Kiss the Bees

7

Coyote had listened to the council in the village before Old Limping Man and Young Man started on their journey across the desert. Ban had decided that anything important enough to take men back into the burning lands was worth examining. When Coyote's stomach is full of food and water, his curiosity is very active. So Ban had gone ahead of the two men to find out for himself what it was that Buzzard had seen and Jackrabbit had told him about.

But now in that burning desert, Coyote was running for his life. TheAli-chu'uchum O'othham — the Little People-were after him-the bees, flies, ants, wasps, and insects of all kinds.Gohhim O'othham — Old Limping Man-could still speak the language ofI'itoi which all the animals and all the Little People understand. He called out to thePa-nahl — the Bees-and to theWihpsh — the Wasps-to ask what was the trouble.

The Little People were very angry, but they stopped. They toldGohhim O'othham that the two men must go with them and that they must keep Coyote away. But there was no danger from Coyote anymore.Ban was too busy rubbing his sore nose in the dirt.

And so the two men-Old Limping Man and Young Man-followedAli-chu'uchum — the Little People. After a time the men saw a strange cloud made up of the flying ones-the bees and flies and wasps. They looked down and saw the ground covered with moving specks. And the moving specks were ants of all kinds-big and little, brown and black.

The word of the coming of the men became known. The cloud of Little People spread out and parted. Then the men saw a woman lying with her eyes closed. The woman was being kissed by the wings of hundreds of bees. They were fanning her and keeping her cool, and all the whilePa-nahl — the Bees-were singing very softly.

At first the men were afraid. They knew that while the Little People are very, very wise, they are also very quick-tempered. But Old Man listened to the song the bees were singing. The song was a prayer for help for this woman who was their friend. So the two men went to the woman and gave her water.

The woman moved and spoke, but the men could not understand what she said. She did not open her eyes. They gave her pinole and water. Then they raised her up and began the return trip to the distant village.

Driving to his appointment, Mitch Johnson couldn't help gloating. All morning long he had made a conscious effort not to rush, even though the clock had been ticking inevitably toward his scheduled appointment with Diana Ladd Walker. Gradually-vaguely, at first-the girl's form had taken shape on the paper. The perspective was masterful-graphic without being anatomical. He wanted her to be sexy in this one. The dissection part, the one that peeled away the outside layers-would come later.

For Mitch, one of the most difficult aspects of the drawing came when it was time to detail the girl's softly rising and falling chest. With Lani sound asleep, the virginal breasts had gone so soft and flaccid they were almost flat. The only solution for that was for Mitch to touch them and caress the nipples until they stood at attention. The difficulty and thrill of that was bringing the body to wakeful attention without necessarily disturbing the girl. If she had awakened and started struggling and fighting right then, it might have done irreparable harm to the pose. It would have spoiled the whole mood, destroyed the magic exhilaration of creation.

But of course, the full force of the drug was still upon her, and she hadn't awakened. Lying there still as death, she had stirred only slightly beneath his touch, an unconscious half-smile on her lips as though, even in sleep, Mitch's tender caress on her body somehow pleasured her. That almost drove him crazy. Breathing hard, Mitch once again retreated to the safety of his easel, forcing himself to regard her inviting body as an artistic challenge, as an enticing morsel to be avoided at all costs rather than as defenseless territory begging to be conquered and exploited.

And the fact that he could do that-put her on paper without giving in to the raging river of temptation-left him with a feeling of power and incredible superiority. Touching her body without immediately tearing into it was something Andy Carlisle never could have done. Mitch had the pleasure of knowing right then that he was a better man than his teacher. Godlike, Andy had tried to mold Mitch in his own image, but in this instance the created had moved beyond his creator.

After the breasts it had been time to do the face and hair. If anything, he wished the girl's hair had been a little longer than it was. That way the dark edge of the hair would have concealed some of the breasts rather than simply falling across the shoulders. But that couldn't be helped. This was to be a study of the actual girl, and so he copied the line of hair exactly as it presented itself.

The final item on his morning's agenda had been the necklace. Mitch had been around Tucson long enough to know that the maze design on her necklace had something to do with Indians, but he wasn't exactly sure what. He took great pains to see that he got it right, that he copied it exactly. You never could tell when…

As soon as the thought came to mind, it had left him shivering. That was a way to top Andy's tapes, something Andy never would have conceived of. Andy had talked a good game-murder as art-but he wouldn't have had the skill to execute such a breathtaking idea.

Mitch would re-create the design on the flat plane of the girl's belly, carving it into her flesh so that slowly oozing blood would be the actual ink. That meant Mitch would have to do that final act while the girl was still alive-maybe drugged again so she wouldn't move and mess things up. One question in Mitch's mind was whether or not, working free-hand with an X-Acto knife, he would be able to get the nested concentric circles right. The other difficulty would be placement. The most artistically unifying concept would be to use that fine little belly button of hers as the head of the man in the maze.

