Desert Shadows (9781615952250) (4 page)

Several years ago we expanded into book publishing. Our first title,
The American Triumph
, earned national attention when Strom Thurmond quoted its passages on the floor of the U.S. Senate. And now, yet another best-selling book adds to our ever-growing reputation.

Losing America
, by historian/journalist Randall Ott, rocketed to the number one spot on the
New York Times
best seller list and remained there for fifteen weeks straight. A full year since its printing, the book remains in the top ten.

Ott's message is an important one. He believes that for America to regain its former stature in the world politic, we must stop all immigration into the U.S., especially that of Arabs, Africans, and Asians. Under certain strict guidelines, he recommends a program which will allow limited immigration of healthy, college-educated Northern Europeans.

While Mr. Ott's views are not necessarily the views of the editors at Patriot's Blood, we do applaud his courage to speak out in a time when political correctness has all but silenced dissent.

Join us. Subscribe to
Patriot's Blood Magazine
today, then begin building your own personal library of Patriot's Blood titles. By doing so, you will help restore America to her former glory.

America needs her patriots now more than ever.

The signature below, in a spidery yet elegant script, was that of Gloriana Alden-Taylor.

I looked up from the brochure and stared across the exhibition hall at Ott, who was preening as a fan pointed excitedly to one of
Losing America'
s pages. An Anglo fan, of course; the book has always been less popular with readers of color. It was especially popular with the vigilante groups that had sprung up along the border Arizona shared with Mexico. An underlined copy had been found in the backpack of one “patriot” sharpshooter who had shot and killed a twelve-year-old Mexican girl trying to get into the U.S. with her mother.

Stuffing the brochure into my carry-all, I headed toward the exhibit hall's rear exit and soon found myself at the top of an artificial berm that sloped gently to the Old West Encampment.

Below me, in a manmade valley, sprawled a motley panorama of faux prairie schooners, faux tepees, faux wickiups, faux hogans, and faux log cabins. A few real Indians—mainly Pima, Navajo and Apache, wearing cynical smiles on their faces—strolled along in tribal dress. When I reached them, I saw they were handing out fliers inviting everyone to their next pow-wow. Cowboys, some of them actually real, did likewise. In the cowboys' case, however, the brochures hyped local dude ranches and city-slicker cattle drives. Near a deeply banked campfire stood a chaps-wearing cowboy poet I recognized as “Chaps” Peterson. His repertoire included poems about starlit nights, lonely trails, mean broncs, and unfaithful saloon gals. The freshening wind (rain tomorrow?) carried snatches of his current presentation.

Left my sweet lil' Sal back home,

Been ridin' the trail seven months and a day.

While I been gone, ol' Lonesome John

Done honeyed my Sal and took her away.

It was all phoney as hell, but who cared? The true West was no longer available except in old men's dreams, and the more the cities closed in, the more we needed the dream. While it might be pretty to imagine an Arizona unblemished by housing tracts and satellite dishes, that hope was no more realistic than imagining Manhattan without gridlock. Evolution happens, whether we like it or not.

An actor dressed like Wyatt Earp handed me a flier. “Shoot-out in fifteen minutes, be there or be square. We're gathering on the other side of the Pima fry bread stand.”

“Where's that?” I asked Wyatt, remembering that the Rev planned to meet me there. I've always been a sucker for fry bread, especially the way the Pimas cook it: hot, puffy, and dripping with wild honey.

I followed Wyatt's directions to the stand, purchased a half-order, then found a seat at a vacant picnic table and began to eat. Pima honey was dripping down my chin when I heard a familiar voice behind me.

“Baby, I can explain everything.”

Dusty.

Quickly assembling my thoughts, I turned to face a man I'd once thought I loved. “Well, well, look what the bobcat dragged in.”

My insult was no exaggeration. Except for Dusty's always immaculate dude ranch attire, he did look like something coughed up by Arizona wildlife. His trail-weathered face had taken on a yellow tinge, and his lanky form seemed crumpled in on itself. Red veins streaked the whites around now-faded blue eyes, contrasting garishly with the purple circles beneath. His hands shook, and I suspected not from nerves.

