” she asked when he rolled down the window.

“Just resting my eyes,” he said.

“I was afraid you were sick.”

Gabe shook his head. “Tired,” he said with a smile. “Tired but not sick.”

“Are you going straight home?” she asked. “We could stop and get something to drink.”

“No, thanks,” he said. “You go on ahead. I have to visit with someone on the way.”

“All right,” she said. “See you Monday.”

As she walked away from the car, Gabe noticed she was stripping off her watch and putting it in her purse. When Gabe had asked her about it, she had told him that on weekends she tried to live on Indian time; tried to do without clocks and all the other trappings of the Anglo world, including, presumably, the evils of air conditioning, he thought as she drove past him a few minutes later with all the windows of her turbo Saab wide open.

Gabe put the now reasonably cool Ford in gear and backed out of his parking place. Instead of heading for Ajo Way and the road back to Sells, he headed north to Speedway and then west toward Gates Pass and the home of his friends, Brandon and Diana Walker.

It wasn’t a trip Gabe was looking forward to because he didn’t know what he was going to say. However, he knew he would have to say something. It was his responsibility.

“Brandon?”

Over the noise of the chain saw, Brandon hadn’t heard the car stop outside the front of the house, nor had he noticed Gabe Ortiz materialize silently behind him. Startled by the unexpected voice, Brandon almost dropped the saw when he turned around to see who had spoken.

“Fat Crack!” he exclaimed, taking off his hat and wiping his face with the damp bandanna he wore tied around his forehead. “The way you came sneaking up behind me, it’s a wonder I didn’t cut off my leg. How the hell are you? What are you doing here? Would you like some iced tea or a beer?”

Now that he was tribal chairman, Fat Crack was a name Gabe Ortiz didn’t hear very often anymore, not outside the confines of his immediate family. The distinctive physiognomy that had given rise to his nickname was no longer quite so visible, especially not now when he often wore a sports jacket over his ample middle. The dress-up slacks, necessary attire for the office and for meetings in town, didn’t shift downward in quite the same fashion as his old Levi’s had. Still, he reached down and tugged self-consciously at his belt, just to be sure his pants weren’t hanging at half-mast.

“Iced tea sounds good,” Gabe said.

The two men walked into and through the yard and then on inside the house. With the book fresh in his mind, Gabe looked around the kitchen. It had been completely redesigned and upgraded since the night of Andrew Carlisle’s brutal attack. The wall between the root cellar, where Rita Antone and Davy Ladd had been imprisoned, had been knocked out, as had the wall between the kitchen and what had once been Rita’s private quarters. The greatly enlarged kitchen now included a small informal dining area. The cabinets were new and so were the appliances, but to Gabe’s heightened perceptions a ghost from that other room—the room from the book—still lingered almost palpably in the air. The damaged past permeated the room with evil in the same way the odor of a fire lingers among the ruins long after the flames themselves have been extinguished.

Acutely aware of that unseen aspect of the room, Gabe looked at the other man, trying to gauge whether or not he noticed. As Brandon bustled cheerfully around the kitchen, he seemed totally oblivious. A full pitcher of sun tea sat on the counter. He filled glasses with ice cubes from the machine in the door of the fridge, added the tea, sliced off two wedges of lemon, and passed Gabe the sugar bowl and a spoon along with the tall glass of tea and a lemon wedge.

“How are you?” Gabe asked. Spooning sugar into his tea, he was thankful Wanda wasn’t there to tell him not to.

Brandon shrugged. “Can’t complain. Doesn’t do any good if I do. Now to what do I owe this honor?” Brandon sat down across the table from his guest. “Not some hitch with Davy’s internship, I hope. He should be leaving for home within the next day or two.”

Gabe took a sip of tea. “No,” he said. “Everything’s fine with that.”

“What then?” Brandon asked.

The two men had been friends for a long time. Fighting the war with Andrew Carlisle and living through the courtroom battles that followed had turned Brandon Walker and Gabe Ortiz into unlikely comrades at arms. And their political ambitions—Gabe’s within the tribe and Brandon’s in the county sheriff’s department—had led them along similar though different paths. Gabe had stood for election to the tribal council for the first time at almost the same time Brandon Walker took his first run at Pima County sheriff. Both of them had won, first time out.

With Gabe working in the background of tribal council deliberations and Brandon running the sheriff’s department, the two men had managed to create a fairly close working relationship between tribal and county law enforcement officers. Gabe’s elevation to chairman had happened only recently, after Brandon Walker had been burned at the polls and let out to pasture. With Brandon Walker no longer running the show at the sheriff’s department, the spirit of cooperation that had once existed between Law and Order—the Tribal Police—and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department was fast disappearing.

“Is Diana here?” Gabe asked.

Frowning, Brandon looked at his watch. When he left office, they had given him a gold watch, for Chrissakes. He hated the damn thing and everything it symbolized. He wore it all the time in the vain hope that daily doses of hard physical labor would eventually help wear it out.

“She should be home in a little while. She had to go to some kind of shindig over at the university. A tea, I think. I must have been a good boy, because she let me off on good behavior, thank God,” he added with a grin.

Gabe didn’t smile back. With instincts honed sharp from years of being a cop, Brandon recognized that non-smile for what it was—trouble.

“What’s the matter, Gabe? Is something wrong?”

Gabe Ortiz took a deliberate sip of his tea before he answered. Convincing other people of the presence of an unseen menace had seemed so easy last night when he had been in tune with the ancient rituals of chants and singing. Now, though, the warning he had come to deliver didn’t seem nearly so straightforward.

“I came to talk to you about Diana’s book,” he managed finally.

“Oh,” Brandon Walker said. “Somehow I was afraid of that.”

“You were?” Gabe asked hopefully. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one with a powerful sense of foreboding.

“When she first came up with the idea for that book, I tried my best to talk her out of it,” Brandon said. “I told her from the very beginning that I didn’t think it was a good idea to rehash all that old stuff. Which shows how much I know. The damn thing went and won a Pulitzer. Now that it’s gone into multiple printings, the publisher is turning handstands. Months after it came out, the book is back on the New York Times Best Sellers list and moving up.” He stopped and gave his visitor a sardonic grin. “I guess I was a better sheriff than I am a literary critic—and I wasn’t too hot at that.”

For a moment they both sipped their tea. Brandon waited to see if Fat Crack would say what was on his mind. When nothing appeared to be forthcoming, Brandon tried priming the pump.

“So what is it about the book?” he asked. “Is there something wrong with it? Did she leave something out or put too much in? Diana’s usually very good with research, but everybody screws up now and then. What’s the scoop, Fat Crack? Tell me.”

“Andrew Carlisle’s coming back,” Gabe said slowly.

Walker started involuntarily but then caught himself. “The hell he is, unless you’re talking about some kind of instant replay of the Second Coming. Andrew Philip Carlisle is dead. He died a month and a half ago. In prison. Of AIDS.”

“I know,” Gabe replied. “I saw that in the paper. I’m not saying he’s coming back himself. Maybe he’s sending someone else.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. To get even?”

Brandon leaned back in his chair. Most Anglos would have simply laughed the suggestions aside. Gabe was relieved that Brandon, at least, seemed to be giving the idea serious consideration.

“Most crooks talk about getting revenge, but very few ever do,” he said finally. “Either in person or otherwise.”

“He did before,” Gabe said.

That statement brooked no argument. Brandon nodded. “So what do we do about it?”

For an answer, Gabe pulled Looks At Nothing’s deerskin pouch out of his pocket. “Remember this?” he asked, opening it and removing both a cigarette and the lighter.

A single glimpse of that worn, fringed pouch threw Brandon Walker into a sea of remembrance. He waited in silence as Gabe lit one of the hand-rolled cigarettes. And once he smelled a whiff of the acrid smoke, that, too, brought back a flood of memories.

The last time Brandon had seen the pouch was the night after Davy Ladd’s Tohono O’othham baptism. Back then the customs of the Desert People had been new and strange. The old medicine man, with help in translation from both Fat Crack and the old priest, had patiently explained some of the belief systems surrounding sickness, both Traveling Sickness—Oimmedtham Mumkithag—and Staying Sickness—Kkahchim Mumkithag.

According to the medicine man, traveling sicknesses were contagious diseases like measles, mumps, or chicken pox. They moved from person to person and from place to place, affecting everyone, Indian and Anglo alike. Traveling sicknesses could be treated by medicine men, but they also responded to the efforts of doctors, nurses, and Anglo hospitals.

