Hour of the Hunter (5 page)

"The mountain?" the woman asked, looking at him dubiously. "I thought you said you're from Prescott. How come you don't know Picacho Peak?"

"My dad's in Prescott," he said. "In the VA hospital up there. I'm from El Paso. I've never been here before. What did you call it, Picacho Peak? It looks steep. Do people climb it?"

"All the time. I grew up around here. The mountain's one of my favorite places. Actually, there's a rest area partway up. We could make a pit stop there if you can spare the time."

"Sure," he said agreeably. "I'd like that."

The parking lot at the rest area was totally deserted.

A searing, hot wind blew down off the mountain and into their faces when they got out of the car. While the woman went to use the rest room, Andrew retrieved two more beers from the cooler and then sauntered over to a shaded picnic table. Across the desert came the whine of tires as vehicles sped along the Interstate several hundred yards away, but none of them slowed or stopped. Closer at hand there was no sign of life.

He took a leisurely sip from his second beer in six years.

The alcohol was making him a little giddy, giving him a slight but pleasant buzz. He sat with his back against the warm concrete picnic tabletop and thought about taking her right there in the heat, in broad daylight, as it were.

That excited him almost beyond bearing, but there was no sense in being stupid. Carlisle looked around. At one end of the rest area, he saw a small playground. Beyond it, a trail wound off up the mountain.

When the woman emerged from the rest room, Carlisle was gratified to see that she had applied a fresh coat of vivid red lipstick. He looked forward to the taste of it, anticipating how it would feel to crush those full lips against his own. He wondered if cosmetic companies had ever considered naming their lipsticks with his kind of flavors---Yielding Woman" would be a good one or maybe "Blood Red."

Maybe he could get a job writing advertising copy.

As she came walking toward him. he again noticed the deep tan on her legs and the easy, sensuous sway of her generous hips. Not unaware of her effect on him, she seemed, in fact, to enjoy it.

He handed her a beer, which he'd already opened. "Ever make any money on the side?" he asked.

She smiled coquettishly over the top of the can, but she made no movement away from him. He caught a whiff of freshened perfume with its hint of tacit agreement. "That depends on what you have in mind," she said. "Your place or mine?"

He almost choked. She was brazen as hell. Is that what had happened to women in the six-and-a-half years since 1968 when they'd locked him up?

Was that what "Women's Lib" was all about? A little reluctance might have been nice.

Carlisle liked reluctance in his women. Sex was always far more interesting when the woman had to give more than she intended. This broad, for instance, thought she was in complete control. He'd be only too happy to show her otherwise.

"Right here," he said, motioning toward the picnic table behind them.

She looked at him incredulously. "Right here? In the rest area? In this heat? What if somebody comes?"

Somebody'll come, he thought. "A quickie," he said, ashamed that it sounded so much like begging.

She laughed then. Something about him struck her as funny. The muscles along his jawline tightened with sudden anger.

"Sixty-five," she said easily. "It'd be more if we had to rent a room.

Let me see the money first."

Sixty-five? he thought. What kind of price was that for a piece of ass? But he counted out the bills slowly and deliberately, giving himself time to savor the sensation. He studied the fine lines of her upturned palm as he placed the money in her hand. Would a fortune-teller have been able to read the lifeline etched there and tell what was about to happen?

She took the money from him, folded it in quarters, and stuffed the wad of bills into the tight hip pocket of her shorts. "You mean right here on the table?" she asked.

"How about down the path," he suggested lamely, as though stricken with a sudden case of shyness. "Maybe far enough to be out of sight of the parking lot."

She laughed again. "So you are bashful after all," she teased.

"A little," he admitted.

Maybe he would have let her go if she hadn't laughed at him so much, but he doubted it. He knew himself better than that. The die had been cast the moment she slowed down to pick him up.

She set off at a brisk pace, leading him toward the path.

Fierce heat leaped off the rocks and burned their faces.

"It may be too hot," he said, dropping back as though he had changed his mind.

"There's a spring," she said. "Water and some shade.

I've been here lots of times. It's not far."

