Читать книгу Queen of the Night - J. A. Jance - Страница 6
ОглавлениеTucson, Arizona
Saturday, June 6, 2009, 6:00 A.M.
69º Fahrenheit
AS JONATHAN SOUTHARD sat in the car, watching and waiting, he was amazed at how cold it had been overnight out here in what was supposed to be the desert, and also at how much his arm hurt. It was feverish and throbbing. That was worrisome.
At the time, it hadn’t seemed like that big a deal. Only a little bite, not a big one. That worthless damn dog had never liked him. As far as he was concerned, the feeling was mutual. Major was Esther’s dog—the kids’ dog. It seemed to him that the beagle was beyond dim, but as stupid as the dog had always seemed, that night Major had somehow read his mind and known what was going to happen. How could that be? It seemed weird.
Esther wouldn’t have had a clue that he had come into the room behind her if the dog hadn’t warned her, springing at him from the back of the couch, growling and with his teeth bared. The ferocity of the unexpected attack had forced Jonathan to dodge away and take a step backward. Major had nailed his wrist before he got quite out of reach, drawing blood and knocking the gun from his hand.
When Esther turned around, she didn’t see the weapon. All she saw was her husband. “No!” she yelled at Major. “Come here!”
The dog listened to her and paused for a moment—a moment that allowed Jonathan to retrieve the gun. Naturally he had shot Major first. Then he shot Esther. Once he could hear again, once his ears stopped reverberating, he stood there with the gun still in his bleeding hand and listened, afraid the kids would wake up and come running to see what had happened.
In all honesty, that was the first time he even thought of the kids. What about them? He could call the cops and turn himself in, but what would happen to Timmy and Suzy then? He seemed to remember setting up a guardianship thing so that if something happened to Esther and him together, the kids would go first to Esther’s sister, Corrine. But what would their lives be like if their mother was dead and their father was in prison for killing her? That might even be worse than growing up as Abby Southard’s no-good, worthless son.
He had decided the next step in that instant. If Timmy and Suzy died in their sleep, he could spare them all that suffering—the suffering of living. And that’s what he did—he shot them while they slept, one bullet each. That way they would never have to wonder if their parents loved them. Then he closed their bedroom doors and left them there. As long as the doors were shut—as long as he didn’t venture back into the living room where Esther lay sprawled on the couch, he didn’t have to remember that they were dead. As far as Jonathan was concerned, they were just sleeping.
He went into the bathroom then and collected the whole set of medication bottles Esther kept there. Antidepressants, sleep aids; whatever bottles he could find that said “Do Not Use with Alcohol.” You name it; Esther had it. He took them down to his study along with a bottle of single-malt Scotch.
He poured a full glass, but sat there thinking before he swallowed that first pill. He remembered seeing a movie called The Bucket List, the one about making sure you did all the things you wanted to do before you died.
He decided right then and there that he would go out with a bang, not the way he had left the bank, slinking out after everyone else had left for the night, carrying the personal possessions from his office in a single disgraceful cardboard box.
Hoping to prove his mother’s dire predictions wrong, he had spent his adult life doing what he was supposed to do all this time, twenty-four/seven. Now he was going to do some of the things he wasn’t supposed to do. He closed the open pill bottles. Then he showered and dressed, packed a suitcase with a week’s worth of clothes, and tossed the collection of pill bottles into the mix. The last thing he did before he walked out the door was set the thermostat down to 65 degrees. Who cared if he ran up the electricity bill? He wouldn’t be the one paying it.
Now, five days later and over five hundred miles away, he sat waiting on a residential street in Tucson, Arizona. He’d been doing that for hours now, shifting periodically in the seat, trying to find a comfortable place to rest his throbbing arm. Then, just when he thought he’d maybe go back to the Circle K and pick up some coffee and take a leak, the garage door on the house he was watching slid open.
As the Lexus backed out into the driveway, Jonathan recognized the guy at the wheel as the man he assumed to be Jack Tennant, Abby’s husband. Jonathan never referred to her as Mother. He refused to give her that much credit. While he watched, Jack loaded a golf pullcart and a bag of clubs into the car. That was interesting. If Jack was going to go play golf, Jonathan wanted to know where he was going, how long he’d be gone, and when he’d be back. That’s what these recon trips were all about—getting the lay of the land.