Staying sicknesses, on the other hand, were believed to affect only Indians and could be cured only by medicine men. Both physical and spiritual in nature, staying sicknesses resulted from someone breaking a taboo or coming in contact with a dangerous object. By virtue of being an unbaptized baby, Davy himself had become the dangerous object that had attracted the attentions of the Ohb-infected Andrew Carlisle. As a cop investigating a case, Brandon had been little more than an amused outsider as he observed Diana Ladd complying with the requirements of Looks At Nothing’s ritual cure.

The prescription had included seeing to it that Davy Ladd was baptized according to both Indian and Anglo custom. Father John, a frail old priest from San Xavier Mission, had fulfilled the Mil-gahn part of the bargain by baptizing Davy into the Catholic Church of Diana Ladd’s Anglo upbringing. Looks At Nothing, aided by ceremonial singers, had baptized Davy according to the ritual of the Tohono O’othham. In the process the boy was given a new name. Among the Tohono O’othham Davy Ladd became Edagith Gogk Je’e—One With Two Mothers.

“But I thought you told me staying sicknesses only affect Indians,” Brandon had objected.

“Don’t you see?” Looks At Nothing returned. “Davy is not just an Anglo child. He has been raised by Rita as a child of her heart. Therefore he is Tohono O’othham as well. That’s why two baptisms are necessary, Anglo and Indian both.”

“I see,” Brandon had said back then. Now, after years living under the same roof with Rita, Davy, and Lani, Brandon understood far more about Staying Sickness than he ever would have thought possible. For instance, Eagle Sickness comes from killing an eagle and can result in head lice or itchy hands. Owl Sickness comes from succumbing to a dream in which a ghost appears, and can result in fits or trances, dizziness, and “heart shaking.” Coyote Sickness comes from killing a coyote or eating a melon a coyote has bitten into. That one can cause both itching and diarrhea in babies. Whenever one of the kids had come down with a case of diarrhea, Rita was always convinced Coyote Sickness was at fault.

Now, though, sitting in the kitchen of the house at Gates Pass, Brandon Walker smelled the smoke and was transported back to that long ago council around the hood of Fat Crack’s bright red tow truck. It was at the feast after the ceremony, after Rita and Diana and Davy Ladd had all eaten the ritual gruel of white clay and crushed owl feathers. There had been four men in all—Looks At Nothing, Father John, Fat Crack, and Brandon Walker—who had gathered in that informal circle.

Brandon remembered how Looks At Nothing had pulled out his frayed leather pouch and how he had carefully removed one of his homemade cigarettes. Brandon had watched in fascination as the blind man once again used his Zippo lighter and unerringly ignited the roll of paper and tobacco. Before that, Brandon had been exposed only once to the Tohono O’othham custom of the Peace Smoke, one accomplished with the use of cigarettes rather than with the ceremonial pipes used by other Indian tribes. He knew, for example, that when the burning cigarette was handed to him, he was expected to take a drag, say “Nawoj”—which means friend or friendly gift—and then pass it along to the next man in the circle.

It had seemed to Brandon at the time that the cigarette was being passed in honor of Davy’s successful baptism, but that wasn’t true. The circle around the truck had a wholly separate purpose.

Only when the cigarette had gone all the way around the circle—from medicine man to priest, from tow truck driver to detective and back at last to Looks At Nothing—did Brandon Walker learn the rest.

“He is a good boy,” Looks At Nothing had said quietly, clearly referring to Davy. “But I am worried about one thing. He has too many mothers and not enough fathers.”

Not enough fathers? Brandon had thought to himself, standing there leaning on a tow truck fender. What the hell is that supposed to mean? And what does it have to do with me?

Obligingly, Looks At Nothing had told them.

“There are four of us,” the shaman had continued. “All things in nature go in fours. Why could we not agree to be father to this fatherless boy, all four of us together? We each have things to teach, and we all have things to learn.”

Brandon recalled the supreme confidence with which the medicine man had stated this position. Out of politeness, it was framed as a question, but it was nonetheless a pronouncement. No one gathered around the truck that warm summer’s night in the still-eddying smoke from the old man’s cigarette had nerve enough to say otherwise.

Twenty-one years had passed between then and now. Two of Davy Ladd’s four fathers were dead—Father John for twenty years and Looks At Nothing for three years less than that. One of the two mothers, Rita Antone, was gone as well.

Of the six people charged by the medicine man with Davy Ladd’s care and keeping, only three remained—Diana Ladd Walker, Fat Crack Ortiz, and Brandon Walker.

“That’s the pouch that belonged to the old blind medicine man, isn’t it?” Brandon asked.

Fat Crack, nodding, passed the cigarette to Brandon. “Nawoj,” Fat Crack said.

At Diana’s insistence, Brandon Walker had quit smoking completely years ago. When he took that first drag on the ceremonial tobacco, the sharp smoke of the desert tobacco burned his throat and chest. He winced but managed to suppress a cough.

“Nawoj,” he returned, passing the cigarette back to Gabe.

For a time after that, the two men smoked in utter silence. Only when Brandon with typical Anglo impatience was convinced that Fat Crack had forgotten how to speak, did Gabe Ortiz open his mouth.

“I finished reading Diana’s book last night,” he said at last. “It gave me a bad feeling. Finally I took the book outside and sang a kuadk over it.”

“A what?” Brandon asked.

“Kuadk. One of the sacred chants of discernment that Looks At Nothing taught me. That’s how I learned the evil Ohb is coming back.”

Brandon frowned. “Even though he’s dead.”

Fat Crack nodded. “I can’t see the danger, I just know it’s coming.”

Brandon shook his head. There was no point in arguing. “What are we supposed to do about it?” he asked.

“That’s what you and I must decide.”

Brandon Walker sighed. Abruptly he stood up and walked back to the counter to fetch the pitcher of tea. In the process, he seemed to shake off the effects of the smoke and all it implied.

“What do you suggest?” he asked irritably. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not the sheriff anymore. I’m not even a deputy. There’s nothing I can do. Nothing I’m supposed to do.”

Realizing that Brandon Walker was no longer in touch with the spiritual danger, Gabe attempted to respond to the physical concerns. “Maybe you could ask the sheriff to send more patrols out this way,” he suggested.

“Why? To protect us from a dead man?” Brandon Walker demanded. “Are you kidding? If I weren’t a laughingstock already, I sure as hell would be once word about that leaked out. I appreciate your concern, Gabe. And I thank you for going to all the trouble of stopping by to warn us, but believe me, you’re wrong. Andrew Carlisle is dead. He can’t hurt anybody anymore.”

“I’d better be going, then,” Gabe Ortiz said.

“Don’t you want to stay and see Diana? She should be home before long.”

Fat Crack shook his head. If Brandon wouldn’t listen to him, that meant that the evil here in the kitchen would grow stronger still. He didn’t want to sit there and feel it gaining strength around him.

“I’ll be late for dinner,” he said. “It’ll make Wanda mad.”

When he stood up, his legs groaned beneath him. His joints felt stiff and old as his whole body protested the hours he had spent the night before seated in that uncomfortable molded plastic chair. Wanda had picked up a whole set of those chairs on sale from Walgreen’s at the end of the previous summer. Now Gabe understood why they had been so cheap.

“Do me a favor, nawoj, my friend,” Gabe Ortiz said, limping toward the door. “Do something for an old man.”

“You’re not so old,” Brandon Walker objected. “But what favor?”

“Think about what I said,” Gabe told him, slipping the deerskin pouch back into his pocket.. “And even if you don’t believe what I said, act as though you do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Be careful,” Gabe answered. “You and Diana both.”

Brandon nodded. “Sure,” he said, not knowing if he meant it or not.

Outside, Gabe Ortiz paused with his hand touching the door handle on the Crown Victoria. “What are you going to do with all that wood out there?” he asked.

“Oh, that.” Brandon shrugged. “Right now I’m just cutting it, I guess,” he said. “I haven’t given much thought to what we’ll do with it. Burn some of it over the winter, I suppose. Why, do you know someone who needs wood?”

“The ladies up at San Xavier sure could use it,” Gabe answered. “The ones who cook the popovers and chili. Most of the wood is gone from right around there. They have to haul it in. And the chips would help on the playfield down at Topawa Elementary. When it rains, that whole place down there turns to mud.”

“If somebody can use it, they’re welcome to it,” Brandon said. “All they have to do is come pick it up.”

“I’ll have the tribe send out some trucks along with guys to load it.”

“Sure thing,” Brandon said. “They can come most anytime. I’m usually here.”

As soon as Gabe Ortiz’s Crown Victoria headed down the road, Brandon Walker returned to his woodpile. A reincarnated Andrew Carlisle? That was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. Still, there was one point upon which Brandon Walker fully agreed with Fat Crack Ortiz—writing Shadow of Death had been a dangerous undertaking.