That would see Andy's goddamned tapes and raise him one better.

It was on that note that he walked into the hotel to meet with Lani Walker's mother.

With her hair, nails, and makeup all professionally attended to, Diana Ladd Walker headed for La Paloma and the scheduled Monty Lazarus interview. His wasn't a byline she recognized, but that didn't mean anything. The magazines he wrote for were name brand, and Megan had been delighted to schedule an interview with him.

As Diana wended her way through Tucson's relatively light summertime traffic, she smiled at the idea that she was going to a fashionable hotel to be interviewed by a reporter with a national audience. As a general rule, interviews were something to be endured rather than enjoyed. Still, considering Diana's humble origins, the very fact that she was being interviewed at all had to count as its own peculiar miracle.

Diana Cooper Ladd Walker had spent her early life in the clean but shabby caretaker's quarters at the garbage dump back in Joseph, Oregon. Diana's mother had scrubbed and fussed and worked to keep the place up, but it had remained indelibly "the old Stevens place"-a run-down one-house slum that was theirs to use only as long as Max Cooper managed to hang on to his unenviable position as Joseph's garbageman.

The job was anything but glamorous. Other than the house, it paid little more than a pittance, but it kept a roof over their heads. With a marginally motivated and often drunk husband, it was the best Iona Dade Cooper could hope for. Max kept both the job and the house for years-far longer than anyone expected-but only because Iona carried more than her share of the load. Max owned the official title of garbageman. Iona did most of the work-his and hers both.

As a child Diana hadn't been blessed with many friends. The few she did have usually found dozens of excuses to explain why they could never come play at her house. For years Diana had searched for ways to make her house more acceptable, more welcoming.

Once when she was ten or so, she had sat at the kitchen table after dinner, poring through the exotic pages of one of the several Sears and Roebuck catalogs that came to the house each year with her mother's name on them.

"Look at these," Diana had said, pointing to a set of sheer, frilly pink curtains. The curtains could be purchased as part of a set along with a matching bedspread. "Wouldn't those look nice in my bedroom?"

Diana's question had been intended for her mother's ears, but at that precise moment, Iona had stepped across the kitchen to the pantry where she was just taking off her apron. Before she could finish hanging up her apron and return to the table, Max Cooper had banged down his beer bottle and then leaned toward Diana. He peered over her shoulder, glowering at the page in the catalog.

"Won't matter none," he announced morosely. With a quick jab, he grabbed the catalog out of Diana's hand and dropped it into Iona's box of kitchen firewood. "Curtains or no, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. And all those hoity-toity girls from school still won't have nothin' to do with you. You know what they say," he added with a leer. "Once a garbageman's daughter, always a garbageman's daughter."

He had leaned back on his chair then, watching to see if she would try to rescue the catalog from the trash heap which, of course, she did not. Even at that age, she already knew better than to give Max Cooper's meanness the kind of satisfaction he wanted.

In the books Diana had devoured every day-fictional stories peopled by the likes of Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton and the Dana girls-the heroines had slick rooms, speedy little roadsters, loving parents, and enough money to do whatever they liked. If they wanted something, they bought it themselves or some nice relative gave it to them. Diana Cooper's life wasn't like that. She never had a matching set of curtains, sheets, and pillowcases until after she had been married and widowed and was living alone in the little rock house in Gates Pass.

She had left the catalog where her father threw it, but she had never forgotten what he had done. And she had never forgiven him either.

Now, driving toward her interview with Monty Lazarus, Diana Ladd Walker was struck once more by how far she had come from those bad old days. It was a long way from the garbageman's house in Joseph, Oregon, to the lobby of the La Paloma in Tucson, Arizona. A damned long way.

When she pulled into the covered driveway in front of the hotel, a valet-parking attendant stepped forward to open the door and claim her car. "Are you checking in?" he asked, helping her out of the seat.

"No," she said. "I'm here for a meeting."

"Very good," he said, handing her a claim ticket.

She stood for a moment watching as he took the Suburban and drove it out of sight. The miracle was that she didn't feel as though she were out of her league or that she had somehow overreached herself. No, she was here at a first-class hotel, and she felt totally at ease.

Smiling, Diana smoothed her dress and started inside, nodding a thank-you to the attendant who opened the door.

Not only was it a long way from Joseph to here, she thought, but every single step had been worth it.

As she entered the room a tall, gaunt-looking man with a headful of bushy red hair, slightly stooped shoulders, and an engaging grin rose and came toward her. "Mrs. Walker?" he asked.

