Gary is working on a preliminary inquiry begun by the attorney general’s office, where he’s been an investigator for seven years. Before that he had a background of wrong choices. He was tall and lanky and could have considered basketball as a possibility, but although he was dogged enough, he didn’t have the raw aggression needed for professional sports. In the end, he went back to college, thought about law school, then decided against spending all those years studying in closed rooms. The result is that he’s doing what he’s best at anyway, which is figuring things out. What sets him apart from most of his colleagues is that he likes murder. He likes it so well that his friends rib him and call him the Mexican Turkey Vulture, a carrion creature that hunts by scent. Gary doesn’t mind the kidding and he doesn’t mind that most people have an easy answer that allows them to believe they’ve gotten a fix on the reason why he’s so interested in homicide. They point straight to his family history—his mother died of liver failure, and his father probably would have done so as well, if he hadn’t been murdered first, over in New Mexico. The fellow who did it never was found, and, frankly, nobody seemed to look very hard for him. But the circumstances of Gary’s past aren’t what drives him, no matter what his friends think. It’s figuring out the why of things; the final factor that makes a person act can be so damn elusive, but you can always find some motivation, if you look hard enough. The wrong word said at the wrong time, a gun in the wrong hand, the wrong woman who kisses you just right. Money, love, or fury—those are the causes for most everything. You can usually uncover the truth, or a version of it at any rate, if you ask enough questions; if you close your eyes and imagine the way it might have been, how you might have reacted if you’d had enough, if you just couldn’t find it in you to care anymore.
The why in the case he’s working on is clearly money. Three kids from the university are dead because someone wanted bucks badly enough to sell them rattlesnake seeds and jimsonweed without once giving a good goddamn about the consequences. Kids will buy anything, especially East Coast kids who haven’t been warned their whole life long about what grows in the desert. One seed of rattlesnake weed makes you euphoric, it’s like LSD growing free. The problem is, two can cause your death. Unless, of course, the first has already done that job nicely, which was the case with one of the kids, a history major from Philadelphia who had just turned nineteen. Gary was called in early by his friend Jack Carillo in homicide, and he saw the history major on the floor of his dorm room. The boy had had awful convulsions before he died; the whole left side of his face was black and blue, and Gary suggested that no one would consider it tampering with the evidence if they put some makeup on the kid before his parents arrived.
Gary has read the file on James Hawkins, who’s been selling drugs in Tucson for twenty years. Gary is thirty-two, and he vaguely remembers Hawkins, an older guy the girls used to whisper about. After dropping out of high school, Hawkins got into trouble in various states, Oklahoma for a while, then Tennessee, before returning to his hometown and getting sent to the lockup on charges of criminal assault, which, along with drugs, seems to be his forte. When he couldn’t bullshit his way out of a bad situation, Hawkins was known to go for his opponent’s eyes, using the heavy silver ring he wore to gouge and dig. He acted as though no one could stop him, but it’s pretty much the end of Mr. Hawkins’s criminal career now. The history major’s roommate positively identified him—from his snakeskin boots to the silver ring decorated with a cactus and a rattlesnake and the cowboy he may have imagined himself to be—and they’re not the only ones to have picked out his photo. Seven other students, who were lucky enough not to take the bogus drugs they bought from him, have identified this loser as well—and that should be that, except no one can find Hawkins. They can’t find his live-in girlfriend, either, from all accounts a good-looking woman who seems to have been a hostess at every half-decent restaurant in town. They’ve checked the bars Hawkins frequented and questioned all three of his alleged friends, and no one’s seen him since late June, when the university let out.
Gary has been getting into Hawkins’s life, trying to figure him. He’s been frequenting the Pink Pony, which was Hawkins’s favorite place to get drunk, and sitting on the front patio of the last house Hawkins rented, which is why Gary happened to be there when the letter arrived. He was sitting in a metal chair, his long legs stretched out so he could prop his feet up on the patio’s white metal railing, when the mailman walked right over and dropped the letter on his lap and demanded the postage due, since the stamp had fallen off somewhere along the way.
The letter was crumpled and torn in one corner, and if the flap hadn’t already been open, Gary would have just taken it over to the office. But an opened letter is hard to resist, even for someone like Gary, who’s resisted a lot in his life. His friends know enough not to offer him a beer, just as they know not to ask him about the girl he was married to, briefly, right after high school. They’re willing to do this because his friendship is worth it. They know that Gary will never deceive them or disappoint them—that’s the way he’s built; that’s the way his grandfather raised him. But this letter was something else; it tempted him, and he gave in to it, and, if he’s going to be honest, he still doesn’t regret it.
Summer in Tucson is seriously hot, and it was a hundred and seven degrees as Gary sat out on the patio of the house Hawkins used to rent and read that letter addressed to Gillian Owens. The creosote plant that grew beside the patio was all but popping with the heat, yet Gary just sat there and read the letter Sally had written to her sister, and when he was done he read it again. As the afternoon heat finally began to ease up, Gary took off his hat and dropped his boots down from the metal railing. He’s a man who’s willing to take chances, but he has the courage to walk away from impossible odds. He knows when to back off and when to keep trying, but he’d never felt like this before. Sitting out on that patio in the purple dusk, he was long past considering the odds.
Until Sonny died, Gary had always shared a house with his grandfather, except for his brief marriage and the first eight years with his parents, which he doesn’t remember out of sheer willpower. But he remembers everything about his grandfather. He knew what time Sonny would get out of bed in the morning, and when he’d go to sleep, and what he’d eat for breakfast, which was invariably shredded wheat on weekdays, and on Sundays pancakes, spread with molasses and jam. Gary has been close to people and has a whole town full of friends, but he’d never once felt he’d known anyone the way he felt he knew the woman who wrote this letter. It was as if someone had ripped off the top of his head and hooked a piece of his soul. He was so involved with the words she’d written that anyone passing by could have pushed him off his chair with one finger. A turkey vulture could have landed on the back rung of the chair he was sitting in, screamed right in his ear, and Gary wouldn’t have heard a sound.
He went home then and packed his bag. He called to tell his buddy Arno at the AG’s office that he had found a great lead and was going after Hawkins’s girlfriend, but of course that wasn’t the whole truth. Hawkins’s girlfriend wasn’t the one he was thinking about when he asked his closest neighbor’s twelve-year-old boy to hike by each morning and set out some food and water for the dogs, then took his horses over to the Mitchells’ ranch, where they’d be turned out with a bunch of Arabians much prettier than themselves, and maybe learn a lesson or two.
Gary was at the airport that evening. He caught the 7:17 to Chicago, and he spent the night with his long legs folded up on a bench at O’Hare, where he had to change planes. He read Sally’s letter twice more in midair, and then again while he ate eggs and sausage for lunch in a diner in Elmhurst, Queens. Even when he folds it back into its envelope and places it deep inside the pocket of his jacket, the letter keeps coming back to him. Whole sentences Sally has written form inside his head, and for some reason he’s filled with the strangest sense of acceptance, not for anything he’s done but for what he might be about to do.
Gary picked up directions and a cold can of Coke at a gas station on the Turnpike. In spite of his wrong turn near the Y field, he manages to find the correct address. Sally Owens is in the kitchen when he’s parking his rented car. She’s stirring a pot of tomato sauce on the back burner when Gary circles the Honda in the driveway, gets a good look at the Oldsmobile parked in front, and matches its Arizona license plate number to the one in his files. She’s pouring hot water and noodles into a colander when he knocks at the door.