The Pallbearers

Chapter 51

I slept on the short flight because I've learned when you get to the end of a case, sleep is the one thing you can't plan for and never get enough of.

My eyes snapped open after a little over an hour, when the prop engine changed pitch and the King Air started to lose altitude for our gradual descent into Tucson.

I looked at my watch. If Coop's timetable was right, we had twenty minutes until touchdown.

The new portion of my cast was finally dry. I looked around the plane. Everybody was asleep, so I pulled out the Swiss Army knife, opened its little saber-tooth saw-blade, and began scoring the cast. I sawed a cut that was a quarter-inch deep from the knuckle of mv right middle finger straight down across the palm where the Bobcat was hiding. I ended the cut at the heel of my hand, making certain it didn't go all the way through. Next I did the same thing at my wrist as I scored the fiberglass all the way around. When I was finished, the cast was substantially weakened, but still intact.

We touched down on the runway at Tucson International. Coop taxied up to the executive air FBO. Then he shut down the twin-engine prop, climbed out of the pilots seat, and lowered the cabin door.

"I ordered up a car for you, Lieutenant," he told Alexa.

The four of us got off the airplane as our Lincoln Town Car pulled up. While Alexa was thanking Coop for the ride, Seriana walked to the luggage compartment in the nose of the plane, opened it up, and pulled out her duffel. Then she headed toward the terminal, where a young man wearing blue jeans and a polo shirt was standing next to the door, waiting. He had a crew cut and military bearing. Seriana embraced him briefly, then handed him the backpack. They spoke for a moment before she returned. Vicki had been watching this operation with a smile.

"What's she got in there? IEDs?"

"I'm trying not to ask," I replied.

"Interesting woman," she commented.

Like most of us, Alexa's strong link is connected to her weak one. Her strength is she values organization and rules. She believes in order. It was one of the reasons she had risen so fast in the department. However, her weak link was that same Girl Scout mentality. My strong link is a creative, loose working style that sometimes has me skirting the edges of the rule book. Obviously that's my weak link as well.

Technically, since I didn't know what was in Seriana s duffel, why make a public guess and draw a complaint?

Alexa told our pilot we wouldn't be needing him further and he could return to L. A. Then we entered the waiting Lincoln Town Car, with Alexa taking the front seat next to the chauffeur. Seriana, Vicki, and I all sat in back.

Our driver was a big African-American guy who had a neck and shoulders that said ex-jock. He introduced himself as Arthur. As we chatted, it turned out he'd been a defensive end at Arizona State.

"You know where the Talking Stick Casino is on the Tohono O'odham reservation?" I asked him.

"Yes, sir." He was talking to me, but I noticed when his eyes were in the rearview mirror, they rarely left Seriana.

We turned onto the Nogales Highway heading toward a chain of mountains, which Arthur told us was the Quinlan range, where the Kitt Peak National Observatory and its telescope were located.

The engine of the town car purred noiselessly, the headlights cutting through the desert darkness. Cactus and sand flashed past the side window as we raced along.

Alexa said to our driver, "I understand the reservation is very poor."

"It is," Arthur replied. "They have big problems out there. The diet these people eat is horrible. Half the tribe has diabetes. The average male life span is fifty-two years. Our governor is trying to do something to help them, but except for the casino, it's hard to find a way to get enough money to raise their standard of living."

"So what's the casino like?" I was expecting the worst.

"Brand new. You're gonna like it. 'Bout a thousand or fifteen hundred rooms. World-class golf course, tennis, pool right in the middle of a hundred square miles of desolate poverty. It's like somebody plopped a Ritz Carlton down in Honduras."

We entered the Tohono O'odham reservation a little past three in the morning. The road in from the highway was a wide four lane, which led us past run-down trailer parks and broken adobe houses, junk was strewn everywhere. I could see the ghostlike hulks of rusting trucks parked on dead patches of dusty ground from which they would never move.

Then we arrived at the Talking Stick Casino property. The adobe barrier around the resort was nine feet high with decorative but lethal-looking wall spikes located at close intervals along the top. There was an elaborate guard shack at the entrance with a large computer check-in manned by several Tohono Nation security police officers.