She was right, it wasn't far, but it was all uphill. About a quarter of a mile up the steep track, she swung off the main trail and followed another, fainter one off to the side. Andrew Carlisle struggled to keep up. By the time they neared the thick grove of mesquite trees, he was completely out of breath. His hard-on had melted into nothing.

He followed her as she disappeared into dappled shade.

The ground beneath them seemed almost pleasantly cool compared to the overheated air and shale outside. A tiny spring sent a trickle of water down a short streambed into a rocky basin. Near the basin, someone had cleared a flat spot in the cool, shaded dirt.

Without a word, the woman kicked off her sandals and stripped out of her clothes. She wasn't wearing a bra. Her breasts sagged a bit, but her figure wasn't that bad. There were no lines or light spots in the golden tan that covered her body. She looked good for her age, and she knew it.

"Me on top or you?" she asked perfunctorily.

"Me," Andrew Carlisle said.

"It figures," she returned.

He undressed quickly, and she pulled him down on her, kissing him eagerly, letting her tongue explore his, expert fingers stroking his hard-on back to life. She was a pro who knew all the right buttons to push. They worked all too well.

He had wanted to take his time, to savor every sensation, but his body worked against him. With a groan, it was over almost before it had begun, and she was laughing again, lying beneath him, giggling into the hot flesh of his shoulder.

"When you said quickie, you weren't kidding," He had planned to do it anyway, but he hadn't expected the blind rage that overcame him at the sound of that laughter. It may have been funny to her, but not to him.

Steadying himself on one elbow, he shoved his thumb into the delicate hollow at the base of her throat. Her eyes went wild, first with Mann and then with abject terror when she realized the extent of her danger.

She tried to cry out, but the terrible grinding pressure that starved her of oxygen also cut off her ability to scream.

Her body arched beneath him as she fought desperately to escape. She rolled from side to side and tried futilely to scoot out from under him, but he held her fast. Her sharpened, talonlike fingernails raked down his shoulders and back, but the pain that shot through him acted as a spur, exciting him, goading him With a sense of satisfaction, he felt himself stiffen once more.

Carlisle had learned the finer points of strangling from some of the boys on Death Row at Florence. You'd think from reading newspapers that those guys never mingle with the general prison population, but Carlisle had made it his business to make contact and take lessons.

The experts all said that once you start, you can't let up or back off, and he didn't. He rode her like a rodeo bronco while she writhed and bucked beneath him, carrying them both away from the dirt clearing, scraping his knees and tearing the flesh from her naked back and buttocks as she dragged them both onto jagged, unshaded, blistering shale. He rode her and came again, semen dribbling into her pubic hair, just as the woman's eyes rolled back into her head.

He knew better than to let go too soon. He held on, lying on top of her supine body with the rocks scorching his knees and shins, until he knew for sure she would never move again.

Only then, spent and gasping for breath, did he raise up on one elbow to examine his handiwork. Her perfect pink nipple lay invitingly exposed before him, inches from his face and teeth. It was the fantasy feast Andrew Carlisle had always dreamed about from the time he began dreaming of such things, but it was something he'd only sampled once before in his life. The temptation to do it again was all too powerful.

Leaning down, he took the still-warm nipple between his lips and sucked on it thoughtfully for a moment. Then he bit it-hard, bit until the soft flesh gave way beneath his teeth and the coppery taste of blood filled his mouth.

He let it linger on his tongue for only a moment before he spat it out.

It was far too salty. What Andrew Carlisle really wanted right about then was another beer.

Davy loved the drive to loligam, as Rita called the mountain that lay like a huge steeping lion overlooking a broad, flat valley. Nana Dahd had explained that ioligam means manzanita, a low-growing desert brush that thrives on the mountain's rocky sides. From a distance, the brush gives the mountain its bluish tint. Diana, however, always referred to the mountain by its Anglo name of Kitt Peak.

Davy preferred Ioligam.

He liked the way the air seemed to clear and the sky turned bluer as they came up the slight rise near the shaded rest area and the turnoff to the village of Ban Thak where they would be going later for the feast.