“Lena, why won't you return my calls?” Even his voice sounded broken.

A few months earlier Dusty had discarded me for another woman, a tourist who'd made a successful play for him at the Happy Trails Dude Ranch where he worked. Still smarting from his betrayal, I wanted to hurt him as badly as he'd hurt me.

“You sure as hell didn't return my calls when you were off in Vegas with that…that…” I thought hard but couldn't come up with a better word, “…with that bitch.”

Without invitation, he sat down on my right, his thigh pressed against mine. It was all I could do not to press back. Not that I still cared about him or anything.

“Baby, let me tell you what really happened. She and I.…”

Thigh scalding, I shifted down the bench as far away from him as I could get. “As entertaining as your yarn might be, I'm not interested. Besides, I'm working.”

He narrowed his bloodshot eyes at my fry bread. “It doesn't look like you're working.”

I snorted. “There's a liar at this picnic table, and it sure isn't me.”

“Please, Lena.…”

To my great relief, I heard Reverend Giblin's baritone behind me. “Told you it wouldn't be long, didn't I, Lena? And great news. David and Emil here have agreed to tell you everything they know.”

I looked past Dusty and saw the Rev flanked by two men I had seen earlier at the SOBOP booth. “That's wonderful. Let's get started.”

The Rev, no dummy, raised his eyebrows. “Ah, will Dusty…?”

“The cowboy was just leaving.”

Dusty clenched his jaw, and for a brief moment, I thought he might refuse. But then his dude ranch manners kicked in and he stood up. “I'll talk to you later, Lena.”

“Not if I see you coming first,” I muttered into the last piece of my fry bread. I wished my heart would quit hurting.

As Dusty stalked off, the Rev gave me a sad look. I knew what he was thinking, that I always managed to screw up my relationships. He was right, too. I didn't bother to tell him that this time, Dusty rejected me first.

After I was certain my voice wouldn't tremble, I patted the bench and said, “C'mon, Rev, take a load off.”

Once the Rev introduced me to the Hispanic man, I realized where I'd seen him before. Emil Ramos, the owner of Verdad Press, made the local news broadcasts recently when he got into a spat at the Arizona Capitol with Representative Lynn Tinsley, the sponsor of the English-only bill. During the shouting match, Ramos screamed at Tinsley in five languages; besides the usual English and Spanish, Ramos was also fluent in German, Vietnamese, and Navajo. Responding in the fractured Spanglish she probably used with her maid, Tinsley called Ramos a “wetback.” Ramos, whose family had lived in Arizona several generations longer than Tinsley's, reminded the congresswoman that if she wanted to return America to its native language, she'd have to learn approximately three hundred Native American dialects. Beside herself with rage, Tinsley then uttered the words that, although they were bleeped out on the local news, ran in their full glory on MTV. “Fuck you, beaner.”

David Zhang, owner of Arizona Trails Publishing, kept a much lower profile. A fourth-generation Arizonan, he, like many other local Asians, descended from the Chinese laborers who built the railroad across the West in the nineteenth century. As Zhang proudly told me, he began his publishing house on the strength of one book,
The Iron Highway,
which contained selections from his track-laying ancestors' memoirs.

“My original publishing mission has expanded to include books on scenic areas all over the Southwest,” Zhang finished. “Most of them are the big glossy, coffee-table extravaganzas you see in gift shops, but I also produce smaller, less expensive guides for campers and hikers.”

I told Zhang that besides the book I'd bought a few minutes earlier, I also owned his beautifully photographed seasonal guide to the Grand Canyon. “My boyfriend bought it for me,” I said. Then I remembered. “I mean my
ex
-boyfriend.”

To forestall any questions, I quickly asked, “Randall Ott couldn't make it?”

Zhang grimaced. “Captain America's still signing books for his admirers. Besides, he only mixes with white people. But since you've got the prerequisite coloring, he might condescend to talk to you once we've left. Just don't be surprised if he forces you to buy that nasty screed of his in order to get an interview.”

Losing America
wasn't my kind of nightstand reading, but if that's what it took.… “As long as it's cheap.”

