Hour of the Hunter

Not only for Diana Ladd, but also for Myrna Louise. As of now, she was on his list twice over.

It pissed him off that she'd got away clean like that, but he'd get even for that eventually. His main problem now was one of time. How long before she would open the trunk and discover what was in it? If she did that, maybe she'd turn him in after all. He'd have to move forward, probably a whole lot faster than planned.

Standing there waffling back and forth, he was startled by a knock on the door. His heart went to his throat. Damn!

The gun was still in the car along with Myrna Louise.

"Yes?" he called.

"Police," a voice answered.

His hands trembled as he went to open the door. As soon as he did so, he shoved his hands in his pockets. The two uniformed cops he had seen earlier stood outside, both holding clipboards.

Carlisle concentrated on keeping his voice neutral and calm. "What seems to be the trouble, Officer?"

"We're investigating the broken gate," one of them said. "A car smashed through it. Next it took off and bashed the El Camino across the street. You came not long after that. Did you happen to see anything out of the ordinary?"

Carlisle shook his head. "Nope," he said. "I didn't see a thing."

The cops apologized for disturbing him and left. It took a while for his breathing to settle back down, to get his mind back to the problem at hand. First and foremost, he thought, he had to have another car.

Focused on solving that one problem, he prepared to leave his storeroom, but first he rummaged around until he found the bulky box that contained not only his first draft of Savage, but Garrison Ladd's manuscript as well.

It was a good thing that hotshot detective had never found either one.

Carrying the box, he locked the door and walked toward the street. The cops waved to him as he passed, but that was all. They didn't really notice him, and he was careful to do nothing that would attract their attention.

In his search for Andrew Carlisle's mother, Detective Farrell had struck out completely. The apartment complex in Peoria where Myrna Louise Taylor had been living at the time of her son's trial was such a transient place that it turned out to be a total dead end. She had evidently moved on from there more than three years earlier.

The manager had been on duty for only six months. The complex's group memory didn't stretch back any further than that.

Stymied and discouraged, Farrell trudged back to his car where the steering wheel, door handles, and seats were all too hot to touch. He turned on the car's air-conditioning full blast, but it made very little headway. Gingerly fingering the controls on his radio, he called in to check for messages.

There were several, but the only one he paid any attention to was from Ron Mallory. The assistant superintendent at the Arizona State Prison was anxious to keep his cushy job. He was doing everything possible to cooperate with Farrell's investigation.

Instead of heading straight out of town, Farrell drove to Metro Center, the nearest air-conditioned mall, and went inside to use a pay phone.

"What's up?" he asked when he finally had Ron Mallory on the line.

"I've got a name for you," Mallory said. "I had to ask more than once, but when I finally got his attention, Carlisle's ex-cellmate came up with his mother's new last name, Spaulding. It was something else before that. She remarried a year or two ago."

"Anything else besides last name? Location maybe?

Husband's first name?"

"Sorry. The last name was all I could dredge out of this guy. I was lucky to get that much."

"You're right," Farrell agreed. "it is progress. I can't expect the whole case to be handed to me on a silver platter."

Myma Louise made it home in one piece. That in itself was no small miracle. She got the hang of steering fairly well, although she tended to run over curbs going around corners. Her worst problem was keeping steady-enough pressure on the gas pedal. She constantly sped up and slowed down. For the last sixty miles, she held her breath for fear of running out of gas. She didn't dare go to a gas station and turn off the motor. What if she couldn't get it started again? All she could think of was how much she wanted to be home, safe in her own little house.

If God got her home all in one piece, she promised, she'd never ask him to do anything for her again.

Chapter Sixteen

AS DIANA AND Davy returned home from San Xavier, Fat Crack's tow truck was parking in the front drive. Diana was momentarily concerned about the presence of a strange vehicle, but Davy was ecstatic when he caught sight of Rita. He was ready to leap from the car well before it stopped.

"Be very gentle with her, Davy," Diana cautioned. "She had surgery, you know. She has stitches, too."

"On her head?"

"No, on her tummy."

"I'll be careful," Davy promised, scurrying toward the truck. Reaching the door just as Fat Crack handed Rita down, Davy stopped short, daunted at first by the huge Indian's presence. Then, remembering who the man was, he stepped forward. "Hi," he said shyly to Fat Crack.

Davy's first instinct was to throw himself at Rita, but remembering his mother's warning, he hung back until Rita raised her good arm and beckoned him to her. He hugged her gingerly around the waist while she patted the top of his head. The gesture activated his "On" switch.

With a grin, he jumped away from her and pointed to the shaved spot on his head.

"See my stitches?" he boasted. "How many do you have?

Can I see them?"

Rita smiled and shook her head. "No, you can't see them, and neither can I. I'm too fat." She laughed, and so did Fat Crack.

During this exchange, Fat Crack pulled several loaded hospital-issue plastic bags from the truck. "I'll take these inside," he said.

Fat Crack went on ahead. Rita limped after him with Davy holding tightly to her good hand. Diana waited at the front door, holding it open. "Welcome home," she said.

"Thank you."

There was a strange formality between the two women, as though neither knew quite how to behave in the presence of Rita's blood kin. "Do you want him to take your things out back?" Diana asked.

Rita nodded. "I'll go, too. I want to rest."

Davy started to follow her, but Diana called him back.

"You and the dog go outside and play," she said. "Rita's tired."

His face fell in disappointment, but Rita came to Davy's rescue. "It's okay. They can both come along. I missed them."

Despite DuShane's ass-chewing, Brandon still hung around the office.

He wanted to be there in case his mother called, and he didn't want to miss any messages from Geet Farrell. He took the time to read the Arizona Sun cover to cover, including both the brief account of Toby Walker's ill-fated joy-riding incident, and the much longer front-page article about the brutal stabbing of Johnny Rivkin, a well-known Hollywood costume designer, knifed to death in his downtown Tucson hotel room.

Brandon read about the bloody Santa Rita murder with a professional's interest in what was going on, to see what his competition at Tucson PD was doing on the case. He routinely read about homicides committed in the city in case something in the killer's MO coincided with one of his unsolved county cases. In this instance, nothing rang a bell.

Several times he was tempted to call Diana Ladd to check on how she was doing, but each time he reconsidered. He'd been summarily thrown out of the woman's house both times he'd been there. She wasn't exactly keeping the welcome mat out for him. Brandon Walker knew he was a dog for punishment, but Diana Ladd dished out more abuse than even he was willing to take.

Every time he thought about that exasperating woman.

he shook his head. He wanted so much to make her see reason, to help her understand the error of her ways. It was crazy for her to hole up in that isolated fortress of hers and wait for disaster to strike.

Supposing her idea did work. Supposing Andrew Carlisle showed up, and she somehow managed to blow him away. What would happen then? Maybe Carlisle would be dead; but so might she.

Whatever the outcome, Walker was convinced an armed confrontation would irreparably harm Davy.

Diana didn't realize that her son was a fragile child, Brandon decided.

Women always thought their male offspring tougher than they were in actual fact. Davy needed something from his mother, something he wasn't getting.

Brandon couldn't tell quite what it was, but he sat there thinking about it, wishing he could help.

Gradually, as time passed, a plan began to form in his mind. He would help, after all, whether or not Diana Ladd wanted him to, whether or not she even knew it. As soon as Brandon got off work that afternoon, he would take the county car home, borrow his mother's, stop by the hospital long enough to check on his parents, and then head out for Gates Pass. He'd lie in wait outside Diana's house all night long if necessary. If Andrew Carlisle actually showed up out there, he'd run up against something he didn't expect an armed cop rather than some wild-eyed latter-day Annie Oakley packing a loaded .45.

In fact, the more Brandon Walker thought about the idea, the better he liked it. As a cop, he had behaved responsibly in doing what he could to talk Diana Ladd out of her foolhardy scheme. But since she was too hardheaded to give up, Walker would use her as a magnet to draw Andrew Carlisle to him. Diana might be the tender morsel necessary to lure Carlisle into the snare, but Brandon Walker would be the steel-jawed trap.

Diana went into the kitchen to fix herself a glass of iced tea. The one dusty box she had carried in from the root cellar still sat on the kitchen table. Diana looked at the box and sighed. "There's no time like the present," she said aloud, quoting one of Iona's old maxims.

Squaring her shoulders, she found a butcher knife and attacked the aging layers of duct tape that sealed the box shut. The labeling may have been done by Francine, her stepmother, but the profligate use of duct tape was Max's specialty. Diana remembered the stack of boxes he had brought down to the car on the morning she left for school in Eugene.

Some of the other girls in her class had got real cedar chests for high school graduation, "hope chests" they called them. When Max came with the boxes, Diana had no idea what they were.

"Those aren't mine," she said. "I can't take all that stuff."

"Your mother says you're taking it," Max said sourly.

She left, taking the boxes with her. It wasn't until she was unpacking in her tiny apartment over the garage that she discovered Iona had made a hope chest for her, too, one in cardboard not cedar, but with hand embroidered tea towels and napkins, crocheted doilies and tablecloths, a brand-new service-for-four set of Safeway-coupon Melmac dishes, and a heavy hand-pieced quilt. There were a few pots and pans, some cheap silverware, and a brand-new percolator.

Opening each box was an adventure, a reprise of a dozen Christmas mornings. Cloth goods were neatly ironed and folded, the edges crisp and straight. Glassware--there was even some of that-was individually wrapped in store bought tissue paper.

One at a time, as she took out each item and admired each bit of handiwork, Diana wondered how and when her mother had managed to amass such a treasure without arousing Diana's suspicions. After opening the last box, she rode her bike over to the Albertsons' and called home from the grocery-store pay phone.

"What's wrong?" Max demanded when he heard her voice. "Long distance calls cost money. Did you get in a car wreck, or what?"

"Nothing's wrong," Diana told him. "Just let me talk to Mom."

But when Iona came on the phone, Diana was so overcome with emotion that she could barely speak. "When did you have time to make all that stuff, Mom? It's wonderful, but how did you do it?"

For years, Diana kept her mother's answer buried in the furthest reaches of her memory. Now, it came back to her.

"Love always makes time," Iona had said.

Remembering those words now left Diana awash m a sea of guilt. Love always makes time. Measured against her mother's performance, Diana's relationship with Davy seemed a gigantic failure. She was too busy with her own concerns and ambitions to pay attention to Davy's day-to-day needs. Stung by guilt, she was still so busy justifying her continued survival in the face of both her mother's death and her husband's suicide that she forgot to pay attention to the quality of that survival. Luckily for her and for Davy, Rita was there to take up the slack.

I'll do better, Diana promised herself. If I live long enough, I swear I'll do better.

She peeled the final layer of tape from the box, releasing the lid. In moments, Diana went from remembering her cardboard "hope chests" to what could only be called hopeless chests, from boxes filled with promise to ones packed with crushed dreams and dashed hopes. That's all Iona Dade Cooper's boxes contained.

All the while the unopened boxes sat stored in the root cellar, Diana had imagined them packed with her mother's few prized possessions, the treasures arranged with the same loving care Iona had used to pack the boxes she sent to Eugene. Except these boxes held no treasures. What was stowed there hardly qualified as personal effects.

Francine Cooper had gone through her new husband's house, Iona's house, packing up only what she didn't want-the inconvenient onion chopper with its broken blade, the battered metal pie tins Iona used only as a last resort when the season's current crop of fruit-pumpkin in the fall, mincemeat in the winter, rhubarb in the spring, and fresh peach in the summer-had swamped her supply of goods Pyrex pie plates. There were ragged hot pads and oven mitts, not the good ones Iona had used for company meals and church dinners, but the old ones she had used only for canning, and that, by rights, should have been thrown out with the trash long before they were stuffed into boxes.

Resolutely now, Diana ripped open the tape on each succeeding box. One rattled ominously as soon as she picked it up. At the bottom of that one, she found the smashed remains of the only really nice thing Iona Dade Cooper had ever owned-a Limoges salt-and-pepper-shaker set she had inherited from her own Grandma Dade-clattered brokenly around in the bottom of the box without even a paper towel as protection against breakage.

Grim-faced, Diana set a few things aside on the table to keep. The rest was swept into a waiting trash can. Only in the bottom box, the heaviest one, did Diana strike gold.

There were books in there-the whole frayed green set called My Book House from which Iona had read her daughter countless fairy tales and poems and fables.

Seeing the books, Diana felt a flash of recognition. From these volumes, she had gained her love of reading, her fascination with the written word. She pulled out each book individually, thumbing through the pages, glancing at the familiar illustrations, remembering her favorite stories, wishing Davy knew them the way she did.

And then, in the very bottom of the box, stuffed in hastily perhaps so Max wouldn't see, was the real treasure, the one item of her mother's that Diana had really wanted and had counted lost-her mother's well-worn Bible. Reverently, she picked it up. One corner- of the cover had been permanently bent back. She opened the book gently, trying to smooth out the wrinkle.

As she did so, a paper fell out. Picking it up, she found it was actually three papers, welded by age into a tightly folded, brittle mass. Carefully, she undid them.

The outside was a letter. Folded into that were two other pieces of paper-a yellowed newspaper article and a small, flower-covered funeral program dated August 16, 1943.

She glanced at that first, wondering whose it was Harold Autry Deeson.

Harold Deeson? Who was he? She had never heard of anybody by that name, although she read right there on the program that Harold's parents were George R. and Ophelia Deeson.

George had a son? Diana wondered. How come she never knew about him?

How come nobody ever mentioned, him by name?

She turned to the newspaper article. The paper was brittle and flaked apart in her hand, but it was from the La Grande Herald on August 11, 1943, and it told how Harold Autry Deeson, only son of George R. and Ophelia Deeson, had died in a one-car crash on the highway halfway between Wallowa and Enterprise. Heading back to base at Fort Lewis, near Seattle, after being home for a weekend, Harold's car had slammed into the highway embankment and then skidded across the road, ending up in the river.

There was no clue as to what caused the accident, although the sheriff theorized that he may have braked to avoid hitting an animal that had wandered onto the road or else he had fallen asleep. Either way, Harold Autry Deeson was dead on impact.

Reading through the account of the accident, the whole picture of Diana's family history suddenly shifted into focus. She started crying long before she ever picked up the letter. It was little more than a note, but Diana knew instinctively what was written there-not exactly, not the details, but the general outline.

"Dearest Iona," Harold had written in a hastily scrawled, immature hand.

"Thank you for tonight. I don't care what my mother says. You may be Catholic, and my mother's Mormon, but that doesn't matter, not to me, and it's not a good enough reason for us not to be together.

"I can't make it home from Seattle again for at least a month, but when I do, we'll run away together to La Grande or Pendleton, or maybe even all the way to Spokane. If we come back married, no one will be able to do anything about it, not even my mother. Please be ready. Love, Harry."

Diana let the paper drift from her hands onto the table.

She didn't need to count on her fingers. Max and Iona Cooper were married in September of '43. She was born in May of '44. No wonder George Deeson had brought her Waldo. George Deeson had been her real grandfather, but why hadn't someone told her the truth?

Under normal circumstances, Davy would have fought tooth and nail at any suggestion of a nap, but that day, when Rita lay down on her old-fashioned box spring mattress with its frail metal headboard, Davy climbed up onto the bed, while Bone settled down comfortably on a nearby rug.

Because of the cast, Rita lay on her back with her arm elevated on pillows. Davy nestled in close to her other side and fell sound asleep.

Davy slept, but Rita didn't. She looked around the room, grateful to be home, glad to have survived whatever the Mil-gahn doctors had dished out. To be fair, Dr. Rosemead was a whole lot different from the first white doctor she'd met, an odd-looking little man with strange, rectangular glasses and huge red-veined nose who had been called in for a consultation when she first got sick in California.

The Baileys hadn't needed another girl-of-all-work, so Gordon found her a job at a farm a few miles up the road.

There, barely a month later, she began to feel tired. A cough came on, accompanied by night sweats. She tried to hide the fact that she was sick, because she didn't want to risk losing her job and being sent home, but finally, when the lady found her coughing up blood, she sent Rita to bed and summoned the one itinerant doctor who treated the valley's Indian and Mexican laborers.

Dr. Aldus was his name, and Rita never forgot it, no matter how hard she tried. He came to see Dancing Quail in the filthy workers' shack where she lay in bed, too sick to move. He examined her and then spoke to the foreman who waited in the background to take word to the farm owner's wife.

"We'll have to take the baby," the doctor said. "The girl may live, but not the baby. Go bring my things from the car. Ask the cook to set some water boiling."