Diana nodded and held out her hand. "Mr. Lazarus?" she asked.

"That's right," he said with a courtly bow. "Monty Lazarus at your service." He led her toward a low, comfortable-looking couch. "I've managed to corral this little seating area for just the two of us. I thought it might be nicer for talking than the restaurant would be. Would you care for a drink?"

"A glass of wine might be nice. A drink sometimes helps take the edge off."

"In other words, you're not looking forward to this."

She smiled and shook her head. "About as much as I look forward to having a root canal," she told him.

For some strange reason, that answer seemed to tickle his funny bone. Monty Lazarus laughed aloud.

"The lobby bar isn't open yet," he said. "You hang on right here. If you'll excuse me for a few seconds, I'll go get you that glass of wine, then I'll do my best to make this as painless an interview as possible."

Diana sat back, closed her eyes, and waited, forcing herself to relax, to forget how nervous being on the subjective side of an interview always made her feel.

"Have you ever been to a bullfight?" Andy had asked Mitch once.

"A long time ago," Mitch answered. "Down in Nogales back in the early seventies. Lori and I went together. I wasn't especially impressed."

"The Nogales ring wasn't noted for the quality of its fights," Andy replied. "It's like small-town sports everywhere. The bush leagues. You get the young guys who aren't quite good enough to make it in the majors and a few major-league has-beens that aren't tough enough to cut the mustard anymore. But bullfighting, if it's done right, is a thing of beauty.

"The bullfighter has to be able to kill. That goes without saying, but the art of it is all in the capework, in the bullfighter controlling the drama with his cape. The whole point is to bring the bull's horns so close that physical injury or even death are less than a fraction of an inch away and yet, when the fight is over the bull is always dead, and usually, the bullfighter walks away unscathed. It's fascinating to watch."

Mitch Johnson remembered every word of that conversation, and he had taken them all to heart. This was his capework, then. He had set up the interview and the whole Monty Lazarus fabrication just to prove to himself that he could do it, that he could take the girl, do whatever he wanted with her, and still talk to her mother with complete impunity. There was power in that.

Mitch stood at the bar waiting for the bartender to finish dealing with some kind of inventory issue. Even that slight suspension in the action was annoying. Now that the interview was about to begin, his whole body was alive with anticipation. The moment when Diana Ladd Walker had come across the room toward him was already one of the high points of his life. He would never forget the cordial smile on her face as he rose to meet her or the way she had held out her hand in greeting. The touch of her fingers had been absolutely electrifying because, like the poor, unfortunate bull, Diana Ladd Walker didn't suspect a thing.

She had no idea that her precious daughter belonged to the man whose hand she was shaking. She didn't have a glimmer that he had spent almost the entire morning with Lani Walker spread out before him as a visual feast for his sole enjoyment. The girl was his, both physically and artistically. Lani was a prisoner of his charcoal and paper as surely as her hands and feet were secured to the trundle bed's sturdy little corner posts. Diana Ladd Walker had no idea that her interviewer had spent several delightful morning hours being alternately tortured and exhilarated by the process of re-creating that delectably innocent body on paper; that, by controlling his aching to take Lani-because it would have been so easy to do so-he had reveled in the rational victory of denying that physical craving, that fundamental bodily urge. So far Mitch's violation of Lani Walker had been mainly intellectual, but that wouldn't last forever.

"Sorry about the delay, sir," the bartender said. "Can I help you now?"

"A glass of chardonnay for the lady," Mitch Johnson said. "And a glass of tonic with lime for me."

For the first half hour of the Monty Lazarus interview, the questions followed such a well-worn track that Diana could have given the answers in her sleep.

"How long have you been writing?" he asked.

"Twenty-five years, give or take."

"You must have studied writing in school, right?"

Diana shook her head. "No," she said. "I applied for the creative writing program here at the university, but I wasn't admitted. I became a teacher instead."

"That's right," Monty said. "I remember something about that from the book. Your husband was admitted using material you had actually written while you weren't allowed in, and Andrew Carlisle turned out to be the instructor."

Diana nodded. There didn't seem to be anything to add.

"Did you and he ever talk about that?" Monty asked.

"About what?"

"About the fact that he had admitted the wrong student, that he had given your place to someone who turned out to have far less talent."

"We never discussed it," Diana said. "There wasn't any need. After all, I won, didn't I?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"Professor Carlisle didn't let me into his class, but I got to be a writer anyway."

"Where did you go to school?"

"The University of Oregon," she answered. "I got my M.Ed. from the University of Arizona."

Monty Lazarus continued to ask questions that reeked of numbing familiarity. Diana had answered the same questions dozens of times before, including two weeks earlier on The Today Show.

