Dance of the Bones

Big Bad John Lassiter had been dazzled by her looks. Amos Warren hadn’t. Worried that he might turn her in, she’d taken him off the board. The poor sap had probably thought she was bluffing when he saw the gun pointed at him. Too bad. You snooze, you lose.

The fact that Ava been able to make off with a fortune in artifacts after Amos’s death was nothing more than a happy coincidence, one that she had used to good advantage. The resulting money had made possible a complete makeover, one that had given Ava entrée into one of the top--tier escort ser-vices in town. From there it had been only a small step to her first upwardly mobile set of marriage vows.

Over the years, however, she hadn’t crossed any of the useful -people from the bad old days off her list. Guys she knew from her earlier drug--dealing exploits—-the ones who were still alive, anyway—-were easy to find because many of them were still in prison and could lead her to a whole new generation of useful contacts. Someone she had met in her escort--service days had turned into a very capable forger who could, with a few strokes of a pen, turn a blood diamond into a conflict--free one that was good to go for two to three times what she paid for it initially. And that was Ava’s focus these days—-smuggling diamonds. Blood diamonds could be bought on the cheap. Certified diamonds went for a bundle, and that was the whole idea—-buy cheap and sell high.

Why diamonds? She’d been in the illicit Indian artifact business for a while, but pots were usually too hard to find. Diamonds were easier to come by, and they weighed a lot less. At the moment, nobody, including the cartels, Border Patrol, and the occasional robber, seemed to be looking for diamonds, at least not so far.

A year or so earlier Ava and Harold had been returning to the United States from their condo in San Carlos with a jar full of peanut butter, which Ava had salted with diamonds. South of Nogales, they’d been pulled over by a bunch of gun--toting banditos posing as Federales. The crooks had happily relieved Harold of his wallet and Ava of her purse, making off with close to a thousand bucks in cash, but they had completely missed the diamond--stuffed peanut butter jar sitting in plain sight in the picnic cooler. The crooks hadn’t been any the wiser, and for that matter, neither had Harold.

Ava no longer brought the goods across the border herself; that was far too dangerous these days. Now she had a small crew of worker bees to do that part of the job. She figured it would only take a -couple more shipments to have enough to make a break for it as soon as Harold corked off, which might well be sooner than later.

The problem was, she had recently learned that a ghost from her past was about to surface. What she didn’t need right now was anything at all that would call attention to her earlier life. Unfortunately, according to the newspaper that morning, Big Bad John Lassiter’s name was once more in the news. If he ended up back in court, someone might well dig deep enough into the past to learn that a girl named Ava Martin, now Mrs. Harold Richland, had been a prosecution witness in both of John’s previous murder trials. That might be enough to bring her entire enterprise crashing down around her ears. There was no way in hell she was going to let that happen.