When Jack headed down the street, Jonathan followed. It was as easy as that.
Tucson, Arizona
Saturday, June 6, 2009, 12:00 P.M.
93º Fahrenheit
The dream came while Daniel James Pardee was sleeping. In it he was back in Iraq, riding in the Humvee with Bozo, the dog no one else would take, sitting between him and the driver. As in real life, the driver was none too happy when Bozo, panting and grinning that weird doggy grin of his, had scrambled his hundred-plus pounds of dusty German shepherd into the cab along with Dan.
“Oh, jeez!” the driver muttered. “Not him again. That stinking dog’s so stupid he’d rather chase birds than bad guys.”
That was the reason the dog, formerly known as King and now jeeringly referred to as Bozo the Clown, had been passed along to the newest guy in the unit, Corporal Dan Pardee. “Three’s the charm,” the CO in Mosul had told Dan. “Either Bozo wakes up and gets serious about his job, or he’s out of here.”
Dan understood at once that, in military parlance, “out of here” didn’t mean some nice doggy retirement program somewhere. It meant termination. Period. Bozo’s career with the U.S. Army would be over and so would he.
“Yeah, Justin,” Dan told Corporal Justin Clifford, the driver. “You don’t smell so good yourself, so leave Bozo the hell alone. Let’s get moving.”
In the dream Dan knew Justin’s name. In real life he hadn’t known his name until after “the incident” and until after the wounded driver had been shipped out of theater, first to Germany and then to Walter Reed, suffering from second-and third-degree burns over fifty percent of his body. Both in the dream and in real life, however, the Humvee ground into gear and moved to the head of the supply convoy.
The whole thing went to hell about forty-five minutes later when the world exploded just outside the driver’s window. Blinded by smoke and deafened by the concussion, Dan and Bozo had scrambled out through the door on the Humvee’s relatively undamaged passenger side. When Dan’s hearing returned, the only sound he heard were the agonized screams coming from Corporal Clifford, who was still trapped inside the burning vehicle. Dan was turning back to reach for Clifford and try to pull him out when he saw the insurgent.
It was ironic that that was the word news broadcasters always used to refer to the bad guys—insurgents. Dan often wondered what people back home in the U.S. thought that word meant. They probably figured a group of “insurgents” would be made up of hardened old soldiers, believers in the old ways, who would rather die than vote in a free election.
Not true. This one, the guy materializing like a ghost out of the smoke and dust with an AK-47 in his hands, wasn’t old at all. He was a kid—eleven or twelve at most. Whoever had planted the bomb had left this little shit behind, armed to the teeth and lying in wait hoping to ambush anyone who managed to stagger out of the burning wreckage.
Both in real life and in the dream, things slowed down at that point. Corporal Daniel Pardee was faced with two impossible choices. Should he reach inside and try to rescue poor Justin Clifford, or should he leave the other man to die and reach for his M16?
Before he had a chance to do either one, Bozo decided for them both. He slammed into the gun-toting kid from one side, blindsiding him and hitting him with more than a hundred pounds of biting, snapping fury. The kid was knocked to the ground, screeching, while the gun, now useless, went spinning away out of reach.
The whole thing took only a moment. With the kid and his gun out of the equation, Dan turned his full attention back on Clifford. With almost superhuman strength he had managed to haul the injured driver to relative safety. By then, other troops from the convoy were hurrying forward to offer assistance. It took three of them to haul Bozo off the kid and keep the dog from killing him.
When Dan finally got back to the dog, both in the dream and in real life, he was sitting there, panting and grinning that stupid grin of his, except by then the dog’s happy grin didn’t seem nearly so stupid. Dan had stumbled over to him and gratefully buried his face and hands in Bozo’s dusty, smoky fur. It was only when the hand came away bloodied that Dan realized the dog—his dog—had been cut by shrapnel from the explosion, by flying bits of burning metal and shattered glass. Later on Dan figured out that he’d been cut and burned, too. Both of them had been treated for relatively minor injuries, but Dan knew full well that if it hadn’t been for Bozo— that wonderfully zany Bozo—Justin Clifford would have died that day in Mosul.
At that moment, as if on cue, Dan’s dream ended the same way the firefight had ended—with Bozo. The dog scrambled up onto the bed, whining and licking Dan’s face.
