Hour of the Hunter

Chapter 15

Diana ushered Brandon into the house and showed him to a seat on the couch. The detective still worried about the gun.

“You shouldn’t do this, you know,” he said.

“Do what, wear a gun, protect myself? Why not?”

“For one thing, if somebody gets shot with that thing, chances are it won’t be Andrew Carlisle. In an armed confrontation with crooks, amateurs tend to shoot themselves, not the other way around. For another, it’s 1975. We’re not still living in the Wild West, you know.”

“Somebody forgot to tell the woman at Picacho Peak,” Diana returned.

“You know about that, too?”

“The reservation grapevine is pretty thorough.”

“And fast. Andrew Carlisle was the first thing I was coming to tell you, and Picacho Peak was the second. I’ve just come from there. I met with the detective on that case. His name’s Farrell, Detective G. T. Farrell from Pinal County. He’s a real pro. I’ve already pointed him in Carlisle’s direction.”

“I suppose that’s only fair,” Diana responded sarcastically, “since you’re the one who helped Carlisle get off in the first place.”

Diana Ladd’s remark cut through Brandon Walker’s usually even-tempered demeanor. “I didn’t help him, goddammit!” Brandon Walker snapped. The hard edge of anger in his voice surprised them both.

“How old were you seven years ago?” he demanded roughly.

“Twenty-four.”

“I was a little older than that, but I wasn’t much wiser. When I told you to trust the system, I meant it, because I still did, too. I was young and idealistic and ignorant. I thought being a cop was one way to save the world. So get off your cross, Diana. You weren’t the only one who got screwed. So did I.”

Diana Ladd was taken aback by this outburst. In the brief silence that followed, Davy and Bone edged back into the room.

“I’m hot,” the boy said. “Can I have something to drink?”

His request offered Diana an escape from Brandon Walker’s unexpected anger. “Sure,” she said lightly, getting up. “The tea should be ready by now. Would you like some, Detective Walker?”

He nodded. “That’ll be fine.”

After she left the room, Walker sat there shaking his head, ashamed of himself for lashing out at her. What she’d said hadn’t been any worse than what he’d told himself time and again during the intervening years. Diana Ladd didn’t have a corner on the Let’s-beat-up-Brandon-Walker market. He could do a pretty damn good job of that all by himself.

With effort, the detective turned his attention to the boy who sat on the floor absently petting the dog. Davy seemed decidedly less friendly than he had been the day before. Wondering why, Brandon made a stab at conversation. “How’s the head?” he asked.

“It’s okay, I guess,” Davy muttered.

“Does it still hurt?”

“Not much. Will my hair grow back? Where they shaved it, I mean.”

“It’ll take a few weeks, but it’ll grow. Have the barber give you a crew cut. It won’t show so much then.”

“Mom cuts my hair,” Davy said. “To save money. I don’t think she knows how to do crew cuts.”

Brandon glanced toward the swinging kitchen door. It seemed to be taking Diana an inordinately long time to bring the tea.

“Did you know my daddy?” Davy asked.

It was a jarring change of subject. “No,” Walker replied. “I never met him.”

“Was my father a killer?”

Brandon found the unvarnished directness of the boy’s questions unnerving. “Why are you asking me?” he hedged.

“Everybody says my daddy was a killer,” Davy answered matter-of-factly. “They call me Killer’s Child. I want to know what happened to him. I’m six. That’s old enough to know what really happened.”

Brandon Walker realized too late that he’d been sucked into an emotional mine field. “What did your mother tell you?” he asked.

“That my daddy was afraid he was going to get into trouble about Gina Antone, and so he killed himself.”

“That’s right.” At least Diana had told her son that much.

“Mom said you were the detective. Did you arrest him?”

“No,” Brandon said. “By the time I got to the house, your father was already gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Out to the desert.”

“To kill himself? That’s where he did it, isn’t it? In the desert?”

“Yes.”

Davy turned his immense blue eyes full on the detective’s face. “Why didn’t you get there sooner?” he demanded. “Why didn’t you hurry and stop him? That way, I could have met him before he died. I could have talked to him just once.”

