J Jance - Queen of the Night

“Nope. First things first.”

Carrying the cooler in one hand and the hamper in the other, he led her over to the waiting picnic table. The candles he had placed on the table earlier, long white tapers, hadn’t fared well in the afternoon heat. They tilted at odd angles, but Jack could see that the fact that the little clearing had been suitably dressed for this evening’s event was making a big impression on his wife.

“This is beautiful,” she said. “You really went all out, didn’t you?”

“Wait until you see the best part,” he said, setting down the hamper and the cooler.

“How far is it?” she asked.

“Not that far. We’ll light the luminarias as we go.”

And they did, walking side by side and lighting the candles along the path as well as the cluster Jack had placed around the base of the ancient ironwood tree. Sticks of hardy deer-horn cactus wound around the trunk and encircled the tree’s lower branches. Slender stalks holding the massive blooms protruded from the cactus. A few of the white blossoms were beginning to open. In the deepening twilight, some of the flowers seemed to spring straight from the tree bark itself.

“It’s glorious!” Abby exclaimed, clapping her hands. “Can you smell them?”

Jack nodded. Even he couldn’t help but notice the flowery aroma, a perfume that was like a cross between plumeria and orange blossom, sweetening the hot desert air.

“How many blossoms?” she asked.

“I counted over a hundred on this one plant.”

“That’s amazing,” Abby said. “I never knew the night-blooming cereus could grow this big. How in the world did you find it?”

“It took time,” Jack admitted with a grin. “Let’s just say I didn’t play nearly as much golf this spring as you thought I did.”

Abby poked him in the ribs. “You rascal,” she said.

“Happy anniversary,” he said. He reached down and turned on a battery-powered camping lantern. “This will give us a little more light when we come back in the dark. Now what say we go back and have our picnic? By the time we finish with that, I’m guessing our very own Queen of the Night will be in full bloom.”

South of Sells, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 10:00 p.m.

71º Fahrenheit

Considering the fact that it was a full moon, Dan’s sector seemed surprisingly quiet that night. With the summer rains still weeks away, daytime temperatures were nonetheless intense, especially for people out walking through the Sonora Desert ’s barren wasteland. With no concrete or blacktop to hold the heat, once the sun went down, temperatures plummeted, sometimes as much as thirty degrees. That was when the walkers often set off on their long and treacherous marches north. They tended to walk at night when it was cool and hole up during the heat of the day.

According to the memos sent down by the folks in Homeland Security, supposedly this was all about the war on terror, but in the year and a half Dan had been a Shadow Wolf, he had apprehended zero terrorists and literally hundreds of nonterrorists. The illegals spilled across the border day after day and night after night in a never-ending flood. They came to do backbreaking work in the fields or in the construction industry; in slaughterhouses and in restaurants.

The vast majority of them came with the burning desire to come to the United States and make something of themselves; to grab some small part of the American dream. As for the smugglers? By and large they were in it for themselves alone. They spared no thought and even less sympathy for the lives of the people they put in jeopardy.

Sometimes the illegal immigrants had paid money to be crammed into speeding Suburbans or rental trucks that crashed during high-speed chases and spilled dead and dying people in every direction. Sometimes illegals were taken to overcrowded houses and held as prisoners until their relatives could raise enough additional money to free them. But most of the illegals Dan encountered were the poorest of the poor-the ones who walked, making their way across the border and through the broiling desert, walking on bleeding feet and often dying of thirst in the process.

Several times Dan had come across the bodies of people who had fallen victim to heat and thirst and had been left behind to perish in the desert. Of those, Dan now recalled the three young women he had found dead. All had been in their late teens or early twenties. There was no sign of homicidal violence. All had died of natural causes-if sunstroke and dehydration could be considered natural. One of them had appeared to be five or six months pregnant at the time of her death.

Looking at her, waiting for the medical examiner’s van to find its way there, Dan had been outraged. “What the hell were you thinking?” he had demanded of the lifeless corpse. “What made you think that whatever you’d find here for you and your baby girl was better than what you had at home?”

That case had gotten to him-and still did. He wished he’d found her soon enough to save her and maybe even the unborn child. He still wondered about them from time to time. Where did they come from? Did the baby’s father have even the smallest inkling of what had happened to them? Was he already here in the States somewhere, waiting for them to show up and wondering what had happened to them? Or was he back home in Mexico? Maybe he was a creep and she had run away from home trying to escape from him.

As far as Dan knew, the lifeless victim had never been identified. She had been buried in an unmarked grave in the pauper’s corner of a Tucson cemetery. Dan had asked to be notified about the burial, and he was. He went to it wearing his full dress uniform. It seemed to him that he owed the poor young woman that much.

There was only one other person in attendance-a woman dressed entirely in black. Catching sight of her, Dan hoped she might be a relative. That hope lasted only until the end of the brief service. As Dan walked away from the grave site, the woman fell into step beside him.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she had demanded.

She was a middle-aged Anglo woman who shook her fist in Dan’s face as she spoke. Fortunately for her, Dan hadn’t brought Bozo along to the cemetery with him.

“I’m the one who found her,” he said. “I came to pay my respects.”

“Respects, my ass,” she retorted. “You guys are the ones out there killing these poor people.”

Dan had simply turned and walked away. Later he had read about an organization of women who made it a point to have a visible presence at the funeral of every illegal who died attempting to cross the border, and not just the ones who died on the reservation, either. They called themselves the WWC-Women Who Care.

The Shadow Wolves had another name for them. They called them witches.

Komelik, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 10:15 p.m.

69º Fahrenheit

On his way back from The Gate, Dan stopped on the shoulder periodically and scanned the surrounding desert with his night-vision goggles. The temperature had plummeted. When he was outside the truck he was glad to slip on a windbreaker. There was plenty of southbound vehicular traffic heading to the dance at Vamori, but not much northbound. For a change, there was no sign of walkers or of overloaded SUVs, either.

On the far side of Baboquivari, the full moon was turning the sky a lighter shade of gray, but it would take time for the moon itself to gain enough altitude to be visible over the crest of the hulking mountain barrier.

At Vamori, Dan turned into the parking lot and made his way through the collection of parked cars in search of any vehicles that didn’t fit in with the pickups and aging minivans that were the preferred mode of reservation transportation. Driving with the window open, he smelled the wood smoke from the cooking fires outside the feast house. A generator roared somewhere in the background, providing electricity to light the dusty dance floor and to power the speakers for the thumping chicken-scratch band.