“Go away,” Dan ordered. “Leave me alone.”
From the moment the bomb went off, Bozo was transformed. When it came time to go on patrol, he was dead serious. He paid attention. He obeyed orders. And he seemed to develop almost a sixth sense about the possibility of danger. Twice he had alerted Dan in time for the two of them to dive for cover before bombs exploded rather than after. And if Bozo said someplace was a no-go, Dan paid attention and didn’t go there.
But right now, the dog and the man weren’t working. They were in bed. Bozo immediately understood that his master didn’t mean it, that his order to go away was one that could be disobeyed. As a consequence, he paid no attention and didn’t let up.
The recurring dream came to Dan night after night, or, as now when he was working the night shift, day after day. The nightmare always left him shaken and anxious and drenched in sweat. He wondered if maybe he had cried out in his sleep and that was what caused Bozo to come running.
Dan tried unsuccessfully to dodge away from Bozo by pulling the sweat-soaked covers over his head and turning the other way, but Bozo was relentless. Thumping his tail happily, the dog scrambled to Dan’s other side and burrowed under the covers to join him. After all, it was time for breakfast. According to Bozo’s time calculations, Dan needed to drag his lazy butt out of bed and get moving.
“All right, all right,” Dan grumbled, giving the dog a fond whack on his empty-sounding head. “I’m up. Are you happy?”
In truth the dog was happy, slobbery grin and all.
Tucson, Arizona
Saturday, June 6, 2009, 1:15 P.M.
93º Fahrenheit
Abby turned the key in the ignition and listened as the powerful V-8 engine roared to life. There was maybe the tiniest squeal, as though a fan belt might be slipping a bit, but the motor settled into a steady hum and the air-conditioning came on full blast—blazingly hot at first, but then cooling. While Abby waited a few moments for the steering wheel to be cool enough to touch, she picked up her cell.
Still careful with her newly applied polish, she hit the green send button twice and called Tohono Chul for the first time that afternoon but for the seventh time that day. She wasn’t surprised when she was put on hold. Abby, of all people, understood what Shirley Folgum was up against. Trying to ride herd on that evening’s party was a complicated proposition.
In Tohono Chul’s annual calendar, the celebration of the night-blooming cereus was an enormous undertaking. On that night alone, as many as two thousand people would show up at the park for the festivities, arriving well after dark and not leaving until early the next morning. All of that would have been complicated enough, if it could have been handled in the established way.
Most big recurring nonprofit-style events come with certain unvarying logistics. Worker bees needed to be organized. Invitations have to be issued. Potential attendees need to be given “Save the date” information. Contracts for entertainment and catering need to be arranged. All of those things held true for the night-blooming cereus party. The big difference—and the big complication—came with the reality that no one ever knew exactly when the party would take place. Not until the very last minute.
Despite years of patient analysis and study by any number of very talented botanists, despite countless computer models examining weather data—daytime temperatures, nighttime temperatures, dew points, barometric pressures, and all points in between—no one had yet been able to crack the code as to when exactly the Queen of the Night would deign to make her annual appearance. Scientific study suggested it would happen sometime between the end of May and the middle of July. As a result of this uncertainty, all preparations had to be ironed out well in advance and then put in abeyance but ready for immediate last-minute execution.
It turned out that was how Abby Tennant herself had stumbled into the event for the first time—at the last minute.
Toward the end of her first June in Tucson, Abby had been dreadfully homesick for her friends and relations back home in Ohio. For one thing, the appalling June heat was nothing short of debilitating. She had almost decided to give up and go back home when a new neighbor, Mildred Harrison, had called.
“There’s going to be a special party at Tohono Chul tomorrow night,” Mildred had said. “Would you like to come along as my guest?”
Abby’s new town house in what was billed as an “active adult community” on Tucson’s far northwest side was just down the street from the botanical garden. She had driven past the rock wall entrance numerous times, but she hadn’t ever considered stopping in. Somehow she had never guessed that one of the world’s ten best botanical gardens would be right there, hiding out in the middle of Tucson.
What interesting plants could possibly grow in the desert? Abby had wondered in all her midwestern arrogance. From what she personally had observed, there seemed to be precious few plants of any kind in this desolate outpost of civilization where, even in May, the heat had been more than Abby could tolerate.