The doctor came back to the bed and loomed over Dancing Quail. "It's going to be fine," he said. "Everything Is going to be okay."

Those were the exact same words Dr. Rosemead had used all these years later, but with Dr. Aldus, everything was definitely not okay. His breath reeked of alcohol. He swayed from side to side as he stood next to her bed.

"No," Dancing Quail pleaded, struggling to get up.

"Leave my baby alone," but he pushed her back down and held her pinned until the foreman returned, bringing with him the doctor's bag and a set of thick, heavy straps.

Somehow the two of them strapped her to the bed frame, imprisoning her, holding her flat. The doctor pressed an evil-smelling cloth to her face. Soon Rita could fight no longer.

She woke up much later, once more drenched in sweat.

The straps were gone. She felt her flattened belly and knew it was empty. She was empty. The straps were gone, and so was her baby.

She cried out. Suddenly, Gordon was there, leaning over her in the doctor's stead, his broad face gentle and caring.

"Why didn't you call me?" he asked, speaking in Papago.

"Why didn't you send someone to tell me you were sick so I could come take care of you?"

Rita couldn't answer. All she could do was cough and cry.

Around four, Rita shook Davy. "Wake up," she said.

"Fat Crack will come soon and I must be ready."

Davy sat up, rubbing his eyes. "Ready for what? Where are you going?"

"To Sells. For a ceremony."

"What kind of ceremony? Do you have to leave again?

You just got here."

"It's important," she said. "The ceremony's for you, Olhoni."

His eyes widened. "For me? Really?"

She smiled. "Really. The singers will start tonight. On the fourth night, you will be baptized. A medicine man will do it."

"A real medicine man? What will he do?"

"Don't ask so many questions, Little One. You will see when time comes.

He will baptize you in the way of the Tohono O'othham. Have you spoken to the priest yet?"

"Priest?" Davy returned. "Oh, the one out at San Xavier?"

Rita nodded. "Mom saw him, this morning. She said he was coming to see me today, this afternoon, I guess. I don't know why."

Rita sighed in relief Father John had asked, and Diana had consented.

"I do," she said. "Listen, Olhoni, you must listen very carefully.

You are very old not to be baptized, not in your mother's way and not in the Indian way, either, Most people are baptized when they are babies.

This is not good, so we are going to fix it. I asked Father John to speak to your mother, because where the Anglo religion is concerned, it is better for Mil-gahn to speak to Mil-gahn.

Do you understand?"

Davy nodded seriously, but Rita doubted she was making sense. "When Father John comes to see you, do whatever he asks."

"But what will he ask?"

"He will speak to you of the Mil-gahn religion, of your mother's religion."

"But I thought you said a medicine man..

"Olhoni," Rita said sternly. "You are a child of two worlds, a child with two mothers, are you not?" Davy nodded. "Then you can be a boy with two religions, two instead of none, isn't it?"

Davy thought about it a moment before he nodded again.

"So tonight," Rita continued, "whenever Fat Crack comes to get me, I will go out to Sells and be there for the start of the ceremony. I will return during the day, but each night I must go again. On the fourth night, the last night, you will come, too. Either your mother will bring you, or I will come back for you myself" "Will there be a feast?" he asked.

"Yes, now get up. I need your help."

Davy scrambled off the bed. "What do you want, Nana Daha'?" "Over there, in the bottom drawer of my dresser, there is a small basket.

Bring it."

Davy did as he was told, carrying the small, rectangular basket back to the bed. "What's this?" he asked.

"My medicine basket."

As he handed it to her, something rattled inside. "What's in it, Nana Dahd? Can I see?"

With some difficulty, Rita had managed to pull herself up on the side of the bed. Now, she patted the mattress, motioning for Davy to sit beside her. "You'll have to."

She smiled. "I can't."

Davy worked at prying off the tight-fitting lid. It was a testimony to Understanding Woman's craftsmanship that even after so many years, even with the repairs Rita had made from time to time, the lid of the basket still fit snugly enough that it required effort to remove it. When it finally came loose, Davy handed the opened basket back to Rita.

One at a time, she took items out and held them up to the light. After looking at each one, she handed it to Davy.

First was the awl, the owij, Rita called it. Davy knew what that was for because he had often watched her use the sharp tool to poke holes in the coiled cactus to make her baskets.

Next came a piece of pottery.

"What's that?" Davy asked.

"See the turtle here?" Rita asked, pointing to the design etched into the broken shard. Davy nodded. "This is from one of my great-grandmother's pots, Olhoni. When a woman dies, the people must break her pots in order to free her spirit. My grandmother kept this piece of her mother's best pot and gave it to me."

Next she held up the seashell. "Grandfather brought this back from his first salt-gathering expedition, and this spine of feather is one my father once gave to his mother when he was younger than you are now.

The clay doll was used for healing."

Next, Davy saw a Thank of black hair. "What's that?" he asked.

"It's something we used to use against the Ohb, the Apaches," Rita explained. "Something to keep our enemies away."

At the very bottom of the basket were two last iternsa piece of purple rock and something small made of metal and ribbon.

"What are those?"

"A spirit rock," Rita answered, holding up the fragment of geode. "A rock that's ordinary on the outside, but beautifully colored on the inside."

"And that?" he asked.

"That is my son's," she said softly, fingering the frayed bit of ribbon.

"Gordon's. His Purple Heart. The army sent it to me after the war."

"What war?"

"The Korean," she said.

"Did your son die, too?" Davy asked.

"I guess," she answered. "He joined the Army during World War II and stayed in. He never came home after Korea. The Army said he was missing, but he's been missing for twenty-six years now. I don't think he's coming home. His wife, Gina's mother, ran off some place. With no husband, she didn't want a baby. I took care of Gina the same way I take care of you."

Rita looked down at the little cache of treasure lying exposed on the bedspread. "Put them all back for me now, Davy. I want to take them with me."

One at a time, with careful concentration, Davy put Rita's things back in the basket then he fitted the lid on tight.

"I've never seen this basket before, have I?" he asked, handing it back to her.

She took it and slid it inside the top of her dress, where it rested out of sight beneath her ample breast and above her belt. "No, Olhoni.

You have to be old enough before you can look at a medicine basket and show it proper respect."

"Am I old enough now?"

"You have not yet killed your first coyote," she said, "but you are old enough to see a medicine basket."

By four o'clock that afternoon, Carlisle had set up camp on the rocky Mountainside overlooking Diana Ladd's home in Gates Pass. Using Myrna Louise's cash, he had bought an AMC Matador from a used-car dealer downtown who claimed to be "ugly but honest." So far that seemed to be true of the car as well. The layers of vinyl on the roof were peeling off and the paint was scarred, but the engine itself seemed reliable enough.

He had constructed a rough shelter of mesquite branches.

The greenery not only provided some slight protection from the searing heat, it also offered cover from which he could spy on the house below without being detected. Sitting there with his high-powered binoculars trained on the house, he watched the comings and goings, counted the people he saw, and planned his offensive. During the long hours, he had to fight continually to stave off panic. In all his adventures, this was the very first time things had gone so totally wrong. He bitterly resented the fact that his own mother was the main fly in the ointment.

In taking the Valiant, Myrna Louise had complicated his life immeasurably. For one thing, she had forced him to spend some of his limited cash on a new vehicle. More seriously than that, Margie Danielson's gun was still in the trunk of the car Myrna Louise had stolen right out from under his nose. So was Johnny Rivkin's suitcase, for that matter-the bag containing the clothing and wigs Andrew Carlisle had planned to use for his getaway.

But far more serious than all the others put together was the loss of time. Everything had to be compressed and hurried, without opportunity for the kind of careful planning Andrew Carlisle considered to be the major prerequisite for getting away with this particular murder.

Instead of having days to work out the logistics of his attack against Diana Ladd, it would have to be done in a matter of hours.

He would have to retrieve the damning evidence from his mother either before or after the main event.

Carlisle knew that his mother hated staying in hotels, and she had severely limited resources besides. Like an old war-horse, she would, in all likelihood, head directly back to the barn, unless of course the cops picked her up for reckless driving somewhere along the way. The very thought of that possibility caused his heart to beat faster.

Damn that woman anyway! He'd teach her to interfere.

A door opened in the yard below. He trained his binoculars on a long-legged Diana Ladd. Tanned and wearing shorts and a tank top, she emerged from the back of the house carrying a tall plastic trash can that she emptied into a rusty burning barrel at the far end of the yard.

Then, using a series of matches, she set fire to the contents of the barrel and stood watching them burn.

While she tended the fire, a huge black dog gamboled up to her and dropped a tennis ball at her feet. Obligingly, the woman picked it up and threw it across the yard. The dog raced off at breakneck speed to retrieve it. They played like that for several minutes. When the woman quit a short time later, so did the dog, still carrying leaving Andrew Carlisle sitting alone on the mountain, pondering this newest wrinkle in his well-laid plans. That dog would have to go, he thought.

He worried about the gun she was wearing. Someone might have warned her.

Why else would Diana Ladd be walking around with a leather holster strapped to her hip?

Of the two, the gun and the dog, the dog was really far more serious.

Surprise could take away any advantage having a weapon gave her, but the dog could bark and rob him of the initiative. Andrew Carlisle thought about the problem for some time, considering the issue from every angle like a scientist dealing with some small but pesky detail that stands in the way of completing a major project. When the idea finally came to him, he acted on it at once.

Sticking to the thin cover as much as possible, he made his way down the Mountainside and back to the Matador, which he had left parked at a shooting-range Parking lot half a mile away. Once in the car, he headed for the nearest grocery store. Cheap hamburger was easy to find in any part of town, but liquid slug bait wasn't. For that, he would have to go a little farther afield to a top-notch nursery halfway across Tucson proper.

He hurried through traffic, careful not to speed, not calling any undue attention to the all-too-distinctive red-and-black car. A nice white Ford would have been better, but the Matador's price was right.

Besides, he didn't expect to keep it for long.

Driving was easier than sitting on the mountain watching the house. It calmed his nerves. The more he thought about it, the more determined he was that he would be careful.

Just because he'd been forced to telescope his plans didn't mean he had to blunder around or make any more costly mistakes. Letting Myrna Louise slip away was bad enough, but if things worked out the way he hoped, he'd soon have her back in hand.

They say it happened long ago that a woman lived near the base of Baboquivari Mountain with her husband and her baby. During the day, the husband would go to work in the fields that were close to the village.

After working hard in the fields, he often did not want to make the long trip home, so he would stay in the village and visit with friends.

This made the woman sad, but she stayed with her baby and waited for her husband, who did not come home.

One night, when the woman was all alone, she heard Ban, Coyote, call, but this was not the usual call of Coyote, so she went out to look for him. It was very dark. At first she could not see, but finally she saw his eyes, glowing like coals in the firelight. He was a large old Coyote, but even when she came close to him, he did not move. At last she came close enough to see that he was lying beside a pool of water.

"Brother," she said, for this was when the Tohono O'othham, the Desert People, still knew l'itoi's language and could speak to the animals.

"Large Old Coyote, why did you call to me?"

"I came to this pool to drink the water," he told her. "This rock shifted and trapped my foot. Will you help me?"

So the woman moved the rock, but by then the Large Old Coyote's foot was so badly injured that he still could not walk. So the woman fed him and watered him and nursed him back to health. She called him Old Lame Coyote.

In the evening, when the woman's husband did not come home and she was very lonely, Old Lame Coyote would tell her news of the desert-where to find honey, when the rains would come again, where the best pifion nuts could be found. In this way, the lonely woman and Lame Old Coyote became good friends.

When she got out of the car, it was all Myrna Louise could do to make it into the house and down the hall to her room.

Without taking off her clothing, she fell sideways across the bed. She was no longer angry with Andrew, and she hoped by now that he was over being angry with her. It was too bad that whenever they spent any time together, they always ended up quarreling.

She was awakened by a knock on the door, and there was Lida, from next door, holding the newspaper and two pieces of mail.

"Back so soon?" Lida asked. "From the way Phil talked this morning, I thought you'd be gone for at least a week.

I already told the newspaper boy to stop delivery, just like Phil said, but he had to deliver today's and maybe tomorrow's. Here's your mail.

I picked that up, too. No sense leaving it for someone to go snooping through."

Myrna Louise stared blankly. Lida's words made no sense. She had stopped the paper and was collecting the mail? What was going on?

"I'm sorry, Lida," Myrna Louise said. "I'm not feeling well."

"No wonder you came back. I was afraid the kind of trip Phil was planning would be too much for you. Driving to the Grand Canyon isn't my idea of a picnic."

Grand Canyon? Myrna Louise thought. Who's going there? It was more than Myrna Louise could stand. "You'll have to excuse me, Lida, I've got to go back and lie down.

Brandon Walker took off right at five. He drove straight to the house.

He parked the Galaxy and pocketed the keys, then he drove his mother's Olds to the hospital. Louella was sitting in the ICU waiting room.

Brandon had planned to stay at the hospital for only a few minutes, but as soon as he saw his mother's ravaged face, he knew there was trouble.

She ran to him and buried her head against his shoulder.

"I'm so glad you're here," she sobbed. "I've done what the doctor said, I've turned off the machine. The nurse told me I could go in now and wait, but I'm afraid to be there alone. Stay with me, Brandon, please. Stay until it's over."

What could he do, tell his mother he had a prior commitment? Taking Louella gently by the shoulders, he looked down into her grief-stricken face. "I have to make a phone call," he said.

"You won't leave me, will YOU?"

"No, Mom," he said, shaking his head. "I'll be right back."

Chapter Seventeen

SORTING THROUGH IONA'S boxes was all the emotional baggage Diana could handle for one day.

Gary's would have to wait. When she finished, she carried the garbage outside, dumped it, and set fire to the trash barrel. As she stood there watching it burn, she felt a peculiar satisfaction, the lifting of a lifetime's burden.

Diana watched the flames lick through Iona's ancient oven mitt and understood at last why her mother considered herself "damaged goods," why she had stayed with Max Cooper no matter what. Iona owed him. He grudgingly lent Iona the use of his name for her baby, for Diana, thus saving Iona's family and reputation from savaging by Joseph's sharp-tongued scandalmongers, but Iona paid a heavy price for that dubious privilege, paid with every waking and sleeping moment of her life.

The flames in the burning barrel soared higher, kicking up and over the surrounding metal. In the leaping flames, something else caught fire, something more than just Francine Cooper's useless castoffs. Max Cooper's hold on his supposed daughter was being consumed as well.

At last Diana grasped why Max had despised her so, why he had hated her and berated her for as long as she could remember. She understood now why he had so resented the rodeo-queen escape hatch that a resourceful Iona, with George Deeson's timely help, had managed to open for her.

But knowledge brought with it an ineffable sadness. If only she had known the truth earlier, while there was still time to ask her mother about her real father or maybe even ask George Deeson himself. Would he have told her, if she had asked him on one of those endless Saturday mornings when it had been just the two of them out in the corral with Waldo? Would things have been different if she had known the old man was really her grandfather?

What was it the Bible said? "The truth will set you free." Was Diana Cooper Ladd free now? Maybe. She felt lighter than she had in years.

As the flames charred through the debris, not only did Max lose his grip on her, so did the past.

Just then, Bone dashed up and dropped a tennis ball at her feet. With a laugh, she ruffled the dog's shaggy head, then threw the ball for him as hard as she could. Eagerly, he raced off after it, returning with it, prancing and proud, tail awag.

"You funny old dog," she said, and threw the ball again.

Over and over she threw the ball. Over and over he brought it back.

It surprised her to find that each time Bone retrieved the ball, the silly, pointless game made her laugh. Laughter felt good, and so did the hot sun on her back.

"Come on, Mister Oh'o," she said at last when the dog was panting so hard his scrawny sides shook. "Let's go inside, cool off, and figure out what's for dinner."

After their naps, Davy and Rita entered the main house to the surprising but familiar smell of baking tortillas. In the kitchen, they found Diana struggling with stiff wads of tortilla dough, waxed paper, and a rolling pin. A stack of misshapen tortillas sat on a platter next to a smoking electric griddle. The tortillas were amazingly ugly-thick in some places, punched full of holes in others.

Some were more than slightly burned, but for a first attempt, they weren't too bad.

Rita touched one of the balls of dough still sitting in a mixing bowl, on the countertop. "A little more shortening next time," she suggested.

"Then you can pat them out by hand instead of using a rolling pin."

"Mom, did you make these all by yourself?" Davy asked wonderingly.

"Can I have one?"

"If you're brave enough," Diana told him. "They're pretty pitiful.

