Dance of the Bones

“Hey,” he objected, “what are you doing?”


Henry didn’t answer. He slammed the door shut, locking it with his key fob, before he walked around the front of the pickup to the driver’s door. Gabe tried to unlock the door manually, but his muscles were still disrupted by the stun gun charge. Before he could make them respond properly, they went numb. Suddenly helpless, he fell back against the seat.

As Gabe drifted into unconsciousness, he had a strange thought. Lani had told him that the Bad -People always came from the South. Henry Rojas was Navajo. Weren’t Navajos from the North?

He’d have to ask Lani to explain that to him the next time he saw her.





CHAPTER 16




THEY SAY IT HAPPENED LONG ago that in the summers, when it was very hot and the low--lying water holes all dried up, the Desert -People would leave their villages behind and go to the foothills at the base of one of I’itoi’s sacred mountains—-Ioligam, which means Manzanita, or Baboquivari, which means The Mountain That Is Small in the Middle.

The Elders—-Kekelimai—-say that once the sacred peak of Baboqui-vari was shaped like the thing the Milgahn—-the Anglos—-call an hourglass. One day Beautiful Girl’s brother returned from the heavens. In the quake that followed his arrival, the top of the hourglass broke off, leaving Baboquivari looking the way it does today, like a spool sitting in the middle of the desert.

BEFORE BRANDON HEADED FOR FLORENCE, he made a call to clear the way. His younger son, Quentin, an intravenous drug user, had developed hepatitis C, which had morphed into cirrhosis before he had managed to store up enough meds to end it all with an overdose.

During the last year of his life, when Quentin had spent far more time in the infirmary than in his cell, Brandon and Diana had both been constant visitors. One or the other of them had been in the infirmary with him almost daily, providing care and comfort that would otherwise have been delegated to overworked and understaffed nurses and orderlies. Over time, surprisingly enough, they had developed a first grudging but eventually enduring friendship with the warden.

Brandon recognized that Warden Edward Huffman was a conscientious man doing a difficult job, and it seemed likely that Huffman saw Diana and Brandon for what they were, too—-a pair of heartbroken parents who, having failed at the task of saving their offspring from himself, were now doing the best they could to see him through to the other side. Maybe Huffman also related to the irony of Brandon’s position—-that of a former sheriff who had been as helpless at raising his own son as any other father on the planet. For whatever reason, on Brandon and Diana’s weekly and finally daily visits, they had been granted a kind of latitude to come and go that most prison visitors were denied.

It had been years now since Quentin died, but Huffman’s name and phone numbers remained in Brandon’s contacts list. Still parked outside Amanda Wasser’s condo, Brandon located the record. Then, since it was Saturday, he dialed the warden’s cell phone first.

“Huffman,” the man answered.

“Brandon Walker here.

“Long time no see. What’s up?”

“I need a favor.”

“What kind of favor?”

“I understand John Lassiter has asked to see me, but I don’t want to drive all the way up there if I’m not on the approved visitor list.”

“Let me check. I’ll get back to you. Is this number all right?”

“It’ll work.”