J Jance - Queen of the Night

On the San Carlos the difficulty had stemmed from the fact that Dan was only half Apache. On the Tohono O’odham, it was because he was any Apache at all. His last name didn’t give it away. After all, Pardee was his father’s name, an Anglo name. But in almost no time at all, the people who lived there had figured out that Dan’s mother had been Apache. Just his manner of speech gave him away. Among the Tohono O’odham being Apache was not okay-definitely not okay.

In the old days, the various Apache tribes-and there were several-had lived by their wits, raiding other tribes of what they had grown and gathered. It was no accident that in the vocabularies of any number of the Southwest Nations the word for “enemy” and the word for “Apache” were one and the same.

In an effort to fit in and to know something about his surroundings, Dan had bought himself a worn paperback copy of an English/Papago dictionary. The faded red-covered volume was seriously outdated because the Tohono O’odham had stopped referring to themselves as Papagos several decades earlier.

It was in perusing the dictionary and trying to teach himself some of the necessary place names that Dan had learned that as far as the Tohono O’odham were concerned, the all-encompassing Apache/enemy word was ohb.

Once the reservation gossip mill managed to spread the information that the new Shadow Wolf, the one with the dog- gogs- was ohb, Dan got the message. Bozo, the gogs, was okay. As for the human with him? Not so much.

They arrived in Sells in the broiling late-afternoon heat. Dan parked his green-and-white Ford Expedition in the shade of a mesquite tree at the far end of the parking lot in the town’s only shopping center.

Dan had no qualms about rolling down the windows and leaving Bozo alone inside the vehicle while he went into the grocery store. Bozo had an unerring understanding of who constituted a threat and who did not. Little kids who came by the Expedition to say hello to Bozo or give him a pat on the nose ran the very real risk of being kissed on the ear or slobbered on. If a bad guy happened to venture too close to the vehicle, however, he might well lose a hand or a finger.

Inside the store, Dan gathered a few items including two ham sandwiches-one for him and one for Bozo-a couple of bags of chips, two Cokes, and several bottles of water. Those would give him enough calories and help keep him alert through the long nighttime hours-hopefully long empty hours-before his shift ended at six the next morning.

Even though the line at Rosemary Sixkiller’s register was longer than the other ones, Dan went through hers anyway. Of all the clerks in the store, she was the only one who was consistently nice to him.

“There’s a dance at Vamori tonight,” she told him as she rang up his items. She gave the ham sandwiches a disapproving shake of the head as she put them in the bag. “You know you could go to the feast house there instead of eating these. They’re probably old.”

Dan had checked the sell-by date on the package, and Rosemary was correct. The sandwiches were right at the end of their sell-by date. He also knew she was teasing him about the dance. That was one of the reasons he always stopped at her register. To Dan Pardee’s ear, “Sixkiller” didn’t sound like a Tohono O’odham name. He suspected that Rosemary, like Dan, wasn’t one hundred percent T.O., or maybe even any percent. He appreciated the fact that she didn’t seem scared of him and that she joked around with him a little, even though they both knew why he wouldn’t be showing his Apache face at a Tohono O’odham feast house anytime soon.

“Can’t,” he said. “I’m working.”

Which was more or less the truth. Other Shadow Wolves did stop by feast houses now and then. Chatting with the locals gave the officers a chance to learn about what was going on in any given neighborhood-what people might have seen that was out of the ordinary, including the presence of any unfamiliar vehicles coming or going. Because the Tohono O’odham’s ancestral lands had been cut in two by the U.S./Mexican border, those strange vehicles often belonged to smugglers of various stripes and were, as a consequence, of interest to Homeland Security. Dan knew better than to try using the feast-house chitchat routine. He was the ultimate outsider here. What he found out about activities in his sector he had to find out the hard way-by personal observation.

Leaving the store with his small bag of groceries, Dan found two little girls standing outside the Expedition feeding bits of popcorn to a very appreciative Bozo. When Dan walked up to the vehicle, however, the two girls ducked their heads and sidled away without speaking to him or even acknowledging his presence.

Yup, he told himself. Daniel Pardee, the ultimate outsider.

“Okay,” he said aloud to Bozo. “Let’s go to work.”

Bozo looked at him, thumped his tail happily, and grinned his goofy canine grin.

With that they headed out of town, driving south toward the village of Topawa and then, beyond that, along the west side of the Baboquivari Mountains. Baboquivari itself, Waw Giwulk, or Constricted Rock, was an amazing rock monolith that towered over the surrounding flat desert landscape.

Driving through the pass just east of Sells always left Dan with the sense that he was a foreigner, but when he drove past Waw Giwulk, Baboquivari, his apartness seemed to melt away. That odd sensation puzzled him. He had no idea why that would be. He understood that Baboquivari was the legendary home of I’itoi, the Tohono O’odham’s Elder Brother. As such, it seemed to him that the mountain should have rejected Dan Pardee in the same way the people did.

Strange as it seemed even to him, he always had the weird idea that I’itoi was somehow welcoming him home. The same feeling washed over him that Saturday afternoon. How was it possible that he seemed to belong here in this wild stretch of untamed Sonora Desert in a way he belonged nowhere else?

Finally, however, he came to his senses. “What was I thinking?” he asked his partner, Bozo. “I must be making it up. I’itoi would never throw out the welcome mat for someone like me, not for an ohb.”

Bozo loved the sound of Dan’s voice. He thumped his tail happily. It wasn’t a very satisfying response, but under the circumstances it was the best Dan could hope for.

“Sounds like you’re of the same opinion,” he said, giving Bozo’s head a fond pat. “For some reason we both belong here.”

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 7:15 p.m.

87º Fahrenheit

When Brandon returned to the house in Gates Pass, he pulled into the garage and parked his CRV next to Diana’s hulking Tampico red Buick Invicta convertible. She had told him just that morning that she intended to sell it-that she wanted him to take it up to Barrett Jackson, the collector car auction place in Scottsdale, to see what he could get for it.

The idea that she was even thinking about unloading her treasured car had come as a real shock to him. The old Buick convertible had been little more than a wreck when Diana had won it at a charity auction, and she had paid good money for Leo Ortiz to bring the vehicle back from the dead. Now it was a real collector’s item, all spit and polish and complete with custom-made red and white imitation leather seats that were unashamed copies of the factory originals.

If she went through with that idea, Brandon doubted Diana would get as much as she expected from selling her pride and joy, but still, why do it? Even with their book-contract difficulties, it wasn’t as if they needed the money. They didn’t.

When Brandon stepped inside the back door, Damsel greeted him ecstatically. Despite years of lobbying on Brandon ’s part, Diana continued to regard pet doors as magnets for other unwanted critters. Damsel had been left inside for so long that she went racing outside without even noticing the doggie bag containing Brandon ’s leftover fajitas. Once she was back inside and downing her treat, Brandon lugged Geet Farrell’s box into his study and set it on his desk.