Four years earlier, on the day the letter arrived from Andrew Carlisle, Brandon Walker and Diana Ladd had already been together for seventeen years. They had come through the trials and tribulations of raising children and stepchildren. Together they had survived the long-term agonies of writing and publishing books and dealt with the complexities and hard work of running for public office. There had been difficulties, of course, but always there had been room for compromise—right up to the arrival of that damned letter. And from that time since, it seemed to him they had been locked in a downward spiral.

That was Brandon’s perception, that things had been hunky-dory before the letter and had gone to hell in a handbasket afterward, although in actual fact everything wasn’t absolutely perfect beforehand. They had already lost Tommy by then, and Quentin had already been sent to prison on the drunk-driving charge. But still . . .

The letter, ticking like a time bomb, had come to the house as part of a packet of publisher-forwarded fan mail. Diana had opened the envelope and read the oddly printed, handwritten letter herself before handing it to her husband.

MY DEAR MS. WALKER,

AFTER ALL THESE YEARS IT MAY SURPRISE YOU TO HEAR FROM ME AGAIN. FURTHER, IT MAY COME AS NEWS TO YOU TO KNOW THAT I HAVE RECENTLY BEEN DIAGNOSED AS SUFFERING FROM AN INEVITABLY FATAL DISEASE (AIDS). I AM WRITING TO YOU AT THIS TIME TO SEE IF YOU WOULD BE INTERESTED IN WORKING WITH ME ON A BOOK PROJECT THAT WOULD CHRONICLE THE CIRCUMSTANCES THAT BROUGHT ME TO THIS UNFORTUNATE PASS.

I HAVE ALREADY ASSEMBLED A GOOD DEAL OF INVALUABLE MATERIAL FOR SUCH A PROJECT, BUT I AM OFFENDED BY THE RULES CURRENTLY IN EFFECT THAT MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR CONVICTED CRIMINALS TO REAP ANY KIND OF FINANCIAL REWARDS FROM RECOUNTING THEIR NEFARIOUS DEEDS, INCLUDING WRITING BOOKS ABOUT SAME. BECAUSE SOMEONE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO MAKE AN HONEST BUCK OUT OF SUCH AN UNDERTAKING, I AM WILLING TO TURN THE ENTIRE IDEA, ALONG WITH MY ACCUMULATED MATERIAL, OVER TO A CAPABLE WRITER—WITH NO STRINGS ATTACHED—TO DO WITH AS HE OR SHE MAY CHOOSE.

YOU ARE UNIQUELY QUALIFIED TO WRITE SUCH A BOOK, AND I BELIEVE THAT OUR TWO DIVERGING POINTS OF VIEW ON THE SAME STORY WOULD MAKE FOR COMPELLING READING, EVEN IF WE BOTH KNOW, GOING INTO THE PROJECT, EXACTLY HOW IT WILL ALL TURN OUT.

DURING MY YEARS OF INCARCERATION HERE IN FLORENCE, I HAVE FOLLOWED YOUR FLOURISHING (PARDON THE UNINTENTIONAL ALLITERATION) CAREER WITH MORE THAN CASUAL INTEREST. THIS HAS BEEN DIFFICULT AT TIMES SINCE IT TAKES TIME FOR NONFICTION WORK TO BE TRANSLATED INTO EITHER “TALKING BOOKS” OR BRAILLE. (AS A RELATIVE “LATECOMER” TO THE WORLD OF BLINDNESS, BRAILLE CONTINUES TO BE SLOW-GOING AND CUMBERSOME FOR ME.)

THE MATERIAL I NOW HAVE IN MY POSSESSION IS IN THE FORM OF TYPED NOTES AND TAPES. I THINK, THOUGH, SHOULD YOU DECIDE TO TAKE ON THIS PROJECT, THAT A SERIES OF FACE-TO-FACE INTERVIEWS WOULD BE THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY OF KICKING THINGS OFF.

WHATEVER YOUR DECISION, PLEASE LET ME KNOW AS SOON AS POSSIBLE IN VIEW OF THE FACT THAT WITH THIS DISEASE TIME MAY BE FAR MORE LIMITED THAN EITHER ONE OF US NOW SUSPECTS.

REGARDS,

ANDREW PHILIP CARLISLE

Just holding the wretched letter in his hand had made Brandon Walker feel somehow contaminated. And angry.

“Send this thing back by return mail and tell him to shove it up his ass,” he had growled, handing the letter back to Diana. “Where does that son of a bitch get off and how come he has your address?”

“Andrew Carlisle always had my address,” Diana reminded her husband. “Our address,” she corrected. “We haven’t moved, you know, not since it happened.”

“Did he send it here directly?”

“No, it came in a packet from my publisher in New York.”

“If you want me to, I’ll call the warden and tell him not to let Carlisle send you any more letters, whether they go to New York first or not.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Diana had said.

“You’ll tell him not to write again?” Brandon asked.

“I said I’d handle it.”

Looking at his wife’s determined expression, Brandon suddenly understood her intention. “You’re not going to write back, are you?”

Diana stood there for a moment gazing down at the letter and not answering.

“Well?” Brandon insisted impatiently. “Are you?”

“I might,” she said.

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“Because he’s right, you know. It could be one hell of a good book. Usually it takes at least two books to tell both sides of any given story. This would have both in one. Not only that, my agent and my editor both told me years ago that anytime I was ready to write a book about what happened, Sterling, Moffit, and Dodd would jump at the chance to publish it.”

“No,” Brandon said.

“What do you mean, no?”

“Just what I said. N-O. Absolutely not. I don’t want you anywhere near that crackpot. I don’t want you writing to him. I don’t want you interviewing him. I don’t want you writing about him. Forget it.”

“Wait a minute,” Diana objected. “You can’t tell me what I can and what I can’t write.”

“But it could be dangerous for you,” Brandon said.

“Being sheriff can be dangerous, too,” she told him. “What happens when it’s time for the next election and you have to decide whether or not to run for office again?”

“What about it?”

“What if I told you to forget it? What if I told you that you couldn’t run for office because I said your being sheriff worried me too much? What if you couldn’t run because I refused to give my permission? What then?”

“Diana,” Brandon said, realizing too late that he had stepped off a cliff into forbidden territory. “It’s not the same thing.”

“It isn’t? What’s so different about it?”

“That’s politics . . .”

“And I don’t know anything about politics, right?”

“Diana, I—”

“Listen, Brandon Walker. I know as much or more about politics as you do about writing and publishing. And if I have the good sense to stay out of your business, I’ll thank you to have the good sense to stay out of mine.”

“But you’ll be putting yourself at risk,” Brandon ventured. “Why would you want to do that?”

“Because there are questions I still don’t have answers for,” Diana had replied. “I’m the only one who can ask those questions, and Andrew Carlisle is the only one who can provide the answers.”

“But why stir it all up again?”

“Because I paid a hell of a price,” Diana responded. “Because more than anyone else in the whole world, I’ve earned the right to have those damn answers. All of them.”

She had left then, stalked off to her office. Within weeks—lightning speed in the world of publishing contract negotiations—the contract had come through for Shadow of Death, although the book hadn’t had that name then. The original working title had been A Private War.

And it had been, in more ways than one. From then on, things had never been quite the same between Brandon and Diana.

Diana heard the whine of the chain saw as soon as she pulled into the carport alongside the house and switched off the Suburban’s engine. Hearing the sound, she gripped the steering wheel and closed her eyes.

“Damn,” she muttered. “He’s at it again.”

Shaking her head, Diana hurried into the house, determined to change both her clothes and her attitude. The literary tea was over, thank God. It had been murder—just the kind of stultifying ordeal Brandon had predicted it would be. Listening to the saw, Diana realized that it would have been nice if she herself had been given a choice of working on the woodpile or dealing with Edith Gailbraith, the sharp-tongued wife of the former head of the university’s English Department. Compared to Edith, the tangled pile of mesquite and creosote held a certain straightforward appeal.

Edith, social daggers at the ready, had been the first one to inquire after Brandon. “How’s your poor husband faring these days now that he lost the election?” she had asked.

Diana had smiled brightly. At least she hoped it was a bright smile. “He’s doing fine,” she said, shying away from adding the qualifying words “for a hermit.” As she had learned in the past few months, being married to a hermit-in-training wasn’t much fun.

“Has he found another job yet?” Edith continued.

“He isn’t looking,” Diana answered with a firm smile. “He doesn’t really need another job. That’s given him some time to look at his options.”

“I’d watch out for him, if I were you,” Edith continued. “Don’t leave him out to pasture too long. American men take it so hard when they stop working. The number who die within months of retirement is just phenomenal. For too many of them, their jobs are their lives. That was certainly the case with my Harry. He mourned for months afterward. I was afraid we were going to end up in divorce court, but he died first. He never did get over it.”