“I suppose they’re holding it at night because it’s too hot to have a garden party during the day,” Abby had groused sarcastically.
Mildred had laughed aloud at that. “It’s a party in honor of the night-blooming cereus,” she explained. “It’s the flower on the deer-horn cactus. We call it the Queen of the Night. Tohono Chul has more than eighty plants that are set to bloom this year, and they all blossom at the same time. They open up around sunset and are gone by sunrise the next morning. Someone called just now to let me know that the bloom will be tomorrow night. Are you coming or not?”
Mildred sometimes reminded Abby of her older sister, Stephanie, who was at times a bit overbearing and more than a little outspoken. On this occasion, Abby had dutifully slipped into full little-sister mode.
“I suppose,” she had agreed reluctantly.
The next day she had tried her best to back out of the engagement, but Mildred wouldn’t hear of it. Around nine o’clock that evening, Abby had ridden over to Tohono Chul’s parking lot in Mildred’s aging Pontiac. Arriving in low spirits and with even lower expectations, Abby was surprised to find the parking lot jammed with cars and parking attendants. Along with hordes of other enthusiastic attendees, Abby and Mildred had walked into the park following footpaths that were lit with candles in small paper bags.
“They’re called luminarias,” Mildred explained. “They’re traditional Mexican.”
Abby was astonished when she saw the throngs of people who were there that night. She kept wondering what all the fuss was about—but only until she saw a night-blooming cereus in the flesh. Once she caught sight of that first lush white blossom, Abby Tennant fell in love.
She couldn’t fathom how such a magnificent white flower could burst forth from what appeared to be a skimpy stick of thorny cactus. She was astonished to find that many of the gorgeous blossoms were as big across as one of Abby’s eight-inch pie plates. They reminded her of her next-door neighbor’s prizewinning dahlias back home in Ohio, but these weren’t dahlias, and the heady perfume that drifted away from each flower on the hot summer air was subtle but elegantly sweet, reminiscent of orange blossoms, but not quite the same.
Abby was dumbstruck. “They’re so beautiful!” she had exclaimed.
“Aren’t they,” Mildred said, nodding in agreement. “And now you know why it’s called the Queen of the Night. By the time the sun comes up tomorrow, the blossoms will be gone.”
Abby Tennant’s first encounter with the night-blooming cereus marked the real beginning of her new life, although her name was still Abby Southard back then. She had been so enchanted by seeing the flowers that she had insisted on taking Mildred to lunch at the Tohono Chul Tea Room the very next week. In the confines of the small cool rooms of what had once been a ranch house, Abby began to see the things about Tucson that she had been missing before—the friendliness of the people, Mildred included, for one thing, and the many subtle beauties of the desert for another.
Abby had taken out her own membership at Tohono Chul only a week or so later. Walking the park’s many manicured paths, she gradually acclimated herself to the heat of her new home. She learned to mark the changing seasons by something other than changing leaves. In spring she saw the profusion of yellow flowers on the prickly pear and the fuchsia-colored blossoms of the barrel cactus. In early summer she came to love the bright yellow blooms standing out against the green branches of the springtime paloverde and the dusky pinks and lavenders on the brooding ironwood. She loved watching the birds, especially the brightly colored hummingbirds that hovered around the equally brightly colored flowers.
Somehow, in the process of exploring this desert oasis, Abby Tennant found peace and came to terms with her new home and her new life. By the time of the first snow-fall in Columbus that first year, she was no longer home-sick. When Christmas rolled around and her friends were complaining about the weather, Abby took herself back to the park and volunteered her services.
At first she knew so little that all she could do was work as a stocker and a cashier in the museum shop. Later, once she was better adjusted to the climate, she went through docent training so she could lead tours and speak knowledgeably about the native plants of her newly adopted home. Because of her enduring fascination with the night-blooming cereus, it was a natural progression of her volunteerism that she went from leading daytime tours to working on the annual Queen of the Night party.
Initially she served on the Queen of the Night Committee, but when the complexity of the event outstripped the committee’s groupthink capability, Abby had finally given up and taken charge. When she came on board, there had been a complicated phone-tree system for notifying workers and guests of the impending bloom. Under her direction, phone trees had given way to a more streamlined form of e-mail notices. But after five years of running the show, it was time to pass the reins to someone else, and Shirley Folgum was her handpicked successor.
