Queen of the Night

Five

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 7:15 p.m.

87º Fahrenheit

When Brandon returned to the house in Gates Pass, he pulled into the garage and parked his CRV next to Diana’s hulking Tampico red Buick Invicta convertible. She had told him just that morning that she intended to sell it-that she wanted him to take it up to Barrett Jackson, the collector car auction place in Scottsdale, to see what he could get for it.

The idea that she was even thinking about unloading her treasured car had come as a real shock to him. The old Buick convertible had been little more than a wreck when Diana had won it at a charity auction, and she had paid good money for Leo Ortiz to bring the vehicle back from the dead. Now it was a real collector’s item, all spit and polish and complete with custom-made red and white imitation leather seats that were unashamed copies of the factory originals.

If she went through with that idea, Brandon doubted Diana would get as much as she expected from selling her pride and joy, but still, why do it? Even with their book-contract difficulties, it wasn’t as if they needed the money. They didn’t.

When Brandon stepped inside the back door, Damsel greeted him ecstatically. Despite years of lobbying on Brandon ’s part, Diana continued to regard pet doors as magnets for other unwanted critters. Damsel had been left inside for so long that she went racing outside without even noticing the doggie bag containing Brandon ’s leftover fajitas. Once she was back inside and downing her treat, Brandon lugged Geet Farrell’s box into his study and set it on his desk.

Once upon a time the room had been a treasure trove of mementos from Brandon ’s law enforcement days. There had been photos of him meeting various dignitaries, including one of him shaking hands with President Nixon. Nixon may have left office in disgrace, but Brandon still had a soft spot in his heart for the man who had campaigned for office as a “law and order” candidate.

And maybe part of Brandon ’s fondness for Nixon came from his own understanding of disgrace, because a similar fate had befallen Sheriff Brandon Walker. Richard Nixon had been brought low by that pesky group of “plumbers.” Brandon ’s downfall had come about due to his two ne’er-do-well sons, Tommy and Quentin, who had never given their father anything but heartbreak.

And the truth was, Quentin had been more at fault than Tommy ever was. Tommy hadn’t lived long enough to grow into anything worse than an overgrown juvenile delinquent. When he disappeared, Brandon and Diana had assumed he had simply run away. Instead, he had died years earlier while on a grave-robbing expedition out on the reservation. His parents might never have learned the truth about their son’s disappearance if it hadn’t been for Mitch Johnson’s attack on Lani, which had led to the discovery of Tommy’s skeletal remains.

Quentin, on the other hand, had lived long enough to become a genuine criminal. His involvement in a prison-based protection racket had been an important component in Brandon ’s losing his bid for reelection to the office of sheriff. And later on, when Quint was paroled from prison for the second time, things had gotten worse instead of better.

While imprisoned in Florence, Quentin had come under the spell of not one but two crazed killers, both of them sworn enemies of Brandon Walker and Diana Ladd. Diana had helped her friend, Rita Antone, see to it that a former English professor named Andrew Philip Carlisle had gone to prison for the murder of Rita’s granddaughter, Gina. Brandon had done the same thing for a remorseless killer named Mitch Johnson, who liked to go out into the desert and use illegal immigrants for target practice.

Incarcerated together in the Arizona State Prison at Florence, Carlisle and Johnson had hatched a complicated program of revenge against Brandon and Diana. Quentin, most likely without realizing what their real motives were, had somehow been drawn into their vortex. The last time Quentin set foot in his father’s house, he had come there with the newly paroled Mitch Johnson, who was operating as Andrew Carlisle’s proxy. Functioning in a drug-addled stupor, Quentin had vandalized his father’s office, smashing his keepsakes and a lifetime’s worth of mementos. Quentin had done all that without realizing that he and his adopted sister, Lani, were the real targets in Mitch Johnson’s scheme.

In the pitched battle that followed, Lani had managed to save herself, and she had tried to save Quentin as well, but he had been badly injured. Over the next several years, Quentin’s physical condition had deteriorated, step by step, into a situation where he had become hooked on prescription medications and had died as a result of an accidental overdose.

Long before that, though, when Brandon and Diana were still dealing with the immediate crisis, Diana had offered to have the broken plaques and photos repaired and reframed. But Brandon had refused. He was done with all that. Repairing the damage would have hurt more than letting all that stuff go. Instead, Diana had done a makeover, one that included new paint and a new desk and, eventually, more of Diana’s burgeoning collection of baskets.