Nothing like a little sweetness and light over tea and cakes, Diana thought, seeing Brandon’s frenetic work on the woodpile through Edith Gailbraith’s prying eyes. And lips. With unerring accuracy, Edith had zeroed in on one of Diana Ladd Walker’s most vulnerable areas of concern. What exactly was going on with Brandon? And would he ever get over it?

Driving up to the house late that afternoon, she still didn’t have any acceptable answers to that question. The only thing she did know for sure was that somehow cutting up the wood was helping him deal with the demons that were eating him alive. Having left Edith behind, it was easy for Diana to go back home to Gates Pass prepared to forgive and forget.

“Go change your clothes and stack some wood, Diana,” she told herself. “It’ll do you a world of good.”

In the master bedroom of their house Diana slipped out of the smart little emerald green silk suit she had worn to the tea. She changed into jeans, boots, and a loose-fitting T-shirt. When she stopped in to pick up a pair of glasses of iced tea, she noticed the two glasses already sitting in the kitchen sink and wondered who had stopped by.

She took two newly filled glasses outside. Brandon, stacking wood now with sweat soaking through his clothing, smiled at her gratefully when she handed him his tea. “I’m from Washington,” she joked. “I’m here to help.”

As a victim of many hit-and-run federal bureaucrats, the quip made Brandon laugh aloud. “Good,” he said. “I’ll take whatever help I can get.”

Without saying anything further, he handed her a piece of chopped log, which she obligingly carried to the stack. They worked together in silence for some time before Brandon somewhat warily broached the subject of the university tea. “How was it?” he asked.

Diana shrugged. “About what you’d expect,” she said. “By holding it at the Arizona Historical Society instead of someplace on campus or at the president’s residence, they managed to make it clear that as far as they’re concerned, I’m still not quite okay.”

“You can’t really blame them for that,” Brandon said. “Andrew Carlisle isn’t exactly one of the U. of A.’s more stellar ex-professors. You can hardly expect them to be good sports about what they all have to regard as adverse publicity.”

In writing Shadow of Death, Diana hadn’t glossed over the fact that Andrew Carlisle had used his position as head of the Creative Writing Department at the University of Arizona to lure Diana’s first husband, Garrison Ladd, into playing a part in a brutal torture killing. Members of the local literary community—especially ones in the university’s English Department who had known Andrew Carlisle personally and who still held sway over the university’s creative writing program—were shocked and appalled by his portrayal in the book. They were disgusted that a book one Arizona Daily Sun reviewer had dismissed as nothing more than “a poor-taste exercise in true crime” had gone on to be hailed by national critics and booksellers alike as a masterwork.

“You were absolutely right not to go,” Diana added, bending over and straightening a pile of branches into a manageable armload. “The vultures were out in spades. Several of the women took great pains to tell me that although they never deign to read that kind of thing themselves, they were sure this must be quite good.”

“That’s big of them,” Brandon said. “But it is quite good.”

Diana stopped what she was doing and turned a questioning look on her husband’s tanned, handsome face. “You mean you’ve actually read it?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“While you were off in New York. I didn’t want to be the only person on the block who hadn’t read the damn thing.”

When she had been writing other books, Brandon had read the chapters as they came out of the computer printer. With the manuscript for Shadow of Death he had shown less than no interest. When the galleys came back from New York for correction, she had offered to let him read the book then, but he had said no thanks. He had made his position clear from the beginning, and nothing—not even Diana’s considerable six-figure advance payment—had changed his mind.

Hurt but resigned, Diana had decided he probably never would read it. She hadn’t brought up the subject again.

Now, though, standing there in the searing afternoon heat, cradling a load of branches in her arms, Diana felt some of the months of unresolved anger melt away. “You read it and you liked it?” she asked.

“I didn’t say I liked it,” Brandon answered, moving toward her and looking down into her eyes. “In fact, I hated it—every damned word, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good, because it is. Or should I say, not bad for a girl?” he added with a tentative smile.

The phrase “not bad for a girl” was an old familiar and private joke between them. And hearing those words of praise from Brandon Walker meant far more to Diana than any Pulitzer ever would.

With tears in her eyes, she put down her burden of wood and then let herself be pulled close in a sweaty but welcome embrace. Brandon’s shirt was wet and salty against her cheeks. So were her tears.

“Thank you,” she murmured, smiling up at him. “Thank you so much.”

By mid-afternoon, Mitch Johnson’s errands were run and he was back on the mountain, watching and waiting. The front yard of the Walker place was an unfenced jungle—a snarl of native plants and cactus—ocotillo, saguaro, and long-eared prickly pear—with a driveway curving through it. One part of the drive branched off to the side of the house, where it passed through a wrought-iron gate set in the tall river-rock wall that surrounded both sides and back of the house.

Late in the afternoon what appeared to be an almost new blue-and-silver Suburban drove through an electronically opened gate and into a carport on the side of the house. Mitch watched intently through a pair of binoculars as the woman he had come to know as Diana Ladd Walker stepped out of the vehicle and then stood watching while the gate swung shut behind the vehicle.

She probably believes those bars on that gate mean safety, Mitch thought with a laugh. Safety and security.

“False security, little lady,” he said aloud. “Those bars don’t mean a damned thing, not if somebody opens the gate and lets me in.”

Using binoculars, Mitch observed Diana Ladd Walker’s progress as she made her way into the house. She had to be somewhere around fifty, but even so, he had to admit she was a handsome woman, just as Andy had told him she would be. Her auburn hair was going gray around the temple. From the emerald-green suit she wore, he could see that she had kept her figure. She moved with the confident, self-satisfied grace that comes from doing what you’ve always wanted to do. No wonder Andrew Carlisle had hated Diana Ladd Walker’s guts. So did Mitch.

A few minutes after disappearing into the house she reemerged, dressed in work clothes—jeans, a T-shirt, and hat and bringing her husband something cold to drink.

How touching, the watcher on the mountain thought. How sweet! How stupid!

And then, while Brandon and Diana Walker were busy with the wood, the sweet little morsel who was destined to be dessert rode up on her mountain bike. Lani. The three unsuspecting people talked together for several minutes before the girl went inside. Not long after that, toward sunset, Brandon and Diana went inside as well.

In the last three weeks Mitch Johnson had read Shadow of Death from cover to cover three different times, gleaning new bits of information with each repetition. Long before he read the book, Andy had told him that the child Diana and Brandon Walker had adopted was an Indian. What Mitch hadn’t suspected until he saw Lani in the yard and sailing past him on her bicycle was how beautiful she would be.

That was all right. The more beautiful, the better. The more Brandon and Diana Walker loved their daughter, the more losing her would hurt them. After all, Mikey had been an angelic-faced cherub when Mitch went away to prison.

“What’s the worst thing about being in prison?” Andy had asked one time early on, shortly after Mitch Johnson had been moved into the same cell.

Mitch didn’t have to think before he answered. “Losing my son,” he had said at once. “Losing Mikey.”

His wife had raised so much hell that Mitch had finally been forced to sign away his parental rights, clearing the way for Mikey to be adopted by Larry Wraike, Lori Kiser Johnson’s second husband.

“So that’s what we have to do then,” Andy had said determinedly.

This was long before Mitch Johnson had taken Andrew Carlisle’s single-minded plan and made it his own. The conversation had occurred at a time when the possibility of Mitch’s being released from prison seemed so remote as to be nothing more than a fairy tale.

“What is it we have to do?” he had asked.

“Leave Brandon Walker childless,” Andy had answered. “The same way he left you. My understanding is that one of his sons is missing and presumed dead. That means he has three children left—a natural son, a stepson, and an adopted daughter. So whatever we do we’ll have to be sure to take care of all three.”

“How?” Mitch had asked.

“I’m not certain at the moment, Mr. Johnson,” Andy responded. “But we’re both quite smart, and we have plenty of time to establish a plan of attack. I’m sure we’ll be able to come up with something appropriately elegant.”

For eighteen years—the whole time Mitch was in prison—he sent Mikey birthday cards. Every year the envelopes had been returned unopened.

Mitch Johnson had saved those cards, every single one of them. To his way of thinking, they were only part of the price Brandon and Diana Walker would have to pay.

4

Because everything in nature goes in fours, nawoj, there were four days in the beginning of things. But these four days were not like four days are today. It may have meant four years or perhaps four periods of time.

On the Second Day I’itoi went to all the different tribes to see how they were getting along. And Great Spirit taught each tribe the kind of houses they should build.