Your father was a scumbag, Walker wanted to say, looking at the wide-eyed boy. Garrison Ladd didn’t deserve a son like you. Instead, he said, “I did the best I could, Davy. We all did.”

It is said that long ago in a small village lived a very beautiful young woman who was the daughter of a powerful medicine man. She was so beautiful that all the young men of the village liked to look at her. This made her father so angry that he made her stay in the house. If she went out, he scolded her. Whenever he found the young men of the village trying to spy on her, he scolded them, too.

In those days, Wind Man spent much of his time in that same village. One day, the young men of the village went to Wind Man and teased him and said that since he was strong enough and clever enough, he should catch the girl when she came out to get water and take her up in the air so they could all see her. At first Wind Man refused, saying that it would be wrong to do this and make her father angry, but the young men begged and pleaded, and at last that is what happened.

When the girl came out of her house to get water, all the young men in the village were watching. Holding her in his arms, Wind Man took her high up into the air, very gently carrying her around and around. Her long hair was loosened. It fell down and wrapped itself around her until it touched the ground. Then it caught up the nearby leaves and dust and carried them back into the air with her.

And that is the story of the very first Whirlwind there ever was on the desert.

Brandon Walker remembered the whirlwinds.

A fierce wind was kicking up a line of them and propelling them across the desert floor as he drove south toward Topawa for the second time. The first trip had been the day before to notify the victim’s grandmother that Gina Antone was dead. The second time he returned to Topawa, he was looking for Gina’s killer.

Walker was called in on the case as soon as it was determined that the water hole in which the body had been found was in the county rather than on reservation land. A dead Indian wasn’t high on Sheriff DuShane’s list of priorities. As a result, Walker wasn’t assigned in a very timely fashion.

The body was discovered by a pair of city-slicker hunters out shooting coyotes mostly for the hell of it, and only incidentally for the bounty paid for each stinking coyote carcass. The two men found the girl floating facedown in the muddy pond and had called the sheriff’s office to report it only after getting back to town. Walker theorized that some of their hunting may have been on reservation land and they hadn’t wanted to call attention to either the body or themselves until after the dead coyotes were well away from Papago boundaries.

A deputy was dispatched to the scene. Not realizing that the fence with the cattle guard took him onto the reservation and the second took him back off, he left the girl where he found her and reported that it was up to the Papago Tribal Police. Only after all jurisdictional dust settled was Brandon Walker assigned the case. By then, someone had already collected the body. He went to the scene accompanied by a tribal officer named Tony Listo and discovered the crime scene area so picked-over that there was nothing left to find.

Tony pointed Brandon in the direction of the charco, but he himself was reluctant to leave his pickup. “This is a bad place,” he said. “People don’t like to come here.”

That hadn’t stopped the great white hunters, Walker thought. “You mean Indians don’t like to come here?”

“Yes,” Listo nodded. “They sure don’t.”

“You’re saying the girl wouldn’t have come here on her own?” Brandon Walker asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” Listo replied.

This short exchange happened prior to the autopsy, while speculation was still rife that the young woman was nothing but a drunk who had fallen in the water and drowned. Later, after the autopsy, the rope burns on her neck and wrists among other injuries had more than borne out Listo’s initial theory. Gina Antone hadn’t gone to the water hole because she had wanted to but because she was forced. The other things that happened to her weren’t by choice, either.

Walker left the charco. Following the Indian police officer’s directions, he made his way first to Sells and then south to an Indian village called Topawa where the dead woman’s grandmother lived in an adobe shack behind a small mission church. He went to the rough wooden door and knocked, but no one answered. He was about to leave when a vintage GMC creaked into the yard behind him. A wide-bodied old woman stepped out.

He waited by the door. “Are you Rita Antone?” he asked.

She nodded. He held out his card, which she looked at but did not take.

“I’m with the Sheriff’s Department,” he said. “I came to talk to you about your granddaughter.”

“I know,” the old lady said. “My nephew already told me.”

Silent now, Brandon and the boy waited until Diana returned to the living room bearing a tray laden with glasses of iced tea and a plate of freshly made tuna sandwiches.

“We have to eat to keep up our strength,” she said.