“So how are things?” Abby asked when Shirley finally came on the line. “Did you hear back from the band?”
“I was talking to the manager when you called. They’ll be here for a sound check no later than five. I told them to come in by way of the loading dock.”
“And the caterer?”
“She’s having trouble locating servers.”
“Don’t worry. She’ll find them. This party is a big deal for her, and we pay her a bundle of money during the summer when there’s not much else going on. She’ll come through. She always does.
“What about the storyteller?” Abby asked.
Abby had come to love the enduring Tohono O’odham legend about the wise old grandmother whose bravery had given rise to the Queen of the Night. Including that story in the annual festivities was one of the ways Abby had put her own distinctive stamp on the party. She insisted that each year some guest of honor would come to the event and recount the story that had struck a chord in her heart. It seemed to Abby that in saving her grand-son, Wise Old Grandmother had saved Abby Tennant as well.
“That’s handled,” Shirley reported. “Dr. Walker and her mother are planning to have lunch in the Tea Room this afternoon before the party starts. Unfortunately, she’s due back at work in the ER at the hospital in Sells by midnight. That means the last scheduled storytelling event can’t be any later than nine.”
“Good,” Abby said. “Earlier is better than later.”
“Are you going to stop by for a last-minute checklist?” Shirley asked.
“No,” Abby said with a laugh. “I don’t think that’s necessary. It sounds as though you have everything under control.”
Tucson, Arizona
Saturday, June 6, 2009, 1:30 P.M.
93º Fahrenheit
Lani Dahd used her key to unlock the front door of her parents’ house. She stepped inside, with Gabe following close on her heel. He had been here before and was always astonished by the place.
For one thing, the house, built of river rock, was bigger than any of the houses he knew on the reservation. Although the people who lived here were Milgahn, Anglos, the place was full of a rich profusion of baskets—Tohono O’odham baskets. There were yucca and bear-grass baskets on every available surface—on walls and tables and the mantelpiece. Gabe had been told that many of them had been made by his great-aunt Rita.
“How did your parents get so many baskets?” Gabe had asked. “Are they rich?”
Lani Dahd thought about that for a moment before she answered. By reservation standards, the Anglo couple who had adopted her when she was little more than a toddler were rich beyond measure.
“Yes,” she said finally. “I suppose they are.”
“But why?” Gabe asked.
“Because my mother writes books,” Lani answered.
“What about your father?”
“He was a police officer.”
“Why are they so old?” Gabe asked.
Lani’s father was almost seventy. Her mother was in her mid-sixties. In the Anglo world that wasn’t so very old, but on the reservation, where people were often cut down by alcoholism and diabetes in their forties and fifties, that seemed like a very advanced age.
“They just are,” she said.
“Why do they have different names?” Gabe asked. “Mr. Walker and Mrs. Ladd. Aren’t they married?”
“Yes, they’re married,” Lani explained, “but my mother was already writing books by then. It made sense for her to keep her own name instead of changing it to someone else’s.”
This time Gabe was without questions as he followed Lani through the house. While she stopped off in a bathroom, Gabe walked on alone to the sliding door that he knew led to the patio.
Damsel, the household dog, stood outside the sliding door. Gabe opened the door and leaned down to pet the dog. Looking away from Damsel, he saw Mrs. Ladd—an older Milgahn woman with pale skin and silvery hair— sitting in the shade of a little shelter on the far side of the pool. A very ugly blind man was sitting there with her.
Once again the dog demanded Gabe’s attention. When he turned away from Damsel, Lani was stepping through the slider and coming outside. By then the man had disappeared. Gabe hadn’t heard him leave. He glanced around the backyard, looking for him. It seemed curious that he could have left so silently, but the man was nowhere to be seen. He was simply gone.
“Mom,” Lani said, frowning when she noticed her mother’s bathrobe and bare feet. “Why aren’t you dressed?”
“I am dressed,” Diana said. “What’s wrong with a robe?”
“But I thought you were going into town with us—to Tohono Chul. The three of us have a reservation for lunch at the Tea Room, and then tonight there’s the night-blooming cereus party.”
“I can’t,” Diana said. “I’m busy.”
Lani had lived with her adoptive mother’s career as a reality all her life. From an early age she had understood how deadlines worked. When there was something to do with writing that had to be completed by a certain time, her mother was simply unavailable.