First, I’itoi went to the Yaquis, the Hiakim, who live in the south. It was very hot in the land of the Yaquis, so he showed them how to dig into the side of a hill and to make houses that would be cool.

When Great Spirit went south, Gopher—Jewho—and Coyote—Ban—followed him because, as you remember, everything must follow the Spirit of Goodness. And while I’itoi was digging into the side of the hill to show the Hiakim how to build their houses, Gopher and Coyote stood watching. And soon, Jewho and Ban began digging as well. Every minute or two, as they worked, they pulled their heads out of the holes they were digging to see how Elder Brother did it.

Presently I’itoi stopped to rest. When he saw what Gopher and Coyote were doing, he laughed and said, “That is a good house for you.” And that, nawoj, is why the gophers and coyotes have lived that same way ever since.

Moments after Lani stepped into the house, the phone rang. “Davy!” she exclaimed, her voice alive with delight as soon as she heard her brother’s greeting. “Where are you? When will you be home?”

“I’ll be leaving Evanston tomorrow morning,” he said. “I won’t be home until sometime next week.”

“In time for Mom and Dad’s anniversary?” she asked.

“What day is it again?” David asked.

“Saturday,” she told him. “A week from tomorrow.”

“I should be there by then. Why? Is there a party or something?”

“No, but wait until you see what I’m getting them. There’s a guy I met on the way to work. He’s an artist. I’m going to pose for him tomorrow morning, and he’s going to give me a picture.”

“What kind of pose?” David asked.

“He wants me to wear something Indian,” Lani said. “I’m going to wear the outfit I wore for rodeo last year.”

“Oh,” David Ladd said, sounding relieved. “That kind of pose.”

“What kind of pose did you think?” Lani asked.

“Never mind. Is Mom there?”

“She’s outside with Dad. Want me to go get her?”

“Don’t bother. Just give her the message that I’m leaving in the morning, so she won’t be able to reach me. Tell her I’ll call from here and there along the way to let her know how I’m doing.”

From the moment Lani had come to the house in Gates Pass, Davy Ladd had been the second most important person in her young life, right behind Nana Dahd. The bond that existed between the two went far beyond the normal connection between brother and sister. Even halfway across the continent Lani sensed something was amiss.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

David Ladd was more than a little concerned about driving cross-country alone. Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t have bothered him at all. In the course of his years of going to school at Northwestern, he had made the solo drive several times. Now, though, he was living with the possibility of another panic attack always hanging over his head. What would happen if one came over him while he was driving alone down a freeway? He had called home, looking for reassurance, but obviously the edginess in his tone had communicated itself to his little sister. That embarrassed him.

“It’s no big deal,” he said. “I’ve just been having some trouble sleeping is all.”

Lani laughed. “You? Mom always said you were the world-class sleeper in the family, that you could sleep through anything.”

“Not anymore,” Davy replied somberly. “I guess I must be getting old.” He paused. “So are things all right at home? With Mom and Dad, I mean?”

“Sure,” Lani said. “Mom’s getting ready to start another book, and Dad’s still cutting up wood like mad.”

“And how about you?” Davy added. “How are things going with the new job?”

“It’s great,” Lani answered. “There’s that hour in the morning, between shifts . . .” She stopped. “Hey, maybe when you’re back here, you could come over to the museum in the afternoons sometimes. I can get you in for free. The two of us could spend the afternoon there together, just like we used to, with Nana Dahd.”

“I’d like that, Mualig Siakam,” David Ladd said softly, drifting back into the world of their childhood names and squeezing the words out over an unexpected lump that suddenly rose in his throat. “I’d like that a lot.”

“Mr. Walker?”

Quentin Walker, slouched in front of a beer on his customary stool, was drinking his way toward the end of Happy Hour at El Gato Loco, a dive of a workingman’s bar just east of the freeway on West Grant Road in Tucson. At the sound of his own name, one Quentin didn’t necessarily bandy about among the tough customers of El Gato, Quentin swung around on his stool and studied the newcomer over the rim of his draft beer.

“Yeah,” he said without enthusiasm. “That’s me.”

“Long time no see.”

Quentin was more than moderately drunk. He had been sitting at the smoke-filled bar since five, working his way through his usual TGIF routine—shots of bourbon with beer chasers. He squinted up at the newcomer, a tall, spare man who, even in the shadowy gloom of the nighttime bar, still wore sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low on his forehead. Only when the man finally reached up and removed the sunglasses did recognition finally dawn.

“Why, Mitch Johnson!” Quentin exclaimed. “How the hell are you?”

“I’m out, same as you,” Mitch answered with a grin as he settled on the next stool. “Which means I’m fine. You?”

Quentin shrugged. “Okay, I guess. What’ll you have to drink?”

“A beer,” Mitch said. “Bud’s okay.”

Quentin signaled the bartender, who brought two beers and another shot as well. When Mitch paid for all three drinks, Quentin nodded his thanks. He hadn’t really planned on another. By the time Happy Hour finished at seven, he was usually juiced enough that he could stagger the three blocks up the street to his grubby apartment. There, if he was lucky and drunk enough both, he’d fall into bed and sleep through the night. Maybe it was just the geography of it, of being back so near to where it had all happened. Whatever the cause, in the months since he’d left prison and returned to Tucson, sleep without the benefit of booze was a virtual impossibility. He went to bed more or less drunk every night. That was the only thing that held his particular set of demons at bay.

“I heard about Andy,” Quentin said. “Read about it in the paper, that he died, I mean. It’s too bad . . .”

“I’m sure he was more than ready to go,” Mitch replied. “He’d been sick for a long time. He was in a lot of pain. I think he had suffered enough.”

Quentin cast a bleary, questioning stare at the man seated next to him. Mitch had seen that look before and understood it. He had seen it on the faces of countless guards and fellow prisoners. They were all searching his face for signs of the awful lesions that had made Andrew Carlisle’s grotesque face that much worse toward the end. Everyone was waiting to see when the same visible marks of AIDS—symptoms of his impending death—would show up on Mitch’s body as well. For all of them—guards and prisoners alike—it was a foregone conclusion that the telltale marks of Kaposi’s sarcoma would inevitably appear.

Mitch alone knew that those conclusions were wrong. He and Andy Carlisle had been cell mates and friends for seven and a half celibate years. Although the rest of the prison population may have thought otherwise, their relationship had been intellectual rather than sexual. Originally there had been some of the trappings of teacher and student, but eventually that had evolved into one of fully equal co-conspirators—with the two of them aligned against the universe.

Their long-term interdependence and mutual interests had merged into a closeness that, outside prison, might well have been mistaken for a kind of love. And in a way, it was. It had been a private joke between them that the universal presumption of physical intimacy between them had given Mitch Johnson a certain kind of protection from attack that he had very much appreciated. Originally that physical security had meant far more to Mitch than Andrew Carlisle’s promised monetary legacy. Once the former professor was in the picture, no one ever again attempted to mess with Mitch Johnson, no one at all.

“Believe it or not, still no symptoms, if that’s what you’re looking for,” Mitch said, answering Quentin’s unasked question.

Embarrassed, Quentin’s eyes dodged away from Mitch’s unflinching gaze. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

“It’s okay,” Mitch said.

For a time the two men were silent while Quentin stared moodily into his beer. “I didn’t mean to insult you . . .”

“Forget it,” Mitch said. “It’s nothing. I’m used to it by now.”

Quentin shook his head. “You two were the only ones up there who ever helped me, you know,” he muttered. “You and Andy. And of all the people there, you two should have been the very last ones. I mean, with everything my family did to you . . .”

“It’s all water under the bridge, Quentin,” Mitch reassured him. “That was then, and this is now.”

“But you don’t know how bad it was for me,” Quentin continued, undeterred. “That first year after I got sent up was a nightmare. I was young and stupid and the son of a sheriff, for God’s sake, and I thought I was so tough. But I wasn’t, not nearly tough enough. Everybody in the joint was after my ass, or worse. Those guys had me six ways to Sunday. They turned me into nothing but a piece of meat.” He shuddered, remembering.

“If you and Andy hadn’t taken me under your wings, I don’t know what would have happened to me. I’d probably be dead by now.”

“Don’t give me any of the credit,” Mitch cautioned. “It was Andy’s idea, not mine.”

“But why did he do it? I’ve always wondered about that. All he had to do was put out the word that I belonged to him and that was it. After that nobody else ever touched me. I was scared shitless that he would . . . that someday he’d make a demand and I’d have to come across, but he never did.”

“No,” Mitch agreed. “Andy wasn’t like that. That’s the part nobody understood about him.”

“Not even with you?” Quentin asked.

“No, not even with me.”

“So why then?” Quentin continued. “Why did he protect me without demanding anything in return?”

