Gabe thought it would be interesting to see how Delia Chavez Cachora dealt with an Anglo who spoke her supposedly native tongue far better than she did. Not only that, Gabe was looking forward to getting to know the grown-up version of his late Aunt Rita’s Little Olhoni.
Next to his ear, someone tapped on the window. Gabe opened his eyes and sat up. Delia herself was standing next to his car, a concerned frown on her face. “Are you all right?” she asked when he rolled down the window.
“Just resting my eyes,” he said.
“I was afraid you were sick.”
Gabe shook his head. “Tired,” he said with a smile. “Tired but not sick.”
“Are you going straight home?” she asked. “We could stop and get something to drink.”
“No, thanks,” he said. “You go on ahead. I have to visit with someone on the way.”
“All right,” she said. “See you Monday.”
As she walked away from the car, Gabe noticed she was stripping off her watch and putting it in her purse. When Gabe had asked her about it, she had told him that on weekends she tried to live on Indian time; tried to do without clocks and all the other trappings of the Anglo world, including, presumably, the evils of air conditioning, he thought as she drove past him a few minutes later with all the windows of her turbo Saab wide open.
Gabe put the now reasonably cool Ford in gear and backed out of his parking place. Instead of heading for Ajo Way and the road back to Sells, he headed north to Speedway and then west toward Gates Pass and the home of his friends, Brandon and Diana Walker.
It wasn’t a trip Gabe was looking forward to because he didn’t know what he was going to say. However, he knew he would have to say something. It was his responsibility.
“Brandon?”
Over the noise of the chain saw, Brandon hadn’t heard the car stop outside the front of the house, nor had he noticed Gabe Ortiz materialize silently behind him. Startled by the unexpected voice, Brandon almost dropped the saw when he turned around to see who had spoken.
“Fat Crack!” he exclaimed, taking off his hat and wiping his face with the damp bandanna he wore tied around his forehead. “The way you came sneaking up behind me, it’s a wonder I didn’t cut off my leg. How the hell are you? What are you doing here? Would you like some iced tea or a beer?”
Now that he was tribal chairman, Fat Crack was a name Gabe Ortiz didn’t hear very often anymore, not outside the confines of his immediate family. The distinctive physiognomy that had given rise to his nickname was no longer quite so visible, especially not now when he often wore a sports jacket over his ample middle. The dress-up slacks, necessary attire for the office and for meetings in town, didn’t shift downward in quite the same fashion as his old Levi’s had. Still, he reached down and tugged self-consciously at his belt, just to be sure his pants weren’t hanging at half-mast.
“Iced tea sounds good,” Gabe said.
The two men walked into and through the yard and then on inside the house. With the book fresh in his mind, Gabe looked around the kitchen. It had been completely redesigned and upgraded since the night of Andrew Carlisle’s brutal attack. The wall between the root cellar, where Rita Antone and Davy Ladd had been imprisoned, had been knocked out, as had the wall between the kitchen and what had once been Rita’s private quarters. The greatly enlarged kitchen now included a small informal dining area. The cabinets were new and so were the appliances, but to Gabe’s heightened perceptions a ghost from that other room—the room from the book—still lingered almost palpably in the air. The damaged past permeated the room with evil in the same way the odor of a fire lingers among the ruins long after the flames themselves have been extinguished.
Acutely aware of that unseen aspect of the room, Gabe looked at the other man, trying to gauge whether or not he noticed. As Brandon bustled cheerfully around the kitchen, he seemed totally oblivious. A full pitcher of sun tea sat on the counter. He filled glasses with ice cubes from the machine in the door of the fridge, added the tea, sliced off two wedges of lemon, and passed Gabe the sugar bowl and a spoon along with the tall glass of tea and a lemon wedge.
“How are you?” Gabe asked. Spooning sugar into his tea, he was thankful Wanda wasn’t there to tell him not to.
Brandon shrugged. “Can’t complain. Doesn’t do any good if I do. Now to what do I owe this honor?” Brandon sat down across the table from his guest. “Not some hitch with Davy’s internship, I hope. He should be leaving for home within the next day or two.”
Gabe took a sip of tea. “No,” he said. “Everything’s fine with that.”
“What then?” Brandon asked.
The two men had been friends for a long time. Fighting the war with Andrew Carlisle and living through the courtroom battles that followed had turned Brandon Walker and Gabe Ortiz into unlikely comrades at arms. And their political ambitions—Gabe’s within the tribe and Brandon’s in the county sheriff’s department—had led them along similar though different paths. Gabe had stood for election to the tribal council for the first time at almost the same time Brandon Walker took his first run at Pima County sheriff. Both of them had won, first time out.
With Gabe working in the background of tribal council deliberations and Brandon running the sheriff’s department, the two men had managed to create a fairly close working relationship between tribal and county law enforcement officers. Gabe’s elevation to chairman had happened only recently, after Brandon Walker had been burned at the polls and let out to pasture. With Brandon Walker no longer running the show at the sheriff’s department, the spirit of cooperation that had once existed between Law and Order—the Tribal Police—and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department was fast disappearing.
“Is Diana here?” Gabe asked.
Frowning, Brandon looked at his watch. When he left office, they had given him a gold watch, for Chrissakes. He hated the damn thing and everything it symbolized. He wore it all the time in the vain hope that daily doses of hard physical labor would eventually help wear it out.
“She should be home in a little while. She had to go to some kind of shindig over at the university. A tea, I think. I must have been a good boy, because she let me off on good behavior, thank God,” he added with a grin.
Gabe didn’t smile back. With instincts honed sharp from years of being a cop, Brandon recognized that non-smile for what it was—trouble.
“What’s the matter, Gabe? Is something wrong?”
Gabe Ortiz took a deliberate sip of his tea before he answered. Convincing other people of the presence of an unseen menace had seemed so easy last night when he had been in tune with the ancient rituals of chants and singing. Now, though, the warning he had come to deliver didn’t seem nearly so straightforward.
“I came to talk to you about Diana’s book,” he managed finally.
“Oh,” Brandon Walker said. “Somehow I was afraid of that.”
“You were?” Gabe asked hopefully. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one with a powerful sense of foreboding.
“When she first came up with the idea for that book, I tried my best to talk her out of it,” Brandon said. “I told her from the very beginning that I didn’t think it was a good idea to rehash all that old stuff. Which shows how much I know. The damn thing went and won a Pulitzer. Now that it’s gone into multiple printings, the publisher is turning handstands. Months after it came out, the book is back on the New York Times Best Sellers list and moving up.” He stopped and gave his visitor a sardonic grin. “I guess I was a better sheriff than I am a literary critic—and I wasn’t too hot at that.”