Abby gave him a kiss and then stood up. “All right,” she said. “I think I’ll go have a little lie-down. A nap would be good for what ails me.”

“Mind if I join you?” Jack asked.

“You’re welcome, as long as you’re there to sleep. No funny business.”

“Of course,” he said, but he had his fingers crossed when he said it.

As he followed Abby back to the bedroom, he suspected she knew that all along.

Casa Grande, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 4:00 p.m.

96º Fahrenheit

Geet was asleep again and Brandon was dozing on the sofa when Sue Farrell came back home. She looked like a new woman. Instead of going to see a movie, she had stopped off for a haircut. She looked altogether better.

“How are things?” she asked anxiously. “I was gone longer than I planned.”

“Once he woke up, we talked for the better part of an hour,” Brandon told her. “After that he went back to sleep.”

She nodded. “An hour of conversation is about as much as he’s good for. Did he ask for more pain meds?”

“No,” Brandon said. “He said they make him too groggy.”

“Being groggy is better than being in pain,” Sue said.

Of course that was a matter of opinion. For right now, Brandon Walker was willing to take Geet Farrell’s word for it over Sue’s.

Brandon lugged the Ursula Brinker evidence box out of the house and loaded it into the back of his Honda CRV. It was a relief to get out of the sickroom-to walk away from the hopelessness and heartbreak that was everywhere in Geet and Sue Farrell’s home. He started the engine. As he waited for the air-conditioning to cool things off enough so he could touch the steering wheel, Brandon thought about checking in with Diana, but then he remembered she wasn’t home. Lani had called last night to invite her mother along to Tohono Chul for lunch, after which they would hang around the park for the major evening do, held each year in honor of the night-blooming cereus.

Brandon had two reasons to be happy about that. Number one: It meant that Diana would be out of the house and doing something fun for a change. Number two: He, Brandon, didn’t have to go along. He’d had tea on occasion at Tohono Chul’s Tea Room, and it wasn’t his kind of place. As for the party? That wasn’t his kind of thing, either. The people there would see to it that Diana was treated as a visiting dignitary, and that was fine, but there were times when Brandon could take only so much of being Mr. Diana Ladd.

Thinking about the Tea Room, however, reminded Brandon that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. It was now almost four o’clock in the afternoon-a very long way past his usual late-morning lunchtime. Once he left Geet and Sue’s neighborhood, he found himself on one of Casa Grande’s larger multi-lane streets. He drove past the first Burger King he saw without even slowing down, choosing instead to pull in at a Mexican food joint called Mi Casa Ricardo.

It was the kind of place Brandon Walker liked-family-owned and unpretentious. He ordered iced tea, a cheese crisp, and carne asada fajitas. He knew he was ordering too much food, but he counted on having some leftovers to take home to Damsel, who firmly believed that restaurant doggie bags had been invented solely for her benefit.

His cell phone rang as he took the first bite of cheese crisp. “How was it?” Ralph Ames asked,

Brandon knew Ralph wasn’t referring to the cheese crisp. Brandon had called Ralph in Seattle as soon as he had received Sue Farrell’s phone call summoning him to Casa Grande.

“Pretty rough,” he said.

“How long do you think he has?” Ames asked.

“Not long,” Brandon answered. “He’s put up a hell of a fight, but we’re down to short strokes. I’d say a couple of weeks at the most. Maybe only days.”

“I had been planning to come down to Arizona the end of next week,” Ralph said. “I’ll see if I can move that up some. I’d like to see him before it’s too late.”

“He gave me the Brinker file,” Brandon said.

“Good,” Ralph said. “I expected that he would. You’re the logical successor on that one. Weeks ago Geet mentioned that he had a new lead. I know he was hoping he’d be able follow up on it himself, but of course-”

“Right,” Brandon said. “The clock wound down before he had a chance. I told him I’d look into it right away. There’s nothing I’d like better than to tell Geet in person that we finally have some answers.”

“Amen,” Ralph Ames said. “I know that would mean more to him than anything else you could possibly do.”

“I’ll do my best,” Brandon said.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 5:00 p.m.

92º Fahrenheit

Even though it was more than an hour early, by five o’clock Bozo was parked in front of the door that led to the garage. When it came time for Dan to leave, the dog wasn’t taking any chances on his being forgotten, and he wasn’t.

When Dan saw K-9 units on Cops, the dogs always rode in the backseat. Not in Dan Pardee’s world. The dog that had saved his life was front and center. Well, front and rider’s side. As they headed out to the reservation, Bozo rode with his head hanging out the window. It was a lot hotter to ride with the window open, but Dan was happy to do it. Bozo deserved that and more.

First they stopped by Motor Pool and filled up with gas. Then they headed out onto the reservation. Just east of Sells the highway climbed over a low pass. Each time he drove down the far side and saw the high school campus and the town of Sells spread out in front of him, Dan was always surprised by how alien he felt. When he had signed on with the Shadow Wolves he had imagined that being an Indian working on a reservation would make things simple-that this was a place where he would finally fit in. And that was true-he did fit in with his unit, with the Shadow Wolves themselves, but he didn’t fit in on this particular reservation any more than he had fit on the San Carlos.

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.