Deadly Waters (41 page)

CXIII

01/28/11 11:18 Arizona Standard Time

Bob Mathers stood with his hat in his hand beside a simple grave in the sun bleached desert outside Tuba City. He straightened the small wooden cross that marked Wayland Zah’s resting place and apologized for taking so long to bring justice to his dead friend.

“Sometimes these things are a matter of luck,” Bob said aloud and sat on his heels in the pale, warm dirt. “These men had planned this out well, or maybe they were lucky, too. I don’t know. I’m a little bug in a big lawn. I can see a few blades of grass and the sky. On second thought, I really don’t like that metaphor. I’m trying to say I don’t know why in the big scheme of things they did what they did. They’d each been dealt a bad hand. That doesn’t justify murder. You were wrong, too, Wayland. I suppose you know that by now.”

Bob picked up a handful of dirt and sifted it through his fingers.

“Becky is really angry with me,” he said. “She’s already threatening to have us go to this LDS retreat for couples up in Salt Lake. You have no idea, buddy, what it’s like being locked in a room with a dozen elders for a whole weekend. God knows she will expect me to go to church with her from here on out. It’s that or sleep on the sofa. On the phone she says she’s thrown out every beer bottle and cigarette in the house.”

He stood erect and looked west across the desert. The never quiet west wind was slipping off Wildcat Peak onto the dry mesa country of the Hopi Reservation, making little towers of dust in the low country as it went;. These small spires the wind created rose for a second over the ground and vanished into nothing, as had the plans of Wayland and the other conspirators. Bob thought as he watched of how he missed his wife and their young daughter and thought of the long hot ride to Phoenix he still had to make that afternoon. He made one last nod toward his friend’s grave and returned to the pick-up he had parked a couple hundred feet away, beside the side of Highway 160.

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