Slathering a load of peanut butter on one side, Davy tried a bite and diplomatically pronounced the tortilla "almost as good as Rita's."

With a second peanut butter-covered tortilla in one hand and a plain one for Bone in the other, Davy and Oh'o went outside to play.

Rita sat down beside the kitchen table and watched Diana work. The Anglo woman seemed self-conscious under the Papago's scrutiny, but she kept on rolling the dough and tossing the resulting crooked sheets onto the waiting griddle.

"While I was just lying there in Sells," Rita began, "I was thinking about how you helped me after Gina died, when people wanted me to leave because I was bad luck."

"Forget it," Diana said determinedly. "What they thought doesn't matter. I've been delighted to have you with me.

With us," she added.

"But it does matter," Rita returned. "I thought I was leaving there just to go somewhere and die, but helping you and taking care of Davy gave me back my luck. It made me young again. The other day, the doctors said I was dead in that ambulance, but thinking about Davy made me want to live, made me want to come back."

Diana Ladd put down the rolling pin and brushed hair from her sweat-dampened face, leaving a white smudge of flour on her face.

"Rita, Davy has always been as much yours as he is mine.

You're the one who's spent all the time with him, who's taught him things, and taken care of him. If you're worried about the Indian baptism, don't be. Father John told me about it this morning when I saw him at San Xavier."

"He did?"

Diana nodded. "He explained the whole thing."

"Good," Rita said. "You don't mind?"

"How could I mind? When will it happen?"

'Because of the . . ."

Rita paused, groping for the proper word. What she felt coming toward them was far more serious than mere danger.

Weak as it sounded, that was the only Mil-gahn word she could think of to express the problem. Diana Ladd would not understand the word ohb.

"Because of the danger to us all," Rita continued, "the baptism ceremony starts tonight. It will continue for four days and nights.

Four nights from now, we go to Sells for the last night of singing and for the feast. On that night, the medicine man feeds the child's parents gruel made from corn and clay."

Diana made a face. "That sounds even worse than my tortillas, but it won't kill me, will it?"

Rita smiled. "No, it won't kill you."

"What about you?" Diana asked. "You said parents. I'm only one.

Will you eat the gruel with me, Rita? The two of us can be Davy's parents together."

The offer came from a generous heart and caused a dazzling smile to suffuse Rita's worn face. She looked twenty years younger. "Yes, nawqj," she said softly, "we will eat the gruel together."

Just then, out in the yard, Bone started up a noisy racket.

They heard him scrabbling over the high stone wall just as Davy burst in through the back door.

"A car's coming," Davy announced. "Oh'o went after it. I couldn't stop him."

Dusting the flour from her hands, Diana hurried to the window and looked out. An unfamiliar late-model Buick was easing into the driveway, while Bone, up to his usual tricks, attacked the front tires for all he was worth. Diana recognized Father John before he rolled down the window.

"Oh'o," she called sharply. "Here."

With one final offended woof, the dog abandoned his attack and came to the porch, where Diana let him into the house. "It's Father John," she told Davy. "Take Bone back outside and keep him there while I bring the company into the house."

Father John entered the house warily, holding his hat in front of him.

"That's quite some dog you've got there," he said. "Are you sure it's safe?"

"Believe me, Bone's exactly the kind of dog we need at the moment," Diana returned, "but don't worry. Davy took him outside. Would you care for something to eat?"

"No, no thank you. I just came to speak to the boy."

"Something to drink then. Iced tea?"

"Tea would be fine."

Diana started for the kitchen but paused when she found the kitchen doorway blocked by Rita's stocky frame. The old woman stood staring at the priest. Eventually, Rita moved aside and let Diana pass, but she did so without taking her eyes away from Father John. For a long moment, the two old people faced one another in awkward silence.

When Father John had invaded the hospital room in Sells, it had been without Rita's knowledge or permission. The man who came there was the same one who had abandoned her years earlier, the one who had caused her to be sent away in disgrace. But now, by helping with Davy, Father John had redeemed himself somewhat in the old woman's eyes.

She no longer saw him through a cloud of bitterness.

The old woman broke the silence. "Thank you for helping with Davy."

Father John nodded. "Nawoj," he said. "Friend, it is nothing." He moved into the room. At once his eyes were drawn to the large basket hanging on the wall over the couch, a plaque actually, two-and-a-half to three feet in diameter. Schooled in the subtle aesthetics of Papago Indian basketry, the priest immediately recognized the superior workmanship in the rare yucca-root basket. The red design, a finely woven rendition of the traditional Papago maze, spread out in the four sacred directions. At the top stood the square-shouldered Man in the Maze.

Father John studied the basket for some time before turning to Rita.

"You made this?" he asked. She nodded.

"Understanding Woman taught you well," he continued.

"It is very beautiful."

Back on the rocky Mountainside with a Styrofoam meat package full of poisoned hamburger, Andrew Carlisle thanked his lucky stars that he had taken the precaution of climbing up to reconnoiter one last time before approaching the house. While he watched in dismay, the crazy dog set up a frenzied roar of barking and then vaulted over the fence to attack an approaching car. Carlisle couldn't believe it.

The ugly mutt charged the front tires of the still-moving vehicle as if he were going to tear them apart.

Christ! How had the dog done it? That stone wall had to be at least six feet tall, and it hadn't slowed him down one damn bit. Carlisle knew that if he tried approaching the house on foot, the dog would have him for lunch, so the problem was finding a way to get the poison to the dog without losing either an arm or a leg in the process.

Through binoculars trained on the household below, Carlisle saw the woman hustle the dog inside while a man, who appeared to be a priest, got out of the car and started for the house. The man went in the front door, while the dog and the child came out through the back. The boy left the dog pacing in unhappy circles on the rear patio.

Clearly, the dog wanted in. If he was generally an inside dog, it wouldn't be long before someone relented. Carlisle realized he would have to act quickly.

Carlisle's first problem was to lure the dog out of the fenced backyard.

Having witnessed the frenzied attack on the Buick, that didn't seem difficult. Carlisle figured just showing his face would be enough to provoke the dog into another battle. The trick was maintaining enough of a safety margin to make escape possible.

Carlisle hiked back down to the Matador and drove as near the house as he dared, stopping just beyond a sharp curve that concealed the car from anyone inside the house.

After turning the car around so it faced back in the opposite direction, Carlisle took the slug-bait-laced meat with him and walked to the middle of the roadway. First he dropped chunks of meat in a wide pattern over the pavement; then, lying down flat on the rocky shoulder, he whistled one short, sharp burst.

At once, the dog responded with a fit of barking. Carlisle whistled again, and the dog barked again. Someone came to the back door. Diana herself emerged from the shadow of the patio and surveyed the area, using one hand to shade her eyes from the glare of the setting sun.

Carlisle kept his head low to the ground and prayed that no other traffic would appear on the road.

Satisfied there was nothing amiss, Diana spoke to the dog. "Quiet, Bone. It's all right. Be still."

Carlisle heard her voice floating up to him from below.

The very sound of it was enticing. Hearing her voice, combined with the knowledge that he was almost within touching distance of her, gave him an instant erection and made his breath come in short, harsh gasps.

If you only knew, little lady, he thought, stifling an urge to laugh.

The dog's smarter than you are.

Below him, the sliding glass door slammed shut behind her as Diana Ladd returned to the house. For a moment, Carlisle was afraid she might have taken the dog with her.

He breathed a sigh of relief when he peered over the bank and saw that the dog was still pacing restlessly in the yard below, still staring up in his direction. He whistled again.

"Come here, little doggie," he whispered under his breath. "Nice little doggie. Come and get it."

This time, the dog made no, sound at all. He simply leapt over the wall and came crashing up the embankment.

Carlisle waited until the last possible moment before making his dash for safety. He had spread the meat over a wide segment of the roadway so the dog would be sure to find it. Now, he ran straight through the meat to his Car so the dog-Bone was a funny name for a dog-following his scent, would be led directly to the poison.

Carlisle jumped into his Matador and drove away, hoping against hope that his plan had worked.

After that, Fitoi struck the water with his stick. The bank broke, and the water from the lake and from all the oceans ran together. And then Fitoi, who can make himself either very large or very small, climbed into the basket he had made, and Ban, Coyote, climbed into his hollow cane, and the waters began to rise.

Soon the waters rose high enough to wash them away.

1'itoi told Ban to follow him to the west, but Coyote did not listen, and the waters continued to rise. Soon all the villages on the flat were covered with water and the people drowned.

The people who lived near Giwho Tho'ag, Burden Basket Mountain, saw the water coming. They hurried to the highest part of the mountain, thinking they would be safe, but as the water came up, the mountain split in two, and all the people were drowned.

In another part of the valley, a very powerful medicine man led his people up to the highest mountain and told them that there they would be safe. As the water rose, the medicine man sang a powerful song, and the mountain rose higher and higher. The water rose and fell, rose and fell until it had risen and fallen four times.

Then the Indians on the mountain were happy, because everything in nature goes by fours, and they thought that now they would be safe.

The' medicine man said that there would be a great feast and the people began to get ready some cooking, some grinding corn.

Now it happens that the people had with them on the mountain only one gogs, one dog. The people sent Dog down the mountain to see how high the water was. Dog went to the edge of the mountain, and then he stretched himself and came back. "The water is going down," Dog said. "It will not rise again."

And right then, at that very moment, as Dog spoke, all the people on the mountain were turned to stone. They changed to stone just as they were when Dog spoke some cooking, some eating, and some grinding corn.

If you go to the place called Superstition Mountain, you can see them to this day.

And that is why, nawoj, my friend, you must never permit a dog to speak to you, for if you do, you may be turned to stone.

Davy and Father John were talking quietly at the kitchen table; Rita had returned to her room. After cleaning the kitchen, Diana had barely started reading the newspaper in the living room when the dog whined and scratched at the front door.

"How did Bone get back out front?" Diana asked irritably as she hurried to let him in. She was worried that he might make a dash for the kitchen and scare Father John. Instead, the dog plodded in slowly, shambled past her without even looking up, and walked directly into the opposite wall with a resounding thump.

"Oh'o," she said, alarmed, "what's the matter with you?"

Bone stood splayfooted, long tail tucked between his legs, head down.

He swayed drunkenly. Davy, hearing the concern in Diana's voice, called from the kitchen. "Mom, what is it?"

"I don't know. Something's wrong with Bone. I let him inside, and he walked straight into the wall."

Davy hurried into the room followed by a still apprehensive Father John.

The dog, who had once seemed so ferocious, now showed absolutely no interest in attacking the priest. Instead, he put one tentative foot in front of the other and tried to walk, only to fall down flat on his belly.

"That dog's been poisoned!" Father John announced decisively. "I've seen it before. We've got to get him to a vet."

"Poisoned?" Diana repeated. "How can that be?"

"Look at him. I had a dog die of poisoning once. He came inside acting just like this. The vet said that if I'd brought him in right away, he might have saved him. There's no time to lose."

Uncertain what to do, Diana glanced at her watch. A quarter to six.

The vet's office would close in fifteen minutes. Rita reappeared just then. "What's wrong?" she asked.

"It's Oh'o. Father John thinks he's been poisoned. We'd better load him in the car. Davy, Rita, come on. We'll all go."

Rita shook her head. "Fat Crack will be here soon. You go on. If we all go, Davy and I will just be in the way.

We'll wait here. I'll call Dr. Johnston and tell him you're coming."

On the floor between them, Bone's body shook convulsively. One look at the suffering animal convinced her. "All right," Diana said. "You stay here."

Diana knelt beside the quaking dog. "Bone, come," she ordered. With a whimper, the dog tried valiantly to get up, only to stumble and collapse once more. Diana attempted to pick him up by herself, but he was well over one hundred pounds of dog, far more than she could lift or carry.

"Father John, would you help me load him into the car?"

"Of course."

Lifting together, they raised Bone off the floor and carried him outside. "My car's out back," Diana said, heading that way.

"No," Father John corrected. "We'll take mine. It's closer."

They reached the car and eased the stricken animal onto the backseat.

As Diana straightened up, she found that Davy had followed them and was starting to climb into the car with Bone. Diana stopped him. "You stay here with Rita," she ordered. "If she has to leave before I get back, you can go along with her."

Davy, close to tears, barely heard her. "Is Oh'o going to die?" he asked.

"I hope not, but I don't know," Diana answered grimly.

She climbed into the car and closed the door behind her while the priest started the engine. Before driving out of the yard, Father John stopped the car beside the distressed child and rolled down his window.

"Remember how we were talking about prayer a while ago?" the priest asked, Davy nodded. "Would you like me to pray for Bone?"

The boy's eyes filled with tears. "Yes, please," he whispered.

"Heavenly Father," the priest said, bowing his head.

"We pray that you will grant the blessing of healing to your servant, Bone, that he may return safely to his home.

We ask this in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."

"Does that mean he'll be all right now?"

Father John shook his head gravely. "When God answers prayers, He can say either yes or no. Right now, it's too soon to tell. You keep on praying while we take him to the vet, okay?"

"Okay," Davy said, his voice quavering. "I will."

Andrew saw the priest and the woman drive away in a hurry. The dog was with them in the car. They were probably taking the mutt to a vet.

Maybe it would work, but he doubted it. He had put enough slug bait in that hamburger to choke a horse. This was, however, one very large dog.

Carlisle turned back toward the house in smug satisfaction and saw the boy walk dejectedly back into the house.

Everything had worked like a charm, just the way i'd planned it. The boy was as good as his. It was stupid of Diana to leave him there alone, but that was her problem.

Diana was gone, and the boy was unprotected, and Andrew Carlisle wanted Davy in the very worst way.

Sliding down the mountain, not caring now whether or not he stayed out of sight or made too much noise, Andrew Carlisle started toward the house. He had spent seven long years waiting for this moment. Now that it was finally starting, he could barely contain himself. Diana Ladd was going to make it all worthwhile.

At ten minutes to six, when the phone rang in the house on Weber Drive, Myrna Louise was waiting. She had gone out to the car to bring in her suitcase from the trunk and had subsequently discovered everything hidden there-her bankbook, her blank checks, the gun, the bag of lime, and the luggage with someone else's name on it.

She didn't bother to open the luggage. It had been stolen from someone else as surely as her own savings-account book had been stolen from her.

And her cash, too, as she discovered moments later.

For half an hour now, she had sat quietly in her rocking chair, wondering what it all meant. She had already assimilated the idea that Andrew, her own son, had meant to kill her, would have killed her, if she hadn't taken the crazy notion into her head to drive off in the car.

Sure knowledge of Andrew's murderous intentions had shocked her at first, but initial shock had worn into fuming anger.

Now, she sat rehearsing what she would say to him when Andrew finally called her, as she knew he would. She had considered turning him in herself but decided against it.

Someone else would have to do the dirty work, not her, not his own mother. But if the cops happened to come to her house looking for him, she wouldn't raise a hand to stop them.

Constantly rephrasing her speech, she decided to tell Andrew that if he ever came near her again, if he ever darkened her doorstep or wrote her a letter or even so much as tried to contact her by phone, she would see to it that he rotted in prison for the rest of his natural life. How did that sound?

Andrew had finally stepped beyond Myrna Louise's considerable threshold of tolerance. Having once reached the end of her rope, she determined to no longer have a son. She would declare him null and void. As far as she was concerned, Andrew Carlisle would cease to exist.

So when the phone finally rang, it was his voice she expected to hear on the other end of the line, whining and blathering. Instead, the voice was that of a total stranger.

"Is Andrew there?" the man asked.

Myrna Louise's heart skipped a beat as she tried to conceal her disappointment "Who's calling, please?" she asked guardedly.

"A friend of his," the man said. "Is he there?"

"Not right now. May I take a message?"

It sounded as though the person on the other end of the line let out a long sigh, but Myrna Louise couldn't be sure.

"No," he said. "That's all right. I'll call back later."

He hung up-slammed the phone down in her ear, actually. She hung up, too, sitting there for a long time afterward with her hand still resting on the receiver. She wished it had been Andrew on the phone so she could have had it out with him once and for all, but it wasn't.

For that she would have to wait a little longer.

The human body isn't quite like anything else, Brandon Walker thought.

People talk about pulling the plug, but just turning off life-sustaining machines doesn't necessarily mean it's over, doesn't mean the person gives up the ghost and dies the way a light goes off when you disconnect a cord from the socket. It wasn't that simple.

Nothing ever is.

The machines had been silenced for over an hour now, but Toby Walker stubbornly clung to life, persisting in breathing on his own much to the doctor's surprise and dismay. His blood pressure was gradually falling, but there had been no marked or sudden change.

