Dance of the Bones (13 page)

“You're saying you know the difference between a pistol and a revolver?” Brandon asked.

Ava shot him a withering look. “Of course I know the difference. Just because I'm a blonde doesn't make me stupid.”

Touch
é
,
Brandon thought.
Well played.

Ava glanced at her watch. “Look,” she said impatiently. “I have a luncheon engagement, and I'm about to be late. If you have more questions, could we please finish this some other time?”

Brandon took the hint. “Of course,” he said, rising to his feet. “You've been a big help. If I could just have a phone number . . .”

She gave him the number and showed him to the door. Brandon walked away feeling downright jubilant. He was getting somewhere. Sheriff Jack DuShane be damned, he was going to solve this case. Not then, Brandon told himself, but maybe now.

With that last thought about the years-­ago investigation and hours after Brandon Walker landed in his bed, he finally fell asleep.

 

CHAPTER 12

THE NEXT MORNING COYOTE TOOK
the beads and went again to the house of Beautiful Girl and her brother. This time Coyote found the girl with her giwho
—­
her burden basket
—­
ready to go out into the desert and gather plants. She would not even listen to him. She took her basket and left Ban standing there alone.

When Big Man heard this he was very angry. He went to Wind Man
—­
Hewel O
'
odham
—­
and asked for his help. And so, while Beautiful Girl was alone in the desert, gathering plants, Wind Man came and found her. With a loud whoop, Wind Man gathered the girl up and took her to the top of a very steep mountain that stands all alone in that part of the country
—­
a mountain the Milgahn call Picacho Peak but the Tohono O
'
odham call Chewagig Mu
'
uk, Cloud Peak.

Everyone knows,
nawoj
, my friend, that Picacho Peak is very small, but it is also very steep, so steep that no one has ever climbed it.

In the evening, Beautiful Girl
'
s brother returned to the house and found it empty. He waited and worried. Finally he went out into the village and told the ­people that his sister was gone, and the ­people agreed to help him find her.

The next day the ­people followed Beautiful Girl
'
s tracks out into the desert. They found the place where she had stopped to gather plants, and they found her empty burden basket, but that is where her tracks stopped. The ­people held a council to decide what to do. Coyote came to the council and said that he
'
d been passing close to Cloud Peak that day and heard the noise of a woman crying. Ban knew that this was very bad trouble because the woman could not climb down.

At last Beautiful Girl
'
s brother decided to ask I
'
itoi
—­
the Spirit of Goodness
—­
for help. He called for Messenger, Ah
'
atha. The brother dressed Messenger in white eagle feathers and sent him to see I
'
itoi. Spirit of Goodness listened to Messenger and decided to help. He took the seeds from a gourd and planted them at the base of the mountain, then he began to sing. Soon the seeds began to sprout. Before the end of the day the gourd vines had grown so tall that they covered the steep sides of the mountain. Beautiful Girl was able to climb down safely.

WITH THE HELP OF SEVERAL
glasses of Pig's Nose scotch, Ava went to bed earlier that evening than she would have otherwise. Several hours later, she was awakened from a deep sleep by the sound of a cell phone clattering noisily across her bedside table. It was another of her burner phones, one that she always kept nearby with the ringer turned on silent and the phone set on vibrate.

“Hello.” She didn't need to ask who was calling, because there was only one person who had the number. “What's up?”

“He didn't deliver the shipment.”

Ava sat bolt upright in bed. “What do you mean, he didn't deliver?” she demanded. “Didn't the package make it across the border?”

“It came across the border, all right, but our guy wants more money.”

Ava was outraged. “Are you kidding me? He's holding my damned diamonds for ransom?”

“That's how it sounds.”

“How much does he want?”

“Twenty thou.”

“That's highway robbery—­twice what we've paid him before.”

“Well,” Ava's caller replied with a chuckle. “You know what they say about no honor among thieves. He claims he needs the money. He says his mom is sick, and he's looking after his younger brothers.”

“Too bad for him,” Ava replied. “Turns out now he's lost his job, too. I want you to take care of this.”

“As in . . . ?”