"How did you sell your first book?"

"I submitted it to an agent I met at a writer's conference up in Phoenix."

"And how long have you been writing full-time?"

"Until I married my husband Brandon, my second husband, I had a full-time teaching job out on the reservation and only wrote during the summers. That's Tohono O'othham — spelled t-o-h-o-n-o new word o'-o-t-h-h-a-m, by the way. The school where I taught is in Topawa, south of Sells, about seventy or so miles from here. After Brandon and I married, I cut back to substitute teaching. I did that for about three years, and I've been writing full-time ever since."

As Diana went through the motions of answering the questions, it occurred to her that if Monty Lazarus had actually read her book, he would have known the answers to some of those questions without having to ask. She remembered dealing with many of them as part of the "back" story in Shadow of Death.

She bit back the temptation of mentioning to her interviewer that it might have been a good idea for him to do his homework. It wasn't at all smart to tell an interviewer how to do his job, not unless she wanted a hatchet job to appear in the periodical in question. Instead, Diana Ladd Walker answered the questions with as much poise and humor as she could muster.

Having filled several pages with cryptic notes, Monty Lazarus finally put down his pen. "Okay," he said. "Enough of that. Now, let's turn to the more personal stuff.

"Where do you live?"

"Gates Pass, west of Tucson."

"For how long?"

"Since 1969. I moved there right after my first husband died. Brandon Walker came to live there after we got married in 1976."

"Where were you from originally?"

"Joseph, Oregon," she said. "My father ran the town garbage dump. We lived in the caretaker's house the whole time I was growing up."

"So yours is pretty much one of those Horatio Alger stories," Monty Lazarus offered.

Diana smiled. "You could say so."

"And do you have children?"

"Yes."

For the first time in the whole interview, she felt suddenly wary and uneasy. That was stupid, because she had answered all these same questions time and again. She took a deep breath.

"In 1975 I was a widow raising an only son, a six-year-old child. In 1976, Brandon and I married. He had two children, two sons. In 1980 we adopted a fourth child, our daughter, Lani."

"Four," Monty Lazarus repeated. "And where are they all now?"

Maybe knowing that question would automatically follow the first one was the source of some of her anxiety. She opted for putting all the cards on the table at once.

"The two older boys were Brandon's. My one stepson disappeared years ago while he was still in high school."

"He ran away from home?"

"Yes. At this point, he's missing and presumed dead. His older brother got himself in trouble and ended up in prison in Florence. I believe he's out now, but I have no idea where he's living. We don't exactly stay in touch. The two younger ones, my son David, and our daughter, Lani, are fine. David just graduated from law school in Chicago, and Lani is a junior at University High School right here in Tucson."

Monty shook his head sympathetically. "It's tough," he said. "Raising kids is always a crapshoot. So it sounds as though you're running about fifty-fifty in the motherhood department."

"I guess so," Diana agreed. Fifty-fifty wasn't a score she was proud of. She would have liked to do better.

Monty Lazarus glanced down at his watch. "Yikes," he exclaimed. "We've been at this for over an hour. I'll go flag down a waitress. Can I get you anything? Another glass of wine, maybe?"

Diana shook her head. "I'd better switch to iced tea," she said. "No sugar, but extra lemon."

As Monty Lazarus sauntered away, Diana was left mulling his sardonic words about raising kids. Crapshoot. That just about covered it.

Tommy, Brandon's younger son, had walked out of their lives one summer afternoon between his freshman and sophomore years in high school. Over the years they had gradually come to terms with the idea that Tommy was probably dead-he had to be. The situation with Quentin wasn't nearly as clear-cut. Diana sometimes thought they would have been better off if Quentin had died as well.

The moment she met Quentin Walker, Diana recognized he was both smart and mean. Even as a ten-year-old, his conversation had shown intermittent flashes of intellectual brilliance. No, lack of brainpower had never been one of Quentin's problems. Curbing his tongue was, his tongue and his temper. He was manipulative and arrogant, angry and unforgiving. Not only that, by the time he was in high school, he had already developed a severe drinking problem.

Five years earlier, he had been driving drunk. He had crashed his four-wheel-drive pickup into a compact car, a Chevette, killing the woman driver and her two-year-old child. As if that weren't bad enough, the woman was six months pregnant. The baby was taken alive from his dead mother's womb, but he, too, had died three days later.

Brandon was still sheriff at the time of the trial, and the whole ordeal had been a nightmare for him. Not that he was responsible. Quentin was an adult and had to deal with his own difficulties. Brandon Walker's whole life had been committed to law and order, yet here was his son, a repeat drunk-driving offender, who had blithely killed three people. And when the judge had shipped Brandon Walker's son off to Florence for five years on two counts of vehicular homicide (the dead unborn fetus didn't count), it had almost broken Brandon's heart. It had seemed at the time that things couldn't get any worse. And then they did.