“What?” Lani asked. “An emergency copyediting job? How come the deadlines always come from the publisher and never the other way around?”
“Not copyediting,” Diana said. “Something else.”
“Look,” Lani said. “It’s Saturday afternoon. You’ve already worked all morning. Let it go. I talked to Dad. He’s on his way to Casa Grande to see a friend of his. Take a break. Come with us right now. It’ll be fun. The blossoms start opening around eight. I’ll have you back home no later than ten-thirty. You can work all day tomorrow if you need to.”
Diana thought about that for a moment. Finally, making up her mind, she picked up her computer. “All right,” she said. “I’ll go get dressed.”
She stood up and walked into the house, closing the door behind her.
“Who was that man?” Gabe asked.
“What man?”
“The man who was talking to your mother.”
“I didn’t see any man,” Lani said.
“He was right there,” Gabe said, “and then he was gone.”
Lani glanced around the yard. Like Gabe, she saw no one. “Maybe he went out through the gate.”
Gabe shook his head.
“What did he look like? Was he young or old?”
“Old,” Gabe said. “The skin on his face was all lumpy.”
“Like wrinkled?”
“No. Bumpy. Like a popover when you cook it.”
In other tribes, popovers are called fry bread. Flattened pieces of dough are dropped into hot grease. As the dough cooks, the outside surface fills with air and puffs up.
Despite the hot air around her, Lani Walker felt a chill. She knew of only one man whose face had puffed up like a popover when it was covered with hot grease thrown by her mother, but that had happened long before Lani was born. Lani knew about it not only because her brother, who had been there at the time, had told her the story. Lani also knew because she’d seen the photographs in her mother’s book, which had also mentioned that Andrew Philip Carlisle had been dead for years.
“He’s not here now,” Lani said. “You must have been mistaken. Come on,” she added. “Oi g hihm.”
Directly translated, that expression means “Let us walk.” In the vernacular of the reservation, it means: “Let’s get in the pickup and go.”
Gabe evidently understood that this was one time when he’d be better off not asking any questions. Without a word of objection and with the dog at his side, he came into the house behind Lani, took a seat on the couch in a room filled with beautiful Tohono O’odham baskets, and waited patiently until it was time to leave.
Tucson, Arizona
Saturday, June 6, 2009, 1:00 P.M.
93º Fahrenheit
While the coffeepot burbled and burped, Dan dished up Bozo’s food—dry dog food along with a dollop of canned food for flavor. Dan couldn’t help but notice that the tinned dog food—beef with gravy—smelled more appetizing than some of the MREs he had encountered during his tour of duty in Iraq.
Our tour of duty, Dan corrected himself mentally as he placed the dish of food in front of the salivating dog. He still remembered his first one-sided conversation with the dog no one had wanted.
“Look,” he had said while Bozo listened to his voice with rapt, prick-eared attention. “Let’s get one thing straight. When we work, we work; when we play, we play, but you’ve got to know the difference.”
“Hey,” one of the guys had said, pointing and laughing. “Looks like Chief here is turning into one of those dog whisperers. Is it possible old Bozo actually understands Apache?”
From the time he was four, Dan had been raised by his grandparents on the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona, where Dan had been ridiculed for being half Anglo and half Apache. Back then he had coped with his tormentors by playing class clown, so maybe Bozo had a point. And maybe that’s one of the reasons Dan and Bozo had bonded. Daniel Pardee was in Iraq wearing his country’s uniform and doing his country’s job, but he was sick and tired of the constant jokes about his Apache background. Maybe Bozo was tired of the jokes, too.
“I was just telling him that some of the people around here are jerks,” Dan replied. “I told him he needs to know who his friends are.”
By the time Dan’s deployment neared its end, he had pretty much resigned himself to leaving Bozo behind. By then Bozo’s reputation was such that the other guys were clamoring to take him on. That was when Ruthie’s “Dear John” letter arrived. He and Ruthie Longoria had been childhood sweethearts and had dated exclusively all through high school. The idea that they would marry eventually had been a foregone conclusion, but the ending had been all too typical. Somehow Dan had known what was up before he even opened the envelope. For one thing, she had sent it via snail mail rather than over the Net.
