Hour of the Hunter (9 page)

She planned to sell it if money ever got really tight.

"So are you out on parole, or what?" she asked petulantly.

"I'm out period, Mama. Free as a bird."

"Good," she said. She paused uncertainly. "Andrew I'd really like it if the neighbors didn't find out. About where you've been, I mean.

Not that I'm ashamed or anything, it's just that it'd be easier . . ."

"I'm still your son," he began.

"Don't let's be difficult. You see, you've been having all that mail sent here, all those things for Phil Wharton, whoever he is. I've been saving them, keeping them here for you just like you said. Who is he anyway, a friend of yours or what?"

"It's a pen name, Mama. I couldn't very well send things out with my own name on them, now could I."

"Thank goodness," she said.

:'What do you mean?"

'Well, that's sort of what I've been pretending. That you were him, or at least that Phil Wharton was my son."

"You've been telling your friends that I'm Phil?"

Myrna Louise cringed at the hard edge of anger in his voice. "I didn't mean any harm, Andrew. One of the ladies was here when the mail came one day. She saw it on the table and asked about it. I told her that you're a journalist who's been out of the country working on assignment and that you'd be home soon."

"So you've lied to them?"

"Please, Andrew, I. . ."

Andrew had her dead to rights, but the idea of his mother making up that kind of whopper was really pretty funny.

He decided to let her off the hook. After all, it was his first night home.

"It's okay, Mama. The name's Phil, remember?"

Breathing a sigh of relief, Myrna Louise smiled grate fully. He was going to go along with it and not embarrass her in front of her friends.

She wouldn't be expelled from the morning coffee break after all.

At once she switched into full motherly mode. "Have you had any dinner?

Are you hungry?"

Sure he was hungry. Why wouldn't he, be hungry? It had been a busy day, a tiring day. Besides, hiking up and down mountains always gives a man one hell of an appetite.

Diana waited until the sun went down before she tried going up on the roof to work on the cooler. No wonder people called them swamp coolers.

The thick, musty odor was unmistakable, gagging. Diana climbed up the ladder armed with a bottle of PineSol. She raised one side of the cooler and poured several glugs of powerful disinfectant into the water.

The oily, piny scent wasn't a big improvement, but it helped.

After returning the side of the cooler to its proper position, Diana stood for a few moments on the flat, graveled roof to survey her domain.

The wild and forbidding front yard remained much as it had been when she first bought the place. An overgrown thicket of head-high prickly pear cast bizarre, donkey-eared shadows in the frail moonlight.

She had spent far more effort in back, where both yard and patio were surrounded by a massive six-foot-high rock wall.

The end result was almost a fortress. Inside that barrier, she felt safe and protected.

The house and outbuildings, sturdily constructed in the early twentieth century and lovingly remodeled during the twenties, had originally belonged to one of Pima County's pioneer families. When family fortunes fell on hard times and when surviving family members dwindled to only one dotty eighty-year-old lady, most of the land, with the exception of the house, cook shack, and barn, had been deeded over to the county as payment for back taxes. That had been during the late forties. The old lady, who wasn't expected to live much longer anyway, had been allowed lifetime tenancy in the house, with her estate authorized to sell off the remainder after her death.

The old lady confounded all predictions and lived to a 101, refusing to leave the walled confines of the compound until the very end, but letting the place fall to wrack and ruin around her. She died, and the wreckage went up for sale at almost the same time Gary Ladd's life-insurance proceeds came into Diana's hands.

After spending her entire childhood in housing tied to her father's job, Diana Ladd wanted desperately to escape the mobile home in the Topawa Teachers' Compound housing, to bring her baby home to a house that belonged to her rather than to her employer. She jumped at the chance to buy the derelict old house. dissuade her, patiently The realtor had done his best to pointing out all the things that were wrong with the place.

it was full of garbage--of dead bread wrappers and empty tin cans and layers of old newspapers six feet deep. The plaster was falling off the lath in places, windows were cracked and broken, the roof leaked, and the toilet in the only bathroom had quit working. Throughout the house, falling wiring was a nightmare of jury-rigged repairs, but Diana Ladd was not to be deterred. She bought the place, warts and all, and she and Rita Antone set about fixing it up as best they could.