And that was fine with Brandon, even though collecting baskets was Diana’s passion, not his. He could look at them impassively and not be reminded of what he continued to regard as his greatest failure in life-his sons.

That was one of the reasons the month of June bothered him so much these days-because of Father’s Day. He had done all right with his stepson, Davy, and with Lani, his adopted daughter. And then there was Brian Fellows, Tommy and Quentin’s half brother, who had worshipped Brandon from afar, sopping up the fatherly crumbs Quentin and Tommy had disdained, and who was now one of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department’s senior detectives in his own right.

Taking Lani and Davy and Brian into consideration, maybe Brandon Walker wasn’t a complete failure in the fatherhood department-just where his own biological offspring were concerned.

Even so, remembering Tommy and Quentin was something that hurt him every day-every single day of the year-Father’s Day or not.

Finally, in order to banish the old insecurities, Brandon sat down at the desk and opened the banker’s box. Before he made any effort to contact the woman who had written to Geet, he needed to familiarize himself with as much of the case as possible.

Plucking a pair of reading glasses out of the top desk drawer, he reached into the box, pulled out the first document he found there, and began to read.

Sells, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 8:00 p.m.

79º Fahrenheit

As Dan drove along the highway south of Sells, he examined the occupants of every vehicle he met and every one he passed. Most of the southbound cars were fully occupied with Indians and were headed for the dance. Among the ones coming north, Dan saw nothing out of line. He recognized the vehicles as belonging to people from nearby villages. They were headed into Sells to shop or into Tucson for the same reason.

South of Topawa, the Anglo name of a village called Gogs Mek, or Burnt Dog, the narrow paved road gave way to rough gravel. Here and there, the tan rocky dirt along the roadway was punctuated by ho’ithkam- ironwood trees, kukui u’us- mesquite trees, and low-lying shegoi, greasewood or creosote bushes.

Dan practiced his self-imposed vocabulary lessons as he drove, not because he thought speaking the language would win him acceptance on the reservation but because he wanted to prove to himself that he could do it.

When Micah Duarte had brought him home to San Carlos, Dan had resisted all of his grandfather’s efforts to teach him Apache. Now Dan studied Tohono O’odham on his own. It was a means of seeking forgiveness, not from Gramps. Micah Duarte had never expected or demanded such a thing. No, Dan Pardee was seeking forgiveness for himself from himself. That was a lot more difficult to come by.

He passed the tiny village of Komelik, which, roughly translated, means Low Flat Place. Compared to the mountains jutting up out of the desert to the left of the road, this was low and flat and mostly deserted. After that, every time a set of tire tracks veered off the road and out into the desert, Dan stopped the Expedition, got out of the vehicle and examined the story left behind in the dust and dirt. Months of patient study had allowed him to put many of the resulting tire tracks together with the people who drove individual vehicles.

The track with the half-bald front tire belonged to a vehicle that had been permanently knocked out of alignment when the driver, an old man named James Juan, had struck a cow on the open-range part of the highway near Quijotoa, a bastardization of Giwho Tho’ag, or Burden Basket Mountain. Dan spotted the tracks of a pickup hauling a livestock trailer. That, no doubt, belonged to Thomas Rios, who along with his son successfully ran several head of cattle on a well-managed family plot of land near Komelik.

The tires on the small sedan probably belonged to the Anglo man Dan had seen hanging around on several occasions lately-mostly when he was working day shift. The guy drove a white Lexus-not exactly reservation-style wheels-but he was always alone, always drove the speed limit, and never failed to pass along a friendly wave. One of the other Shadow Wolves had talked to the guy. He was evidently some kind of naturalist doing research in the desert with Thomas Rios’s full knowledge and approval.

Today the Anglo man had driven off into the desert and then had come back out again, but so had another vehicle, one whose tracks Dan didn’t recognize. That one, too, had turned off the road and then come back. So it might be worthwhile to check into that later, but right now he wanted to head on south.

