J. JANCE - Hour of the Hunter

The child left the room, shoulders sagging, head drooping, with the dog following dutifully behind. “What do you want to talk to me about?” she asked.

All his careful plans for telling her flew out the window. “Andrew Carlisle,” he replied. “He’s out.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m wearing this.”

A raw recruit would have been drummed out of the academy for making such a mistake. It wasn’t until she touched it with her hand that he noticed the gun and holster strapped to her hip. And not just any gun, either-a gigantic.45 Colt single-action revolver.

“Jesus H. Christ, woman! Is that thing loaded?”

“It certainly is,” she told him calmly. “And I’m fully prepared to use it.”

Diana ushered Brandon into the house and showed him to a seat on the couch. The detective still worried about the gun.

“You shouldn’t do this, you know,” he said.

“Do what, wear a gun, protect myself? Why not?”

“For one thing, if somebody gets shot with that thing, chances are it won’t be Andrew Carlisle. In an armed confrontation with crooks, amateurs tend to shoot themselves, not the other way around. For another, it’s 1975. We’re not still living in the Wild West, you know.”

“Somebody forgot to tell the woman at Picacho Peak,” Diana returned.

“You know about that, too?”

“The reservation grapevine is pretty thorough.”

“And fast. Andrew Carlisle was the first thing I was coming to tell you, and Picacho Peak was the second. I’ve just come from there. I met with the detective on that case. His name’s Farrell, Detective G. T. Farrell from Pinal County. He’s a real pro. I’ve already pointed him in Carlisle’s direction.”

“I suppose that’s only fair,” Diana responded sarcastically, “since you’re the one who helped Carlisle get off in the first place.”

Diana Ladd’s remark cut through Brandon Walker’s usually even-tempered demeanor. “I didn’t help him, goddammit!” Brandon Walker snapped. The hard edge of anger in his voice surprised them both.

“How old were you seven years ago?” he demanded roughly.

“Twenty-four.”

“I was a little older than that, but I wasn’t much wiser. When I told you to trust the system, I meant it, because I still did, too. I was young and idealistic and ignorant. I thought being a cop was one way to save the world. So get off your cross, Diana. You weren’t the only one who got screwed. So did I.”

Diana Ladd was taken aback by this outburst. In the brief silence that followed, Davy and Bone edged back into the room.

“I’m hot,” the boy said. “Can I have something to drink?”

His request offered Diana an escape from Brandon Walker’s unexpected anger. “Sure,” she said lightly, getting up. “The tea should be ready by now. Would you like some, Detective Walker?”

He nodded. “That’ll be fine.”

After she left the room, Walker sat there shaking his head, ashamed of himself for lashing out at her. What she’d said hadn’t been any worse than what he’d told himself time and again during the intervening years. Diana Ladd didn’t have a corner on the Let’s-beat-up-Brandon-Walker market. He could do a pretty damn good job of that all by himself.

With effort, the detective turned his attention to the boy who sat on the floor absently petting the dog. Davy seemed decidedly less friendly than he had been the day before. Wondering why, Brandon made a stab at conversation. “How’s the head?” he asked.

“It’s okay, I guess,” Davy muttered.

“Does it still hurt?”

“Not much. Will my hair grow back? Where they shaved it, I mean.”

“It’ll take a few weeks, but it’ll grow. Have the barber give you a crew cut. It won’t show so much then.”

“Mom cuts my hair,” Davy said. “To save money. I don’t think she knows how to do crew cuts.”

Brandon glanced toward the swinging kitchen door. It seemed to be taking Diana an inordinately long time to bring the tea.

“Did you know my daddy?” Davy asked.

It was a jarring change of subject. “No,” Walker replied. “I never met him.”

“Was my father a killer?”

Brandon found the unvarnished directness of the boy’s questions unnerving. “Why are you asking me?” he hedged.

“Everybody says my daddy was a killer,” Davy answered matter-of-factly. “They call me Killer’s Child. I want to know what happened to him. I’m six. That’s old enough to know what really happened.”

Brandon Walker realized too late that he’d been sucked into an emotional mine field. “What did your mother tell you?” he asked.

“That my daddy was afraid he was going to get into trouble about Gina Antone, and so he killed himself.”

“That’s right.” At least Diana had told her son that much.

“Mom said you were the detective. Did you arrest him?”

“No,” Brandon said. “By the time I got to the house, your father was already gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Out to the desert.”

“To kill himself? That’s where he did it, isn’t it? In the desert?”

“Yes.”

Davy turned his immense blue eyes full on the detective’s face. “Why didn’t you get there sooner?” he demanded. “Why didn’t you hurry and stop him? That way, I could have met him before he died. I could have talked to him just once.”

Your father was a scumbag, Walker wanted to say, looking at the wide-eyed boy. Garrison Ladd didn’t deserve a son like you. Instead, he said, “I did the best I could, Davy. We all did.”

It is said that long ago in a small village lived a very beautiful young woman who was the daughter of a powerful medicine man. She was so beautiful that all the young men of the village liked to look at her. This made her father so angry that he made her stay in the house. If she went out, he scolded her. Whenever he found the young men of the village trying to spy on her, he scolded them, too.

In those days, Wind Man spent much of his time in that same village. One day, the young men of the village went to Wind Man and teased him and said that since he was strong enough and clever enough, he should catch the girl when she came out to get water and take her up in the air so they could all see her. At first Wind Man refused, saying that it would be wrong to do this and make her father angry, but the young men begged and pleaded, and at last that is what happened.

When the girl came out of her house to get water, all the young men in the village were watching. Holding her in his arms, Wind Man took her high up into the air, very gently carrying her around and around. Her long hair was loosened. It fell down and wrapped itself around her until it touched the ground. Then it caught up the nearby leaves and dust and carried them back into the air with her.

And that is the story of the very first Whirlwind there ever was on the desert.

Brandon Walker remembered the whirlwinds.

A fierce wind was kicking up a line of them and propelling them across the desert floor as he drove south toward Topawa for the second time. The first trip had been the day before to notify the victim’s grandmother that Gina Antone was dead. The second time he returned to Topawa, he was looking for Gina’s killer.

Walker was called in on the case as soon as it was determined that the water hole in which the body had been found was in the county rather than on reservation land. A dead Indian wasn’t high on Sheriff DuShane’s list of priorities. As a result, Walker wasn’t assigned in a very timely fashion.

The body was discovered by a pair of city-slicker hunters out shooting coyotes mostly for the hell of it, and only incidentally for the bounty paid for each stinking coyote carcass. The two men found the girl floating facedown in the muddy pond and had called the sheriff’s office to report it only after getting back to town. Walker theorized that some of their hunting may have been on reservation land and they hadn’t wanted to call attention to either the body or themselves until after the dead coyotes were well away from Papago boundaries.