“Doesn't get much cheaper,” Zhang said. His tone made me suspect he didn't mean the book's price.

To my surprise, the stories the three told dovetailed with Owen Sisiwan's. The day before the murder, Gloriana had suddenly asked everyone at their dinner table if they'd like to go on a hike at Oak Creek, and—impressed by her good will—the group said yes. They had arrived at Oak Creek around ten in the morning and hiked for a couple of hours. At various points, several people had lagged behind to pick flowers and herbs, only to have Owen confiscate their haul.

“Owen had no patience with that kind of behavior,” the Rev finished up. “He said that as long as they were on state land, they needed to keep their hands to themselves.”

Ramos smiled. “As I remember, he told them if they wanted greenery, to buy it at the resort's flower shop.”

“How well did you know the other people on the hike?”

He smoothed his silvered hair. “I know
of
Randall Ott, and his inamorata, Representative Lynn Tinsley. Perhaps the honorable Ms. Tinsley believed that the hemlock she picked would ward off those black helicopters she is so worried about.”

I frowned, not certain that I'd heard right. “Black helicopters?”

Zhang winked at Ramos and grinned at me, flashing the kind of perfect orthodontia you only find in Scottsdale or Beverly Hills. That and his Armani sports coat hinted that Arizona Trails' books sold well. Or maybe he'd inherited money.

“You haven't heard about Tinsley's black helicopters?” Zhang asked. “The only things that worry her more than a child speaking Spanish are the black helicopters she believes are jamming the television signals at her house. Perhaps you haven't read her magnum opus,
The Area 51 Project the Government Doesn't Want You to Know About
. She had ten thousand copies published at her own expense and now she can't even give them away. So much for her dreams of matching her boyfriend's publishing success.”

“Not enough hate in her book,” Ramos murmured. “Just fear.”

Frightened people frequently kill, though, so I filed the knowledge away for further consideration. “Who else spent their time picking plants?”

Ramos looked abashed. “I must admit that I was foolish enough to do so. My eye was captured by a purple aster, though, not hemlock. Owen made me give my treasure to him, which served me right for being so thoughtless. Another sinner was Gloriana's niece, Sandra Alden-Taylor. The woman is a lovely person, of that I am quite sure, but several times, Mr. Sisiwan had to caution her, also, to leave the plant life alone.”

Zhang flashed his teeth again. “Yeah, Sandra seemed determined to shovel half the creek's flowers into her fanny pack.”

That made several people who couldn't keep their hands off the plants, even those who should have known better. But I sympathized. The glories of Arizona's deserts, canyons, and forests could do strange things to people.

I noticed the Rev watching me closely, a worried expression on his face. Was it because of my questioning, or was it something else?

“What?”

“Lena, Owen made everyone hand over what they'd picked. Everyone. He did everything short of frisk us to make sure we didn't carry even a leaf away.”

Going over everyone's stories, I began to run the numbers in my mind. “Ott, Tinsley, Gloriana's niece, you three…that's only six, plus Owen. Who have I missed?”

The Rev smiled. “Myra Gordon, an acquisitions librarian from Wyatt's Landing, down near Casa Grande. She was the only one on the hike who is actually staying at the resort. The rest of us here just drive up to the Expo every morning. Anyway, from what she told me, she's attending SOBOP to find locally published books for the Wyatt's Landing Public Library. And Zach, Gloriana's grandson, came along, too. But I can assure you that he didn't pick a thing. He was right in front of me, and I would have noticed.”

I'd heard such assurances before. They seldom amounted to much. “Zach would have seen the water hemlock and heard Owen's warning, right?”

The Rev shrugged. “I guess. But he's a good man, Lena. One of the best.”

Most of the men on Death Row had once been described by someone as “a good man.” Especially by their mothers.

“One final question, Rev. Did any of you see exactly what Owen did after he confiscated the plants?”

“He replanted most of the herbs and flowers, and disposed of the too badly damaged plants in the brush. But he put the hemlock in his jacket pocket.” The Rev's face looked glum.

Not good. Owen had probably collected enough lethal flora to wipe out the entire Arizona Diamondbacks team, and half the Cardinals to boot.