After the Gadsden Purchase divided the Tohono O’odham’s ancestral lands, the Desert People had pretty much ignored the international border, crossing back and forth at will, especially at a place on the reservation known as The Gate. All that had changed in the aftermath of 9-11. As border security tightened in other places, immigration and smuggling activities had multiplied on the reservation, bringing with it far more official scrutiny from Homeland Security, most especially from the Border Patrol.

Now, as Dan Pardee did every other time he was on night shift, he drove to The Gate first. Then, during the course of the night and the remainder of his shift, he would work his way back north.

Sells, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 7:30 p.m.

79º Fahrenheit

Donald Rios had told Delphina that he’d come by the house in Sells at seven to pick them up and go to the dance. By six, Delphina was showered and dressed. By six-thirty, she had bathed Angie, dressed her, and carefully braided her daughter’s straight black hair. Then Delphina sat back to worry while Angie settled in to watch Dora the Explorer on the TV set in the living room.

Maybe he won’t come, Delphina worried as she sat at the kitchen window and stared out at the empty yard. Maybe he’ll stand us up.

That belief, of course, was a holdover from her days with Joaquin Enos, who had never been a man of his word. With Joaquin, even the smallest promise was made to be broken. He had been handsome enough to appeal to a fifteen-year-old and had thought nothing of knocking her up, but he hadn’t wanted to have anything to do with her or Angie once the baby was born.

So now all of Delphina’s old insecurities kicked in: What if Donald didn’t come after all? She had already told Angie that they were going to the dance. Would they have to go alone? Was there enough gas in the pickup to make it all the way to Vamori and back? When the clock turned over seven o’clock and Donald still wasn’t there, Delphina plunged into a fit of disappointment. He wasn’t coming. All men were just alike, and Donald Rios was as bad as the rest of them.

Then, at a quarter to eight, almost an hour after he was supposed to be there and after Delphina had already given Donald Rios up for lost, he drove into her yard. She had the porch light on and she could see that his Chevy Blazer was shiny and freshly washed. With all the dust in the air, people on the reservation considered the act of washing a car either as an exercise in futility or as a deliberate rain dance.

When he knocked, Angie abandoned her pal Dora and went racing to the door to let him in. Donald Rios was a large man. Standing on the shaky wooden step outside Delphina’s door, he looked more than a little silly in his dress-up boots and shirt, holding a child’s pink-and-yellow pinwheel in one hand and a wilted handful of grocery-store flowers in the other.

“Sorry I’m so late,” he said with an apologetic smile, handing the pinwheel to Angie and the flowers to Delphina. Angie took her present and raced back to the TV set with barely a thank-you while Delphina opened the door and ushered him inside.

“Indian time?” she asked, accepting the proffered flowers. She didn’t have a proper vase, so she put the flowers in a water glass and set them on the kitchen counter.

Donald laughed sheepishly. “I had to do something for my mother,” he said. “If it had been real Indian time I would have been a lot later. Are you ready to go?”

Delphina nodded.

“Oi g hihm,” Donald called to Angie. “Let’s go.”

He didn’t need to say so twice. Pinwheel in hand, Angie came on the run, ready to do just that-clamber into his Blazer and go.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 6:00 p.m.

81º Fahrenheit

Jack Tennant was relieved when Abby emerged from the bedroom wearing a turquoise-colored pantsuit and a pair of sandals. He wouldn’t have objected if she’d turned up in a dress and heels, but he knew the slacks would make for an easier wardrobe change when it came time to slip on the jumpsuit. Abby still had a fair amount of midwestern modesty about her. Stripping down and getting naked or nearly naked in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t come easily.

That wasn’t to say it wouldn’t ever happen. With women you never could tell. Jack had the air mattress along just in case his powers of persuasion outstripped Abby’s objections. After their sweet afternoon nap interlude, what they did later on that evening to celebrate their anniversary was no longer such a pressing issue, at least not as far as Jack was concerned.

When they got in the car, Jack insisted that Abby put on the blindfold, and she was a good sport about it. Hoping to keep their destination secret for as long as possible, he headed west on I-10 toward Marana rather than going south through town. In Marana he turned off on Sandario Road. That was as much as Abby could take.

“I can’t stand this anymore,” she said, whipping off the blindfold. “Where in the world are you taking me?”

The jig was up.

“To the reservation,” he said. “Out beyond Sells.”