We told our Indian gate guard we were going to rent hotel rooms and had to show our IDs and be put on the computer list. Since Alexa and I had creds that said we were police officers, the guard asked if we were carrying sidearms.

"We are," Alexa said.

"Sorry, but Til have to collect your weapons," the guard said. Til give you a receipt and keep them in a gun locker right here. You can retrieve them when you exit."

"I've never been asked to surrender my weapon to a sister police department anywhere in the U. S.," I told him.

"You aren't in the U. S.," the guard replied. "This is the Tohono O'odham Indian Nation, a sovereign territory."

We all surrendered our weapons, including Vicki. Alexa glanced at my cast but said nothing.

Then we were passed onto the grounds.

As we drove on I saw an expansive eighteen-hole golf course off to the right and a lighted tennis center on the left. We drove past an aquatic park with water rides, then a riding stable and archery range, all of it new and beautifully maintained. This resort had it all. Up ahead the Talking Stick Casino came into view.

It was a big, artfully lit building with a huge five-story center section that was designed in a modern pueblo theme. Two large hotel wings stretched out on each side of the main structure and contained the thousand or more rooms our driver, Arthur, had mentioned.

The hotel casino was modern with clean lines, but along the roof of the main building were architectural cement parapets with decorative wooden poles extending from them, reminiscent of an Indian sweat lodge. The resort was modern and aesthetically pleasing but with a definite tribal flavor.

In the center of the circular drive by the front entrance was a fountain with a large lit statue of an Indian chieftain holding a crooked talking stick high above his war bonnet as water cascaded down, splashing on his bronzed head and shoulders.

A billboard nearby announced, THE MAGIC OF CHRISS ANGEL IN THE TOHONO ROOM-MONDAY THROUGH FRIDAY AND THE RAGE IN THE CAGE AT THE TALKING STICK EVENT CENTER 8:00 P. M. SATURDAY

We pulled to a stop and got out. While we were standing under the huge porte cochere waiting for Alexa to pay Arthur, an overly polite, heavyset man in a dark suit with Indian features approached.

"Welcome to the Talking Stick Hotel and Casino," he said. 'Tin Graham, your casino host. May I direct you inside or help you to find anything?"

"I think we'll just check in and get to bed," I said.

Alexa moved up to join us, and Graham led us to the registration desk.

The lobby was almost deserted at this hour, with only a few tables working in the adjoining casino.

There were four of us, so it was cheaper to rent a two-bedroom suite instead of three separate rooms. In order to avoid detection, we had already decided to take the suite under Seriana's name. She showed her ID, we were registered, and Alexa paid for one night in cash.

Because we had no luggage other than briefcases and purses, we followed a bellman, carrying our own gear down a first-floor hallway carpeted with a new, Indian-style patterned rug.

We stopped in front of 1477, which had a brass plaque that read: THE PINTQ SUITE

The bellman opened the room and showed us inside. I tipped him, then closed the door as he left.

The two-bedroom, ground-floor suite was done in desert-sand colors and furnished with expensive, plushly upholstered, Italian reproduction furniture.

"Not bad," Vicki said.

The others trooped out onto the patio, which adjoined the beautiful, semilit golf course, while I called the front desk and asked for Rick O'Shea's room. He wasn't registered. Neither was Diamond Peterson.

They refused to give me any information about Team Ultima, saying I should talk to the event center in the morning.

After I hung up, I went out on the patio to join the others.

I said, "It's almost four. We're not going to learn anything tonight. Let's get a few hours' sleep and start working on it at eight tomorrow."

"What about Diamond?" Vicki said.

Alexa said, "We won't find out anything tonight. Nobody's even up to talk to."

We selected our rooms, and I went to the writing desk, picked up the cordless phone, and set the wake-up call for 8:00 A. M.

After I finished, I replaced the phone next to the heavy leather folder that held the room-service menu and hotel literature.

On the folder's front cover, embossed in gold, I saw the same little logo of a mesa with a circle around it that I'd seen on the roof of the building on Wilshire Boulevard.

I picked up a brochure.

The Talking Stick Hotel and Casino was a Eugene C. Mesa resort.