Three years and a half years after he was locked up, shortly after Diana had started work on Shadow of Death, Brandon had come home from work and told her the latest bad news in the Quentin Walker department.

The moment Diana caught a glimpse of his face as Brandon stumbled into the house, she knew something was terribly wrong. His face was so gray she initially thought he might be having a heart attack.

"What's happened?" she had asked, hurrying to his side. "What's going on?"

Shaking his head, he walked past her proffered embrace, opened the refrigerator door, pulled out a pair of beers-one for each of them. He sank down beside the kitchen table and buried his face in his hands. Concerned, Diana sat down beside him.

"Brandon, tell me. What is it?"

"Quentin," he groaned. "Quentin again."

"What's he done now?"

"He's hooked up with a gang of extortionists up in Florence," Brandon answered. "They've been operating out of the prison, supposedly accepting bribes on my behalf. It's a protection racket. They've been telling people that if they don't pay up, something bad is going to happen to their building or business, without any cops being there to take care of things. In other words, if the marks don't fork over, they don't get any patrol coverage."

"But that's outrageous!" Diana exclaimed. "They're claiming you're behind it?"

"That's right."

"But that's the whole reason you were elected in the first place," Diana protested. "To clean things up and put an end to that kind of crap."

"Right." Brandon, staring into the depths of his beer bottle, answered without looking Diana in the eye.

"How did you find out?"

"Hank Maddern told me."

"Hank!" Diana echoed. "He's been retired for years. How did he find out?"

"One of the deputies-Hank wouldn't say which one-went to him with it and asked for advice as to what he should do about it. The deputy evidently thought I was in on it." Brandon's voice cracked with emotion. It took a minute or so before he could continue.

"Considering the well-known history of graft and corruption during Sheriff DuShane's watch, you can hardly blame the guy for thinking that. Thankfully, Hank and I go back a long way. He came straight to me with it."

"What are you going to do?"

Brandon sighed. "I already did it," he said. "I went straight to Internal Affairs and told them to check it out on the off chance that some of my officers are involved. I told them I'll cooperate in any way necessary, and that they should do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of it."

"What'll happen to Quentin?" Diana asked.

Brandon shook his head. "We're talking felonious activity, Diana. If the prosecutor gets a conviction, he'll spend a couple more years in prison. And when you're already in the slammer, what's another year or two? He won't give a damn, but it's going to be hell for us. Our lives will have to be an open book. We'll have to turn over all our bank records. The investigators will want to know just exactly how much money came in, where it came from, and where it's gone. I told them to have a ball. We've got nothing to hide."

In the bleak silence that followed that last statement, Brandon Walker slipped lower in his chair, leaning his weight against an arm that had dropped onto the table. "No matter what we did for that kid, it was never enough."

Diana reached out and put one hand over her husband's. "I'm sorry," she said.

He nodded. "I know," he murmured. "Me, too."

"It's not your fault, Brandon," Diana said. "You did everything you could."

He looked up at her then, his eyes full of hurt and outrage. And tears. "But he's my son, for Chrissakes!" he croaked. "How the hell could my own son do this to me? How could he go against everything I've ever stood for and believed in?"

"Quentin isn't you," she said. "He made his own choices…"

"All of them bad," Brandon interjected.

"… and once again, he's going to have to suffer the consequences."

Even as Diana uttered the too pat words, she knew they were a cop-out. She was hurt, too, but the real agony belonged solely to Brandon. After all, Quentin was his son. With Tommy evidently out of the picture for good, Quentin was the only "real" son Brandon Walker had left, which made the betrayal that much worse.

For years they had listened while Janie, Brandon's ex-wife, made one excuse after another about why Quentin and Tommy were the way they were. In Janie's opinion, the critical missing ingredient had always been Brandon's fault and responsibility, one way or the other, although whenever Brandon had tried to exert any influence on the kids, Janie had continually run interference. Any attempt on Brandon's part to discipline the boys had met with implacable resistance from their mother. Diana had seen from the beginning that it was a lose/lose situation all the way around.

"Can you imagine what Janie's going to say when she gets wind of this? She's going to blame me totally, just like she did with the accident."

"You're the sheriff," Diana had said. "You have to do your job. Remember, Quentin's a big boy now-a grown-up. If he's turned himself into a criminal, then it's on his head, not yours."

But that wasn't entirely true. Quentin was the one who was prosecuted for his part in the extortion scheme, and a slick lawyer got him off but when the next election came around, Brandon Walker lost. His opponent, Bill Forsythe, managed to imply that there had to be some connection between Quentin's illegal but unproven activities and his father, the sheriff.

