“And you’d better bring your hiking boots and some galoshes, too,” Luke told him. “They’re predicting rain for later on this afternoon, heavier in the mountains than down here.”
“What about the M.E.?” Brandon asked.
“I know they’ve been called, but there’s been a fatality MVA up around Marana. They’ll send someone out when they can.”
Much of southern Arizona is made up of relatively flat or hilly terrain with occasional sections of steep mountain ranges jutting skyward here and there. The Catalina Mountains are generally to the north and east of Tucson, and the Rincons southeast. The two distinct ranges are separated by a low-lying dividing line known as Redington Pass. Heavy summer rains could send devastating flash floods roaring through the gullies and washes that ran in veins down the mountainsides and into the valleys below.
As a detective, Brandon was allowed to take his car home. His ride was a respectable Plymouth Fury sedan with a police pursuit engine that made it fine for chasing down crooks on long stretches of open highway. But on a muddy, rain-flooded road out in the middle of the boonies, the front-wheel-drive vehicle wouldn’t be worth squat.
“Any chance of coming in and picking up a four-wheel drive?”
“Nope,” Luke answered. “I already asked. They’re all checked out for the weekend.”
Something jarred Brandon out of his nighttime reverie. He listened, wondering if he’d heard some distant sound, but when Bozo didn’t stir, Brandon didn’t, either.
HALF AN HOUR OR SO of walking later, as Gabe was finally approaching Highway 86, he heard the distant hum of an oncoming vehicle. When the turn signal indicated that a pickup—an older-model dual-cab Silverado—was turning onto Coleman Road, Gabe once again ducked out of sight, this time checking behind him for any patches of marauding cactus.
He listened to the sounds of doors opening and closing, of men laughing and joking and relieving themselves. Gabe caught enough of the back-and-forth chitchat to learn that these were Indians—a group of guys who had gone into town to buy some beer and were now headed back to the village of San Miguel for a weekend of partying. Gabe could tell that the men weren’t kids. They were older—maybe his father’s age. They might even be friends of his father’s, but just because they knew Leo Ortiz didn’t mean they knew Gabe.
Gabe took a deep breath and stepped out into the open. His sudden appearance startled the others, but he had a plausible story at the ready.
“My friends left me here,” he said plaintively. “Can you give me a ride?”
“Hebai?” the man closest to the driver’s door asked. “Where?”
The fact that the man spoke Tohono O’odham rather than English meant that the men in the group were most likely far older than Gabe’s parents. From Gabe’s point of view, that was all to the good.
“Komikch’ed e Wah’osithk,” Gabe answered.
The men exchanged surprised glances. They probably hadn’t expected that he would answer the question in their native tongue and use the traditional name, Turtle Got Wedged, rather than the Milgahn name of Sells.
There was a small pause, then the driver nodded. “Oi g hihm,” he said.
Literally translated, “Oi g hihm” means “Let us walk.” In the everyday vernacular of the reservation it means “Let’s get in the pickup and go,” and that’s exactly what Gabe did—climb in—but before he did so, he took off the spine-riddled blanket and tossed it into the bed of the pickup, where it landed on a tarp-covered load that was most likely several cases of illicit beer.
Squeezed into the backseat between two massive men, Gabe had no choice but to sit there and suffer. There were still sharp bits of cholla spines stuck in his jeans that made squirming in any direction an agony.
To his immense relief, the drive into Sells was done in almost complete silence. Without a stranger in their midst, the men had been jovial and talkative, but now Gabe’s presence seemed to have stifled any desire to talk. As soon as they crossed the low pass just before Sells, Gabe broke the silence.
“Ihab,” he said, meaning “Let me out right here.” The truck pulled over at the road that led to the high school. From here it was probably a mile or more to the house, but on the off chance one of these guys did know Gabe’s parents, Gabe wanted to be dropped off as far as possible from both his father’s garage and the Ortiz family compound.
Gabe was warm when he climbed down from the cab of the truck, but that soon changed. He retrieved his prickly blanket, but even with that slung over his shoulders, he was cold within a hundred yards or so. By the time he reached the house, he was shivering.
With all the windows dark, the house was forbidding rather than welcoming. Gabe wasn’t at all surprised that his parents weren’t home yet. As part of Delia’s duties as tribal chairman, she tried to attend at least one village dance each weekend. The long hours of sitting around fires, dancing, and standing in food lines at feast houses allowed Delia to stay in touch with her constituents, the ordinary people who weren’t necessarily sitting on the tribal council. Most of the time, Gabe would have gone to the dance with them.
Gabe stepped onto the poured concrete slab that served as a front porch and walked forward, ready to slip his key into the lock. Before he reached the door, however, he tripped over something and almost fell. Righting himself, he reached down and picked up a small paper bag. When he carried it inside and switched on a light, he saw that the bag held a Costco-sized jar of Skippy peanut butter. Since peanut butter sandwiches were his father’s lunch-pail favorite, Gabe’s first assumption was that his mother had asked someone who was going into town to pick up a jar for her. At the bottom of the bag, however, Gabe spotted a hand-scribbled note:
Please keep this for Carlos. I’ll explain later.
Tim
Gabe stared at the note and then at the jar of peanut butter. It made no sense. Why would Carlos need him to keep that? After a moment, he put down the note, picked up the jar, and opened it. It had been opened before—the foil seal had been peeled away. The problem was, the label on the jar said the peanut butter was creamy style rather than crunchy, but this was definitely lumpy rather than smooth.
Curious, Gabe took the jar over to the kitchen counter, pulled out a tablespoon, and dug a heaping spoonful of peanut butter out of the jar. As he did so, something that was definitely not a piece of peanut caught the light. He put the spoon with the peanut butter inside a wire mesh strainer and used hot water and dishwashing detergent to clear away the peanut butter. What was left in the bottom of the strainer were four brightly glittering glasslike pieces of rock. They reminded him of Lani’s pieces of crystal, but he knew at once what they really were—diamonds. Diamonds in a peanut butter jar!
He plucked one of the gems out of the strainer to study it. It seemed as though the diamond worked exactly the same way as Lani’s divining crystals. Focusing on the jewel, Gabe realized what was going on. Carlos José and maybe Max, too, had been caught up in some kind of smuggling operation. If that was the case, it meant Lani was right and the Josés were part of the Bad People. It was even possible Tim himself was part of it.
Gabe understood that if his parents found out he was involved in any of this, they would kill him. That was especially true for his mother. The problem was, Tim was Gabe’s friend, and he had asked for help. Gabe couldn’t just turn his back on his friend. No, tomorrow Gabe would take the jar back to Tim and tell him he’d need to ask someone else for help. In the meantime, though, the jar, the bag, and the note all needed to be kept out of sight. He carried them into his bedroom.