“Because that’s the way he was,” Mitch answered. “Because Andrew Carlisle was a remarkable man.”

“It’s the nicest thing anybody ever did for me.” Quentin Walker’s blood alcohol level had taken him to the edge of maudlin. He ducked his head and swiped tears from his eyes.

Mitch looked away and pretended not to notice. “He helped me the same way he did you,” he said quietly. “He taught me how to survive, no matter what. In the end, he was the one who gave me a reason to go on living.”

“Hell of a guy,” Quentin murmured, raising his beer glass in a toast. “Here’s to Andy. May he rest in peace.”

Again they were both silent for a moment. “I suppose you’ve read your stepmother’s book about him?” Mitch said finally.

Quentin Walker scowled into his glass. “Are you kidding? Whatever that bitch has to say about him, I’m not interested. Just because she had a problem with Andrew Carlisle doesn’t mean I did, too.”

Mitch clicked his tongue. “Your stepmother may be famous, but it doesn’t sound as though she’s one of your favorite people.”

Quentin shook his head. “Are you kidding? She’s got my dad wound so tight around her little finger, it’s a wonder the man can even breathe on his own.”

“One of those blended families that isn’t quite working,” Mitch Johnson observed.

Quentin Walker had come back to Tucson from prison to a kind of internal exile. He was right there in town with them, but he wanted nothing whatever to do with Brandon Walker and his “second” family. He had seen his mother a few times, but the second time he hit Janie Walker Fellows Hitchcock up for a loan, Quentin’s goody-goody half-brother, Brian Fellows, had barred the door. Now Quentin was only allowed to speak to his mother in person and in the presence of either her nurse or of Brian himself.

Working construction, Quentin had developed a reputation as a loner. He caught rides to and from work with various coworkers, but having discovered how people reacted to the news that he was fresh out of the slammer, he now kept that information strictly to himself. He resisted all suggestions of possible friendship and relied on various neighborhood bartenders when he needed a shoulder to cry on.

In all those lonely months, Mitch Johnson’s was the first truly friendly face he had encountered. Here at last was someone who, however distant, qualified as a friend; someone who could be counted on to understand the depths of Quentin’s own miserable existence. Here was a kindred spirit, an ex-con himself, who didn’t automatically regard Quentin as some kind of repulsive monster. Grateful beyond measure, the younger man warmed to this prison acquaintance in the same boozy way he might have approached an old classmate at a high school reunion.

For months, for years, in fact, Quentin had kept his feelings locked behind a dam of self-pity. Now, as the floodgates opened, he spilled out his sad tale, wallowing in the injustice of it all.

“Tommy and me didn’t get blended,” Quentin replied bitterly. “Sliced and diced is more like it. Or else pureed right out of existence.”

“Tommy’s your brother then?” Mitch Johnson asked.

Quentin considered for a moment before he answered. “He was my little brother. The two of us always ended up taking a backseat to Davy, my stepmother’s kid, and even to Lani, once she came along. They got everything, and we got nothing.”

“Lani’s the Indian girl your dad and stepmother adopted?”

Quentin frowned. “How did you know that?”

“It’s in the book,” Mitch said quickly. “In your stepmother’s book. You’re all in it. You said Tommy was your little brother. I don’t remember the book saying anything about him being dead.”

“Tommy’s missing,” Quentin answered firmly. “He’s been missing for years. He disappeared between his freshman and sophomore years in high school. After all this time, I suppose he’s dead. Nobody’s heard from him since.”

Quentin ducked his head and took another quick sip of beer. “Sorry,” he added. “I didn’t mean to end up spilling out all this family crap.”

“It’s okay,” Mitch returned. “Families are like that, especially for people like us. All you have to do is screw up once and then you find out the whole idea of ‘unconditional love’ is a crock of shit. The people who are supposed to love you usually turn out to be the ones who break your heart. That’s why friends are so important. A lot of times, friends are it. They’re all you end up with.”

Once again Quentin gave Mitch a searching, sidelong look. “You mean you’re in the same boat?”

Mitch nodded. “Pretty much,” he said. “If it’s any consolation, there’s a whole lot of that going around.”

“As in misery loves company?”

“More or less.”

Quentin gave a bleak laugh and lifted his almost empty glass. “Here’s to friends, then,” he said.

“To friends,” Mitch agreed, touching his still almost full glass to Quentin’s nearly empty one. Quentin raised one finger and called for another beer.

“So what are you up to these days?” Quentin asked as they waited for the bartender to deliver the order.

“For the last couple of months,” Mitch Johnson said quietly, “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Looking for me?” Quentin asked, as though he couldn’t quite believe it.

Mitch nodded. “I probably wouldn’t have found you now if it hadn’t been for your mother.”

“Which one, my stepmother or my real mother?”

“Your biological mother,” Mitch answered.

“You mean you actually made it past the screen and talked to her?”

“What screen?”

“My brother, Brian. My half-brother. He doesn’t let me anywhere near Mom if he can help it. He claims I upset her. What he really means is she might end up slipping me some cash. Brian wants to keep all that for himself.”

“Your brother must not have been home,” Mitch replied, “because I talked to her directly. She’s the one who told me where you were living.”

“You still haven’t told me how come you were looking for me in the first place.”

“Andy told me once that you claimed to have found some pottery—some Indian pottery—out on the reservation. Is that true?”

Quentin had been chatting easily enough. Now, though, he pulled back. “What if it is?” he asked.

Mitch ignored the sudden shift in mood. “One of the things Andy did for me before he died,” Mitch continued, “was to give me the benefit of some of his contacts. I may have found a possible buyer for those pots of yours—if they’re legit, that is.”

The conversation ground to a momentary halt. “How much money?” Quentin asked finally, looking up.

Mitch shrugged. “That depends on quality and quantity of the merchandise, of course. But before my buyer will deal on any pots, he wants me to take a look at them. He wants me to see the pots as well as where you found them.”

Before Mitch could even finish the sentence, Quentin Walker was already shaking his head. “No way!” he said. “No way in hell! I can maybe bring them out for you to see them, but you can’t go there to look at them. It’s not possible.”

“Why not?”

“You just can’t, that’s all.”

“But I can make it worth your while,” Mitch said.

Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out his wallet. He removed several bills and laid them on the bar. “Believe me, Quentin, there’s a lot more where this came from. It’s our chance to make some big bucks.”

Quentin looked at the money blankly for some time, as though lost in thought. “What’s this?” he asked at last.

“What does it look like?” Mitch Johnson smiled. “It’s a small down payment, Quentin. But remember, seeing the material on site is part of the deal. This is the first half. You get the same amount as soon as you show me the spot. After that, it’s a sixty-forty split of whatever my buyer pays.”

Mitch knew very well the kind of hand-to-mouth existence Quentin Walker had lived since being released from prison. He had expected the man to leap at the opportunity to make some fast money. Mitch found Quentin’s apparent reticence somewhat surprising. He waited impatiently while the younger man stared down at the bills without touching them.

“Drywalling money’s that good then?” Mitch asked in an effort to move things forward.

Tentatively, almost as if afraid they might bite, Quentin Walker reached out and moved the bills closer to him. He leaned down and examined them in the dim light of the bar. An unfamiliar picture stared back at him from the topmost one. Quentin may not have recognized Grover Cleveland’s likeness right off the bat, but the numbers in the corner of the bill were easily identifiable—a one and three zeros.

“There’s more where that came from.”

Not quite believing what he was seeing, Quentin thumbed through the other bills. “Five thousand dollars?” he mouthed silently.

Mitch nodded. Quentin glanced furtively around the bar. Most of the customers were engrossed in the San Diego Padres baseball game blaring from the television set at the far end of the bar. As the bartender pulled himself away from the game and started toward them with the next round, Quentin snatched the bills off the counter and stuffed them into his shirt pocket.

Watching him, Mitch suppressed a sigh of relief. The surge of power he felt was almost sexual in nature. It reminded him of that first time he had invited Lori Kiser to go on a date—a picnic in Sabino Canyon. She had said yes, even though they both knew at the time that she was saying yes to far more than just a picnic. There had been an implicit understanding in her saying yes that day, in the way she had blushed when she answered. Her yes was to the picnic, but it was also to something else. To going to bed with him, probably before the day was over. They had gone on the picnic. Mitch had taken a blanket along, just in case, and he had been absolutely right.

Sitting in the bar with Quentin Walker, Mitch sensed that this was the same thing. By taking the money, Quentin knew he was agreeing to break the law. Again. What he couldn’t possibly know was exactly which laws he would end up breaking.

“When do you want to go?” Quentin was asking.

Now it was Mitch’s turn to pull himself out of a reverie in order to answer. “How about tomorrow evening?”