Diana thought that Brandon could have and should have fought back harder against the Forsythe campaign of character assassination, but somehow his heart wasn't in it. When the fight ended in defeat, he retreated into the Gates Pass house and lived in virtual seclusion while focusing all his energies and frustration on cutting and stacking wood.

Monty Lazarus returned to Diana trailed by a waitress bearing a tray laden with glasses of iced tea as well as a bowl of salsa and a basket of chips.

"I thought I'd order a little food-something to keep up our strength." He grinned. "Now where were we? Oh, that's right. You were telling me about your daughter. University High School. That's a prep school of some kind, isn't it?"

Diana nodded.

"So she must be smart."

"Yes. She hopes to study medicine someday."

"And pretty?"

Once again she felt that vague sense of unease, but she shook it off.

"I suppose some people would say so," Diana said dismissively. "But aren't we getting a little off track?"

"You're right," Monty Lazarus said. "Have some chips and salsa. When I'm hungry, my mind tends to wander."

Buying the car had been fun for Quentin Walker. Early on he had settled on a faded orange, '79 Ford Bronco 4-by-4 XLT, with alloy wheels, a cassette deck, towing package, a newly rebuilt 302 engine, and a slight lift. He'd had to go through the usual car-buying bullshit with that cocky bastard of a salesman who acted like he was working for a Cadillac dealership instead of hawking beaters at a South Tucson joint called Can Do Deals Used Cars.

Winston Morris, in his smooth, double-breasted khaki-colored suit and tie, had taken one look at Quentin's mud-spattered boots and figured him for some kind of low-life without a penny to his name. Quentin had willingly put up with all the crap, waiting for the inevitable moment when Winston would finally get around to saying, "What's it going to take to put you in this car today?"

Quentin had leaned back in his chair and casually crossed one leg over the other. "You've got it listed at forty-two hundred. I'll give you thirty-five, take it or leave it."

The sad look that came over Winston's face was as predictable as his initial closing question. "You can't be serious. We're in this business to sell cars, not give them away."

But when Quentin got up to leave, the bargaining had begun in earnest. Quentin ended up paying thirty-six fifty. But the most fun came when the dickering was done and Winston had said, "How do you intend to pay for this?"

That was the supreme moment, the one Quentin had been salivating over all morning. Nonchalantly, he had reached for his wallet and opened it. One by one he drew out four of the thousand-dollar bills and laid them down on the desk in front of the salesman. "You can give me change, can't you?"

The look on Winston's face as he scooped up the four bills had been well worth the price of admission. He had taken the money and disappeared into his sales manager's office. He was in there for a long time. No doubt, everybody there was busy trying to figure out whether or not the money was counterfeit. Eventually, though, he came back out and finished up the paperwork.

Leaving the lot, Quentin still felt good. After not driving a car for six years, it was strange to be back behind the wheel again, odd to be in his own vehicle. Knowing what would most likely be waiting for him in the desert, he stopped at a grocery store and picked up a six-pack of beer, a flashlight, and several spare batteries, as well as a large box-an empty toilet-paper box. Then he headed out of town.

The good mood lasted for a few miles more, but as soon as he crossed the pass and could see the mountain ahead of him, a pall of gloom settled over him. He popped open the first can and took a sip of beer, hoping to hold off the blanket of despair that was closing in on him.

If only his father hadn't made him take Davy out to the charco that day. Then, none of the rest of it would have happened.

"Do I have to?" Quentin had whined to his father on the phone. "Me and Tommy have better things to do today than haul Davy Ladd out into the desert to put a bunch of plastic flowers on something that isn't even a grave."

"Listen here, young man," Brandon Walker said. "We're not talking options here. Where did you get that car you're driving?"

"From Grandma," Quentin conceded grudgingly. "You bought it for us from Grandma Walker."

"That's right. Diana and I both bought it for you," Brandon corrected. "As long as we're paying for gas and insurance, you'd better straighten up and help out when required to do so. Is that clear?"

"I guess," Quentin said. "But do we have to do it today?"

"Yes. Today is the anniversary of Gina Antone's death. Rita's too busy with Lani to take care of the shrine herself and it would be too hard on her anyway, so Davy's agreed to do it for her. It's very important to Rita that the work be done today."

"Well, I'm not doing any of it."

"Nobody's asking you to. Davy will do whatever needs doing. Brian will probably help out too, if he can come along." Now that Quentin was being slightly more agreeable, Brandon was willing to be conciliatory as well. "I'll send along enough money so the four of you can stop off at the trading post and have a hamburger or a burrito on your way back. How does that sound?"

"Okay, I guess," Quentin said.