“But there aren’t any restaurants-” She stopped abruptly because she got it. “You found one, didn’t you,” she said accusingly, but beaming as she spoke. “You found a night-blooming cereus out in the desert somewhere. That’s where we’re going!”

Jack nodded, because Abby was right, up to a point. After months of using his phantom foursome to cover his activities, after asking and gaining permission to explore various people’s lands both on the reservation and off it, Jack hadn’t found just “a night-blooming cereus.” He believed he had found what might be the granddaddy of them all!

The deer-horn cacti on display at Tohono Chul sometimes had as many as seven or eight blooms on them. This one, an old giant that had wound its way up into an ironwood tree, had at least a hundred buds on it. Jack had been afraid something would go wrong. Maybe the plants growing in the wild would be on a different schedule from the ones in captivity, as it were. So he had come out and checked on the buds on his plant and then had made secret visits to Tohono Chul to make sure the buds there seemed to be progressing along the same schedule. And they had. They were.

He was sure that tonight when the flowers bloomed in the garden, the ones in the desert would be blooming as well. There, hundreds of people would be in attendance. Here, there would be only Jack and Abby and maybe Thomas Rios’s son, Donald, who was about to become engaged himself. When Thomas had told him about that and asked if Jack would mind if Donald and Delphina stopped by for a little while to see the flowers, Jack hadn’t had the heart to object. After all, this was Thomas Rios’s land to begin with.

“Absolutely,” he had said heartily. “The more the merrier.”

And he had meant it, too. He had made sure there was enough food for everyone and extra dishes and silverware just in case. He worried a little about the wine. He knew you weren’t supposed to have liquor on the reservation, so he might wait to pour that until after Donald and his girlfriend left to go to a dance. There would be a full moon tonight. There would be plenty of time for him and Abby to savor the flowers, the night, and the claret.

Abby reached over and gently lifted Jack’s hand off the steering wheel. She held the back of it to her lips, kissed it, and then returned it to the steering wheel.

“Thank you,” she said. “You really are a remarkable man.”

Jack smiled at her. “Words to warm a man’s heart,” he said.

“But how did you manage to pull this off? Did someone find it for you?”

“Don’t expect me to tell you all my secrets,” he said. “I may want to surprise you again sometime.”

Smiling, she leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes. The nap they had both missed this afternoon was starting to catch up with her. Truth be told, it was catching up with Jack as well, but he hummed a few bars of their special song, “Solamente Una Vez,” to keep himself awake.

Everyone else knew the song as something schmaltzy about the Thousand Guitars, but a young dark-eyed singer with a local mariachi band had translated it for them that night after they had stood before the justice of the peace: “Only once in a lifetime does the light of love fall across your garden path.”

And tonight the garden is the desert, Jack Tennant thought. And the light of love will be a full moon.

So while Abby slept, Jack drove. She snored a little, but he was far too much of a gentleman to tell her that.

It’s one of our little secrets, he thought to himself. He was incredibly grateful that, at their supposedly advanced ages, there was still enough room in their lives to have secrets. And fun. For a moment, and it was only a moment, Jack felt a fleeting bit of wistfulness for poor Irene, because she hadn’t lived long enough to find that out. Even if she had lived long enough, he suspected Irene never would have figured out the fun part.

That was another place where Abby had Irene beaten six ways to Sunday.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 6:00 p.m.

81º Fahrenheit

Jonathan was working his way through his second take-out burger when Jack Tennant backed his Lexus out of the garage. Then, with him holding the passenger door open, a woman came out through the garage and let him take her hand as she got into the car.

Just seeing her made Jonathan’s heart leap to his throat. The last time he had spoken to his mother in person had been the afternoon he graduated from Wheaton. Both his parents had been there. It was the last time Jonathan had seen them together. He had known even then that his father had a side dish, but with a nag for a wife, who could blame him?

He had been standing there having his picture taken with Esther when his mother came up to him, smiling. “I’m so proud of you,” she had said. “I thought this day would never come.”

Of course you didn’t, Jonathan had told himself. Because you always thought I was dumb.

“Do your homework. Study harder. Don’t hang out with those loser friends of yours. Listen to decent music instead of that punk rock. Don’t drink. Don’t do this. Don’t do that.” When he was little, Jonathan had thought he had the best mother in the world. By junior high, that had changed. By high school they were in an undeclared war. By college the hot war became a cold one.

