“It’s at the bottom of the mountain,” one of them shouted back at Edwina. “Radio Sells for another ambulance.”
Edwina nodded and turned to go back inside. Holding Davy’s hand, she intended to take him with her, but he pulled free and darted away, climbing back into the front seat of the Grand Prix just as it started out of the parking lot behind the speeding ambulance.
No matter what, Davy Ladd’s place was with Nana Dahd.
The pain was bigger than she was and hotter than the sun. It burned through her, seared through her, until she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe.
Where’s Olhoni? she wondered. She had called for him, but he didn’t answer. Where was he? Was he dead? No. That was impossible. That couldn’t be, but where was he?
She asked the man, a man who was there trying to talk to her through the mangled window of the truck, but she could no longer translate the funny Mil-gahn words. The only words that made sense to her now were those of her childhood, the Papago ones. The man shook his head helplessly. He didn’t understand, either.
“Where is Olhoni?” she murmured again and again. “Where is my bald-headed baby?”
There were other cars now, other people. Rita could hear them, could see feet where faces ought to be. Were they upside down or was she? What had happened? And where was Olhoni?
And then the pain. The pain that was bigger than she was grew even larger. It was a pain bigger than the stars and the sky and the universe. The pain was everything.
She heard a noise and realized that someone had cut a hole in the door of the truck. Her body was flowing out through that hole-her body and her blood.
They were moving her now, moving her out onto the ground and strapping her down to a board or a stretcher of some kind. That was when she started to fight them. The heavy white strap locked her to the board just as another strap long ago had once locked her to a bed.
She fought them like a smart cow fights when she knows she’s being led to the slaughter. The pain was blinding, but she fought through it, fought beyond it. She might have won, too, but suddenly Olhoni was there, kneeling at her side, pleading with her to be still.
“Let them help you, Nana Dahd,” he begged. “Please let them help you.”
She looked up then and saw that beyond Olhoni some of the other faces swarming above her were Indian faces. She wondered where they’d come from, or if they had been there all the time.
A few of the men were trying to pick up the stretcher with her on it. She could tell from the looks on their faces that they thought she was too heavy. For some reason, this seemed funny to her, but when she tried to laugh, another searing pain shot through her.
One of the men tried to pry Davy away from her hand, but he clung to her and refused to budge.
“Let him come,” one of the attendants said. “He’s hurt, too.”
Could that be? Olhoni hurt? Rita tried to look at him, to see what was wrong, but she blacked out then. The next thing she knew, she was riding in the ambulance, or rather on top of it. Over it somehow. She could see the two attendants huddled over a strangely familiar figure lying flat on a stretcher.
Olhoni was sitting off to one side. Rita called to him, but he didn’t look up, didn’t hear her. His eyes never left the face of the old woman on the stretcher. There was a bottle with some kind of liquid in it hanging above her. A plastic tube led from the bottle to a needle pressed into the flesh of the woman’s arm.
Suddenly, there was a flurry of activity. “We’re losing her! We’re losing her!” one of the attendants shouted.
Ruthlessly, the other man shoved Olhoni aside, pushing him roughly up into the front seat. The boy didn’t protest. He went where he was told and sat there, with his hands clutching the dashboard, staring out the window in front of him.
And that was when Rita saw the buzzards, three of them, sitting in a row on three separate telephone poles, their huge wings outstretched to collect the last warming rays of sunshine. Those buzzards, their heads still naked and bloody after I’itoi scalped them in punishment for betraying him, sat there soaking up the sun on their coal-black living wing tips.
The buzzards were alive and wanted to be alive. Suddenly, so did Rita. Olhoni still needed her. I’itoi did not.
Clawing her way, hand over hand, Rita scrambled down from the roof of the moving vehicle, fought her way back inside the ambulance until she stood peering curiously down at the shrunken form still strapped to the stretcher. For some time, she gazed dispassionately at the body, amazed by how terribly ancient that old woman seemed, by how worn and wrinkled and used-up she was, but not yet ready to be dead.
With a terrifying jolt, the electrical current passed through her body, hammering her heart awake once more, and she was home.
Andrew Carlisle took his time coming down the trail. He searched back and forth, combing the mountainside until he found the two empty beer cans they had dropped on the way up. No sense in leaving a set of identifiable fingerprints. He knew from what he’d learned in Florence that the chances of homicide cops finding a “stranger” assailant were slim as long as the stranger was reasonably smart and played it cool.
The waning afternoon sun scorched the ground around him. No one had yet ventured into the deserted rest-area parking lot by the time he returned to his victim’s car. He helped himself to another beer-still cold, thank God-and started the Toyota. He turned off the air-conditioning and drove down the freeway with the windows open, letting the hot desert air flow freely over his body. It was outside air. He was free.
Fortunately, there was plenty of gas in the car, so he didn’t have to stop before he got to Phoenix. He drove straight to the Park Central Mall in Phoenix proper and parked in an empty corner of the lot. There, as afternoon turned to evening, he went through the woman’s purse and removed all the cash, over two hundred dollars’ worth. Beneath the seat he discovered a gun, a Llama.380 automatic. He had planned to take nothing that belonged to his victim, nothing that could tie him back to her, but the weapon was more temptation than he could resist. Trying to purchase a weapon if he wanted one later might cause people to ask questions. So he pocketed the gun.
Carefully, systematically, he went over every surface in the vehicle, wiping it clean of prints. Then he did the same to the beer cans and jewelry before he took them to a nearby trash can. The clothing he ditched in another can, this one at Thomas Mall on his way to the airport.
Sky Harbor was his last stop. Once there, he pulled into the long-term lot and took a ticket. One last time he wiped down everything he remembered touching since Park Mall-the door handle, steering wheel, gearshift, window knob, and keys. Then, placing the newly wiped keys back in the ignition, he got out of the car and walked away.
It was dark by then and much cooler. In the hubbub and hurry of the airport, no one noticed him walk away. It would be a five-mile hike to his mother’s new house in Tempe, but he wasn’t afraid of walking. In fact, walking that far would be a real treat.
Chapter 4
Around seven, Brandon Walker emerged from his cubicle and ventured down the hallway hoping to bum a cigarette and some company from Hank Maddern in Dispatch.
“Who knows. .” Brandon began by way of greeting, walking up behind the dispatcher’s back.
“. . what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” Maddern finished without turning. Both men laughed.
The intro to the old radio show The Shadow was a private in-crowd joke, shared among the grunts of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Professional police officers called themselves Shadows to differentiate between themselves and the political hacks who, with plum appointments, held most key jobs.