The air of false gaiety in her tone grated on Brandon’s nerves. She still wore the gun. Who the hell was she trying to kid, Brandon wondered-him, her child, or, more likely, herself?

“I heard you two talking,” she said, placing the tray on the table in front of the couch. “What about?”

Davy shot the detective a quick, meaningful look. “I asked him if my hair would grow back,” Davy replied. “You know, the part they shaved off. He said yes.”

Brandon Walker was impressed. The kid was a talented liar. They had indeed talked about Davy’s hair growing back, but they had talked about a lot of other things besides. Walker was surprised that Davy didn’t mention any of them. Something was going on between the boy and his mother, an undercurrent, a tension that had been missing when he had seen them on Friday and Saturday.

“How long will it take?” Diana asked, chewing a bite of sandwich and falling completely for Davy’s lie of omission.

It took a moment for Brandon to reorient himself to the conversation. “To grow out his hair? A few weeks,” he said. “Not much longer than that. A crew cut would help.”

“I don’t do crew cuts,” Diana said. “I don’t have clippers.”

And that was the end of that. Davy took his sandwich, tea, and dog, and melted ghostlike into another room, leaving the two grown-ups in another moment of awkward silence.

“I can’t get over how you’ve changed,” Brandon said, still thinking about the gun. “Since that first time I met you, I mean.”

“Murder and suicide do that to you,” she responded. “They make you grow up quick. You’re never the same afterward. No matter how hard you try, you can never be the same.”

After watching Gary drive off and hanging up the phone, Diana stumbled blindly back to the couch and sat there for what seemed like hours, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Briefly, she thought about jumping in the car, driving into town, and looking for him, but where would she go?

Gary had mentioned lots of places where he and Andrew Carlisle hung out together, lowbrow places where Andrew said you could see slices of real life-the Tally Ho, the Green Dolphin, the Golden Nugget, the Grant Road Tavern, the Shanty. She knew the names of the bars, the joints, but she hadn’t been to any of them personally and couldn’t bear the humiliation of going now, of trailing after him, of being just another foolish, hapless wife asking jaded, snickering bartenders if they had seen her drunk of a husband.

Because Gary was drinking more now, she finally admitted to herself, just like her father, and she she, just like Iona, continued to stand by him for no apparent reason. She could see now that she should have stayed in Eugene, should never have agreed to come to this terrible place where she would be without resources and where he would fall under the spell of that man.

That man-Andrew Carlisle. It was easy to blame all of Gary’s shortcomings on Andrew Carlisle. Diana saw the professor as a sort of evil Pied Piper, as someone who had cast a terrible spell over her husband’s psyche and bent it to his own purposes.

Some of Carlisle’s catchphrases whirled back through her memory just as Gary Ladd had reported them to her. “Write what you know.” “Experience is the greatest teacher.” “If you want to write about it, do it.”

Do it? Do what? For the first time, she allowed herself to frame the question: What was Gary writing? She had never asked to look at his manuscript, had never interfered with his work. That was an act of faith on her part, a self-imposed test of her loyalty. Of course, she had passed the exam with flying colors. She was, after all, Iona Dade Cooper’s daughter. How could she do anything else? She had buried her head in the sand and refused to see anything beyond the fact that the stack of manuscript pages on his desk in the spare bedroom had grown gradually taller. That had been the only proof she’d ever required to convince herself that Gary was working, that he was doing what he was supposed to and living up to his part of the bargain.

But now, trembling with fear, Diana sprang from the couch and went looking for the manuscript. Naturally, it wasn’t there. The Smith-Corona still sat on the desk in the spare bedroom, and the blank paper was there where it should have been, but the manuscript itself was gone. She had seen it earlier in the day, when she’d been straightening up the house. That could mean only one thing. Gary had taken it with him when he left.

Why? she wondered. Why would he?

Diana looked at Brandon Walker across the top of her iced tea glass. She seemed much more composed now, as though she had made up her mind about something while she was making the sandwiches.

“So why are you here?” she asked. “Why did you come all the way out here? Are you worried about me?”

“Yes,” he admitted.

“And you’re convinced, just like I am, that he may come looking for me?”