He forced himself to ask the question casually, even though he knew from his scheduling discussion with Megan in New York that this was the one time when he could be reasonably sure that Brandon and Diana Walker were going to a banquet together. That meant they would both be away from the house for a predictable period of time.

Already more than a little drunk, Quentin tried to think his way through all the various ramifications. There were risks involved in selling the pottery, but that much money—ten thousand tax-free dollars—almost made the risks worthwhile. At least, it made them seem far less significant.

“I suppose that would work,” Quentin said. “In fact, it’ll probably be better if we go there in the dark. Fewer people will see us if we go then. This place is a secret, you know. I want to keep it that way. Not only that, it won’t be nearly as hot.”

“All right,” Mitch agreed. “What time?”

“Five?”

“I already have another afternoon appointment. Five may be pushing it. Let’s make it six. Where should we meet?”

“Here,” Quentin said. “I don’t have wheels at the moment.”

“No problem,” Mitch assured him. “Meet me out front. You can ride with me.” He stood up and staggered slightly, waiting for his permanently damaged knee to steady under his weight.

Quentin noticed and seemed to relax. “At least I’m not the only one who’s had one too many.”

“I guess not,” Mitch said agreeably. “See you tomorrow.”

He limped outside and climbed into his waiting Subaru. He sat there for a few moments, eyeing the bar’s vivid neon lights and thinking. Originally the plan had simply been to do the girl in her parents’ house and to leave a drunken Quentin there to take the blame. In that basic plan, the pots had been intended as nothing more than bait, something off the wall enough to dupe Quentin into going along with the program.

In the months since Mitch had been out of prison, however, he had been doing some research. He had learned that these pots—if they actually existed—were probably worth a fortune in their own right. And if he could have Quentin Walker and his pots as well, why not go for broke?

The original plan had been a perfectly good one, and it gave every indication of working in a totally predictable fashion. That didn’t mean, however, that it couldn’t be improved upon. After all, Andy hadn’t left Mitch so much money that he couldn’t do with a little more.

See you tomorrow, sucker, Mitch thought, as he turned the key in the ignition. We’ll have so much fun that you won’t be able to believe it.

Once Mitch Johnson left the bar, Quentin Walker wasted no time in summoning the bartender once again. “Let me have one for the road,” he said. “Jack Daniels on ice. A double.”

“Why the sudden change?” the bartender asked. “Did you win the lottery or something?”

“Damn near,” Quentin replied, trying his best not to sound too enthusiastic. He patted his shirt pocket, checking to make sure the five bills were still there. They rustled crisply beneath his hand. He hadn’t dreamed them, then; hadn’t made them up. He hadn’t made up Mitch Johnson, either.

The money was good. In fact, the money was great, better than he would have dreamed possible. The only problem was taking Mitch Johnson up to the cave.

The prospect of doing that left Quentin almost sick with fear. There must be a way around it, he thought as the bartender delivered his next drink. There just has to be. All he needed was a good solid shot of whiskey to clear his head.

Not long after that, Quentin left the bar. He was afraid that if he stayed around too long, he might shoot his mouth off and tell somebody about the money. In this neighborhood, walking around with a wad of money on you was almost as bad as being handed a death warrant.

Glancing warily over his shoulder, Quentin staggered the block and a half to his alley-fronting apartment. It would have been a crying shame if somebody had hit him over the head and rolled him on his way home.

A hell of a crying shame!

Brandon waited until he and Diana were getting ready for bed before he brought up the subject of Fat Crack’s visit. They had been having so much fun together out chopping and stacking wood that he hadn’t wanted to spoil things by bringing it up. And then again, during dinner, he hadn’t wanted to mention anything at all about Andrew Carlisle in front of Lani.

He was just gearing up to say something when Diana beat him to the punch. “What did Fat Crack want?” she asked.

“It drives me crazy when you do that,” Brandon told her.

“When I do what?”

“When you read my mind. I was about to tell you, and then you asked me before I had a chance to spit out the words.”

“Well?”

Brandon Walker took a deep breath. “He came to talk to us—to me, really—about Andrew Carlisle.”

Diana finished slipping her nightgown on over her head. “What about Andrew Carlisle?”

“Fat Crack says he’s coming back.”

“Andrew Carlisle is dead.”

“That’s exactly what I tried to tell Fat Crack when he was here,” Brandon explained. “It didn’t make any difference. He says he’s read your book and it convinced him that, dead or not, Andrew Carlisle’s still after us. That he’s after you.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Diana said at once. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Maybe not, but I can tell you Fat Crack is serious as hell about this. He wanted me to call up the department and ask Bill Forsythe to send more patrols out this way.”

“To protect us from a dead man,” Diana said.

“Right.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That Bill Forsythe would laugh himself silly at the very idea.”

“Good, because that’s exactly what would happen.”

“But still,” Brandon cautioned, “maybe it would be better if you didn’t run around by yourself too much for the next little while. What are you doing tomorrow?”

“I have that interview, the one New York set up out at La Paloma, but first I go to the beauty shop for hair, nails, and makeup. There’s a photo shoot along with the interview. And then in the evening, there’s the dinner. You’re already going to that.”

“If you want me to, I’ll be happy to go along in the morning as well,” Brandon offered.

“To the beauty shop and the interview?” Diana asked incredulously. “Have you lost your marbles?”

“I love you, Diana,” Brandon said. “Sure it sounds crazy, but Fat Crack scared the hell out of me. If anything happened to you . . .”

“Nothing’s going to happen,” Diana said firmly. “And if you wouldn’t go with me to the damn Pulitzer banquet, you sure as hell are not going to come hold my hand in the beauty shop or bird-dog me through an interview. That’s final.”

“But—”

“No buts,” she said, shaking her head. “I could have used you at the ceremony, but the beauty shop is absolutely off limits. I’d say that’s true for both of you,” she added with a smile. “You wouldn’t be caught dead there, and neither would Andrew Carlisle.”

Back home in his RV on Coleman Road, Mitch Johnson tried to sleep but couldn’t. He was too excited. He felt like a little kid again, and thinking Christmas Eve would never end, that morning would never come, and it would never be time to unwrap the few presents that his impoverished parents had somehow managed to put under their scrawny tree.

His own son, Mikey—Michael Wraike, as he was now called—had never known the kind of grinding poverty that had shaped his biological father. Raised in the affluence provided by his hotshot developer stepfather, Mike was now a tall, handsome, rangy kid, a student at the University of Arizona, who had attended his stepfather’s funeral service with no idea that his natural father—his real father, as Mitch liked to think of himself—was standing in the fifth row only a few yards away.

Mitch had known that going to the funeral was risky, especially since Lori’s relatives would be there right along with her dead husband’s. But using the makeup techniques Andy had taught him, Mitch had taken great pains to disguise himself. Obviously it had worked. He had held his breath when Lori’s Great Aunt Aggie had plopped her ample butt down on the pew beside him.

Even though being so near her made him nervous as hell, he nonetheless had to smile to himself at the realization that after years of good living, Lori had gone to fat as well, just like her well-fed auntie.

Aunt Aggie had given Mitch the benefit of one of her cursory and universally disapproving glances. Then, with no hint of recognition, she had sighed and settled back in the pew, turning her attention to the beginning of the service.

Larry Wraike’s funeral was, of course, a closed-casket affair. That may have been a surprise to Aunt Aggie and a few of the other attendees. It was no surprise to Mitch Johnson. He had made a very conscious effort to make sure that would be the case.

“Greedy targets are easy targets,” Andy had told him once. In Larry Wraike’s case, that had proved absolutely true. Using a simple electronic device that altered his voice, Mitch had called his wife’s second husband at his plush office at Stone and Pennington in Tucson to give him some unwelcome news.

“The problem is, Mr. Wraike, that the land you’ve developed wasn’t yours in the first place.”

“Now wait just a goddamned minute here!” Larry had sputtered. “I don’t know who the hell you think you are, but—”

“I think you’d better hear me out,” Mitch interrupted. “As I understand it, there’s been a mistake of some kind, back in D.C. Kiser Ranch Estates is actually supposed to be part of the reservation.”

“But that’s impossible. It’s been in my wife’s family for years.”

“Illegally,” Mitch said.

“But the Kiser land isn’t anywhere near the reservation. This doesn’t make sense.”

“Since when does anything that happens in Washington have to make sense? Here’s the deal. A few people out on the reservation—a very few—are aware of this situation. And they’re prepared to forget it—for a price, that is.”

“For a price?” Wraike protested. “They can’t do that. That’s blackmail!”