Nurses looked in on them every once in a while, respectfully, as though conscious that their presence was now an intrusion, not a help. Their concern focused on the two nonpatients-a woman quiet at last, worn out from continual weeping, and a man, the son, whose narrow jaw worked constantly, but who sat beside his dying father stiff and straight, dry-eyed and silent.

Brandon Walker had forgotten he was a cop in all this, forgotten that there was another duty calling. Sitting there, he was nothing but a grieving son, a lost, abandoned, and nearly middle-aged child, facing his own bleak future in a universe suddenly devoid of its center, an unthinkable world where his father didn't exist.

The three people waited together in a room where the silence was broken only by the old man's shallow breathing.

No words were necessary. They had all been spoken long ago, and Brandon was convinced that in that broken shell of a man on the bed, there was no one left to listen.

Detective G. T. Farrell was well outside his Pinal County jurisdiction.

He should have contacted the local lawenforcement agencies, either Maricopa County, or, in this case, the Tempe Police Department to ask for backup, but that would have taken time. Farrell knew in his gut there was no time to lose. He was propelled forward by the common force that drives all those who pursue serial killers-the horrifying and inevitable knowledge that time itself is the enemy.

Refusing to be rushed, Farrell had systematically worked the problem, marching down the Spaulding column in the phone book, calling each number in turn, always asking for Andrew-a first name Andrew-rather than giving out any further information. He had tried Spauldings in Phoenix proper. Next he worked the suburbs. Halfway through that process, a frail-sounding old woman answered the phone.

As soon as he asked for Andrew and heard the sharp, involuntary intake of breath, he knew -he had hit pay dirt.

Even while he talked to her, making sure his voice on the phone stayed calm and noncommittal, he was frantically tearing the page with her name on it out of the book. This was no time for scribbling notes.

But once in the car, Farrell couldn't risk lights or siren' That would have raised too many unpleasant questions had anyone stopped him. He drove only as fast as the traffic would bear.

A resourceful man who always carried a selection of maps in his car, Geet headed East on Camelback in the general direction of Tempe, using crosstown stops at lights and the usual rush-hour slowdowns to locate the exact whereabouts of Weber Drive and to pinpoint the address in his Thomas Guide. Farrell figured it would take him about forty-five minutes to get there. His actual elapsed time was thirty-eight minutes flat.

Getting out of the car on Weber Drive half a block away from the address, he patted his holster and felt the reassuring presence of his .38 Special. It was possible that the old woman had lied and that her son had been right there in the room with her all along, but Farrell doubted it. The old woman didn't sound as though she was that glib or that fast on her feet. She wasn't that capable a liar. At least Geet Farrell fervently hoped she wasn't.

Taking a deep breath, Farrell opened the gate, strode up the long walkway, and rang the doorbell. Almost immediately, he heard movement inside the small house. He swallowed hard to calm himself as the door opened and an old woman peered nearsightedly out at him through a screen door. "Yes?" she asked.

Carefully, using deliberate gestures, he brought out his badge. "I'm a police officer," he said, holding it up to the screen so she could see it. "I'm looking for Andrew Carlisle."

The woman squinted at the badge without reading it.

"He isn't here," she said.

"Could I talk to you then? Are you his mother?"

"For the time being," she answered.

Farrell wondered what that meant. He wondered, too, if she recognized his voice from the phone. If so, her next question gave no hint of it.

"What do you want with him?"

"We want to ask him some questions, that's all," Farrell answered.

"There are a few matters. we need to clear up."

"Me, too," the old woman added, opening the screen door, motioning him inside. "I have some matters I'd like Andrew to clear up for me, too."

Something in the woman's injured tone suggested a switch in tactics from investigator to sympathizer, from potential enemy to ally. "What kind of matters, ma'am?" Farrell asked innocently.

"He stole my money, for one thing," she answered with ill-concealed fury, "my money and my bankbooks. Then, when he saw I was leaving, he was so angry that I think he would have killed me if he could have gotten close enough, but I fooled him. I drove away all by myself. I drove all the way here. Can you believe it? Andrew never thought I would, and neither did I. After all, I'm sixty-five years old and had never driven a car before in my life, but I did. So help me I did. I wouldn't have done it, either, if he hadn't treated me so badly."

Maybe you ought to tell me about it, ma'am," Geet Farrell said. "This could be important."

Davy was surprised when he saw the bald-headed man standing outside the glass patio door. The man was wearing funny brown-colored clothes, the kind with plants painted on them, that soldiers sometimes wore in the movies.

"Nana Dahd," he called. "Someone's here."

Davy expected the man would wait outside until Rita came to the door to talk to him. Instead, he shoved the door open and stepped inside.

"Who are you?" Davy demanded. "What do you want?"

"You," the man answered. "You're what I want.The man lunged for him.

Davy tried to dart out of the way, but the man was too quick. He caught Davy by one arm, spinning him around. He swung the child up in the air and held him two feet off the ground.

"You were talking to somebody, kid. Who was it? Where are they?"

"I'm right here," a woman's voice said behind him.

"Don't hurt him."

"Nana Dahd," the boy complained. "He just came right in the house. He didn't even knock."

Suddenly, the man's arm clamped tight around Davy's throat, choking off his air. He kicked and fought, but he couldn't get away. The last thing he heard before he blacked out was the man saying, "I don't have to knock, because as long as I have you, I own the place. Isn't that right, old woman?"

Davy didn't see Rita's answering nod. It was true. As long as he had Davy, Andrew Carlisle could have anything else he wanted.

Around the Pinal County Sheriff's Department, Detective Geet Farrell had a considerable reputation as a ladies' man. With men he could be tough and hard-nosed as hell, but with women he gentled them along until even the bad ones offered to give him the shirts off their backs.

Slowly but urgently, Geet Farrell worked Myrna Louise Spaulding. He didn't rush her, but he didn't allow any unnecessary delays, either.

Within minutes, he had talked her into showing him the contents of the battered Valiant's packed trunk. He recognized Johnny Rivkin's name as soon as he saw the tag on the luggage, but he didn't let anything betray his exultation. Because it was too soon. He needed to know more.

So he led the garrulous old lady through her entire day, encouraging her to remember everything from the moment she woke up until he himself had arrived on her doorstep.

Myrna Louise loved having an appreciative audience.

She warmed to the telling and was totally engrossed by the time she got to the part about going into the office in Tucson to pick up those mysterious papers with those two women's names on it. Only then, as she was telling the detective about the papers, did she fully allow herself to know what those two names meant, what Andrew Was really going to do.

It hit Detective Farrell at the same time, like a fierce, double-fisted blow to the gut.

"Where is he now?" he demanded savagely. All gentleness disappeared from the man, transformed instantly into a single-minded intensity that was frightening to see.

"I don't know," Myrna Louise whimpered. "I don't have any idea."

"We've got to find him. Where was he when you left him?"

"I already told You. At the storage unit. In Tucson."

"Can I use your phone?" he asked.

"Yes," she whispered, barely containing the despairing sob that rose in her throat. "Go ahead. Help yourself."

Chapter Eighteen

R. JOHNSTON, THE vet, was guardedly optimistic about the dog's chances for survival as he sifted a pinch of yellow powder into Bone's eyes.

"This is apomorphine," he explained, "an emetic. It gets into the bloodstream through the conjunctival sacs. It'll make him barf his guts out within minutes. He's certainly exhibiting all the classic symptoms of slug-bait poisoning. Where'd he pick it up?"

"I don't know," Diana said. "He was fine just twenty minutes or so earlier when we put him outside. He came back in acting drunk. He could barely walk."

The vet shook his head. "You've got a neighbor who hates dogs."

"I don't have any neighbors," Diana started to say, and then stopped.

A chill ran down her spine. Perhaps this was it, she thought, the beginning of what Rita called the wind coming to the windmill, the reason she was wearing a gun.

,,You'd better go on out now, Diana," Dr. Johnston warned. "Bone is going to be one miserable dog here for a while, but if we caught it as soon as you say, he should pull through. I'd like to keep him overnight, though, if you don't mind."

But Diana did mind. She dreaded the idea of going home without the dog.

Bone was her first line of defense. She glanced at her watch.

It wasn't dark yet and wouldn't be for some time, but once it was, she wanted the dog with her.

"I'd rather wait, if it's not going to be too long."

"Suit yourself," Dr. Johnston said. "It won't take long, but it isn't going to be pretty."

Half an hour earlier and 120 miles away, Pinal County homicide detective Geet Farrell had considered his options and hadn't liked any of them. He tried calling Brandon Walker directly, but there was no answer, either at his office or at home. Farrell refused to waste any more time in stationary phoning, but he didn't want to abandon his questioning of Myrna Louise Spaulding, either. There might be more she could tell him, details he had so far neglected to ask.

Farrell flung the phone back on the hook. "You do know what he's up to, don't you?"

Myrna Louise nodded. "I do now."

"I'm going to try to stop him," the detective continued grimly. "Will you help? I'll need you to come with me."

"Yes," Myrna Louise answered, rising unsteadily to her feet. "I'll do whatever I can. Just let me get my purse."

They left Weber Drive in a spray of gravel and headed for 1-10. Once across the Pinal County line, Detective Farrell switched on lights and sirens and drove like a bat out of hell. They sped south on the Interstate through the hot desert evening, while Farrell's mind grappled with the problem on threedifferent levels.

First, he dealt with the car, navigating with fierce concentration.

Second, he played radio tag, trying to get a good enough connection to be patched through to someone in Tucson who could actually help him.

Third, he listened to -Myrna Louise Spaulding's seemingly endless story.

It wasn't until a Pinal County dispatcher hooked him up with the counterpart dispatcher in Pima, a guy named Hank Maddern, that Farrell finally felt as though he was talking to somebody real, someone with a sense of urgency.

"What can I do for you, Detective Farrell?" Maddern asked. "Brandon Walker told me to expect your call."

"Where is he?"

"At the hospital. His father's dying."

"I'm sorry as hell to hear it, but this can't wait. You've got to get him on the phone for me."

"Why?"

"Tell him we've got trouble. Tell him it's bad. I just don't know how bad."

"It could take some time," Maddern cautioned. "They're in the ICU at Tucson Medical Center. Can anyone else help?"

Considering what Myrna had told him about Carlisle's illegal purchase of police records and what Farrell himself knew about the graft and corruption in the Pima County Sheriff's Office, the detective was leery about bringing in any more players whose loyalty might be questionable.

Maddern sounded like the genuine article, but Farrell remained skeptical. Someone high in DuShane's administration had helped Andrew Carlisle at least once before. It might very well happen again.

"I don't want to have to brief someone else if it isn't necessary," Farrell hedged. "Try getting through to Walker.

I'm just now passing Picacho Peak. If you can't reach him within a matter of minutes, then we'll have to do something else."

By six-thirty Wanda Ortiz, Fat Crack's wife, was finishing the last batch of tortillas. She had started out early that morning by making six dozen tamales, a big vat of pinto beans, and another of chili.

With a dozen preparations left to do before the singers arrived, she was hot, sweaty, and tired. She was also annoyed.

She was annoyed because her mother-in-law, Juanita, had refused to lift a finger to help her. Real Presbyterians didn't participate in pagan baptisms, Juanita had archly informed Fat Crack when he had gone to his mother's house asking for help. She wouldn't lend her support to Looks At Nothing's crazy idea, not even as a favor for her own sister.

So Wanda had done all the cooking herself, not complaining, but with a layer of very un-Christianlike anger seething just beneath her seemingly placid surface.

This was Wanda's second church-related battle with her mother-in-law in less than a month. The first had been over whether or not Juanita's grandchildren would attend Presbyterian Daily Vacation Bible school.

Juanita had won the skirmish hands down since the Presbyterian church also happened to own the reservation's only swimming pool.

There were times, Wanda thought, slapping the last tortilla on the griddle and picking it off with nimble fingers, that she wished all the Anglo missionaries would go back where they came from. Even Fat Crack's Christian-Science studies sometimes provoked her.

Wanda was still nursing her grudge when Looks At Nothing pounded on the door with his walking stick. She wasn't especially happy to see him, either. At that particular moment, the Indian medicine man was more trouble than all the others put together.

"What is it?" she asked curtly, wiping her hands on her apron.

"Where is your husband?"

"Taking a nap. He has to stay up all night with the singers. He wanted to sleep before going to get Rita."

"We must go now," Looks At Nothing said urgently.

"It's started."

Wanda shook her head. Gabe had given her strict orders not to wake him up until seven. He had spent the whole afternoon dragging a stalled BIA road grader out of a sandy wash, and he had wanted to sleep as long as possible. Looking at the agitated old man, Wanda wondered if perhaps he was crazy in addition to being blind.

"No," Wanda replied. "Nothing has started yet. It's too early. The singers don't come until nine."

Not the singers," he snapped. "The ohb. We must go quickly, or it will be too late."

In Dr. Johnston's waiting room, Diana Ladd alternately sat and paced while Father John thumbed through a worn pet-food catalog. She berated herself for leaving Rita and Davy home alone, for being stupid about waiting for the dog, for not accepting Brandon Walker's offer of help.

When Dr. Johnston's receptionist got up to leave, Diana asked to use the phone.

The phone at home rang nine or ten times without anyone answering.

That in itself wasn't alarming. When Rita was out in her room, she and Davy sometimes didn't hear the phone ringing.

Just as Diana started to hang up, Rita answered. "Hello."

"Rita, it's me. Diana. Is everything okay there?"

"Okay?" Rita's voice seemed distant, hollow. "Yes.

Everything here is okay."

"Bone's still with Dr. Johnston," Diana rushed on.

"We're waiting for him. We'll be home as soon as we can. Did Davy tell you he can go with you if you have to leave before I get home?"

"No," Rita replied. "He didn't tell me, but that's good."

Diana hung up, too preoccupied to think it odd that Rita had answered the phone instead of Davy. Without leaving the desk, Diana decided to swallow her pride and call Brandon Walker. The least she could do was let him know what had happened and ask for his advice, but he wasn't in.

With a frustrated sigh, Diana sat back down. It was probably just as well. What she and Rita planned for Andrew Carlisle should be kept totally secret.

If she talked to Brandon Walker, she might accidentally let something slip.

Father John glanced at her. "The dog's going to be fine," the priest said reassuringly, misreading her agitation as concern for Bone. "We got him here so soon after it happened that I'm sure he'll be okay."

Diana nodded but said nothing. According to Rita, things were still all right at home, but with Andrew Carlisle on the loose, the dog was really the least of her worries. She sat there wishing she'd left the 45 at home with Rita.

"It's taking so long," she said, glancing at her watch for the second time in less than a minute.

"Some things can't be rushed," Father John replied.

Diana started to argue and then thought better of it. What Father John didn't know wouldn't hurt him. If he thought she was only worried about the dog, so be it.

Now that he was actually inside Diana Ladd's house, Carlisle felt downright invincible. His plans were working perfectly. Still holding the boy, Carlisle ordered the old woman to sit down on the couch. She did so at once. Her immediate compliance gratified him. Carlisle was sure that holding the boy hostage would work exactly the same magic on Diana Ladd. With Davy in jeopardy, she would have to submit to his every demand, give him whatever he wanted when and how he wanted it.

The phone blared, startling him so that he almost dropped the child.

He held the knife to Davy's throat. "Answer it," he growled at the old woman. "Try anything funny and the boy dies."

Clumsily, Rita heaved herself off the couch and hobbled over to the phone. Carlisle nodded with satisfaction at her curt answers. As far as he could tell, she made no attempt to pass along any secret messages.

"Who was it?" he asked when she put the phone back in the cradle.

"Diana Ladd?" The old woman nodded. "What did she say?"

"She'll be back soon."

"Good," he said. "We'll be waiting, won't we? Pull the cord out of the wall."

The old woman hesitated as though she didn't understand him. He brandished the knife over the now fully awake boy.

Seeing the knife, the boy regarded him through terrified eyes, but he made no effort to fight.

"I said pull it out," Carlisle repeated. "No more phone calls." Rita yanked the phone cord from its receptacle, and Carlisle smiled.

"Good.

Now, back on the couch." He almost laughed aloud at the way the old woman jumped to do his bidding. He was enjoying having them all by the short hairs.

Carlisle knew firsthand how abject submission works.

If he had learned nothing else, his tormentors in Florence had taught him that lesson well. He had seen how, in order to avoid pain, victims can become so eager to please that they transform themselves into willing participants in their own destruction. The old woman's reaction was a textbook case. Diana Ladd's would be as well.