“Well, it did,” he had said to her then. “No thanks to you.”

With that, Jonathan had walked away from his mother and stayed away. Permanently, until now. It turned out that absence hadn’t made the heart grow fonder. If anything, his opinion of her had deteriorated. Over the years, she became the root cause of everything that went wrong with his life.

When Jonathan’s marriage began to come apart at the seams, it was because Esther was just like his mother. Jonathan’s father had told him that Abby was a spendthrift, and Jonathan believed it. His mother had spent Hank’s money; Esther had spent Jonathan’s. And every criticism Esther had leveled at him seemed to be an echo of his mother’s words and voice. He knew that his father was living a hellish existence with his relatively new wife and dipshit daughter, Jonathan’s half sister.

But here was Abby living a seemingly carefree existence with this new husband. She had made a couple of halfhearted e-mail attempts at reconciliation over the years, but Jonathan hadn’t been interested. He didn’t need a mother in his life any more than he needed a wife. One was gone and the other would be soon.

As he pulled into traffic a few vehicles behind the Lexus, it struck him that he had felt precious little remorse about what he had done so far. No, make that no remorse. He was relieved. Isn’t that what they always said during trials, that the killer showed no remorse? He wouldn’t, either.

In the hours after the murders in Thousand Oaks and before he drove away from the house just prior to sunrise, he had used Esther’s phone to buy himself some time. He had sent out a series of text messages to people in her address book-even to the boyfriend he wasn’t supposed to know about-letting them know that she and Jonathan were taking the kids to Yosemite for a couple of days. Once the bodies were found in Thousand Oaks, once it made the news, maybe he’d feel something, but by then he expected to be somewhere south of the border, sipping margaritas and living off the funds he had already transferred to an account in the Cayman Islands. That was the thing about continuing education. In teaching bankers how to counter illegal money transfers, the instructors had inadvertently taught them how to do it as well.

So the money that he didn’t have with him would be there waiting for him wherever he ended up. In the meantime, he knew that he had spared his own children the pain of knowing that one or the other of their parents had rejected them. He knew that feeling all too well. Yes, he had turned away from Abby, but only after she had already abandoned him.

He had taken care of Esther. Tonight he would even the score for his mother’s betrayal as well. Once he had fixed that, he would be able to move on into his new life, whatever and wherever that might be. His old life was over. Jonathan Southard had finally gotten a little of his own power back-power both his mother and his wife had leached out of him.

Once again he was careful to stay in the background. He expected they’d be going back to the reservation, so he was a little surprised when they set off in an entirely different direction. Eventually Jack turned off the freeway, first onto Cortaro Road and finally onto Sandario. When that happened, Jonathan knew he had been right all along about where they were headed. He could afford to relax. He would get there when he got there.

Jack and Abby Tennant could start their little party without him, but he was the one who would finish it.

South of Sells, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 8:10 p.m.

78º Fahrenheit

Dan was glad to be driving south toward the border. Coming from Tucson, he had been driving into the setting sun. This was much better.

This would be his second full summer with the Shadow Wolves. Brainwashed by what’s on television, most people probably expected that every shift had at least one high-speed chase and maybe a running gun battle or two. That had been Dan’s preconceived notion as well, but Aaron Meecham had disabused him of that notion at his first official Shadow Wolves briefing.

“Okay, guys,” Aaron had said. “Meet Dan Pardee, a San Carlos Apache who comes to us via Iraq and the U.S. Army.” There were a dozen uniformed men assembled in the briefing room that morning. Most of them nodded in welcome and three gave Dan a discreet thumbs-up. In other words, several guys there had the same kind of military credentials Dan did. That meant that, in a tight spot, whoever had his back would be someone he could count on.

The guy sitting directly in front of Dan, a Paiute from Nevada named Russell Muñoz, turned back to Dan. “Welcome to the most dangerous cop job on the planet,” he said. “Got my passenger window shot out just last night, thanks to some jerk-face federale from across the border who decided to use my SUV for target practice. And all we get to carry around with us is a lightweight piece-of-crap Beretta.”

Dan had to agree with that. Packing a new government-issue Beretta 96D didn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence on Dan’s part. If he was going to be involved in a shooting war, he would have preferred the comforting presence of his old M16.