Six years later, the remodel was stalled for lack of Money. To solve that problem, Diana had temporarily set aside home-improvement projects in favor of finishing her book.

Writing it was pure speculation, of course. She had made some preliminary and reasonably favorable inquiries, but the book wasn't sold yet. She hoped that when she did sign a contract, she'd be able to hire a contractor to complete some of the heavier work.

Standing on the roof, she watched the approach of an oncoming pair of headlights on the road overhead Approaching her driveway, the vehicle slowed to a craw and the turn signals came on. As the unfamiliar car turned off the blacktop, Diana Ladd suffered a momentary panic.

For years, she had steeled herself against the possibility of Andrew Carlisle's coming after her in the same way she had prepared herself for the possibility of a snakebite. With Carlisle, as with the neighborhood's indigenous snakes, you assumed a certain amount of risk and did what you could to protect yourself.

Rattlesnakes rattle a warning before they strike, and so had Andrew Carlisle. The last time she had seen the man in the hallway at the courthouse, he had mouthed a silent threat at her when his accompanying deputy wasn't looking. "I'll be back," his lips had said noiselessly.

Over the years, she had learned to live with that threat, treating it seriously but keeping her fear firmly in the background of her consciousness. Most of the time, anyway, but the arrival of unfamiliar cars always brought it to the forefront.

The tires bounced down the rough, rocky road, and the headlights caught her in a piercing beam of light, blinding her, trapping her silhouetted against the night sky. She stood there paralyzed and vulnerable, while fear rose like bile in her throat.

From near the base of the ladder, she heard Bone's low-throated warning growl. The urgency of the sound prompted her to action, jolted her out of her panic. The headlights moved away. In sudden pitch darkness, she scrambled clumsily toward the ladder.

"Bone," she called softly, hoping to reach the ground in time to catch the dog's collar and keep him with her, but the tall, gangly hound didn't wait. Still growling, he raced to where the rocky, six-foot wall with its wooden gate intersected the corner of the house. The wall would have stopped most dogs cold, but not the Bone, a dog with the size and agility of a small mountain goat. Bounding from rock to rock, he scrambled up several outcroppings to the top, then flung himself off the other side.

As the car pulled to a stop in the front drive, the dog hurled himself out of the darkness toward the car, lunging like a ferocious, tooth-filled shadow at the front driver's side tire. Using the dog's attack as cover, Diana slipped into the house unnoticed. She was already in the living room when the trapped driver laid on the horn.

Cranking open the side panel of the front window, she called, "Who is it?"

The driver must have rolled down his window slightly, because the dog left off attacking the tire and reared up on his hind legs at the side of the car, barking ferociously.

."Call off this goddamned mutt before he breaks my window!" an outraged voice demanded.

"Who is it?" Diana insisted.

"Detective Walker," the voice answered. "Now call off the dog, Diana.

I've got to talk to you."

As soon as she heard the name, Diana recognized Brandon Walker's voice.

A sudden whirlwind of Memory brought the buried history back, all of it, robbing her of breath, leaving her shaken, unable to speak.

His voice softened. "Diana, please. Call off the dog."

She took a deep breath and hurried to the door. "Oh'o. Ihab," she ordered in Papago, stepping out onto the porch.

"Bone. Here."

With a single whined objection and a warning glare over his shoulder at the intruding car, the dog went to her at once and lay down at her feet.

Brandon Walker switched off the headlights and the engine. Cautiously, he opened the door, Peering warily at the woman and dog waiting on the lighted porch.

-Are you sure it's all right? Shouldn't you tie him up or something?

That dog's a menace."

"Bone's all right," she returned, making no move to restrain the animal.

"Why are you here? What do you want?"

"I've got to talk to you, Diana. There's been an accident."

"An accident? Where? Who?"

"Out on the reservation. Your son David's been hurt.

Not bad, but - - ."

"Davy? Oh, my God. Where is he? What's happened?"

Hearing the alarm in Diana's voice, the dog rose once more to his feet with another threatening growl. Diana grabbed Bone's collar and shoved him into the house, closing the door behind him.