With the younger woman, though, he would have to be careful. Pacing would be everything. He would have to restrain himself in the beginning and not go too far.

The kind of dehumanizing submission he wanted from her would take time and effort and a certain amount of finesse.

There were those in the prison community who took the position that raping a rapist qualified as poetic justice and maybe even as a kind of aversion therapy. Well, Andrew Carlisle was here to tell those jokers that it hadn't worked out that way for him. Physical violation hadn't "cured" him at all. Instead, it had only added fuel to his Diana Ladd bloodlust, given him something else to blame her for. He'd spent years planning every move of his campaign against her. He wouldn't settle for anything less than total capitulation. He looked forward to having Diana Ladd crawling naked on the floor before him. He wanted to see her on her hands and knees, subject to his every whim. He wanted the pleasure of hearing the bitch beg.

Carlisle sat the boy down on one end of the couch and ordered him to stay still while he tied up the old woman.

Busy with the twine, Carlisle found he was having difficulty concentrating. His whole body pulsed with eagerness for the coming confrontation. What would happen in those first crucial minutes? he wondered. Would she fight or give in at once? Would the very sight of him strike terror in her heart? Would she guess what was in store for her?

He didn't think so. The others hadn't, why should she?

For the first time, Carlisle considered whether or not she'd bring the priest back with her. He hoped not. Carlisle was not a religious man, nor was he terribly superstitious, but the idea of killing a priest lacked appeal. Not only that, he was reluctant to expend his energies on any side issue that might dull his appetite for the main course.

"What are you going to do?" the old woman asked, intruding rudely into his thoughts. He didn't answer immediately. Finished tying her one good hand to the cumbersome cast, he went to work binding her swollen ankles together, hobbling her like a horse with the short lengths of twine he had cut up and brought along for that express purpose.

Advance planning was everything.

"Whatever I want," he replied nonchalantly. "I'm going to do whatever I want."

Diana was about to call home again when Dr. Johnston returned to the waiting room. It was almost seven, a whole hour after the veterinarian's office had been scheduled to close.

"I think we're over the hump now," Dr. Johnston said.

"He's been one sick puppy, but I believe he's going to be okay. Plenty of rest, plenty of liquids. Tell Davy not to overtax him for the next few days. He's probably through the worst of it, but we'd better cover your car seat with some old blankets, just in case."

Dr. Johnston's assistant, a burly teenager named Scott, carried the ailing dog back out to Father John's car and laid him gently on a layer of hastily assembled blankets.

With a huge sigh, the dog put his chin on his front paws and closed his eyes.

"Call me in the morning," Dr. Johnston said, "and let me know how he's doing."

Diana replied with a grateful nod. "I'll call first thing."

"That was weird," Scott said as Father John's Buick pulled out of the office parking lot.

"What's weird?" Dr. Johnston asked.

"How come that lady was wearing a gun?"

"A gun? Was she really?" Dr. Johnston sounded startled. "I was so concerned about the dog that I never even noticed."

The old woman sat silently at one end of the couch.

Carlisle ordered Davy to the opposite end, where he began tying the boy up as well. He wanted his prisoners relatively immobile but easily trans-portable when necessary, because Carlisle had no intention of playing out his whole game in Diana Ladd's house.

it was fine for the first major skirmish to take place here. Invading Diana's private territory and bloodying her there was an essential part of his psychological warfare against her. But after that, after he'd humiliated her and established a pattern of absolute control, then he would take his prisoners to the cave, to Gary Ladd's own special cave, for dessert.

Carlisle theorized that the isolated cave by what had once been Rattlesnake Skull Village was eminently suited to his purposes. No one, not even that wise-ass young detective, had ever figured out that the cave, not the charco, had been the actual scene of Gina Antone's last moments on this earth.

During the pretrial proceedings, Carlisle had made absolutely sure that no one knew of the existence of Gary Ladd's manuscript with its whining references to the cave. Once he left three more bodies there to rot, he would have all the more reason to see that Gary Ladd's crude manuscript disappeared off the face of the earth. Too bad Myrna Louise hadn't thrown that in the burning barrel instead of Savage.

She would have been doing something useful for a change.

He thought longingly about the cool, dark cave, about how the timeless limestone walls would swallow up whatever agonized sounds his particular brand of pleasure might wring from his captives. In that dusky cave, with the added luxury of total isolation, no one would interrupt him or interfere with the process. There, once and for all ...

Carlisle had tried explaining that same thing to Gary Ladd years before, the morning after their little debacle, but the man had been hysterical when he learned the girl was dead, astounded that things had got so far out of hand while he slept.

Even then, things would have been fine if Ladd hadn't lost his nerve and gone back later to move the body so she could have a proper burial.

The fool dumped her in a water hole, for God's sake, thinking people would be stupid enough to believe she had drowned. With the rope burns around her neck and her nipple bitten off? What the hell kind of dumb-ass idea was that? And then, a week later, if Carlisle hadn't stopped him, Ladd would have gone to town and confessed for both of them, taking his tell-tale manuscript with him. Thanks a lot, buddy, but no thanks.

Carlisle shivered at the tantalizing memory, letting his imagination travel back to the cave, remembering that long-ago desert night and the girl. Despite her objections, he had coaxed her into that huge and immensely silent place. He had started a small fire-for light he had told her-but light wasn't all the fire was for, not at all. He had other plans for those burning twigs and coals.

To begin with, she had liked being tied up, giggling drunkenly as he bound her, thinking it nothing but some kind of kinky game. Gradually, as she learned the terrible truth, her tipsy laughter changed, first to fear and then to terror and dread as the tenor of the night changed around her. Carlisle hadn't much liked her screaming when it finally came to that. Screaming showed a certain lack of delicacy and finesse on his part. He much preferred the small, animal-like whimpers of pain and the begging.

God, how her begging had excited him! Even though it was in a language he didn't speak, he had understood her well enough. He hadn't stopped when she asked him to, of course, but he had understood.

And all the while that jackass of a Gary Ladd was dead drunk in the pickup. When he did wake up finally, after the fun and games were all over, Carlisle managed to convince Gary that he, too, had been an active participant in all that had gone before, that being too drunk to remember was no excuse.

"But she's dead," Ladd had protested, as though he couldn't quite believe it Of course she was dead. Carlisle had always intended that she would be, that was the whole idea, wasn't it? But Gary Ladd was far too cowardly to value or take advantage of what he was learning, and he hadn't been smart enough to keep his mouth shut, either.

Carlisle shook himself out of what was almost a stupor and found he was sitting on the floor in front of Diana Ladd's couch. Both the boy and the old woman were tied up, although he didn't remember finishing the job. They were both watching him with strange expressions on their faces. Had he blacked out for a moment or what?

These episodes were beginning to bother him. It had happened several times of late, and it scared the shit out of him. Was he losing his mind? He'd come back to himself feeling as though he'd been asleep when he knew he hadn't been. Sometimes only seconds would have passed, sometimes whole minutes.

He inspected the knots. They were properly tied, but he had no recollection of doing it. Somehow it seemed as though his body and his mind functioned independently.

He'd have to watch that. It could be dangerous, especially in enemy territory.

"Who are you?" the boy demanded.

Carlisle looked hard at the child, recognizing some of Gary Ladd's features, but the boy had a certain toughness that had been totally lacking in his father.

"Well, son," Carlisle said in a kind tone that belied his words, "you can just think of me as retribution personified, a walking, talking Eye-for-an-Eye."

Davy Ladd frowned at the unfamiliar words, but he didn't back off.

"What does that mean?"

Andrew Carlisle laughed, giving the boy credit for raw nerve. "It means that the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, just like the Good Book says. It also means that if you don't do every single goddamned thing I say, then I use my trusty knife, and you and your mother and this old lady here are all dead meat. Do you understand that?"

Davy nodded.

The room was quiet for a moment when suddenly, sitting there, looking him directly in the eye, the old lady began what sounded like a mournful, almost whispered chant in a language Carlisle didn't recognize. He glowered at her.

"Shut up!" he ordered.

She stopped. "I'm praying," she said, speaking calmly.

"I'm asking I'itoi to help us."

That made him laugh, even though he didn't like the way she looked at him. "You go right ahead, then. If you think some kind of Indian mumbo-jumbo is going to fix all this, then be my guest. But I wouldn't count on it, old woman. Not at all."

"Why did you do it?" she asked.

"Do what?"

"Why did you kill my granddaughter?"

Prosecutors and lawyers and police tend to limp around questions like that. Carlisle wasn't accustomed to such a direct approach. It caught him momentarily off guard.

"Because I felt like it," he said with a grin. "that's all the reason I needed."

A while later, Coyote followed the trail to where Cottontail was sitting. "Brother, you tricked me back there, and now I really am going to eat you up."

"Please, " said Cottontail, "don't eat me yet. I don't want to die until I have seen a jig dancer one last time. Do this for me and then you may eat to your heart's content."

"All right," said Coyote. "What do you want me to do?"

"Come with me over here," said Cottontail. "First I will plaster your eyes shut with pitch. then, when your eyes are shut, you will hear firecrackers popping. When that happens, you must dance and shout.

When the dance is over, then you may eat me."

So Cottontail plastered Coyote's eyes shut with pitch, then he led him into a cane field. When Coyote was in the middle of the field, Cottontail set fire to it. Soon the cane started crackling and popping.

Coyote thought these were the firecrackers Cottontail had told him about, so he began to dance and shout. Soon he began to feel the heat, but he thought he was hot because he was dancing so hard. At last, though, the fire reached him, and burned him up.

And that, my friend, is the story of the second time Cottontail tricked Coyote.

From the sound and cadence of that softly crooned chant, someone listening might have thought Rita Antone was giving voice to some ancient traditional Papago lullaby.

It included the requisite number of repetitions, the proper rhythm, but it was really a war chant, and the words were entirely new:

"Do not look at me, little Olhoni.

Do not look at me when I sing to you So this man will not know we are speaking So this evil man will think.he is winning.

"Do not look at me When I sing, little Olhoni, But listen to what I say.

This man is evil.

This man is the enemy.

This man is ohb.

Do not let this frighten you.

"Whatever happens in the battle, We must not let him win.

I am singing a war song for you, Little Olhoni. I am singing A hunter's song, a killer's song.

I am singing a song to I'itoi Asking him to help us.

Asking him to guide us in the battle So the evil ohb does not win.

"Do not look at me, little Olhoni, Do not look at me when I sing to you.

I must sing this song four times For all of nature goes in fours, But when the trouble starts, When the ohb attacks us, You must remember all the things I have said to you in this magic song.

You must listen very carefully And do exactly what I say.

If I tell you to run and hide yourself, You must run as fast as Wind Man.

Run fast and hide yourself And do not look back.

Whatever happens, little Olhoni, You must run and not look back.

"Remember it is said that Long ago I'itoi made himself a fly And hid himself in the crack.

I'itoi hid in the smallest crack When Eagle Man came searching for him.

Be like Titoi, little Olhoni.

Be like I'itoi and hide yourself In the very smallest crack.

Hide yourself somewhere And do not come out again, Do not show your face Until the battle is over.

Listen to what I sing to you, Little Olhoni. Listen to what I sing.

Be careful not to look at me But do exactly as I say."

The song ended. Rita glanced at Davy, who was looking studiously in another direction. He had listened. He was only a boy, one who had not yet killed his first coyote, but she had trained him well. He would do what he'd been told.

In the gathering twilight, Rita glanced at the clock on the mantel across the room. Seven o'clock. Fat Crack must come for her soon, because the singers were scheduled to start at nine. The very latest he could come was eight o'clock, an hour away.

One hour, she thought. Sixty minutes. If they could stay alive until Fat Crack got there, they might yet live, but deep in her heart, Rita feared otherwise. As he tied them up, she had looked into Andrew Carlisle's soul. All she saw there were the restless, angry spirits of the dead Apache warriors from Rattlesnake Skull Village. They had somehow found this Mil-gahn's soul and infected it with their evil.

Andrew Carlisle was definitely the danger the buzzards had warned her about, the evil enemy who Looks At Nothing said was both Ohb and not Ohb, Apache and not Apache. And although the process had been started, Davy was still unbaptized.

The man sat on the floor in front of her, unmoving, seemingly asleep although his eyes were open. She had heard of these kinds of Whore-Sickness trances before, although she herself had never witnessed one. She knew full well the danger.

Looking away from their captor, Rita stared over her shoulder at the basket maze hanging on the wall behind her. She remembered the ancient yucca she had harvested to find the root fiber to make it. Howi, a yucca, an old cactus, had willingly sacrificed itself that Diana Ladd might own this basket.

And, suddenly, Rita knew that Fitoi had heard her song and sent her a message even without the use of Looks At Nothing's sacred smoke. She would be like the plant that had given up its life so I'itoi's design could spread out from the center of the basket. Davy Ladd had become the center of Rita Antone's basket. She would be his red yucca root.

"Whatever you're going to do," she said softly, "the boy should not see."

Andrew Carlisle seemed startled, as though she had peered into his brain and read the secret plans written there. "Do you have a better idea?"

Rita nodded. "There's a root cellar," she said. "Off the kitchen.

Put the boy in there. I will stay with him."

"A root cellar?"

Carlisle sounded almost disbelieving. He had been worried about how to handle the growing number of hostages in case the priest showed up as well, but now here was the old lady helping out, solving the problem for him. Carlisle knew all about root cellars. There had been one in his grandmother's home, a place where he'd been left on occasion for disciplinary purposes. A root cellar would do nicely.

He rushed into the kitchen to see for himself, worried now that Diana might return before he was ready. And the old lady was absolutely right. Except for a stack of musty old boxes and a few canned goods, there was nothing else there.

Back in the living room, he grabbed the boy and carried him into the root cellar. Then he hauled the old woman to her feet and helped her shuffle along. With both prisoners safely stashed inside the room, he slammed the door shut and locked it with the old-fashioned skeleton key that was right there in the lock. For safekeeping, he put the key in his boot along with his hunting knife. Smiling to himself, Carlisle hurried back to the living room and stationed himself out of sight behind the door.

Actually, the more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea of having those first few minutes with Diana all by himself-just the two of them, one on one, sort of a honeymoon. He pulled a whetstone from his pocket and began to sharpen the blade of the hunting knife. It wasn't necessary--the blade was already sharp enough, but it gave him something to do with his hands while he waited.

The dog had already had two accidents in the priest's car between Dr. Johnston's office and the driveway. Diana was embarrassed. The vet had been right all along. She should have left Bone there overnight to recuperate.

"I'm sorry about your car, Father," she apologized.

"Don't worry about it," Father John said, driving into the yard and stopping in front of the house. "These things happen. Would you like him inside?"

Diana shook her head. "I don't think so. There's no sense taking him inside and having him be sick in there as well. If you can, take him on out to the back patio, while I work on cleaning up this mess. Ask Davy to fill his water dish with fresh water and take it out there for him."

The vet had sent the ailing Bone home on a borrowed leash. Using this, Father John coaxed the now-docile dog through a gate at the side of the house and into the backyard.

Meanwhile, Diana dealt with the lingering physical evidence of the dog's illness, removing soiled blankets from the priest's car and draping them over the wall for a quick hose down.

She was surprised that Davy wasn't waiting on the porch to greet them, but she was so busy cleaning up after the dog that the idea never quite surfaced as a conscious thought.

Leaving the windows open to let the car air out, she started into the house.

With his heart hammering in his chest, Carlisle watched the car pull into the driveway. Damn! The priest was there.

What the hell should he do now?

The man and woman in the car spoke briefly, then the priest got out, opened the door, and bent into the backseat.

What was he doing? Getting the dog? Goddamn! The dog was back, too?

What the hell kind of constitution did that dog have?

For a moment, Carlisle vacillated between following the man and staying to keep an eye on Diana Ladd. At first he couldn't understand what was going on, but then, when she pulled the blankets out of the car and turned on the hose, he realized he was getting another chance.

There was time to do both. He headed for the kitchen at a dead run.

Father John left the dog resting on the dusky patio and rose to go into the house. Seeing no sign of Rita or Davy, he stepped up to the sliding patio door, which had been left slightly ajar.

"Hello," he called. "Anybody home?"

Hearing no answer, he crossed the threshold and turned to close the door behind him just as something heavy crashed into the back of his skull.

The root-cellar door flew open. From the darkened kitchen, something heavy was thrown in with them before the door slammed shut again. Davy felt with his feet and realized it was a person lying flat on the floor, someone who didn't move when Davy touched him. At first the child was afraid it might be his mother, but finally he realized the still body belonged to Father John.

