J. JANCE - Hour of the Hunter

When he finished with that, he returned to his room and retrieved the gun, Margaret Danielson’s automatic. Long ago, Myrna Louise had been known for going through her son’s things. Andrew didn’t want to take any chances.

Besides, she had given him the keys to Jake’s old Valiant. She told him the tags were still good and he was welcome to use it anytime he wanted. He went out to the little one-car garage and slipped the gun under the base of the jack in the trunk’s spare-tire well. That way it would be safely out of the house should he need it.

The other key his mother had given him was to his storage locker, the place where he had directed her to leave all his furniture and belongings once she emptied his house in Tucson before selling it. At the time, Myrna Louise had questioned what he was doing with all that camping equipment in storage and what did he keep in the huge metal drum? He had reassured her that his survivalist gear was nothing more than a harmless interest in camping, a hobby he might want to take up again once he got out.

Andrew was reasonably certain all his equipment was there, at least most of it. He’d have to go down to Tucson as soon as possible and do a thorough inventory to make sure everything he needed was in good working order. Once he finished that, he’d be ready to go hunting again.

He could hardly wait.

After what she’d been through with her mother, the last thing Diana Ladd expected to happen in the emergency room was for her to get queasy when the doctor started to put stitches in Davy’s head. The doctor asked her if she’d be all right, and she confidently assured him that she would be, but that was before she knew that they wouldn’t be able to deaden it, that the stitches would have to be done with only ice cubes as anesthetic.

As Davy winced and cried out under the needle, she felt herself getting weak-kneed and woozy. A nurse helped her from the room. While she sat in the lobby with her head dangling between her knees feeling both foolish and helpless, Brandon Walker hurried into the emergency room and held Davy Ladd’s hand while the doctor sewed the little boy’s scalp back together.

It didn’t seem like that big a deal, really, but when Brandon Walker carried a wide-awake Davy back out of the emergency room and delivered him into his mother’s waiting arms, Diana’s tearful gratitude warmed his heart. No matter what Louella said, maybe Brandon wasn’t such a poor excuse for a human being after all.

He waited patiently while Davy proudly showed his mother the shaved spot on his head and the straight line of caterpillar-leg stitches that marched from his temple down one cheek.

“Ready?” Brandon asked at last.

“Yes,” Diana said. “Would you mind carrying him again? You’re right. He really is too heavy.”

“I can walk all by myself,” Davy said. “The doctor said I was real brave. I was, wasn’t I?” He looked up at Brandon for confirmation.

“Yes, you were. You barely cried at all.”

They walked to the waiting Ford three-abreast, with the boy between them holding each of their hands.

“Can I sit in the front now?” Davy asked, while they waited for Brandon to unlock the door.

“You bet,” Brandon Walker replied. “Any kid with twelve stitches in his head ought to get to ride in the front seat.”

In La Cantina, a dive of a bar in Rocky Point, Mexico, the driver of a red Grand Prix was sipping tequila and telling a buddy of his about the tough little boy he’d met earlier that day after a spectacular auto accident.

“That kid was something else,” the man was saying. “Here he was with all kinds of blood pouring out of his head, but all he could think about was this poor old Indian broad who was still pinned in the truck. I was about to take off in the wrong direction to get help, but he wouldn’t let me. He kept dragging on my leg and insisting there was an ambulance up on top of the mountain, for Chrissakes. Damned if he wasn’t right. If we hadn’t gone up the mountain after it right then, I don’t think she would have made it. Maybe she didn’t, for that matter.”

“You say the woman was an Indian and the kid was an Anglo?”

“A regular towhead,” the man answered. “And cute as a button.”

“I wonder if there isn’t a story in this,” his buddy said. “You know, human interest. I’ll talk to my features editor about it when I go back tomorrow. Maybe it’s something we can use next week. Once it gets hot around here, feature stories are tough to come by.”

The speaker drained his shot glass, licked a patch of salt off his hand, and took a bite from the lime on a napkin on the bar in front of him. “Ready for another?”

“You tell me. Is the Pope Catholic?”

Brandon Walker, stretched out full length on Diana Ladd’s long but sagging couch, wasn’t sure which of the two woke him-the boy or the dog. When the detective opened his eyes, a pajama-clad Davy Ladd sat cross-legged on the floor next to the coffee table, munching on a rolled-up flour tortilla and sharing an occasional bite with a grateful, tail-thumping dog. Bone lay with his bristly, spike-haired head resting comfortably on the child’s knee. Both the boy and the dog were staring intently, watching Brandon Walker’s every move.

“Did your mom let you sleep over?” Davy asked.

The question brought Brandon Walker fully awake and put a rueful smile on his lips. “Not exactly.”

By now, his mother would have discovered her thirty-four-year-old son’s overnight absence and would be absolutely ripped. Louella had never come to terms with the idea that her son was a fully grown man.

Brandon had returned to the family home as a temporary measure in the bleak financial aftermath of his divorce. Because of his father’s failing health, that stopgap measure had stretched into a more or less permanent arrangement. There was no longer any discussion about Brandon moving into his own place, and most of the time he didn’t mind. After all, his parents needed him-his physical presence as well as his regular financial contributions. The only major drawback was the fact that his mother continued to treat him like an errant teenager.

“If your mom didn’t let you, how come you’re here then?” Davy asked thoughtfully.

“Because of your mom,” Walker answered. “She was worried about you and asked me to stay.”

Just then the tiny travel alarm clock Diana had placed on the coffee table beside him went off with a shrill jangle. Brandon quickly silenced it, hoping not to waken Diana. They’d both had very little sleep.

“What’s the clock for?” Davy asked.

“To wake me up,” Brandon replied. “So I could wake you.”

The detective sat up and put both feet on the floor. At once Bone raised his head and regarded the man warily. Remembering the dog’s violent attack on the Galaxy, Brandon reminded himself not to make any sudden or unexpected moves.

“Why?” the boy asked. “I’m already awake.”

“I noticed,” Brandon Walker responded, struck by Davy’s precociousness. The boy had to be around six, but he sounded older. His long, lank hair, so blond it was almost white, flopped down over one eye in sharp contrast to the other side with its round pink patch of bare skin and ladder of stitches. The combination gave him an almost comic appearance, but the expression on his face was serious.

“How come you did that?”

“Did what?”

“You and Mom, woke me up all night?”

“The doctor said not to let you sleep too long, or you might not wake up.”

“He was wrong,” the boy pointed out. “Are you hungry? There’s tortillas in the kitchen.”

“Sure,” Walker told him. “A tortilla sounds great.”