“And you did not return fire, correct, Mr. Muñoz?” Meecham asked.

“I did not,” Muñoz replied grudgingly. “If you ask me, it’s about time somebody rescinded that standing order. If those bastards shoot at us, we should be able to shoot back. Why do we have to do this job with both hands tied behind our backs?”

“That order stands, Muñoz, and don’t you forget it,” Meecham told him. “I don’t want you creating an international incident with that little Beretta of yours. If you were to return fire, all hell would break loose around here, and the full wrath of the gods of DC would rain down on all our heads.”

Meecham paused and looked around the room. “Let’s see a show of hands. How many of you think guns are the biggest problem you have when you’re out on patrol?”

Russell’s hand shot in the air. No one else’s did.

“Since its inception, this unit has had only one fatality, Mr. Pardee,” Meecham explained, speaking directly to Dan. “Mitchell Davis was a Rosebud Sioux, and he was wearing his Kevlar vest when he died. If he’d taken a bullet to the chest, he probably would have been fine. He had stopped a group of illegals. What killed him was the one-pound rock one of them picked up and used to bash in his skull.

“Guns are expensive,” Meecham continued. “Ammunition is expensive. Rocks are free, and they’re everywhere. Fortunately for us, most of the federales aren’t well trained, and they can’t hit the broad side of a barn. That window they shot out last night was pure luck-good luck for them and bad luck for you, Mr. Muñoz. What makes you think it was a federale?”

“I saw it,” Muñoz grumbled. “I heard it.”

“Was it dark when this happened?”

“Yes, it was dark,” Muñoz replied. “Of course it was dark. I’m working nights now, remember?” Russell Muñoz was beginning to sound aggrieved, as though he thought Meecham was picking on him.

“Exactly,” Meecham said with a smile. “And after that flash, you were blind as a bat for a couple of seconds. If someone had rushed you right then, you wouldn’t have seen them coming. Rocks don’t have a flash, but they don’t make any noise, either. They’re the ultimate stealth weapon-silent and deadly. In other words, Mr. Pardee, watch out for rocks and for people throwing them.”

Dan nodded. “Got it,” he said.

The meeting had broken up shortly after that. As soon as Meecham left the room, Russell Muñoz turned back to Dan. “Beretta, my aching ass,” he said. “One of these nights I’m going to bring my AK-47 along for the ride and give those dickheads a taste of their own medicine.”

“With your dashboard camera recording the whole thing for posterity.” That was from Kevin Ramon. He hailed from San Xavier District near Tucson and was the only full-blooded Tohono O’odham member of the unit. He was also one of the guys who had given Dan the old thumbs-up.

“Already thought of that,” Russell told them. “I’m fixing up a Kleenex box that I’ll be able to drop over the camera as needed. What Meecham can’t see and doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

Kevin raised a disparaging eyebrow. “If you say so,” he said.

With that, Russell Muñoz had stormed from the room. Dan had been taken aback by the whole exchange. You could maybe disagree with your superior officers, but doing so in public was out of bounds.

“I’ll bet he doesn’t even own an AK-47,” Kevin said. “And if he ever tried to fire one, he’d probably shoot himself in the foot.”

This was probably not the best time for Dan to mention to one of his fellow Shadow Wolves that he himself really did have such a weapon.

It was the same AK-47 that he and Bozo had earned that day in Iraq. While Dan and his dog were taken away to be stitched up and bandaged, some of the other guys in the convoy had taken charge of the kid’s dropped weapon. They had carefully dismantled it and sent it home, one piece at a time, with directions inside to each of their loved ones that they should forward all pieces on to Micah Duarte in Fort Thomas, Arizona.

By the time Dan’s deployment ended and he was back home, he had been amazed to discover that his grandfather Micah had reassembled the weapon from all those separate pieces. The gun was back together-cleaned, ready and waiting, and it was stored under lock and key at Dan’s house in Tucson.

“That’s not to say we never have shoot-outs,” Kevin continued. “The mules who drive drugs for the cartels are usually armed to the teeth. They shoot first and ask questions later, but if that happens, don’t look to Russell to help you out. The federales may not be the best shots, but neither is Russell. Just wait’ll you see him on the target range,” Kevin added. “He’s pathetic.”