"It's the priest," he whispered to Rita.

Before locking them in, Carlisle had warned they would die if they made noise, so Davy and Nana Dahd spoke in subdued whispers.

"Try to wake him up," Rita said.

Davy moved closer to the man and nudged him, but the priest didn't stir.

His labored breathing told them he wasn't dead. "He won't wake up," Davy said.

"Keep trying," Rita told him.

Diana stepped onto the porch and turned the doorknob.

Suddenly, with no warning, the door gave way beneath her hand, yanking Diana into the house.

Before she could make a sound, before she could reach for the handle of the .45, iron fingers clamped down over her face and mouth. The razor-sharp blade of a hunting knife pressed hard against the taut skin of her throat.

"Welcome home, honey," Andrew Carlisle said. "You're late. It's not nice to keep a man with a hard-on waiting."

Diana shook her head wildly, struggling to escape, but he ground his punishing fingers deep into the tender flesh of her face. "Oh, no, you don't lady. Make one sound, and everybody dies. Starting with you."

Chapter Nineteen

OI'lTOl WENT to see Gopher Boys, who guard the gates of those who live below. "I need people to come help me," 1'itoi said. "I have people from the East and the West, from the North and the South, who will help me fight Evil Siwani. Are there any people here who will help me fight my enemy?"

"First," said Gopher Boys, "you must sing for four days to weaken your enemy. After that, come again, and we will open the gates."

Meanwhile, Evil Siwani worried about how many warriors 1'itoi would bring with him, so he sent Coyote to see.

Coyote ran to the top of Baboquivari and looked down just as Gopher Boys opened the gates. The people who would help Fitot started coming out, more and more of them all the time.

It is said that long ago, if Coyote didn't like something, he could laugh and change it. So Coyote laughed and said, "Will these people never stop coming?" Right then the hole in the earth slammed shut, and no more people came out.

Coyote ran back to tell Evil Siwani that 1'itoi was on his way with many warriors. Wherever there were people who heard about the coming battle, they were happy to join forces with I'itoi. Finally, l'itoi's warriors camped for the night just a little way from Evil Siwani's village. Fitoi called his people together.

"Whoever kills first in the morning will have first choice of the place he wants to live."

She wanted to scream, but she couldn't, not with his hand clamped over her face, crushing her cheeks and nostrils together, cutting off her ability to breathe. Carlisle had grabbed her from behind. She felt his hot breath on the back of her neck.

"Take the gun out of the holster," he ordered, "nice and easy. Hold it by the handle with your thumb and forefinger.

We're going to walk over and put it down on the table, very carefully."

Where are Davy and Rita? she wondered. Where is Father John? If he was still out behind the house, he might come in and help....

The blade of the knife pressed against her skin. "I don't want to cut you, baby. Blood's real messy for what I have in mind, but I will if I have to. Don't try me. The gun. Now!"

Faint from lack of oxygen, she thought maybe that was all he intended-strangling her, but then he eased his pincerlike pressure, allowing her to gulp desperate mouthfuls of air.

"The gun!" he repeated.

She reached for it silently, cursing Brandon Walker as she did so. He had been right, damn him. She'd never had a chance to touch the gun, to say nothing of using it. All having the gun had done was to make her stupid, to give her a false sense of security.

She removed the gun from its holster and held it as she'd been told.

With Carlisle clutching her from behind, they glided from door to table like a pair of grotesque waltzing skaters.

"That's better," he muttered once the .45 was resting on the tabletop.

"Much better. Now turn around and let me look at you."

"Where's Davy?" she asked, without turning. "What have you done with Davy and Rita?"

His voice rose menacingly. "I gave you an order, goddamnit! Turn around." He grabbed her by one shoulder and spun her toward him. The abrupt motion threw her slightly off balance. She almost fell, but he caught her by one wrist and held her upright. The knife seemed to have disappeared into thin air, but as soon as his powerful fingers closed around her wrist, Diana knew he didn't need the knife. Not really.

His hands alone were plenty strong enough.

"Where's Davy?" she asked again, trying to keep her voice steady, trying not to let it expose her rising terror.

He grinned back at her. "Where's Davy?" he mocked.

"Where do you think he is? What will you give me if I show him to you?

A kiss maybe? A piece of tail?"

Carlisle's tone was light and bantering, but Diana's wrist ached from the punishing pressure of his fingers, She knew then, with a sinking heart, that strangling wasn't it. Carlisle would never let her off that easy.

Someone seeing the frozen tableau from outside the window might have thought the man and woman to be lovers standing face to face, might have imagined them holding hands and exchanging endearments in preparation for a romantic kiss. The man was smiling. Only a glimpse of the woman's stricken face betrayed the reality of their desperate life-and-death struggle.

"Let me go!" She started to add, "You're hurting me," but she didn't.

Life with Max Cooper had taught her better than that. In an uneven contest where defeat is inevitable, she had learned to show no reaction at all, to deny her tormentor his ultimate gratification- the perceptible proof of his victim's pain.

"You know you're going to give me whatever I want, don't you?" he leered at her, relentlessly pulling her closer.

Steeling herself, she refused to shrink away from him, refused to cringe, but even as she struggled against him, she was beginning to fear the worst-Davy and Rita were dead. They had to be. If not, they would have given her some sign, some reason to hope.

"One way or another," Carlisle continued, "like it or not, I'm going to have you six ways to Sunday, little lady, so you could just as well get used to the idea, lay back and enjoy it, as they say. Now tell me, how's it going to be, hard or easy?"

She didn't respond.

"That was a joke," he said, laughing. "Didn't you get it?"

By then, their lips were almost touching. For an answer, she brought her knee up and rammed it into his groin.

Stunned, he doubled over, grabbing himself, groaning with pain.

Momentarily, he let go of her hand, giving her the chance she needed.

Dodging backward and to one side, Diana groped for the handle of the .45.

The gun was a mere three feet away, but it could just as well have been three miles. She picked it up and used both hands to pull back the hammer, but before she could aim or pull the trigger, Carlisle tackled her, slamming her hard against the wall, knocking the wind from her lungs, forcing her hand up into the empty air overhead. The gun discharged with an earsplitting roar, blasting a hole in the stucco ceiling before he knocked it from her hand and sent it whirling across the room.

"That's going to cost you, bitch!" he snarled. "That cute trick is really going to cost you."

He came after her then in a blind heat of rage, tearing the clothes from her body, sending her sprawling. They crashed to the floor together with him on top, using Diana's body to cushion his own fall.

The back of her head bounced off the Mexican tile. A kaleidoscope of lights danced before her eyes. The room swirled around her while she drowned in a sea of despair. Davy's dead, she thought. My son is dead....

By the time she could see again or breathe or move, resistance was useless. Carlisle was on her, inside her, pounding away.

Davy was still trying to waken the priest when the root cellar was rocked by the roar of gunfire. Frightened, the boy cringed against the wall. No one had to tell him what the sound meant. That terrible man, that ohb, was out there with his mother, trying to kill her. Maybe he already had.

Out in the living room, braced by Nana Dahd's secret song, it had been easy to pretend to be brave, but now cowardly tears sprang to his eyes.

"Don't let him kill my mommy, Nana Dahd," he sobbed.

"Please don't let him."

"Quiet!" Rita ordered.

Davy was startled by the harshness in Nana Dahd's voice. Never had she spoken to him so sharply. "Listen.

Come help me with the medicine basket. I can't get it out by myself."

Davy scrambled over the priest's prone form. He felt around Rita's body until he located the medicine basket still hidden beneath the ample folds of her dress. The basket was too large to slip out without first unfastening some of the buttons.

"Hurry," she urged as he struggled in the dark with the buttons and the slippery material. When the basket came free, it popped out and fell to the floor. "Find it," Rita ordered. "Take off the lid and give me the awl."

Davy groped on the floor until - he found the basket with its tight-fitting lid still securely closed. After some struggle, he finally pried open the lid and fumbled inside until his fingers closed around the awl.

"Here it is," he said.

"Good. Put it in my good hand, then come close. Hold your hands steady and as far apart as you can."

"What are you going to do?" he asked.

For an answer, she poked at the twine around his wrists with the sharp point of the awl, the same way she had poked it through thousands of strands of coiled cactus. Pulled taut, the twine cut sharply into Davy's wrists. The child yelped with pain.

"(Niet," she commanded. "Don't make a sound, Olhoni, no matter how much it hurts." He bit his lip to stifle another cry.

"Once we are free," Rita continued, "we must stand on either side of the door and be absolutely silent. When the door opens, the ohb will be there. He will expect us to be tied up just as he left us. When he does not see us, he will step into the cellar. I will try to hit him with my cast or stab him with the owij. We will have only one chance.

You must not wait to see what happens. Like I said in the song, you must run somewhere and hide."

"But what about you and my mother?" Davy whispered.

"No matter what happens, you must stay hidden until morning, until someone you know comes to find you.

Looks At Nothing sat hunched forward in the speeding tow truck as though by merely peering blindly ahead through the windshield he could somehow remove all Obstacles from their path. "How soon will we be there?" he asked.

Fat Crack was driving flat out, red lights flashing. "Fifteen minutes," he said, not daring to take his eyes from the road long enough to check his watch. "Ten if we're lucky."

For a time, there was no sound in the cab other than the wind rushing through the open windows. "We will probably have to kill him, you know," the old man said finally. "Before it's over, one of us may kill the ohb. Have you ever killed before?"

It was a startling question, asked in the same manner Looks At Nothing might have inquired about the weather, but this was no rhetorical question, and it demanded a serious answer. "No," Fat Crack replied.

"I have," Looks At Nothing continued. "Long ago. When I worked in the mines in Ajo, I accidentally killed a man, another Indian. Afterward, there was no one to help me paint my face black, no one to bring me food and water for sixteen days. That is one of the reasons I'itoi took awa my sight. If you are the one who kills the ohb, I will bring you food and water. If I do, will you bring it to me?"

As a child, Fat Crack had heard stories of how ancient Papago warriors who killed in battle were forced to remain outside their villages, purifying themselves by eating very little and by praying for sixteen days until the souls of those they killed were finally quiet. This was 1975. He was driving a two-ton tow truck, not riding a horse.

After-battle ceremonies should have been a thing of the past, but they were not. Looks At Nothing was absolutely serious, and Fat Crack could not bring himself to deny the medicine man's request.

"Yes, old man," Fat Crack replied. "If you kill the ohb, I will bring food and water."

Louella Walker left Toby's bedside long enough to use the rest room down the hall. When she returned, she touched Brandon's shoulder.

Although his eyes were wide open, he jumped as though wakened from a sound sleep. She nodded toward the door, and he followed her into the hallway.

"What is it?" he asked.

"There's a phone call for you at the nurses' station."

He seemed dazed. "A phone call? For me?" he asked vaguely.

She nodded. "Over there."

Watching him go to the phone made her heart ache.

He looked much as his father had looked years earlier the same impatient gestures, the same lean features. But Brandon was almost a stranger to her. She had expended so much energy and concentration denying what was happening to Toby that she had totally lost touch with her son.

Putting down the phone, he turned back toward her with his face contorted by anger or grief, Louella couldn't tell which. She wondered who had been on the phone. From his look, the news must have been as bad or worse than what was going on beyond the swinging door of her husband's room.

"Brandon," she said, reaching out to him. "What's wrong?"

He pushed her hand aside and shook his head. "Nothing, he said irritably. "It's work."

"Don't lie to me," Louella flared. "It isn't nothing. it must be important. I can see it in your face."

To her dismay, Brandon exploded in anger. -You're right. It is important. Terribly important, but what the hell am I supposed to do?

I can't be in two goddamned places at once!"

With her child of a husband far beyond help, Louella searched her heart for strength enough to once more be a mother to her child. "It's all right, Brandon," she said, giving his shoulder a reassuring pat. "You do what you have to. Your father and I will stay right here. We'll be fine until you get back."

As Davy's hands came free, Rita's heart overflowed with thanks to Understanding Woman for giving her granddaughter the own, for teaching Dancing Quail to be an expert with it. There was no tool Rita knew better, nothing she had held in her hands longer.

At once she reached down and went to work on the twine binding Davy's feet. It was important that he be totally free and capable of running, even if her own knots were, still securely tied.

Breathing shallowly, the priest lay still, while no sounds at all came from the rest of the house. The ominous silence filled the old woman with misgiving. She knew some of what had been done to Gina, and she hated to think- what that ho'ok, that monster, might be doing to Diana.

Whatever it was, at least Davy wouldn't see, not if he followed her directions and did as he'd been told.

The twine around Davy's legs tugged free at last. Rita turned her attention on her own bindings. With one arm in a cast, it should have been much more difficult, but her craftsman's fingers quickly learned the secrets of Andrew Carlisle's crude knots, which melted apart beneath the probing point of her awl.

With Davy quaking beside her, Rita began to pray. First she addressed Fitoi, asking that the boy and his mother both be granted strength and courage. Then she spoke to Father John's God, asking that the priest be spared from dying there on the root-cellar floor. Finally, to comfort herself as much as the boy, she took up the refrain of her song, crooning softly in the darkness.

"Remember what I say, Little Olhoni, You must run swiftly and not look back.

That is the only way to help your mother.

That is the only way to help me.

Be like I'itoi, little 01honi.

Hide in a crack and do not come out."

"Get dressed," he whispered in her ear, snapping her head back with a savage pull on her hair that loosened some of it from the roots. As tears sprang to her eyes, the ghost of an elusive memory fluttered briefly, but she couldn't capture it. It required all her mental stamina to resist the temptation to cry out. Earlier, sinking his teeth deep into the tender flesh of her breast, he had elicited one involuntary gasp of pain. She had sensed his excited, eager response.

She was grimly determined not to let it happen again.

Carlisle let go of her hair, and she fell limply back to the bed. "I said move!"

Diana had lost all sense of time. She might have been battling with him for minutes or hours or days. After his first, frenzied attack, he had dragged her from the living room to the bedroom, where he had assaulted her again.

Survival instinct warned her to obey his commands, but her body refused.

Bruised and bloodied, her flesh functioned at a level that was somehow beyond whatever further violation Andrew Carlisle could inflict.

Davy's dead. The words ran through her head like a broken record.

Davy's dead, and so is Rita. Grappling with catastrophe, Diana lost all will to carry on. Whatever happened to her no longer mattered.

Carlisle grabbed one ankle and twisted it until Diana was forced onto her back. She lay naked on the bed while he feasted his eyes on her.

He particularly admired the series of angry bruises around her swollen nipples. He congratulated himself for his self-restraint for being able to let go once he had fastened his teeth on her. He was saving the nipples for later.

He enjoyed the look of wary watchfulness in her eyes.

She must be wondering, dreading to learn what might come next. He regretted that he couldn't get it up again right that minute, but there was plenty of time. He would show her that, hard-on or not, he was still full of surprises.

Her gritty silence annoyed him. Diana Ladd was one tough cookie, but he knew she wouldn't be able to deny him forever. He'd find her weakness eventually. In the face of his carefully focused efforts, she wouldn't always keep quiet. When the agonized sounds finally escaped her lips, they would be music to his ears. You'll come around, he thought, smiling down at her.

Carlisle had begun the complicated process of subjugation. Having once established dominance, it was important to consolidate his control, to show Diana Ladd exactly who was boss.

Stepping from the foot of the bed to the side of it, he reached down and yanked ruthlessly on the exposed mound of auburn pubic hair, pulling out a handful of the stiff, curly stuff. She winced and gritted her teeth, but again she refused to cry out. Damn her! She was deliberately spoiling his fun.

He moved to the head of the bed and stood looking down at her, hoping that she'd shrink away from him and try to get away, but she lay beneath his gaze without moving, staring brazenly back at him, daring him to hit her.

And so he did, slapping her hard across the face. He smiled at the rewarding droplet of blood that appeared almost instantly at the corner of her mouth. Maybe now he'd start getting through to her. He hit her three times in all-twice openhanded and once with the back of his hand.

He didn't have to put much effort into it The blows were gratuitous, stinging slaps, administered mechanically and Andrew Carlisle hit the woman primarily for effect and without emotion, calculated more to humiliate than hurt.

for his own amusement. He hit her because she dared stare back at him.

He hit her because he could. It never occurred to him that hitting her was a tactical blunder. That thought never crossed his mind.

Diana tasted blood in her mouth where a tooth had cut through her cheek.