“As in take care of it!” Ava snapped. “As in make a statement. As in do whatever the hell you have to do to get the job done. As in let other ­people out on the res know that I am not to be trifled with. I want those three José boys wiped off the face of the earth.”

“Yes, ma'am, I'll take care of it.”

“Before you do,” she added, “I want you to make Carlos tell you what the hell happened to my diamonds. I want them back. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said again. “I certainly do.”

As he hung up, Ava thought the poor man sounded a bit shocked and more than a little cowed. It must have been hard for him to imagine that she had so casually condemned three members of a single family to death. He shouldn't have been surprised. After all, this wasn't Ava Richland's first rodeo, and it wasn't the first time she had issued someone's death sentence, either. In fact, now that she thought about it, this probably wouldn't be the last time.

Ava was relieved that she now had other ­people to do the dirty work for her, so it was no longer necessary for her personally to be the one pulling the trigger. Max José had worked for her for one reason only—­because he understood that what she was doing had no connection to the cartels. But if he was behind this and was directing his brothers to hold her up for more money, he had made a fatal error in thinking that she wasn't every bit as dangerous as the cartels.

Ava went into the kitchen and started the coffee. It was just after midnight. Harold wouldn't awaken for several more hours. She knew that three-­fourths of the José problem would be handled, but now, while she had a little peace and quiet to herself, Ava needed to make some private phone calls and arrange to deal with Max. What's more, once and for all, she needed to take care of John Lassiter.

The man had already had two separate trials. If Ava Richland had her way, he sure as hell wouldn't have a third one.

AFTER GABE LEFT, LANI SAT
by the fire for hours, wrapped in her bedroll and gradually feeding the remaining pieces of wood into the flames. Her work as an ER physician meant that she was accustomed to working odd hours, especially nighttime hours. So she didn't try to sleep. Instead, she stayed awake, thinking. For a while she let herself meander through the old stories, the ones she had learned from Nana
Dahd
and from Fat Crack. And since Gabe wasn't present to hear them, she told them to herself—­the story of Bat bringing fire as well as the story of Beautiful Girl who would eventually become Evening Star.

Finally, though, her thoughts drifted to Gabe. She wandered through her collection of memories about him, remembering the things about him that had endeared him to her as a child, starting with the night he was born.

Lani and Delia Cachora hadn't exactly been friends back then. When Delia first arrived back on the reservation, the fact that Fat Crack had chosen, doted on, and mentored both of them had caused an odd kind of sibling rivalry to grow between the two young women. They were still wary of each other at the time of Fat Crack's death.

On the day of his funeral, after the nightlong feast in the village of Ban Thak—­Coyote Sitting—­Delia's water had broken. Lani was still in medical school, but she had realized at once that the baby was coming too fast to make it to the hospital before he was born. That was how Gabe Ortiz became the first baby Lani Walker ever delivered, turning the backseat of Diana Ladd's fully restored Buick Invicta into a makeshift delivery room.

Wanda Ortiz, Fat Crack's widow and the baby's grandmother, had taken the squalling child and dried him on clean towels from the feast house. Then, after wrapping him in one of his father's immense flannel shirts, she had handed him to Lani, who had in turn passed him along to Delia.

Lani still remembered how she had felt in that moment. The baby was a gift through time. He had been passed down from Nana
Dahd
's grandmother, Understanding Woman, to the next generation, to Rita Antone and Looks at Nothing. They had passed the gift on to Rita's nephew, Fat Crack, who had done the same, passing the baby along to the next generation—­Lani and Delia. It had seemed to Lani then, and still did, that the Elders, Kekelimai, had entrusted the care and keeping of this precious child to new hands, with the expectation—­the requirement—­that he be kept safe.

Gabe had just turned eight when Lani first became aware of how different the little boy was. Lani's mother had been dealing with some health issues, and the mental symptoms had been far more troubling than the physical ones. Although Lani and her father never came right out and discussed the situation, they were both convinced that Diana was losing it—­that she was drifting into some kind of dementia situation or perhaps starting down the slippery slope into early-­onset Alzheimer's.