“But I thought we were supposed to be the best of the best,” Dan argued. “Best shots, best trackers.”

Kevin shook his head. “All that and ex-military, too, but as far as I know, the only uniform Russell ever wore was for Cub Scouts.”

“How’d he get in, then?” Dan asked.

“Pull,” Kevin returned. “His father’s a big mucky-muck in the BIA. He pulled a few strings, and here we are stuck with Russell. Take my word for it, one of these days he’s going to screw up bad enough that someone’s gonna get killed. As for Meecham’s rock lecture? Don’t take it personally. Meecham made it sound like it was meant for you, but it wasn’t. He was mostly talking to Muñoz.”

Several months later, after Dan had talked Bozo’s way into the unit, he had his own up-close and personal experience with one of those “stealth” rocks. Dan now sported a jagged scar on his left cheek where he had been nailed. Kevin said it gave him “character,” but Dan knew the damage would have been far worse if it hadn’t been for Bozo. The dog had barked a warning, letting Dan know someone was there. Dan had ducked for cover just in time. The rock had grazed him, but had it not been for Bozo’s timely intervention, Dan Pardee might have died on the spot, or he could have lived the rest of his life with only one eye rather than two.

Each night Dan wasn’t paired with Russell Muñoz, he counted himself lucky. Russell’s academy-acquired skills didn’t measure up to the real ones Dan, Kevin, and the others had picked up in military firefights. In crisis situations, when split-second decisions were called for and when someone’s life was hanging in the balance, Dan didn’t think Russell would be able to hold up his end. The Paiute was all bluff and bluster and precious little action, and no one had yet to see any sign of Russell’s legendary AK-47.

Bozo, on the other hand, was just the opposite. The dog didn’t spend any time bragging about what he would or wouldn’t do, or agonizing about it, either. He simply did it. When the guy hiding on the cliff above him was getting ready to heave that potentially lethal rock in Dan’s direction, Bozo didn’t stand around discussing the relative merits of an AK-47 over your run-of-the-mill Beretta. Nope, the dog simply stepped up and did what needed to be done.

When they were on patrol, Bozo always rode shotgun in Dan Pardee’s front seat. Why wouldn’t he? The dog was his partner. He had earned the right to sit there.

Komelik, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 7:46 p.m.

78º Fahrenheit

Jack had barely finished parking the car before Abby was out of it and ready to don the overalls and hiking boots he had brought along for her. “Where is it?” she asked. “Can I go look now?”

“Nope. First things first.”

Carrying the cooler in one hand and the hamper in the other, he led her over to the waiting picnic table. The candles he had placed on the table earlier, long white tapers, hadn’t fared well in the afternoon heat. They tilted at odd angles, but Jack could see that the fact that the little clearing had been suitably dressed for this evening’s event was making a big impression on his wife.

“This is beautiful,” she said. “You really went all out, didn’t you?”

“Wait until you see the best part,” he said, setting down the hamper and the cooler.

“How far is it?” she asked.

“Not that far. We’ll light the luminarias as we go.”

And they did, walking side by side and lighting the candles along the path as well as the cluster Jack had placed around the base of the ancient ironwood tree. Sticks of hardy deer-horn cactus wound around the trunk and encircled the tree’s lower branches. Slender stalks holding the massive blooms protruded from the cactus. A few of the white blossoms were beginning to open. In the deepening twilight, some of the flowers seemed to spring straight from the tree bark itself.

“It’s glorious!” Abby exclaimed, clapping her hands. “Can you smell them?”

Jack nodded. Even he couldn’t help but notice the flowery aroma, a perfume that was like a cross between plumeria and orange blossom, sweetening the hot desert air.

“How many blossoms?” she asked.

“I counted over a hundred on this one plant.”

“That’s amazing,” Abby said. “I never knew the night-blooming cereus could grow this big. How in the world did you find it?”

“It took time,” Jack admitted with a grin. “Let’s just say I didn’t play nearly as much golf this spring as you thought I did.”

Abby poked him in the ribs. “You rascal,” she said.

“Happy anniversary,” he said. He reached down and turned on a battery-powered camping lantern. “This will give us a little more light when we come back in the dark. Now what say we go back and have our picnic? By the time we finish with that, I’m guessing our very own Queen of the Night will be in full bloom.”