“Yes,” he said again.

It was true, that was his concern. He could point to no concrete evidence to that effect, but all his cop instincts screamed out warnings that this woman was in danger.

She laughed aloud in the face of his obvious distress. “Me, too,” she said. “At least we’re agreed on that score. Now tell me, if you don’t want me to wear a gun, and if you don’t want me to protect myself, what do you suggest I do?”

“Leave,” he said simply. “Go away for a while. Stay with friends or relatives and give us a chance to catch him. Once Detective Farrell gets going on this case, Carlisle won’t be on the loose for long. He has no way of knowing that we’re already onto him, and if it weren’t for the Indians, God knows he wouldn’t be.”

“What Indians?” Diana asked.

“Two Papagos came to see me this morning, an old blind one and a younger one, an enormous man whose name is Gabe Ortiz.”

“Fat Crack came to see you?” Diana said incredulously.

“His name is Fat Crack? You know him? He’s evidently some kind of relative of the murdered girl.”

Diana nodded. “Her cousin. He’s Rita’s nephew, but I can’t imagine him coming to town to talk to an Anglo cop about this.”

“Well, he did,” Brandon said defensively, “and he brought the old blind man with him. They tipped us off early, so we’re on Carlisle’s trail while it’s still relatively warm. When I left him, Farrell was on his way to Florence to see if he could pick up any useful information-the names of Carlisle’s relatives or friends in the area, for instance, someone he might turn to for help now that he’s out.

“I remember his mother hanging around town during the time when his case was about to come to trial. It seems like she was from north Phoenix somewhere, maybe Peoria or Glendale, but I don’t think she had the same last name. Farrell will try to get a line on her as well.”

“And meanwhile, you want me to run away and hide?”

“Right.”

“Well, I won’t,” Diana declared stubbornly. “I’m going to stay right here in my own home. If he comes looking for me, I’ll kill the son of a bitch! I’ll put a damn bullet right between his eyes.”

“That’s premeditation,” Brandon countered. “If you kill him, you’ll be in big trouble.”

“Too bad.”

“It’s a whole lot more likely, though, that you’ll choke up when the time comes and not have nerve enough to pull the trigger.”

“I’ll have nerve enough,” she replied.

She was determined, tough, and foolhardy. Brandon Walker wanted desperately to talk her out of it. He had only one other weapon at his disposal, and he didn’t hesitate to use it.

“What will that do to Davy?” he asked.

Diana paused and swallowed. “Davy? He’ll be fine,” she said. “He’ll have Rita.”

“Will he? Will that be enough? People already call him Killer’s Child.”

Her eyes flashed with sudden anger. “How do you know that? Who told you?”

“Davy did,” Brandon said, watching as shocked dismay registered on her face.

“You’d better leave now,” Diana said.

Brandon Walker unfolded his long legs from the couch and got up to go, but first he stood for a moment, staring down at her.

“Think about it,” he said gravely. “Davy’s only a boy, Diana. How much of this do you think he can take?”

He paused at the end of the driveway and berated himself for betraying the boy’s confidence, but it was the only possible means of pounding some sense into Diana’s thick skull. Meantime, he looked around him in despair for other signs of civilization. No one else lived anywhere around here, for God’s sake. She couldn’t have picked a worse place. Help would be miles away if and when she finally needed it.

Enclosed behind the forest of cactus and with a high wall surrounding the patio and backyard area, the house had a fortresslike appearance, but appearances were deceiving. Once someone breached that walled perimeter, if the dog were taken out of the picture, for instance, the people in the isolated house would be totally vulnerable. Diana talked a good game, but Walker didn’t believe for a moment that she’d actually use the gun. She would threaten, but then hesitate at the critical moment. Even veteran cops made that potentially fatal mistake at times.

But even as he worried about her, Walker was struck by the difference between Diana now-defiant and resourceful-and the way she was when he first saw her-broken and worried sick about that bastard husband of hers.

He had driven up to the mobile home in Topawa late in the afternoon of an oppressively hot June Saturday. The sky was blue overhead, but far away across the desert a red wall of moving sand topped by black thunderheads announced an approaching storm.