Showing off, Quentin had driven the aging '68 New Yorker like a maniac on the way out to the reservation. Tommy was game for anything, but Quentin was waiting to see if he could scare either Davy or Brian into telling him to slow down. Neither one of them said a word. The bad part came, though, when they turned off Coleman Road and headed for the charco.

Quentin was still going too fast when they came around a blind curve that concealed a sandy wash. He jammed on the brakes. Seconds later, the Chrysler was mired in sand up to its hubcaps. By then they were only half a mile or so away from the charco and the shrine. Brian and Davy had set off with their flowers and candles. Meantime, Quentin left Tommy to watch the car while he hiked out to the highway to find someone to pull the Chrysler out of the sand.

That took time. He was gone over an hour. When he came back with a guy with a four-wheel-drive pickup and a chain, Tommy was nowhere to be found. The car was out of the sand, the guy with the pickup was long gone, and Brian and Davy were back from doing their shrine duties before Tommy finally showed up.

"Where the hell have you been?" Quentin growled.

"I got bored," Tommy told him. "But you'll never guess what I found. There's a cave up there," he said, pointing back up the flank of Kitt Peak. "It's a big one. I tried going inside, but when it got too dark, I came back." He wrenched open the passenger door, opened the glove box, and took out the flashlight Brandon Walker insisted they keep there in case of trouble.

"Come on," he said. "I'll show you."

"We can't do that," Davy said.

"Can't do what?"

"Go in the caves on Ioligam, " Davy told him.

"Why not?"

"Because they belong to the Indians. They're sacred."

"That's bullshit and you know it!" Tommy said. "Caves belong to everybody. What about Colossal Cave? What about Carlsbad Caverns? Besides, it's Kitt Peak anyway, not 'chewing gum.' "

"Ioligam,"Davy repeated, but by then Tommy was already headed back up the mountain. Quentin paused for a moment. He himself wasn't wild about exploring caves, but the idea of doing something Davy was against proved to be too much of a temptation. "If Tommy's going, I'm going," he said. With that, Quentin set off after his brother.

"Why are the caves sacred?" Brian asked as he and Davy trudged reluctantly up the mountain after the others.

"Nana Dahd told me that it's because that's where I'itoi goes for summer vacation," Davy answered. "But Looks At Nothing told me once that back when the Apaches attacked the village that used to be here, the village called Rattlesnake Skull, the only people who lived were some little kids who hid out in a cave. Later on, the Tohono O'othham found out that one of the girls from Rattlesnake Skull had betrayed her people to the Ohb. Some hunters went looking for her. When they found her, they brought her back and shut her up in one of the caves on the mountain to die."

With three older brothers, Brian Fellows was used to having his leg pulled. "Is that the truth or is that just a story?" he asked.

Davy Ladd shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "Looks At Nothing told it like it was the truth, but maybe it is just a story."

They had followed the older boys to the entrance of the cave and then waited outside until the flashlight gave out, forcing Tommy and Quentin to emerge.

"It's beautiful in there," a gleeful Tommy reported. "Unbelievable! It's too bad you're both chickens."

"We're not chickens," Davy said quietly.

Quentin laughed. "Yes, you are. Come on, chicky-chicky. Let's go have that hamburger. I'm starved."

During the next couple of weeks, Tommy had persuaded Quentin to spend every spare moment exploring the cave. When they ran out of money for gas and flashlight batteries, they stole bills from their mother's purse. And even Quentin was forced to agree it was worth it. The cave was magnificent-magnificent and awful at the same time. It was so much more than either of them had imagined and yet it was terribly frustrating. They had found something wonderful and amazing, beautiful beyond all imagining. Gleaming wet stalactites hung down like thousands of rocky icicles. Stalagmites rose up out of watery pools like so many gray looming ghosts. Here and there, pieces of crystal reflected back light like a thousand winking eyes. Tommy was dying to share their discovery.

"You know what'll happen if anybody finds out," Quentin had warned his brother. "They'll kick our asses out of there and we'll never get to go back."

"Will they ever open it up? Maybe charge admission like they do at Colossal Cave?"

"Don't be stupid, Tommy. You heard what Davy said. It's sacred or something."

It wasn't the first time Quentin and Tommy had squared off against the rest of the world. The two of them had been keeping secrets-some worse than others-all their lives. They were used to it, and they kept this one, too.

Three weeks after finding the cave, they ventured far enough inside the first chamber to locate the narrow passage that led to the second. The first room had been so rough and wet that it was almost impossible to walk in it. Starting in the passage, the second one seemed dryer, and it had a dirt floor, as though someone had gone to the trouble of covering the rough surface so it would be easier to walk on it.