The real culprit had been a simple matter of adverse drug interactions, but it was Gabe who had helped Lani understand that Diana was having hallucinations—­that she was carrying on long heart-­to-­heart chats with Andrew Philip Carlisle, the crazed convicted killer who had once tried to murder her and who also happened to be dead. Lani's dad had always credited her medical skills with sorting out Diana's situation, but Lani herself knew that it was Gabe—­born long after Carlisle had gone to what she hoped was his just reward—­who had brought the matter to her attention.

Instinctively being able to suss out something like that was a medicine man kind of thing. For the next three years, Gabe had followed Lani around like a puppy dog. On Tuesdays and Thursdays after school he would come to the hospital's dialysis unit, where he seemed to function in the dayroom as a pint-­sized medicine man, singing the healing chants Lani had taught him and reciting the ancient stories and legends for the patients. Long boring hours in the dialysis unit could be shortened by hearing the stories and legends of I'itoi someone remembered hearing long ago as a child living in one of the villages—­in Ge Oithag, Big Fields, or Komlick, Big Flat Place.

Lani had taught Gabe that the I'itoi legends in particular were winter-­telling tales and were only to be told between the middle of November and the middle of March. Most of the time Gabe was careful to abide by that rule. Sometimes, when it was July and someone who would not live to see another November wanted to hear the story of Old White-­Haired Woman or the story of the Peace Smoke, Gabe would tell the story anyway. It didn't seem to him that I'itoi, the Spirit of Goodness, would mind that in the least.

Only when requested to do so did Gabe visit the rooms of individual patients—­the injured, ill, and dying. Even though he had not yet reached
cheojthag
—­manhood—­and was not yet a fully grown medicine man, the families of patients told Lani that there were times when having Al Siwani—­Baby Medicine Man—­visit their loved one was better than having no medicine man at all.

Lani had marveled at how, sitting in quiet hospital rooms and without even having access to her sacred divining crystals, Gabe had often known long before anyone other than the doctors about who would live and who would die. He talked to Lani about those things sometimes, but even then he had instinctively known to keep from mentioning them to the ­people involved. And when Lani had asked how he knew those things, he could never explain it other than shrugging his shoulders and saying, “I just know.”

Then, for reasons the divining crystals couldn't or wouldn't tell her, Gabe had started pulling away. He had stopped coming to the hospital. He had started distancing himself from her. And now, much to Lani's despair, her connection to Gabe seemed to be severed. He had walked away down the mountain, leaving her behind along with her last-­ditch chance to save him from whatever was pulling at him. It was easy, sitting on the mountain, to ascribe what was happening to the Bad ­People—­PaDaj O'odham—­who had come up out of the South to steal the Tohono O'odham's crops and eventually to do battle with I'itoi himself.

So was that what this was all about? Lani wondered. Were the four José brothers with all their family troubles—­a dead father and an ailing mother—­the cause of all this? Were they somehow a modern-­day equivalent of the PaDaj O'odham? And, if so, what did Lani have to do to extricate Gabe from their grasp?

Tossing one more piece of wood onto the fire, Lani slipped into her bedroll. Staring up at the stars, she remembered the story Nana
Dahd
had told her—­the one about the terrible time when Andrew Carlisle, the evil
ohb,
had captured both Nana
Dahd
and Lani's brother, Davy, and held them prisoner in the root cellar. While there, Nana
Dahd
had summoned I'itoi to help them by singing a chant—­a healing chant—­speaking in the language of the Tohono O'odham. Lani had heard the chant often enough that she remembered every word, the same way one remembers a cherished lullaby. And it made her smile to know that while the song had been totally opaque to Andrew Carlisle, Davy had heard the words, understood them, and acted upon them:

Do not look at me, little Olhoni.

Do not look at me when I sing to you

So this man will not know we are speaking,

So this evil man will think he is winning.

Do not look at me when I sing, little Olhoni,

But listen to what I say. This man is evil.

This man is the enemy. This man is ohb.

Do not let this frighten you.

Whatever happens in the battle,

We must not let him win.

I am singing a war song for you,

Little Olhoni.
I am singing

A hunter's song—­a killer's song.

I am singing a song to I'itoi,