Diana came to the door wearing a shapeless robe. Her eyes were red, as though she’d been crying. Her face was drawn from lack of sleep and her coloring sallow and unhealthy. When he showed her his ID, she turned even paler.

“Does Garrison Ladd live here?” he asked. She nodded. “Is he home?”

“No. He’s not. He’s gone.”

“Do you have any idea when he’ll be back?”

“No.”

“Are you Mrs. Ladd?”

“Yes.”

“Could I come in and speak with you for a few minutes?”

She stepped aside and held the door for him to come in without asking what he wanted or why he was there. As soon as he saw the crumpled newspaper on the floor, he guessed that she already knew.

He took a small notebook from his pocket. “I’d like to ask you a few questions. Mind if I sit down?”

“No. Go ahead.”

He sat while she remained standing, her arms wrapped tightly around her body as if she were desperately cold, although the cooler was turned off and the temperature was stifling. Outside, the wind kicked up, and the first few splatters of rain pelted against the metal siding.

“Was your husband home last Friday night?” he asked.

“He was out,” Diana answered woodenly. “He went to a dance.”

“Where?”

“One of the villages, San Pedro.”

“What time did he get home?”

“Saturday. In the morning. The dance lasted all night.”

“Did he go by himself?”

“No. His professor went with him, his creative-writing professor from the U., Andrew Carlisle.”

“And did this Andrew Carlisle come home with your husband?”

“No. Gary came home by himself.”

“How did he seem when he came home? Was he upset? Did he act as though something was wrong?”

Diana had been answering his questions as though in a fog. Now, she seemed to rouse herself “I shouldn’t be talking to you,” she said evasively.

Brandon played dumb. “Why not?”

“You’re going to trap me into saying something I shouldn’t.”

“So he was upset?”

“I didn’t say that he was fine when he came home. Tired from being up all night and maybe from having had too much to drink.”

“He was drinking?”

“A little.”

Brandon stared meaningfully at the newspaper lying on the floor, its front page crumpled into a wad. He made sure there could be no doubt about where he was looking.

“You’ve seen the paper,” he said. “Did you know the girl?”

In the stricken silence that followed, both became aware of the steady drum of wind and rain on the outside of the trailer. For the longest time, Diana Ladd didn’t answer.

“No,” she said at last. “I didn’t know her.”

“What about her grandmother, Rita Antone? She lives just across the way a few hundred yards.”

Diana nodded. “I know Rita from school, but we’re not necessarily friends.”

“Did your husband know Gina?”

“Maybe. I don’t know everyone my husband knows.”

“Why did he go to the dance?”

“Why does anyone? To eat at the feast, to drink the wine.”

“Is your husband a student of Indian customs?” he asked.

“My husband is a writer,” she answered.

By the time the detective finally left the house, he drove into the teeth of a raging desert storm. Fierce winds shook the car, while sheets of rain washing across the windshield made it difficult to see. Walker had been told that the dance at San Pedro had been a traditional rain dance. It worked with a vengeance, he thought, as he slowed down to pick his way through a dip already filling with fast-moving brown water. Two miles east of Three Points, he was stuck for forty-five minutes at one of the larger dips, waiting for cascading water to recede.

He was still there when a call came over the radio telling him to turn around and go back to the reservation. A pickup truck had been found in a flooded wash off Highway 86 west of Quijotoa. When the highway patrol was finally able to reach the vehicle, they found a body inside-that of a male Caucasian with a single, self-inflicted bullet hole in his head.

That was how Brandon Walker first laid eyes on Garrison Ladd. As he told Davy years later, Garrison Ladd was dead from the bullet wound long before Walker met him.

Rita had hated living with the Clarks.

All that week, no matter what she did, the Mil-gahn woman found fault with Dancing Quail’s work. She didn’t work fast enough, she wasn’t thorough enough, she wasn’t good enough. And all that week, Dancing Quail kept silent in the face of Adele Clark’s angry onslaughts, but she began planning what she would do.

“I’m very unhappy here,” she told Louisa one night as they were getting ready for bed in their stuffy upstairs room. “I must go someplace else to find work.”

