Kiss the Bees

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'll be leaving Evanston tomorrow morning," he said. "I won't be home until sometime next week."

"In time for Mom and Dad's anniversary?" she asked.

"What day is it again?" David asked.

"Saturday," she told him. "A week from tomorrow."

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

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

"What kind of pose?" David asked.

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

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

"What kind of pose did you think?" Lani asked.

"Never mind. Is Mom there?"

"She's outside with Dad. Want me to go get her?"

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

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

"What's wrong?" she asked.

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

"It's no big deal," he said. "I've just been having some trouble sleeping is all."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mr. Walker?"

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

"Yeah," he said without enthusiasm. "That's me."

"Long time no see."

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

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

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

Quentin shrugged. "Okay, I guess. What'll you have to drink?"

"A beer," Mitch said. "Bud's okay."

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

"I heard about Andy," Quentin said. "Read about it in the paper, that he died, I mean. It's too bad…"

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

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

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

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

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

Embarrassed, Quentin's eyes dodged away from Mitch's unflinching gaze. "Sorry," he mumbled.

"It's okay," Mitch said.

For a time the two men were silent while Quentin stared moodily into his beer. "I didn't mean to insult you…"

"Forget it," Mitch said. "It's nothing. I'm used to it by now."

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

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

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

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

"Don't give me any of the credit," Mitch cautioned. "It was Andy's idea, not mine."

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

"No," Mitch agreed. "Andy wasn't like that. That's the part nobody understood about him."

"Not even with you?" Quentin asked.

"No, not even with me."

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

"Because that's the way he was," Mitch answered. "Because Andrew Carlisle was a remarkable man."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"One of those blended families that isn't quite working," Mitch Johnson observed.

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

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

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

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

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

"Tommy's your brother then?" Mitch Johnson asked.

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

"Lani's the Indian girl your dad and stepmother adopted?"

Quentin frowned. "How did you know that?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"As in misery loves company?"

"More or less."

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

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

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

"For the last couple of months," Mitch Johnson said quietly, "I've been looking for you."

"Looking for me?" Quentin asked, as though he couldn't quite believe it.

Mitch nodded. "I probably wouldn't have found you now if it hadn't been for your mother."

"Which one, my stepmother or my real mother?"

"Your biological mother," Mitch answered.

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

"What screen?"

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

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

"You still haven't told me how come you were looking for me in the first place."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why not?"

"You just can't, that's all."

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

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

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

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

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

"Drywalling money's that good then?" Mitch asked in an effort to move things forward.

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

"There's more where that came from."

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

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

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

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

"When do you want to go?" Quentin was asking.

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

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

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

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

"All right," Mitch agreed. "What time?"

"Five?"

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

"Here," Quentin said. "I don't have wheels at the moment."

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

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

"I guess not," Mitch said agreeably. "See you tomorrow."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A hell of a crying shame!

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

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

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

"When I do what?"

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

"Well?"

Brandon Walker took a deep breath. "He came to talk to us-to me, really-about Andrew Carlisle."

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

"Fat Crack says he's coming back."

"Andrew Carlisle is dead."

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

"That's ridiculous," Diana said at once. "It doesn't make any sense."

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

"To protect us from a dead man," Diana said.

"Right."

"What did you tell him?"

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

"Good, because that's exactly what would happen."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But-"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The problem is, Mr. Wraike, that the land you've developed wasn't yours in the first place."

"Now wait just a goddamned minute here!" Larry had sputtered. "I don't know who the hell you think you are, but-"

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

"But that's impossible. It's been in my wife's family for years."

"Illegally," Mitch said.

"But the Kiser land isn't anywhere near the reservation. This doesn't make sense."

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

"For a price?" Wraike protested. "They can't do that. That's blackmail!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mitch shook his head. "No deals," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Like getting your rocks off?" Mitch asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You do know why I'm doing this, don't you?" he asked.

Larry shook his head frantically.

"Would you like me to tell you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What was the author's name again?" Noreen Kennedy, the prison librarian, had asked.

"Nicolaides," Mitch Johnson answered. "He's Greek."

"And the name of the book?"

"The Natural Way to Draw."

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

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

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

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

"I don't know," she said. "I'll see what I can do."

It was a month before Mitch received a summons to the library. Noreen Kennedy, who was almost as wide as she was tall, smiled broadly at him. "You'll never guess what I found," she said, holding up a shabby volume Mitch instantly recognized as a much-used copy of the Nicolaides book.

"I got it from a used-book dealer in Phoenix who's an old friend of mine," she said. "We went to Library School together. Jack said he's had it in inventory for years and he only charged me five bucks. Can you afford to buy it, or should I just go ahead and put it in the collection?"

"I'd really like to have my own copy, if you don't mind," Mitch said.

"I thought you would," Noreen said, handing it over.

The book had been a godsend. When Mitch was sketching, the hours seemed to fly by. As the months went past, it was easy to recognize the increasing skill in the way he executed the exercises. While he sketched, Andrew Carlisle talked. It was as though he had an almost physical need to share his exploits with someone. Mitch Johnson became Andy's chosen vessel.

Andy's bragging about the tapes was how Mitch first heard about them. At first it made him uneasy that Andy had taken such pains to make a record of all he had done, but in the long run, Mitch realized that recordings were just that-mechanical reproductions. They didn't allow for any artistic license. Painting did.

There was a locked storage unit under the bed in the Bounder. In it were two 18-by-24-inch canvases. Each oil painting was of Larry Wraike, one before and one after. The first was of a moderately handsome overfed businessman in a well-pressed suit, the kind of dully representative portrait that an overly proud wife might have commissioned in honor of some special occasion. An art critic seeing the second painting would have assumed, mistakenly, that this was an imaginative rendition of a soul in torment.

Only Mitch Johnson knew that that one, too, was fully representational. He thought of them as a matched pair-"Larry Wraike Before" and "Larry Wraike After."

Half an hour after returning to the RV, when he held the unfinished drawing up to a mirror to examine it, the artist was pleased with the likeness. Anyone who knew Quentin Walker would have recognized him. The picture showed him sitting slump-shouldered, his elbows resting on the bar, his eyes morosely focused on the beer in the bottom of the glass in front of him. Quentin Walker Before.

Looking at the picture, though, Mitch Johnson realized something else about it-something he had never noticed before that moment-how very much the son resembled the father. That hadn't been nearly so apparent when Quentin first showed up in Florence as it was now. He had come to prison as nothing but a punk kid. The hard years in between had matured and hardened him into what Brandon Walker had been when Mitch first knew him.

"Well, I'll be damned!" Mitch said to the picture reflected back from the mirror. "If you aren't your daddy's spitting image, Mr. Quentin Walker. Imagine that!"