Inside the second chamber they had discovered the rock slide barring most of what had once been a second entrance to the cavern. And over against the far wall, much to both their horror and fascination, they had found the scattered pieces of a human skeleton.

"Hey, look at this?" Tommy said, picking up a bone and flinging it across the cave. "Maybe they left this guy here to guard these pots and to cast a spell over anybody who tries to take them."

Tommy Walker's imagination and his fascination with magic had always outstripped his older brother's. "Shut up, Tommy," Quentin said. "And leave those bones alone. What if they still carry some kind of disease or something?"

Shrugging, Tommy leaned down and picked up the first pot that came to hand. In the orange glow from the flashlight it looked gray or maybe beige. A black crosshatch pattern had been incised into the surface.

"I'll bet something like this would be worth a lot of money," he said thoughtfully. "How about if we take it to the museum over at the university and try to unload it? Whaddya think of that idea?"

"It might work," Quentin had agreed. "With all the gas we're buying these days, our budget could use a little help."

Together they had discussed which pot might best serve their immediate monetary purposes, settling eventually on the one Tommy had picked up in the first place. Carrying the pot in one hand and his flashlight in the other, Tommy had started back toward the main cavern. Quentin was several feet behind him, so he never saw exactly what happened. All he knew was he heard a noise, like something falling. He also heard the pot breaking into what sounded like a million pieces. When he came around the corner, Tommy was nowhere in sight.

"Tommy," he yelled. "What happened? Where'd you go?"

For an answer, he heard only dead silence, broken occasionally by the drip of water.

"Tommy, come on now. Don't play games," Quentin said, fighting back a sudden surge of fear. "This is no time for jokes. We have to get out of here and head home. It's getting late."

But still there was no answer. None at all.

Slowly, carefully, Quentin had begun to search the area. After ten minutes or so, he found the hole, almost killing himself in the process. Just off the path they had used to get to the passage, there was something that looked like a shadow. But when Quentin shone his light that way he found instead a shaft, some twenty feet deep, with Tommy lying still as death at the bottom with his feet in a murky pool of water.

"Tommy!" Quentin shouted again. "Are you all right? Can you hear me?" But Tommy Walker didn't answer and didn't move.

Terrified, Quentin raced out of the cave. In honor of their spelunking adventures, the two boys had managed to amass a fair collection of discarded rope. Gathering an armload of rope, Quentin dashed back up the mountain. Inside the cave, working feverishly, he managed to rappel himself down the side of the shaft. Once there, he was relieved to find that Tommy was still alive, still breathing.

"Tommy, wake up. You've gotta wake up so we can get out of here." But there was no response. Finally, desperate and not knowing what else to do, Quentin tied the rope around his unconscious brother's chest-fastening it under both his arms so it wouldn't slip off. Then he climbed back up to haul Tommy out.

It had worked, too. With almost superhuman effort and after a half-hour struggle, Quentin finally dragged Tommy's dead weight up out of the shaft. He heaved him out of the hole and rolled him onto the jagged floor of the cave like a landed fish, but by then Tommy Walker wasn't breathing anymore. He was dead.

"Goddamn it!" Quentin had screamed, gazing down at his brother's still and rapidly cooling form. "How dare you go and die on me! How dare you!"

He had started to go for help even then, but halfway to the car the second time, he changed his mind. What if, in the process of pulling Tommy up and out, Quentin had done something to him-what if he had broken something else, caused some other damage that hadn't happened in the fall? What if it was Quentin's fault that his brother was dead? And maybe it was anyway. After all, Quentin was the one who had driven them there in the first place. It was Quentin's car, Quentin's driver's license, and Quentin's gas.

And finally, because he didn't know what else to do; because he didn't know how to go about beginning to face the enormous consequences of what he had done, he climbed into the car and drove away. He went home. Later that night, when Janie asked where Tommy was, Quentin said he didn't know. He claimed he had no idea.

And a day later, Quentin Walker had reluctantly agreed, right along with everyone else, that for some unknown reason his brother Tommy must have run away.

From that day on, no amount of drinking ever held the awful memories quite at bay. In his sleep, Quentin Walker often dreamed about his brother lying limp and lifeless on the floor of the cave. And now, after all the intervening years, for the first time, Quentin Walker was headed back there.

He didn't know for sure if Tommy's body was still in the cave. It probably was, but by the time Mitch Johnson arrived on the scene, it wouldn't be there anymore. Quentin couldn't afford for Tommy to be found now. Back at the beginning, when it first happened, people might have believed it was an accident. If they found out about it now, who would believe that story, especially if it was coming from Quentin Walker, from somebody who was an ex-con?

Tommy Walker had been missing all these years, and his brother Quentin was determined that he stay that way-missing forever.