“My brother Gordon is in California,” Louisa offered. “I could write and ask him. He might know someplace you could go.”

“How far is California?” Dancing Quail asked.

Louisa shook her head. “A long way.”

“How can I go there?”

“On the train, I think,” Louisa answered.

“Will you write down where your brother is so I can find him?”

Louisa’s eyes grew large. “You would go there? By yourself?”

“I can’t stay here,” Rita answered stubbornly.

Louisa wrote her brother’s address on a scrap of paper, which Dancing Quail tucked inside the leather case. “What about Mrs. Clark?” Louisa asked. “What will she say?”

“She won’t know until after I am gone.”

Dancing Quail surprised herself when she talked so bravely, but a river of courage flowed into her from Understanding Woman’s medicine basket. She was determined that once more she would have that basket as her own.

She waited impatiently for the next occasion when she would be scheduled to dust the basket room. At the appointed time, she took the other medicine basket with her, concealed under her apron. When she finished dusting, the new basket, now empty, had been exchanged for the other.

That very night important guests came to visit the Clarks and were shown through the basket room. Breathlessly, Dancing Quail waited to see if the switch would be discovered, but it was not. No one opened the glass case. The Mil-gahn woman either couldn’t tell or didn’t notice the difference in quality between the two medicine baskets.

Two days later on Thursday, girls’ day, the domestic workers’ traditional afternoon off, Rita declined Louisa’s invitation to visit the park. Instead, she stayed behind. First she cut off her long braids, hiding the clipped hair in her leather case. Then, with her hair cut short and taking only the precious medicine basket with her, she made her way downtown. Going to one of the few stores that catered to Indians, she bought a set of men’s clothing, telling the clerk she was buying it for her younger brother who was coming from the reservation to visit.

Dancing Quail took her purchases and slipped away into an alley where she donned the new clothing. At first it felt strange to be wearing stiff pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and heavy shoes, but she soon got used to it. That night, with the help of two young men, Papagos she met in the train yard, Dancing Quail headed west on a slow-moving, California-bound freight train.

It was hot on the train, and noisy, but not nearly as frightening as it had been long ago as she headed to Phoenix from Chuk Shon for the very first time. Dancing Quail told the two Indian boys she was traveling with that she was going to join her brother in California. A job waited for her there in a place called Redlands.

Each time the train slowed for a station, the Indians would jump off and hide so that when the railroad police-the boys called them bulls-checked, no one would be there. Then, as the train started up again, they would run and jump on it. Sometimes the three were alone in the car. Sometimes other travelers-mostly Mexicans but also a few other Indians-joined them.

For a long time, they rode and talked, but late that night, when the towns and stops got farther apart, Dancing Quail found herself growing sleepy. She was dozing when she felt something pressing against her. Opening her eyes she found another Papago, smelling of alcohol and very drunk, trying to unfasten her pants.

“Stop,” she hissed. “Stop now.”

“Mawshch,” he whispered back. “You are promiscuous. You want it. If you did not, you would not be here.”

But she didn’t want it. What she had done with Father John was one thing. That she had wanted to do, but this was different. Struggling away from him in the swaying, noisy boxcar, she groped inside her shirt and found the medicine basket. She pried off the tight-fitting lid as he came after her again.

In addition to the items that had been there originally and the ones she had added from the other basket, there was now one other item-the owij, the awl, which Dancing Quail used to make her baskets. Her trembling fingers sought the awl, found it, and clutched it in the palm of her hand.

Her attacker reached for her again, grabbing her pants, fumbling them down over her hips, but as he leaned over her, thinking her helpless, he felt something hard and sharp press painfully into the soft flesh at the base of his throat. He grunted in surprise.

“Pia’a,” she whispered fiercely. “No!”

When he didn’t back off, she increased the pressure on the awl. Any moment, she would cut him, and then what would he do? Cry out? Kill her? She should have been terrified, but Understanding Woman’s spirit was still strong inside her.

For a long time, they stayed frozen that way in the darkened boxcar, with him above Dancing Quail, pinning her down, and with the awl pricking his neck. Finally, he pulled away.

“Ho’ok,” he said, backing off. “Monster.”