She focused on the salty taste, and that, combined with the teeth-rattling blows, shocked Diana out of her stunned lethargy and forced her to remember that other man who had once hit her like this, who had pulled her hair out by the roots. The sudden surge of memory galvanized her in a way Carlisle couldn't possibly have foreseen or predicted. It rekindled the spark of her old anger, relit a raging fire that lost hope had almost extinguished.

Without a word, she sat up.

"Get dressed," he ordered again, flinging a pair of shorts and a tank top in her direction. "Wear these, but no shoes.

I like my serving women dressed but barefoot."

She stared blankly at the clothing. They weren't what she'd been wearing before. Those, torn from her body in his initial fierce attack, still lay in a heap on the living room floor.

Carlisle leered at her from the doorway, savoring the marks he'd left on her sore and naked body, but she refused to turn away from him while she dressed. "Hey." he said jokingly, "except for a few stretch marks here and there, you've got a pretty good bod. Anybody ever tell you that?"

A flush of embarrassment crept up her face. She said nothing. He came over to where she sat on the edge of the bed and shoved the muzzle of the gun hard into the tender flesh of her already bruised breast.

"Don't you have any manners at all?" he demanded.

"Didn't your mother teach you that when someone pays you a compliment, you're supposed to say thank you?"

"Thank you," she murmured.

"That's better. Now, get moving. We're going to the kitchen. I want you to fix me some dinner or, better yet, breakfast. Sex always makes me hungry. How about you?"

Without answering, she started for the kitchen at once, hoping he would read defeat and submission in her every action. But Diana Ladd knew she was fighting him again, and Andrew Carlisle was far too pleased with himself to notice.

There were two sounds in the room-the priest's breathing and the mouse-like twitchings of Rita's owij picking at the twine. Davy wished Bone were there. He longed for the dog's comforting presence, but Bone was at the vet's or dead now, too, along with everybody else.

Forbidden to make a sound, Davy thought about what Rita had told him, for him to run away, to find a crack,, to hide. A crack.

He thought about cracks, about the jagged one in the lumpy plaster beside his bed. He always examined that crack in great detail when he was supposed to be taking a nap, wondering if it had grown bigger or smaller since the last time he saw it. But a fly could never hide in there.

Davy couldn't even put his thumbnail in it. Flies were bigger than that.

A crack. The verse came to him, singsong, the way he had heard it at school. "Step on a crack, and you'll break your mother's back." But that was a sidewalk crack. Again, not big enough.

There was Fat Crack, but he wasn't a crack at all. He was a person.

Then, finally, Davy remembered the cave he and Bone had found, the chimney in the mountain behind the house.

Now that he thought about it, maybe that cave wasn't a cave at all. It was a crack-a crack in the mountain. That was where he would go, where he would run to hide if he ever got a chance.

Suddenly, there were voices on the other side of the door.

Davy's heart pounded, wondering how soon the door would fly open again, how soon before he would have to make his dash for freedom.

At first, Davy heard only the man's voice, talking on and on, but then he heard another voice, that of a woman, softer and higher. Straining, he recognized his mother's voice. She wasn't dead after all.

Rita had finally managed to free herself Davy tugged at the old woman's hand, wanting to tell her the news, but she laid her fingers on his lips, warning him to silence.

Carefully they moved into position. A sliver of light had appeared under the door. They used that as a guide.

They stood on either side of the door for what seemed like forever.

Eventually, the smell of frying bacon came wafting into Davy's nose.

It was a long time since he and the Bone had shared their last tortillas. The smell of that frying bacon filled Davy's nostrils and made his mouth water. His feet itched. He needed to go to the bathroom.

Davy began to doubt that the door would ever open. He fidgeted a little, but Rita clamped her good hand down hard on his shoulder, poking him painfully with the awl in the process. After that, he stood quietly and waited.

doused the lights and parked the truck. He had kept the A hundred yards or so from the turnoff, Fat Crack lights flashing almost the entire way, but as they neared the house, he turned off everything, flashers and headlights included.

"Now what?" he asked, shutting down the ignition and parking the truck just beyond a curve that concealed the house from view.

"We go down there and try to take him by surprise."

"Good luck," Fat Crack returned. "What about the dog?"

"Dog?"

"Rita has a huge dog named Oh'o. When I was here earlier, he almost bit my leg off."

"He must be inside," Looks At Nothing said.

Right, Fat Crack thought. Sure he is. Famous last words.

With a disgusted shake of his head, the younger man hurried around to the passenger side and helped Looks At Nothing climb down. Moving as quietly as possible, they headed for the driveway that led down to the house. The dark made no difference to the blind medicine man, but when they stepped off the pavement, Fat Crack had some difficulty negotiating the rocky terrain.

They'd gone only a few steps when Fat Crack saw, a mile or so away, the approaching headlights of another vehicle.

That other car worried him. What if Looks At Nothing was wrong? What if the ohb was only now coming to the house, only now beginning his attack? If he drove up right then, they would be trapped in the open driveway with no means of retreat or defense.

"I have my stick," the old man was saying. "What will you use for a weapon?"

"A rock, I guess," Fat Crack replied. "I don't see any thing else."

"Good," Looks At Nothing said. "Get one."

Fat Crack was bent over picking one up when he heard the dog. This time there was no warning bark, only a hair-raising, low-throated growl. The night was black, and Bone was a black and brown dog, totally invisible to the expecting to fend off an all-out attack.

Instead, Looks At naked eye. Fat Crack straightened up and looked around, Nothing spoke forcefully into the darkness.

"Oh'o, ihab!" the medicine man commanded. "Bone, here!"

To Fat Crack's astonishment, the dog obeyed at once, materializing out of the brush beside the road. He went directly to the old man, tail lowered and wagging tentatively.

Preoccupied with the dog, they failed to notice the other car again until it braked at the head of the drive. Too late Fat Crack tugged at Looks At Nothing's arm, trying to pull him down the hill toward the meager covet of a mesquite tree.

All the way from Tucsone, Brandon had cursed himself for being in his mother's car instead of the Galaxy, for being cut off from all communications. If only he had talked to Maddern again, they might have coordinated some kind of game plan. As it was, the only thing he'd thought to tell Hank was for him to call Diana and warn her.

He reached down and checked the .38 Smith & Wesson Special in his ankle holster. Police officers were required to be armed at all times.

Ankle holsters were the only feasible choice when wearing ordinary clothing.

Brandon's car sped over the top of the rise and roared down the long canyon road. Ahead and to the right, he could see lights glowing peacefully in the windows of Diana Ladd's solitary house. Maybe he and Farrell were pushing panic buttons for no good reason.

Walker slowed and switched on his turn signal. As his tires dropped off the hard surface onto the dirt driveway, the headlights caught two shadowy figures dodging into the underbrush ahead of him. Walker felt a rush of adrenaline.

He had surprised them, caught them in the act.

He jammed on the brakes, cutting the motor, turning off the lights.

Expecting gunfire, he ducked down on the seat and drew his weapon.

Heart pounding, he lay there waiting, with the desert night still and expectant around him.

Two of them, he thought. So who had that bastard Carlisle brought along with him? Whoever it was, Brandon thought, they're going to get more than they bargained for. Not only was he here, Geet Farrell was on his way with plenty of reinforcements. In addition, there was that godawful dog.

If those two jokers ran into Bone out there in the dark somewhere, they'd have yet another rude awakening.

Carlisle scrounged through the refrigerator and came i away with a pound of bacon and half a dozen eggs, which he handed over to Diana.

"Bacon, crisp. Eggs, over easy.

Toast. Orange juice and coffee. Think you can handle that, honey?

You know, if you're a good-enough cook, maybe I'll keep you around awhile. We'll play house, just the two of us---cooking and fucking-and not necessarily in that order. What do you think of that?"

Diana said nothing. Carlisle, enamored with the sound of his own voice, didn't notice. While he continued with his rambling monologue, Diana gathered what she needed for cooking-frying pan, salt and pepper shakers, the spatula.

What would happen if she turned on the gas in the oven and didn't light it? Would enough propane accumulate to cause an explosion, or would the oven just come on eventually when the gas seeped out far enough to reach the pilot lights on top of the stove? Anything was worth a try.

Diana turned on the control.

She worked mechanically, trying not to think about Rita and Davy. That would divert her, take her mind away from the problem. She put a few pieces of bacon into the frying pan, started the fire under it, and loaded coffee and water into the percolator.

Still talking, Carlisle had meandered into a long selfpitying dissertation about prison life. "Do you know what they do to people like me in places like that?" he was saying. "Do you have any idea?

Answer me when I speak to YOU."

"No," she said, "I have no idea."

A spatter of hot fat leaped out of the frying pan as she turned the bacon, stinging Diana's wrist. She jumped back, but the pain on her bare wrist gave her the beginning glimmer of an idea. Quickly, she dumped the rest of the pound of bacon into the frying pan and turned up the heat.

"How do you like your eggs?" she asked, "I already told you. Over easy, same as I like my women.

Get it?" He laughed. "Pay attention, girl. You pay attention to everything I say, and maybe I'll let you hang around a little longer."

She nodded. knowing it was a lie, and stirred the sizzling bacon, willing the fat to render out of it, welcoming the painful spatters that found their way to the bare skin of her arm and wrist.

"That was Gary's problem, you know," he continued off handedly. "He didn't pay attention. That's why I had to get rid of him."

Trying to shut him out, Diana almost missed Carlisle's throw-away admission. Then, when she did understand, the what of it if not the how, she fought off the temptation to react. It was still too soon.

Ducking down on the seat to make himself less of a target, Brandon waited for the bark from Bone that would signal the dog's attack or at least alert those in the house to their danger. The expected bark never came.

"Damn," Walker muttered. The dog was probably inside the house, sleeping on the job. The detective lay there and tried to strategize.

He had to assume that both his opponents were armed and dangerous.

Two-to-one odds aren't very good, especially for a cop dealing with crooks who may not care that much if they live or die.

He considered honking the horn to alert the people in the house of the impending danger, but that might do more harm than good. If Diana came outside to see what was going on, she might possibly fall into the wrong hands.

What if the crooks took off with her before help arrived?

Finally, Walker hit on the only strategy that seemed feasible. He would attempt to make his way to the house undetected. Once inside, he and Diana could probably hold the bad guys off long enough for help to arrive and catch them in a cross fire. Once the decision was made, Walker moved to put it into action.

Closing his eyes so the overhead light wouldn't rob him of night vision, he eased open the passenger door and quickly dropped to the ground. The door closed behind him with a dull thud, and he scuttled silently off into the desert. swinging wide and hoping to make it to the side of the house before Carlisle and his pal realized what he was up to.

The bacon turned to hard, brittle curls in the pan, but an oblivious Andrew Carlisle continued talking. "There are tools for rape, you see, things you wouldn't normally think about, but in prison you have to use whatever's handy.

You'd be surprised what people get off on. This gun, for instance.

What would you think if I crammed that all the way up inside you?

Would it make you come? The metal gun sight might bother you a little.

don't you think?"

Diana's stomach lurched with dread, and the hand holding the wooden spatula trembled uncontrollably.

His voice rose in pitch. "Look at me when I speak to you. I asked you a simple question. What would you think of it?"

She looked. He was grinning at her, holding the .45, fondling it, sensually stroking the long barrel with his fingertips. I wouldn't like it," she said.

"Wouldn't you?" he asked, eyeing her speculatively. "I think you would. Maybe after I eat, we could have a lesson.

I'll show you how it works right here on the kitchen table.

Mr. Colt has a permanent hard-on for you. I think he'd enjoy it."

He paused, as if waiting for Diana to comment. When she didn't, he bent over and pulled something out of the top of his boot. She saw him out of the corner of her eye and trembled to think that he had retrieved his knife, which he would use on her as well, but when he straightened up, he wasn't holding the knife at all. Between his fingers was a key-a familiar, old-fashioned skeleton key.

"Or maybe, little Mama," he added with a malicious grin "since you don't think you'd like it, maybe I should get that kid of yours out here and cram it down his throat or maybe up his ass a couple of inches. How much could he take? How much could you? What would you do then.

Diana? Would you ask me to stop? Would you beg me to do it to you instead of him? Would you crawl on your hands and knees on the floor and kiss my feet and beg?"

A shock of recognition sent needles and pins through her hands and feet.

Davy wasn't dead after all. He was alive and in the root cellar.

There was still hope, still a chance.

Suddenly, frowning, Carlisle stood up. "Hey, wait a minute, aren't you burning the bacon?"

Putting the key down on the table and retrieving the gun, he started toward the stove. When he was three steps away, Diana grabbed the overheated handle of the frying pan and heaved it full in his face.

Pieces of blackened bacon clung to his skin wherever they landed. He screamed as fiery-hot fat burned through his clothing, sealing it to his skin. Diana dodged to one side as the gun roared to life, shattering the window behind her.

Walker, riveted by both the ungodly scream and the gunfire, knew his worst nightmare had come true. Somehow his opponents had made their way inside and were firing guns. Someone was hit and dying.

Forgetting about cover, Walker charged toward the house himself, circling around the thicket of gigantic prickly pear and coming up on the front porch from the opposite direction. He tried the door handle and found it locked. He tried kicking it, but the stout old door didn't give way.

The windows all had screens. From inside the house, Walker heard the sounds of an ongoing battle, but off to the side of the porch, the detective caught sight of movement.

"Stop," he shouted, but two shadowy figures simply disappeared into the darkness beyond the porch. Two of them, he thought. Some inside and at least two still out here.

How the hell many of them are there? Walker wondered grimly.

In silent pursuit, he moved sideways off the porch. At the side of the house, he encountered only a massive wall with a tall wooden gate. He tried the gate, but it appeared to be latched from the inside.

Through a nightmare of searing pain, Andrew Carli tried to wipe the clinging grease from his face and He could see nothing. I'm blind! he thought furiously.

bitch blinded me!

He slipped on the greasy floor and crashed into the table, banging it into the wall before managing to right himself With superhuman effort, he pulled himself above the terrible pain.

"I'll kill you," he whispered hoarsely. "So help me God, bitch, I'll kill you if it's the last thing I do!

Diana watched in horror as Carlisle attempted to wipe the blistering grease from his skin and eyes. Pieces of his face seemed to melt away with his hand, dissolving like the water-soaked Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz.

"I'll kill you," Carlisle muttered over and over. It was a chant and incantation. "I'll kill you."

Somehow he still held Diana's .45. Frozen with fear, Diana stared at the weapon, waiting for the death-dealing explosion that would end her life, but for some strange reason Carlisle didn't seem to be pointing it at her. He turned around and around, like a child playing blindman's bluff.

"Where are you, bitch?" he demanded. Only then did Diana realize that he couldn't see. The bacon grease had blinded him.

Holding her breath for fear the sound might betray her whereabouts, Diana glanced around the room, looking for an escape hatch or place to bide. On the floor beside the up-ended table. she spied the fallen key to the root cellar.

As soon as she saw it, she dived for it, even though Carlisle was between her and the key.

Hearing movement, Carlisle lunged in her direction.

They collided in midair and crashed to the floor together.

The force of the blow knocked the .45 from Carlisle's hand.

It spun across the floor, coming to rest at the base of the sink. Of the two, he was far stronger, but being able to see gave Diana a slight advantage. Twisting away, she eluded his grasp and retrieved the key.

She scrambled toward the root-cellar door and was almost there when his powerful fingers clamped shut around her ankles.

She kicked at his fingers, but her bare feet had no effect on the hands inexorably dragging her away from the door.

She fought him desperately but despairingly, realizing she was no match for him, that it was only a matter of time.

Dimly, Diana became aware of Bone's frantic scratching on the sliding glass door. If only she could let him into the house. Maybe, with the dog's help ...

Suddenly, for the barest moment, Carlisle let go of her.

She scrambled away from him, and this time managed to shove the key into the lock before he grabbed hold of her again. She tried to push him away only to have a smarting pain shoot across her hand and up her arm.

Shocked, Diana looked at her arm and hand as blood spurted out Carlisle had his knife again. This time she knew he would kill her with it.

There would be no escape.

Stymied by the latched gate, Brandon Walker dropped back and then vaulted over the barrier, which seemed to be covered by a layer of wet blankets. Inside the yard, he landed on something soft and yielding, something human.

His added weight brought the other man down. They fell to the ground as one and grappled there briefly until he glimpsed Fat Crack's face in the pale starlight.

"Fat Crack!" Walker exclaimed. "What the..."

"It's the detective," Fat Crack said simultaneously.

From deeper in the yard came Looks At Nothing's commanding voice. "We must hurry! Come," he ordered.