“We’re too young to make this kind of commitment,” she had told him. “We both need to see other people, but we can still be friends.” Yada yada yada.
Sure, like that’s going to happen! It was long after Dan had come back home that he finally learned the truth. Ruthie had already found a new man before she ever cut Dan loose.
Still, at the time he read the letter, he was pissed as hell—more angry than sad—but he was also grateful. He understood that he had dodged a bullet as real as any of the live ammunition on the ground in Iraq. If that was the kind of woman Ruthie Longoria was, he was better off knowing about it before the wedding rather than after—a wedding and honeymoon he’d been dutifully saving money for the whole time he had been in the service.
With that monetary obligation off the table, however, Dan decided to cut his losses. If he couldn’t keep his woman, he would sure as hell keep his dog. So Dan took the money he had set aside to pay for a wedding and paid Bozo’s way home instead. It took all the money he’d had and more besides. His maternal grandfather had helped, and so had Justin Clifford’s family. Finally all the effort paid off. After months of paperwork and red tape and after being locked in quarantine for weeks, Bozo came home—home to Arizona; home to San Carlos; home to being a half-Apache dog.
With the wedding in mind, Dan had lined up a postmilitary job with a rent-a-cop security outfit in Phoenix, but that was because Ruthie loved Phoenix and wanted to live there instead of on the reservation, and that’s exactly where she and her new boyfriend—now husband— had gone to live.
Dan did not love Phoenix—at all. Instead of taking that security job, he went back to the reservation, stayed with Gramps, as he called Micah Duarte, his widowed grandfather, the man who had raised him. Sitting in the quiet of Gramps’s small but tidy house, Dan had tried to figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. At age twenty-nine it had seemed that he was too old to go back to college, even though his veteran status would have made that affordable. After the excitement of Iraq, Dan was bored, and so was Bozo. And even though Gramps never said a word, Dan worried that he and his dog were wearing out their welcome.
Then one day two years earlier, when they were eating breakfast at the kitchen table, Gramps put a newspaper in front of him.
“Here,” he said, pointing. “Read this. It sounds like something you’d be good at.”
That article, in the Arizona Sun, told about a special group of Indian trackers, the Shadow Wolves, who worked homeland security on the Tohono O’odham Nation west of Tucson by patrolling the seventy miles of rugged reservation land that lay next to the Mexican border. Members of the elite force came from any number of tribes and were required to be at least one quarter Indian. Dan qualified on that score, with a quarter to the good since he was half Indian and half Anglo. Shadow Wolves needed to be expert trackers, and Dan qualified there, too.
His taciturn grandfather, who had spent all his adult life working on a dairy farm outside of Safford, may not have been long on language skills, but he had taught his grandson how to ride, hunt, and shoot, occasionally doing all three at once.
Micah Duarte counted among his ancestors one of the Apache scouts who had trailed Geronimo into Mexico and had helped negotiate the agreement that had brought him back to the States. In other words, being a tracker was in Daniel’s blood, but Micah Duarte had translated bloodlines into firsthand experience by teaching his grandson everything he knew.
Together Dan and Gramps had hunted deer and javelina, usually with bow and arrow rather than with firearms. Hunting with a bow and arrow required being close to your quarry, and getting that close meant you had to be smart. You had to be able to read the animals’ tracks and know exactly what was going on with them and with their neighbors.
Once, when Dan was in his late teens, he and Gramps had been deer hunting in southeastern Arizona. Toward the end of the day they had spotted a jaguar and followed the big cat back to its lair, not to kill it—just to see it. At the time, Dan had been astonished to learn that jaguars still existed in the States.
“Not many Apaches have done that,” Micah had told Dan later that evening as the two of them sat by their campfire. “I’m not a medicine man, but I think perhaps it is a sign.”
The comment wasn’t said in a boastful way, but the quiet dignity of the statement had somehow infected the impressionable teenager who had cut his teeth watching Star Wars movies and who knew far more about Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader than he did about Apache warriors like Geronimo and Victorio or even about his own forebears. That experience more than any other had prompted him to enlist in the army after graduating from high school.
Now, after Iraq, the more Dan read about the Shadow Wolves, the more they intrigued him, especially since they were a part of ICE and the Border Patrol, so his previous work experience in the military would be a point in his favor.