With the dog safely locked away, Brandon Walker moved closer. "It's not as bad as it sounds," he reassured her quickly, "but the Indian Health Service doctor can't do anything about either treating him or letting him go until they talk to you. Your phone isn't working."

Diana's hand went to her throat. She looked stricken. "I forgot to put it back on the hook when I quit working."

She started toward the house, leaving him standing there.

"Wait. Where are you going?"

"To call the hospital and get my car keys," she said.

Two minutes later, she emerged from the house and headed toward her car, a tiny white Honda.

"Why don't you let me drive," Brandon offered, motioning toward the far more powerful Galaxy. "We'll make better time, especially if we use the lights."

She wavered for a moment, vacillating between driving herself and accepting his offer of help.

"What did the doctor say?" Brandon pressed.

"That Davy will have to go on into Tucson for stitches."

"See there? Let me drive. That way, you can take care of the boy."

The detective's good sense overcame Diana Ladd's stubborn independence.

Without another word, she headed for his car.

Later, as the Ford roared down the highway, lights flashing overhead, Diana noticed she was still holding the partially full bottle of PineSol. She clearly remembered putting it down when she used the phone, but in her frantic rush to leave the house, she must have unconsciously picked it up again. As unobtrusively as possible, she slipped the offending bottle out of sight under the seat of the speeding Galaxy. Diana Ladd was upset, and she didn't want the detective to realize exactly how upset she was.

Fat Crack Ortiz owned the only gas station in Sells. He also owned the only tow truck. Consequently, he was the first member of Rita Antone's family to be notified of the accident on Kitt Peak Road.

After towing the demolished Jimmy back to the station, he hurried straight to the hospital. One of a handful of Christian Scientists on the reservation, Fat Crack subscribed to neither medical doctors nor medicine men, but he was prepared to be open-minded as far as other people's beliefs were concerned.

As soon as he turned up in the emergency-room lobby, one of the nurses, Effie Joaquin, recognized him. "Is it serious?" he asked.

Effie nodded. "It sure is. She's ruptured her spleen and broken some ribs and one arm. There may be other internal injuries as well. She went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance. Do you want to see her before she goes into surgery?"

"If I can," Fat Crack said.

The nurse ushered him into the emergency room. Rita, looking pale and shrunken, lay on a gurney with an IV bag draining into her flaccid right arm. The other arm was swathed in bulky, bloody bandages. He walked over to the gurney and bent close to Rita's head.

"Ni-thahth?" he whispered gently in her ear, speaking the traditional words for his mother's elder sister.

Her eyes fluttered open, darted around wildly for a moment, then settled on his face. "Ni-mad," she returned.

"Nephew."

"I will pray for you," he said, reaching out and touching her grasping fingers, feeling his own power flowing into her. His auntie did not believe according to his rights, but Fat Crack's faith was strong enough for both of them.

"Olhoni," she whispered.

Her nephew had not heard the name before. At first he didn't understand what she was saying, He thought she was still worried about the spooked steer that had caused the accident.

"He's fine," Fat Crack reassured her. "You didn't hit him at all."

Rita shook her head impatiently and wet her parched lips. "The boy," she said. "Davy. He's outside. Stay with him. Until his mother comes."

"Sure, Ni-thahth," he told her. "I will see that he isn't left alone."

Rita's eyes closed then as Effie came to get the gurney.

"The operating room is ready now," she said. "You'll have to wait outside."

"Yes," Fat Crack said. "I will wait."

Myrna Louise fixed her son a quick dinner of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast, washed down with a tumbler of her own rotgut vodka, then she showed him into the tiny second bedroom.

"Jake's clothes are still in the closet there," she said. "I haven't gotten around to calling Goodwill to come pick them up. Maybe some of it will fit."

Andrew Carlisle waited until his mother left the room and closed the door behind her before he hurried over to the bed. He groaned with disappointment. Three large selfaddressed envelopes lay there on the chenille bedspread manuscript-sized envelopes-each address, written in his own clear hand, said Mr. Philip Wharton.