J Jance - Queen of the Night

Holding the newborn child in those first few moments of life, looking down at a wrinkled new face that resembled a wrinkled old face, Lani had also understood that Gabe would be more than just his grandfather’s namesake. He would be a medicine man, a siwani, like the others who had gone before him-like Fat Crack, Looks at Nothing, Understanding Woman, and Lani Walker herself.

That knowledge about Gabe’s real destiny, like the scar on her own breast, was another of Lani Walker’s treasured secrets. It was why she spent so much time with the boy-why she made such a concerted effort to teach him fully all the things he needed to know.

On this night, though, she needed to tell him something else, and in telling it she couched the tale in the old traditional language. Part of it was one of the old legends, the story of Rattlesnake Skull village and the people who haunted that bad place. That portion of the story had been handed down in legend from that time in the far distant past when I’itoi, Elder Brother, first emerged from the center of the earth. But part of it was much newer than the rest. It was Lani’s own story, and she wanted Gabe to hear that as well.

After all, if he was going to be a medicine man in the twenty-first century, Gabe would need to know both.

They say it happened long ago that some Bad People, PaDaj O’odham, people who followed the Spirit of Evil, lived in a village called Ko’oi Koshwa, Rattlesnake Skull. One day marauding Apaches, the ohb, came to Rattlesnake Skull. They killed all the people there except for one young girl who went to live with them.

Later the Tohono O’odham learned that this girl loved one of the Apache warriors. They believed that she had betrayed her people to impress him, and it was because of her that the people of Rattlesnake Skull village died.

This made the Tohono O’odham very angry, so they asked I’itoi to help them find Oks Gagdathag, Betraying Woman. I’itoi, the Spirit of Goodness, led them to the place where she was hiding. They brought her back to the land of the Tohono O’odham and shut her in one of I’itoi’s sacred caves on Ioligam, the mountain the Milgahn, the whites, call Kitt Peak. There were many ways in and out of the cave. Betraying Woman could have escaped, but she knew that she deserved to be punished, so she stayed there alone until she died.

After that no one went back to live in Rattlesnake Skull because everyone knew it was a Bad Place. One day two Milgahn, white men, were wandering in the desert. They came upon Rattlesnake Skull. While they were there, the men were infected by the spirits of the Bad People. After that, even though they were not ohb, they were s-ohbsgam, Apache-like, and they went around killing people and doing bad things. One of the people they killed was a Tohono O’odham girl named Gina.

There were two of these s-ohbsgam. The first one liked being bad. The other one, a man with a wife and a baby, knew he had done wrong, and he killed himself. The first one would have gotten away, but the wife of his dead friend talked to the judge and so the Apache-like Man went to prison.

After he got out, he started killing people again. One of the people he wanted to kill was the woman who had helped put him in prison, and he came looking for her. When he found her all alone, he thought he had won, but the woman had a friend, an old Indian woman who knew how to sing for power. She sang a powerful song, a war chant. Even though the other woman was Milgahn, the old woman’s song gave her enough courage to fight back. When the man came too close she burned his face with hot fat, and from then on the Bad Man was blind, and he is blind to this day, even though he’s dead.

That, nawoj, my friend, is the story of the Woman Who Fought the S-Ohbsgam.

Highway 86, West of Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 11:30 p.m.

73º Fahrenheit

The story ended. For a long time after that, Lani and Gabe were silent. She didn’t want to say anything more, but she wondered how much of all that the child understood. He understood it all.

“Is that the man I saw this morning by your mother’s swimming pool?” he asked. “The one who was sitting there talking to your mother-the one you couldn’t see.”

“Yes,” Lani said quietly. “I think so.”

“But why?” Gabe asked. “If he’s dead, why would he come back?”

“I don’t know,” Lani said. “That’s what we have to find out.”

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 11:00 p.m.

73º Fahrenheit

Pima County Detective Brian Fellows hung up the phone and returned to the bedroom. When he switched on the light in the closet, his wife, Kath, groaned and pulled a pillow over her face.

“What time is it?” she grumbled.

“Eleven. Go back to sleep.”

“What’s going on?”

“A quadruple homicide out on the reservation.”

“Great,” she said. “Why is it, when it comes to homicides on the reservation, you’re always William Forsythe’s favorite go-to guy?”

“You know why as well as I do,” Brian answered.

In terms of political correctness, Sheriff William Forsythe was only one very small step beyond the outdated notion that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” The Tohono O’odham Nation took up a large segment of Pima County’s landmass, but since whatever crime happened there often had to do with Indians or illegal aliens, Sheriff Forsythe was usually only too happy to relegate it to the low end of the priority scale. Sending Brian to work those remote cases was Forsythe’s way of continuing to punish Fellows for his long and close association with Forsythe’s immediate predecessor, Brandon Walker.

No doubt Sheriff Forsythe thought sending Brian to the reservation would tick Detective Fellows off, but like Br’er Rabbit, Brian didn’t mind being thrown into the reservation briar patch. As for Sheriff Forsythe? The guy was a jerk. Brian hoped that someday Forsythe would no longer be an issue. Either the people of Pima County would come to their senses and elect someone else, or Brian would put in his twenty years and then be gone. At this point there was no way to tell which would come first.

Kath sat up in bed and propped the pillow behind her. “Who’s going with you?” she asked.

“Just me,” he said.

“For a homicide with four victims?” she asked. “What is it, some kind of drug war?”

“Maybe,” Brian said, pulling on his shoes. “Dispatch said the victims are two Indians and two Anglos. It was called in by one of your Shadow Wolves guys. Pardee, I think the name is.”

When Kath and Brian met, he had been a lowly deputy with the sheriff’s department while she was a full-fledged Border Patrol officer. For a time after their marriage, they had both enjoyed being out in the field in their respective departments, comparing notes and chasing bad guys, but after the birth of their twins, Amy and Annie, things had changed.

With two little girls counting on them, they no longer thought it such a good idea to have both of them putting themselves in harm’s way on a daily basis. When a spot had opened up in Personnel, Kath had taken off her Kevlar vest, turned in the keys to her patrol car, and chained herself to a desk and a computer.

“With both Anglo and Indian victims, that’ll be a jurisdictional nightmare,” Kath mused.

“You’ve got that right,” Brian agreed.

“Where did it happen?”

“South of Topawa,” he said. “On the way to Vamori.”

“I guess that means you won’t be home for Sunday school and church tomorrow.”

He leaned down to kiss her good-bye. “Probably,” he said.

“All right then,” she said. “If you see Dan Pardee and his wonder dog, Bozo, tell them hello.”

“Bozo? As in the clown?”