That was the start of it. Dan had applied for the Shadow Wolves, where he had been accepted into the training program and where he had aced every test. The job paid well enough that, even though he was unmarried, he was able to use his VA benefits to buy his first house. It was still a sparsely furnished home on Tucson’s west side, but it came with a spacious fenced backyard where Bozo had the run of the place. Best of all, unlike so much rental property, it didn’t come with a lot of rules, including the dreaded NO PETS ALLOWED prohibition.
Yes, this was a place both Dan and Bozo could call home.
Once on board with the Shadow Wolves, Dan found it easy to prove his worth. He loved the work and he was good at it. As the weeks passed, however, with Dan going off to work and with Bozo staying home, he could see that the dog was growing more and more depressed. Bozo understood work. He knew that Dan was working and he wasn’t, and the dog didn’t like being left behind. Bozo demonstrated the extent of his separation anxiety by chewing up any number of expensive items—shoes, boots, holsters, and drywall—anything that was within easy reach.
Dan knew the dog well enough to understand the problem. He had two choices—either lock the dog in a pen outside and leave him there all day long or else put the dog to work, too. Talking Bozo’s way into Shadow Wolves hadn’t been easy.
“In case you haven’t noticed, Wolves don’t need K-9 units,” Captain Meecham told him. “Period. Besides, as near as I can tell, Bozo is definitely not an Indian.”
Meecham’s bloodlines and face said Kiowa even if his name did not.
“Let me show you what he can do,” Dan had offered. “Wouldn’t it make sense if we knew in advance if a vehicle was carrying illegal drugs as opposed to just illegal aliens? Get yourself a bag of grass from the evidence room and hide it in one of the cars outside in the parking lot. Let’s see how long it takes Bozo to find it.”
Dan had taught Bozo that little trick at their newly purchased, once foreclosed, home in Tucson. As a target, he had salted his own car with a small amount of grass he had taken off one of his neighbors’ junior-high-school-aged kids who was standing on a nearby street corner selling it to his classmates. Dan didn’t arrest the kid because what went on inside the Tucson city limits was outside Dan’s jurisdiction, but he knew he had scared the hell out of that pint-size dealer.
It took Bozo less than five minutes to transform Aaron Meecham into a believer. Once turned loose in the parking lot, Bozo had trotted purposefully up and down the aisles before stopping and vaulting into the back of Aaron’s immense Toyota Tundra and barking wildly at the stainless-steel tool chest where Aaron had hidden the weed.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’m impressed. I suppose we can try it for a while, unofficially, that is.”
Aaron had gone back inside then. As Dan walked Bozo through the parking lot and back to his vintage Camaro, the dog alerted two more times—at other vehicles, at coworkers’ cars.
“They’re working here and using weed themselves?” Dan asked the dog. “It’s a good thing Captain Meecham didn’t hang around long enough to see that. If he had, there’d be hell to pay.”
Now, a year after that test run, Bozo rode shotgun in the front seat of Dan’s green-and-white Border Patrol SUV every time Dan went out on patrol. He loved it. So did Dan. Because of the rough terrain and the possibility of high-speed chases, Dan had found a dog harness that allowed him to fasten Bozo’s seat belt and keep him secure.
The dog was almost eight years old now. He had started limping a little again. The vet said that he had developed a bit of arthritis in his left rear leg, the one that had been damaged by the IED, and that maybe it was verging on time for Bozo to retire, but Dan didn’t want to think about that, not yet.
At the moment the two of them worked four ten-hour shifts a week. They went on duty at 8:00 P.M. and were off again at 6:00 A.M.
Dan was glad to have Bozo’s company through the long boring hours of patrolling and to have him there as backup during the occasional confrontation. Even the fiercest thug tended to give it up when faced with Bozo’s snarling countenance. And if one of them ever fought back and harmed the dog? Dan wasn’t sure what he’d do, but he didn’t think it would be inside the regulations.
While Bozo finished eating, Dan took his coffee, settled down in his one good chair, and turned on the TV. Punching the clicker, he paused briefly at CNN to pick up the headlines, and then moved over to his DVR to watch ESPN’s coverage of last night’s Padres game.
And that was how Dan Pardee spent a lazy Saturday afternoon, drinking coffee and watching the Great American Pastime with his faithful companion at his side.
Life didn’t get any better than that.