But it didn’t matter to Dancing Quail what he called her, as long as he left her alone. Once he was gone, she pulled her pants back up and refastened them. She lay there then, wide awake, waiting for morning, afraid to close her eyes for fear he would come after her again.

Finally, as the orange sun rolled up over the rocky, far horizon, she did drift off for a little while. She woke up with a start a few minutes later. The awl was still clutched firmly in her hand. Only later did she realize that the arrowhead had disappeared from the opened basket.

Andrew Carlisle waited until he was sure his mother was asleep before he crept out of the house. He drove until he found a pay phone at an all-night Circle K. His hand shook as he dialed the old, familiar number and then waited to see if it would ring. It had been so many years, perhaps the phone had been disconnected by now, perhaps the system no longer worked.

The telephone was answered on the third ring. “J.S. and Associates,” a woman’s voice said.

He plugged the required change into the phone. “I’m an insurance investigator,” he said. “I’ll be in town tomorrow, and I need a copy of a police report on the double. I don’t want to have to wait around for it once I get there.”

“Have you done business with our firm before?”

“Yes, but it’s been several years.”

“Are you familiar with our new location?”

“No.”

“We’re on Speedway, just east of the university, in a house that’s been converted into offices.”

Just the thought of being close to the university made Carlisle uncomfortable. He was always afraid of running into someone he knew.

“Will you be coming by in person?”

“No,” he said. “Someone will be in to pick it up.”

“Fine. What report is it you need?”

“The accident that happened on the Kitt Peak Road last Friday.”

“Case number?”

“I don’t have it with me.”

“Anything else?”

“No. That’s all.”

“Very good. That’ll be one hundred fifty dollars, cash on delivery. Please place the cash in an envelope. We’ll have another envelope here waiting for you. What name should I put on it?”

“Spaulding,” he said, suddenly unable to resist the joke. “Myrna Louise Spaulding. She’ll be in to pick it up around noon.”

“Very good. Anything else?”

“No, ma’am,” Carlisle responded cheerfully. “It’s a pleasure doing business with you.”

Fat Crack brought Looks At Nothing home to his house where Wanda Ortiz, the younger man’s unfailingly cheerful wife, served them a dinner of chili, beans, and fresh tortillas. She was mystified about her husband spending so much time with the old medicine man, but she said nothing. As a good husband and provider, Gabe was allowed his little foibles now and then.

“We will need some clay,” Looks At Nothing said, “white clay from Baboquivari to make the gruel.”

Fat Crack nodded. “Right. I know where to find such clay.”

“And the singers?” Looks At Nothing asked.

“I know nothing at all about singers.”

“The best ones for this come from Crow Hang. It will be expensive. You must feed them all four days.”

Fat Crack nodded. “My aunt says she will pay whatever it costs from her basket money. The singers can stay here at my house. Wanda will do the cooking. I will see about them tomorrow when I pick my aunt up from the hospital to take her home.”

“Your wife is a god woman,” Looks At Nothing said. “You are lucky to have her.”

“I know,” Fat Crack agreed.

They were sitting outside under the stars. Looks At Nothing lit another crooked cigarette from his seemingly endless supply. He took a puff and passed it. “Nawoj,” he said.

“Nawoj,” Fat Crack replied.

Far away from them, across the horizon, a bank of clouds bubbled with lightning. The rains were coming, probably before the end of the week.

“You would make a good medicine man,” Looks At Nothing said thoughtfully. “You understood how the enemy could be both Apache and not Apache long before I did. Perhaps I am getting too old.”

“You are old,” Fat Crack returned, “but not too old. Besides, in my religion I am already a medicine man of sorts, a practitioner.”

“What kind of religion is this? White man’s religion?”

“Christian Scientist.”

“Christian I understand. This is like Father John. What is Scientist?”

Fat Crack considered for a moment. “We believe,” he said, “that God’s power flows through all of us.”

Looks At Nothing nodded. “You are not practitioner,” he insisted firmly. “You are a medicine man.”

Fat Crack smiled into the night at the old man’s stubbornness. “Perhaps you are right,” he said laughing. “A medicine man with a tow truck.”