"Tell me again why they call it Coyote Sitting," Davy begged. "Do coyotes really sit there?"

Rita smiled indulgently. "Only in the winter," she said, when they tell one another stories."

As they continued on, Davy took a keen interest in the crosses that dotted the roadside here and there along the way. Like Gina's, many of them were now dressed up with vivid new wreaths and candles. In one place, four separate crosses were clustered together.

"Did four people die there?" he asked, testing the reliability of his newfound knowledge.

Nana Dahd nodded. "A car wreck," she answered.

She had told him they would have to hurry to get to the gift shop on top of the mountain before the road closed, but when they turned off the highway onto the much smaller one leading up to Ioligam itself, Davy puzzled over what would close it. The road with its Open Range sign seemed Straight enough, at least at first, and there was nothing wrong with the weather.

Davy knew, for instance, that during heavy rainstorms, running water could sometimes fill dry creek beds and washes and make roads impassable, but on this cloudless day, that seemed an unlikely possibility. He puzzled over the question as they wound their way up the mountain. A road closing for no reason seemed as mysterious as lighting a candle in broad daylight.

Finally, he broke down and asked. "Why will the road close, Nana Dahd?"

"Those men up there," Rita said, nodding her head in the direction of the observatory buildings, which shone in the sunlight like so many white jewels clustered in a rough crown around the top of the mountain.

"Those men who look at the stars through their big telescopes don't like light. They say headlights from cars make it so they can't see the stars."

"But doesn't I'itoi mind having all those white men living up there and making regular people stay away?" Davy asked.

The I'itoi legends were the Papagos' traditional winter telling tales.

Elder Brother stories were told only during those months when the snakes and lizards were hidden away from cold weather. It was said that if Snake or Lizard overheard someone telling an I'itoi story, the animal might swallow the storyteller's luck and bring him harm.

During the previous winter, while Diana Ladd was taking a graduate night course at the university in order to maintain her teaching certificate, Rita had entertained both Davy and herself by recounting all the traditional I'itoi tales she could remember. A few she had made up on the spot.

She had told Davy how in the old days loligam had been l'itoi's summer home, the place he went to relax when he left his regular home on Baboquivari, another peak many miles to the south. She had told him how, when the Anglo scientists had come to the tribe and asked for permission to build their star-gazing telescopes on the sacred top of Ioligam, the tribal council had insisted that a special clause go into the lease that declared that all caves on the mountain belonged to l'itoi. They were sacred, and not to be disturbed.

Now, though, as Davy's words slipped into her heart, Rita Antone realized that he regarded the Anglo scientists as different somehow, as a people apart from his own kind. For the first time, she wondered if she had done the right thing.

Nana Dahd loved her little Olhoni more than life itself, but had she gone too far? Did blond-haired Davy Ladd believe he was disconnected from "those white men" and their telescopes? Had she created an Anglo child who would always watch westerns on television and in the movies with an Indian child's inevitable dread of impending defeat?

Rita Antone had wanted desperately to pass on her legacy of wisdom, knowledge gleaned from her own grandmother, a much-respected Ban Thak wise woman. She had expected that wisdom to flow through her own son, Gordon, to Gina, her granddaughter. But Gina had been stolen from her, and during the terrible troubles that followed Gina's death, Diana Ladd alone had been Rita's constant ally.

That was a debt that demanded repayment, and she was paying it back in the only wealth she had at her disposal.

When O’honi was born, Rita had looked at the fatherless child and had known instinctively that Diana's ability to mother the child had somehow been obliterated with the death of the child's father. So Rita had stepped into the breach, taking on the role of godmother and mentor to the little bald-headed baby. She had been happy to find willing ears into which she could pour all that she knew.

The old woman had lavished on Davy the kind of love Diana Ladd couldn't wring from her own rock-hard heart.

At sixty-five years of age, Nana Dahd usually knew her own mind. She lived with a Papago's stolid and abiding faith in life's inevitabilities. This sudden attack of uncertainty caused new beads of sweat to break out on her forehead.