“My principals would prefer you didn’t call it blackmail,” Mitch Johnson said smoothly. “They’d like me to meet with you to discuss a possible settlement. If I were you, in advance of that meeting, I’d make damned sure I didn’t mention a word of this to a soul.”

There was a long silence on the phone. “A meeting where?” Wraike asked at last, and Mitch Johnson knew he had him.

They had met in a darkened bar in Nogales, Arizona. It had been an easy thing to slip a dose of scopolamine into his drink. Larry was so upset at the thought of losing his real estate empire that he never suspected a thing, never saw through Mitch’s simple disguise that made a much older man out of a middle-aged one.

It was only later when the makeup was gone and as the drug started to wear off that he recognized who Mitch was. Even then Wraike didn’t tumble to the full extent of his danger.

That was something Mitch regretted now, as he sat looking up at the stars over Kitt Peak. He had rushed things. He hadn’t made sure Larry Wraike was fully aware of what was going on before it happened. Mitch had only himself to blame that he hadn’t taken time enough to savor the moment.

“So whaddya want, Mitch? Money?” Larry had asked. “I have plenty of that. We can make a deal.”

Mitch shook his head. “No deals,” he said.

Larry Wraike’s mumbled, half-drugged offer of a deal constituted his last words. Moments later, Mitch shoved a fist-sized gag into the man’s mouth. Looking down at his trussed and helpless victim, Mitch peeled off his own clothes and set them out of harm’s way. That was another piece of Andy’s sage advice. No sense in getting blood anywhere it wouldn’t be easy to wash off.

When Mitch turned back to the bed, he was holding the knife. As soon as he saw it, Larry’s eyes bulged with fear. He thrashed on the bed, trying to get loose, but Mitch’s expert knots held firm. It would have been fun to tease him with the knife for a while, to prick the son of a bitch here and there, just to get his attention.

That was where the scheduling problem came in. Without realizing how long it would take for the drug to wear off, Mitch had hired a young prostitute to show up later in the afternoon. Now her scheduled arrival was less than an hour away. By the time she showed up and let herself in with the room key Mitch had thoughtfully provided, Mitch had to be finished with Wraike—finished, cleaned up, and long gone.

“It can be a beautiful thing if you do it right,” Andy had said. “It’s almost like a dance. All you have to do is touch them with the tip of the knife, and you can watch their flesh try to crawl away from it. A knife has far more nuances than a gun.

“Given your history, I can understand your peculiar fascination with what an exploding shell can do to the human anatomy. But let me ask you this: When you shoved the barrel of your rifle up that little gook girl’s twat, you couldn’t feel her heart beating, could you?”

Still shocked that Andy had used the effects of the drug dose to trick him into revealing his darkest secret, Mitch Johnson had shaken his head.

“I didn’t think so. With the tip of a knife, though, if you hold it right here in the hollow of someone’s neck, you can feel their pulse,” Carlisle said. “It comes right up through the handle with a vibration that’s so faint you can barely feel it. And the more scared they are, the better you can feel it. There’s nothing quite like it,” he had added, twisting his distorted lips into what could only have been a smile of remembrance.

“There’s nothing like it at all. And then, after you let them know that you own them, that there’s nothing they can do, that’s when it gets personal. You stand there and you’re God, and all you have to decide is where to cut them, where to draw the first blood. Just wait,” he added. “You won’t believe how great it feels.”

“Like getting your rocks off?” Mitch asked.

“No,” Andy Carlisle had said. “Better than that. Much better.”

And so, with his rival lying naked on the bed, Mitch tried touching the tip of the knife against the hollow at the base of Larry Wraike’s throat. The thrashing stopped. Larry lay there still as death beneath the weight of the knife. The only thing that moved were his eyes. They swung back and forth between Mitch’s face and the slightly trembling blade.

Mitch held the knife delicately. The vibration that came through the bone handle reminded him of a time long ago when, as a twelve-year-old, he had plucked a tiny baby bird out of a nest. He had held it in the palm of his hand for several minutes, feeling the frantic beating of its heart and wings against his skin. He didn’t remember how long he held it. What he did remember was that eventually the damned thing pecked him, bit him so hard that it drew blood. When that happened, he simply closed his fist around it, crushing out that little bit of life as if it had never existed.

That had been a very clear and simplified lesson in the ethics of crime and punishment. The bird had hurt him, so he killed it. This was the same thing.

Moving the tip of the knife away from Wraike’s throat, Mitch was gratified to see the man’s heartfelt sigh of relief. As the stark tension drained out of Larry’s body, Mitch felt a sudden stiffening in his own. He almost laughed aloud at the sensation. Some idiot psychology major had once done a series of interviews at the prison, asking some of the more violent offenders if there was any correlation for them between sex and violence.

If Mitch ever ran into that broad again, he’d have to be sure to tell her that for him the answer was a definite yes.

“You do know why I’m doing this, don’t you?” he asked.

Larry shook his head frantically.

“Would you like me to tell you?”

This time Larry’s answering nod was equally frantic. Mitch wasn’t so much interested in having this one-sided conversation as he was in stretching the moment. He could not, in his whole life, ever remember having anyone listen to him with quite such rapt attention.

“You cheated me,” Mitch said with no particular animosity. By the time they reached that point, Mitch Johnson had moved far beyond anger. He was simply delivering information, allowing Larry to understand the gravity of his mistake. Maybe, in another lifetime, he wouldn’t make the same fatal error a second time.

“The deal was all set,” Mitch continued reasonably. “All either one of us had to do was wait for old man Kiser to kick off. He was already sick, so it wouldn’t have taken long. Once he did, we both would have made out like bandits. Instead, you waited until I was locked up and then you moved in and took your share and mine as well. To top it all off, you ended up fucking my wife, too. That wasn’t a nice thing to do, Larry. It just wasn’t right.”

Around the gag and behind it, Larry’s lips and tongue tried vainly to form words. He might have been agreeing with Mitch’s assessment. He might even have been trying to say he was sorry, but as far as Mitch was concerned, it was far too late for apologies. After eighteen years, sorry didn’t exactly cut it.

In the end it was the sexual injustice of Larry Wraike’s actions that ruled the day. That, even more than the money, dictated the final result. That was why the first cut—the one that bled the most—was directly between Larry Wraike’s legs. Mitch stood back and watched for a while, watched the man writhe and squirm and bleed and try to scream. And then, when Mitch lost interest in that, just as he had with the bird, and because he was worried about the time element, he went ahead and finished him off.

Larry Wraike was dead long before Mitch took the knife and began carving up his face. Andy would have called that gratuitous. It might even have been more than Andy himself would have done. If so, it was a way for Mitch to prove to himself that he had graduated, that he had moved beyond being Andrew Carlisle’s student. He was, in fact, a talented killer in his own right, out to get a little of his own back from those who had wronged him in the past.

It took only a matter of seconds to mangle Larry Wraike’s face. Afterward, while Mitch was showering, he laughed to think of Lori being called into a coroner’s office to identify the bloody remains. Other than Lori and a few cops, not many people would see what he had done, but the thought of Lori seeing her husband that way made Mitch happy.

She was, after all, the only one who mattered.

As expected, Mitch himself was miles away from the motel when the teenaged prostitute from the other side of the border let herself into the room and discovered the body. Despite her frenzied screams and her subsequent protestations of innocence, she and her pimp would be going on trial soon, down in Santa Cruz County, for the savage murder of Larry Wraike.

Mitch Johnson had made it back to his RV on Coleman Road without any questions asked. And if any homicide cops from Nogales ever went looking for the old man who had met with the victim in a bar a few hours before his death, they never had any luck finding him.

Nope, as far as Larry Wraike was concerned, Mitch Johnson got away clean.

More relaxed now, Mitch stood up, stretched, and went inside, but he still didn’t feel like sleeping. Instead, he took out a sketchbook and went to work.

“What was the author’s name again?” Noreen Kennedy, the prison librarian, had asked.

“Nicolaïdes,” Mitch Johnson answered. “He’s Greek.”

“And the name of the book?”

“The Natural Way to Draw.”

Noreen was a firm believer in the importance of rehabilitation. “You’re studying art, then?” she asked.

Mitch smiled diffidently. “I’ve always been interested in art,” he said. “But there was never enough time to do anything about it. Now I’ve got nothing but time. This book is supposed to be the best there is.”

The book arrived eventually, courtesy of an inter-library loan. And it was every bit as good as Mitch had been told it would be. With a pencil and a cheap sketchbook, he went to work doing the exercises. The book contained a year-long course of study. Unfortunately, the checkout period was limited to two weeks.

“Could you order it for me again, Mrs. Kennedy?” he asked, the day he returned it to the library. “In two weeks’ time, I barely got started. What I really need is my own copy.”