Fat Crack let go at once, and they both struggled to their feet. In the melee, Walker had dropped his .38 Special.

They wasted precious seconds searching for it. At last Fat Crack found it and gave it back.

"If you're out here," Brandon whispered, "who's in there?"

"The ahb," Fat Crack answered. "It's the ohb."

Faced with her bloodied arm and inarguable evidence of her own mortality, Diana resolved that even if she died, somehow her son would live. Once more Carlisle's fingers locked onto her ankle. Once more he dragged her toward him and toward the raised knife heeld above his head, waiting to plunge it into her.

She searched desperately for something to hold onto, something to give her purchase on the slippery floor. Suddenly, her flailing hands encountered heat-the still fiery hot frying pan. Ignoring the blistering handle, she picked it up and drove it with all her strength toward Andrew Carlisle's forehead.

He couldn't see it, but Carlisle felt the superheated frying pan whizzing toward him. He drew back in panic, holding up his. arms in an attempt to ward off the blow. The frying pan missed his skull but struck his hand, knocking the knife away from him. While he groped blindly for it, he heard her scrabbling away from him again.

Weaponless except for his bare hands, he crawled after her.

Partway across the room, something rushed past him, making for the outside door. He turned to it as if to follow.

The momentary respite gave Diana one more chance.

This time she made it all the way to the root-cellar door.

Still on her knees, she reached up and turned the key in the lock.

Before she could move out of the way, the door banged open, knocking her backward into the wall.

At the sound of the second gunshot, Davy almost burst into tears. Once more Rita shushed him. "Ready now," she whispered. "When the key turns, open the door and run."

"I'll kill you," the man was saying over and over outside the door.

"I'll kill you."

Davy's heart leaped to his throat. His mother was still alive. Would she be when the door opened? He crossed his fingers and tried to remember how to pray.

The key filled the lock. The tiny keyhole-shaped patch of light disappeared, but the key didn't turn. The door didn't open.

Again they waited. Davy heard another sound. Bone, scratching frantically at the back door, wanting to be let in. Oh'o was home, but he couldn't get inside to help them.

And then, miraculously, the key did turn. Davy shoved the door with all his might, flung it open, and dashed outside. In the middle of the room, he encountered a man-at least it looked like a man---crawling toward him on his hands and knees. This terrible apparition, its face a misshapen mass of bloodied blisters, must be the ohb.

Pausing long enough for only one look at that terrifying visage, Davy turned and raced for the sliding glass door.

The pain was terrible, beyond anything he could have imagined, but what was worse, Carlisle feared Diana Ladd had escaped. He started toward the door.

"Where are you, bitch?"

"Here," Diana responded from someplace else in the room. "I'm behind you." To decoy Davy's safe escape, she wanted Carlisle's attention focused solely on her.

'Where?"

,:Right here," she answered again, and it sounded as though she was laughing at him.

Doggedly, like an unstoppable monster from an old B-grade movie, Andrew Carlisle whirled and came crawling toward her, but before he made any progress, something heavy landed on his back. Horrified, he felt a dog's inch-long canines plunge into the back of his neck.

Too stunned to move and trying to stem the flow of blood from her own arm, Diana could do nothing but watch.

The dog was everywhere at once, huge jaws snapping. He leaped up and backward and sideways, always staying just out of the man's reach.

Finally, Bones's jaws closed over Carlisle's wrist.

While the man howled in inhuman rage, the dog shook his massive head.

Bones crunched in Carlisle's mangled wrist. Tendons and nerves snapped like so many broken rubber bands.

Arm upraised, owij in hand, Rita emerged from the root cellar ready to do battle. She, too, stood transfixed, watching the man struggle to escape the attacking dog. Trying to save his mangled wrist, Carlisle attempted one last kick. The dog let go of the hand and pounced on the foot. As the dog's jaws closed once more, Carlisle folded himself into a fetal position.

Rita remained where she was for a moment, surveying the room, while Carlisle sobbed brokenly. "Get the dog off me. Please, get him off."

The Indian woman pocketed her owij. It was no longer needed. Across the room, she saw both the knife and the gun. She hurried at once to retrieve them. Only when she had them both firmly in her possession did she speak to the dog.

"Oh'o, ihab." The dog came to her side at once, wagging his tail, waiting to be petted. "Good gogs," she crooned, patting his shaggy head. "It's over."

Rita turned from the dog and placed the gun in Diana's lap. "Here," she said. "If you wish to shoot him, now's your chance. Do it quickly."

Diana looked from Rita to the stricken form of Andrew Carlisle, who lay sobbing on the floor in a widening pool of his own urine. Finally, Diana looked down at the gun and shook her head.

"No," she said. "I don't have to now. It wouldn't be self-defense."

A radiant smile suffused Rita's weathered old face.

"Good," she said. 'Titoi would be proud of you."

Behind them, Brandon Walker burst into the room. Bone turned to fend off this new attack, but before he could, the oven door blew its hinges with a resounding thump, knocking the dog to the floor.

Crying and laughing both, Diana knelt beside Bone and cradled his massive head in her lap. The dog looked up at her gratefully and thumped his long tail on the floor. He wasn't hurt, but it had been a hard day for a dog. He didn't want to get up.

Detective Farrell and Myrna Louise arrived just ahead of a phalanx of police cars dispatched by Hank Maddern at the Pima County Sheriff's Department. For the first time in her life, she refused Andrew's summons when he asked for her. Stone-faced and without getting out of the car, Myrna Louise watched while her son was loaded into a waiting ambulance. Ironically, he was taken first. Of all the injuries, his were deemed the most serious.

But not serious enough, Myrna Louise thought bitterly, not nearly serious enough. If she'd been lucky-and she had never been lucky where her son was concerned Andrew would have died. Someone would have put a bullet through his wretched head and taken him out of his misery, the way they used to do with rabid dogs.

After that, another stretcher came out of the house with someone strapped to it. The old Indian woman-what was her name again-limped heavily along beside the stretcher and climbed into the waiting ambulance to ride to the hospital, although she herself didn't seem to be hurt.

A few minutes later, Myrna Louise recognized Diana Ladd. She, too, was carried past the detective's car to an ambulance, with a man wailing along beside her. Thank God they weren't dead, Myrna Louise thought gratefully. She never could have lived with herself if that had happened.

Myrna Louise sat there quietly, knowing that eventually it would be her turn to answer questions. What would she say about Andrew when they asked her? Tell the truth, she thought. And what would happen when the neighbors on Weber Drive found out that Andrew Carlisle was her son?

Would they still speak to her?

Myrna Louise sighed. She could always move again, she supposed. She'd done it before. Maybe she'd get herself one of those U-Hauls. What did they call that, "an adventure In moving"? She'd drive herself far away and start over again, somewhere where nobody knew her.

But first, she thought, she'd have to get herself a driver's license, and maybe even a pair of glasses.

Davy sat in the crack and waited. That's what he would call it from now on, Fitoi's crack. He wondered how it would feel to be a fly and to go back down to the house.

He would be able to see what was happening, but nobody would know he was there. He wanted to know and yet he didn't. He was afraid to know.

His mother was still alive when he ran past her, and so was Nana Dahd, but were they still? He couldn't tell.

Bone had wanted to come with him, but he had ordered the dog to stay.

Now, he wished he hadn't. Why didn't Bone come looking for him? Why didn't someone else?

While he watched, a string of cop cars came streaming down the canyon road, lights flashing. It- looked like a parade, except it wasn't.

There were no floats, no marching bands. The police cars were all going to his house. What would they find there? Would his mother still be alive?

When he first reached the cleft in the rock, he was panting, out of breath, afraid that the terrible man was right behind him. Now, as more time passed, he wondered who would come for him. Nana Dahd had been very specific about that. She had told him he must wait until morning, wait for someone he knew.

He shifted his body. The sharp rocks behind his back were growing uncomfortable. What if they forgot all about him and nobody came?

Maybe he'd end up living there forever. How long was forever, anyway?

Three more sets of flashing lights came down the winding road and pulled in at the driveway. How many police cars did it take? he wondered.

What was happening? He kept thinking his mother would come for him or Rita, but the longer it went without anyone coming, the more he was afraid they were dead.

What happened to you after you were dead? That was one of the things he was supposed to talk about with Father john the next time he saw him.

Davy thought about Father John lying there so still on the root-cellar floor. and he thought about what the priest had said as they were leaving to take Bone to the vet.

How had that Prayer gone? Davy squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated, trying to remember the exact words.

"In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."

The Father he could understand, and he could understand the Son, but who was the Holy Ghost? Maybe, thought Davy, the Holy Ghost was I,itoi. So he bowed his head, just as he had seen Rita do, just like Father John, and he said a prayer for his mother, for Nana Dahd, for Father john, and also for Oh'o. He finished by praying, "in the name of the Father, Of the Son, and of I'itoi. Amen." It sounded a little different, but Davy was sure it meant the same thing.

Just then, as he finished the prayer, he heard a rock go scrabbling down the face of the cliff. He drew back inside the rocky cleft, making himself as small as possible, holding his breath, afraid that somehow the ohb had managed to escape and was coming after him.

He listened. Clearly now, he could hear footsteps coming closer and closer, as though whoever was coming knew the path to the crack, as though they knew all about Davy's secret hiding place.

"Olhoni?" Someone was calling his name, his Indian name, but it wasn't Nana Dahd. Who could it be then?

No one else called him that. The voice wasn't familiar, and Nana Dahd had given him strict orders to wait for someone he knew.

Then, suddenly, Bone thrust his spiked head into the entrance to the crack and covered the boy's face with wet, slobbery kisses. Behind the dog, a man's face peered in the small opening.

"Olhoni? Are you in there?"

Weak with relief, Davy let his breath out. It was Fat Crack.

"Hell'u," he answered. "Yes."

"Come on, boy," the Indian said, gently moving the dog aside. "An old man and I are waiting to take you to the hospital."

Hospital? The word made Davy's heart hurt. "Is my mother all right?" he asked. "Is Nana dead?"

"Your mother is hurt, but not bad," the Indian said quietly. "Rita went with Father John. Come on. Everyone will be better once they know you are safe."

As soon as Davy was outside the cave, Bone careened around him in ecstatically happy circles, but the boy was not ready to play. This was still far too serious. What he had lived through that day was anything but a game.

"What about the ohb?" Davy asked. "Is he dead?"

"No, nawoj," Fat Crack replied. "Me ohb isn't dead, but he didn't win.

He's in the hospital, too. Your dog almost bit his hand off. Rita wouldn't let him."

"She should have," Davy said angrily. "What will happen to him now?"

Fat Crack shrugged. "The Mil-gahn will send him back to the Mil-gahn jail, I guess."

"Will he get out again?" Davy asked.

"Who knows?" Fat Crack said, shaking his head. "That, Olhoni, is up to the Mil-gahn, isn't it."

Chapter Twenty

WANTING TO BE the first to kill, Rattlesnake crept close to Evil Siwani's camp, so the next ‘morning, when the battle started, Rattlesnake killed first, and he chose the place that is now called Rattlesnake House.

When the battle was finally over, Evil Siwani was dead, and his house and all his people had been destroyed.

SO Fitoi told the warriors who had helped him that they should choose where they wanted to live. Some people wanted to be farmers, and they went to live by the river.

Since then they have been called Akimel O'othham, or the River People.

Some of the warriors were hunters, so they went to live near Waw Giwulk, which means Constricted Rock and which the Mil-gahn call Baboquivari.

There they found plenty of mule deer to hunt and lots of other good food to eat. the people who stayed there have been called Tohono O'othharn, or the Desert People.

And that is the story of how the Desert People emerged from the center of the earth to help Titoi battle the Evil Siwani, and how they came to live here in this desert country where, nawoj, my friend. they still continue to live even to this day.

The feast was well under way. In four days' time, word had got around the reservation that Rita Antone's luck had changed for the better.

The ritual singing had been well attended, and the feast was a rousing success. The expense was more than Rita alone could have managed, but someone else was helping to defray the cost. Eduardo Jose, the bootlegger from Ahngarn, whose grandson, Lucky One, had recently been released from the Pinal County Jail, was more than happy to help out.

Rita had spent two days sitting at Father John's bedside at St. Mary's Hospital. Now, she sat at the head of the long oilcloth-covered table in the feast house at Sells. Davy, his face still bearing telltale traces of red chili, sat on one side of her. Diana Ladd sat on the other.

Shyly, a girl of sixteen or seventeen sidled up to Rita's chair, hanging back a moment before daring to say what she had come to say.

"I remember you," she said almost in a whisper. "You used to make us eat our vegetables."

Instantly, Davy's ears perked up. "Wait a minute. You, too? I thought I was the only one."

Rita laughed. "No," she said. "I try to get all children to do that.

Gordon taught me to eat my vegetables when I was sick in California."

"Gordon your son?" Davy asked.

"No. Gordon my husband. I was very sick, and he and Mrs. Bailey, the Mil-gahn lady he worked for, told me that if I ate all my vegetables, it would make me better, and it worked. I'm still here, aren't I?"

They all laughed at that, even Diana.

In four days, that was the first time Davy had heard his mother laugh, so maybe now she would be all right, just like Detective Walker said.

He had told Davy it would take time, that the ohb, Carlisle, had hurt her badly, but that if they were very careful of her, she would be okay.

The boy looked around, noticing for the first time that the men had all disappeared.

"Where's Fat Crack?" he asked.

Rita shrugged. "Out by the truck, I guess."

Davy promptly set off to find him.

The four men gathered in an informal group around the hood of Fat Crack's tow truck. The medicine man tried to explain Whore Sickness to the detective. He told him it was Staying Sickness and not the bacon grease that had caused Andrew Carlisle's blindness. This was all quite strange to Brandon Walker, although he tried to listen with an open mind.

No one was surprised when Looks At Nothing opened his leather pouch and pulled out one of his cigarettes. Walker watched with renewed amazement as once again the old man flicked open his Zippo lighter and unerringly lit the cigarette.

Upon hearing Brandon would be driving the boy and the two women out to the reservation for the baptism feast, Hank Maddern had warned his friend about not being sucked into some strange kind of peyote ritual.

Brandon had quickly put Hank's worries to rest.

"Believe me," he said. "Tobacco is the only thing in that old man's cigarettes, and it's not very damn good tobacco, either."

Looks At Nothing took a deep drag, said, "Nawcj," and then passed it along to Father John. The priest had spent three full days in the hospital being treated for a concussion, but he had convinced the doctor that he had to be dismissed in time to go to a feast in Sells on Friday.

The doctor had grumbled, but in the end he had let the old man have his way.

The cigarette passed from the priest to Fat Crack to the detective, and back, at last, to the medicine man. Far to the west, a thundercloud rose over the desert. Periodically, lightning lit up the cloud's billowing interior, but the rains had not yet come. The California river toads still slept quietly in their hardened mud beds.

"He is a good boy," Looks At Nothing said, "but I am worried about one thing."

"What's that?" Father John asked.

He was sure it would be some complaint that the other part of the bargain, the Mil-gahn baptism, was going too slowly, but he had only just got out of the hospital that very afternoon. Davy Ladd was scheduled to be baptized during the eleven o'clock mass at San Xavier the day after tomorrow. What more did the old man want?

But Looks At Nothing's objection had nothing to do with that. "Edagith Gohk Je'e," he said, calling Davy by his new Indian name. "One With Two Mothers, this boy, has too many mothers and not enough fathers.

"There are four of us," Looks At Nothing continued, "and all nature goes 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."

As soon as Brandon heard the words, he knew Looks At Nothing was right.

No matter how much Rita Antone and Diana Ladd loved Davy, they could not be his father.

A lump caught in Brandon Walker's throat as he listened.

Fatherless himself for three days now, Brandon Walker felt for Davy Ladd almost as much as he hurt for himself.

It grew quiet in the circle. No one said aloud that he would or wouldn not accept the assignment. That was a foregone conclusion. The decision had been made for them long before they were asked. Looks At Nothing had decreed it so, and that was the way it would be.

Davy himself came running up just then. "What are you guys doing?" he demanded. "I looked around the feast house, and you were all gone."

"We were talking," Brandon Walker said.

"What about?"

"You.

“About me? What were you saying?"

"That somebody needs to take you into Tucson for a haircut," Brandon said, affectionately ruffling Davy's hair, but being careful about the stitches.

"You mean it?" Davy asked. "Honest? To a real barber?"

"That's right," Brandon Walker replied with a slight grin.

"You see, Davy, mothers don't give crew cuts. Barbers do."