defects and learning disabilities of their children. Gage convinced a farmworker to help him steal samples from the fields and warehouses and smuggle them back into the U.S. A lab analysis revealed that the corporations farming the Yaqui land were using toxaphene, a compound of six hundred and seventy chemicals that had been dumped in Mexico after they were banned in the U.S.
The truth came too late for the man who’d helped him. Gage received a letter from his widow a month after he’d died of toxaphene poisoning. She wrote asking for help, not for herself, but for her niece, Tansy, who’d graduated from nursing school in San Francisco just before Moki had been attacked. Gage sought her out and after talking with her and with the prosecutor, he was convinced Charlie was behind the collapse of the prosecution of the kids who’d destroyed Moki’s life.
There was no one in San Francisco other than Charlie who could have done it so perfectly.
Gage repaid the debt his father and his patients owed Tansy’s uncle and tried to compensate for Charlie’s crime by offering her a job that allowed her to both work and care for her disabled son. He even let her bring Moki into the office on days when she couldn’t find a nurse’s aide to stay with him at home.
But it was too late to reopen the case, even if Tansy had been willing, because the prosecutor’s race against the statute of limitations had already been lost.
“And that’s what Charlie did to a thousand other people.” Gage jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward Pacific Heights where Moki had been assaulted. “Those kids grew up knowing their parents could buy their way out of anything by hiring somebody like Charlie Palmer.”
Tansy fixed her eyes on Gage. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“When you hired me, I heard you left police work to study philosophy at Cal. I figured you’d be somebody who talked in theoretical concepts, whether for real or just to impress people.” She grinned. “I had enough of that in the 1980s when graduate students would come out to the reservation thinking they could squat down with an old Deer Singer and he’d spit out their dissertations for them.” She giggled, her face brightening. “There we were, in the middle of the godforsaken desert, trying to build cinder-block houses, and all they’d want to talk about was deconstruction.”
Gage shrugged as if to say academics sometimes got lost in their jargon.
Tansy caught his meaning, but shook her head. Her grin faded.
“For you, it was never about abstract ideas, justice with a capital J and truth with a capital T. I’ve watched you. Everyone thinks you live in your head”-she tapped her chest-“but this is where you live. You understand heartache. That’s what moves you. I’ve been told that’s what the old people used to say about your father, and everything I’ve seen since I started working here shows me you’re your father’s son. I even can see it in Faith’s eyes when she looks at you now.”
She lowered her hand and fell silent. After a few seconds she nodded as though she’d found the just right words to express her thoughts, and said, “I’m thinking it probably would’ve been better if you’d been born a Yaqui.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because of the way your mind works. It’s just like how we approach the world. It’s even in our language. In English you say, ‘I see the earth.’ The emphasis is on the person seeing, the filtering through the mind. In Yaqui we say, Inepo bwia vitchu, I earth see. The emphasis is on us facing the thing as it exists in the world. It makes us a humble people.”
Gage was quick to respond. “Too humble.”
As a child, Gage had watched Yaquis traveling through Nogales from Mexico on their annual Easter migration, wondering whether they were like the Bedouins he was reading about in Lawrence of Arabia, except unarmed and nearly defeated, run out of Mexico by a government attempting to break their will and harassed by immigration agents and police at the border. They were only safe when they arrived at a patch of desert a six-year-old Apache schoolmate of Gage’s once called a resignation, instead of a reservation. Gage remembered driving up to Tucson from Nogales with his father in the 1960s, when he went to stand with Yaquis at city council meetings protesting real estate developers encroaching Old Pascua village, a collection of dusty one-room shacks and shotgun brick houses founded by refugees fleeing Mexican government persecution.
“But we survived,” Tansy said.
“Maybe the tribe should’ve gotten a cut from the Carlos Castaneda books,” Gage said, finally offering a smile back. “And made some money selling tickets to watch him and that Yaqui shaman turn into crows and fly around the Sedona vortexes.”
“Carlos who? I don’t recall such a person dropping by, as a man or a bird. And the only vortex any Yaqui ever saw was a dust devil.”
Gage shook his head in mock sadness.
“Lots of new age folks in San Francisco will be really disappointed to learn that.”
“Not from me. When I see them heading my way, I pretend I’m a Navajo.”
Chapter 11
Gage had been the only one at the San Francisco Police Department who knew why they all called him Spike.
Homicide Lieutenant Humberto Pacheco, too short to play volleyball when he and Gage were growing up together, and now looking more like a mallet than a nail, lumbered through the entrance of the Fiesta Brava Taqueria on Mission Street a little after 1:30 P.M. Tan sports coat, brown pants, pale yellow shirt, and a blue tie painted with tiny footballs. He didn’t pause to survey the interior of the storefront restaurant before heading toward a table in the far corner where Gage already sat. The rest of the tables were empty, the lunch crowd having already moved on.
Spike waved to their usual waiter, then dropped a manila envelope onto the table and sat down to the right of Gage, a plate of chicken in chili-laced cream sauce already cooling before him. A warming Coke stood next to it.
“Sorry I’m late,” Spike said. “I got hung up at a meeting with the chief. The mayor is pissed because some Japanese woman got mugged coming out of the St. Francis Hotel. Cut up pretty bad. He’s worried about losing the Asian tourist business.”
Gage set down his fork. “I’ve got an idea. Maybe he should hire the homeless to paint targets on the Nicaraguans and Sudanese so the crooks would know who he wants mugged.”
Spike grinned. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“You did, you just didn’t say it because you know the chief doesn’t appreciate that kind of sarcasm.” Gage pointed at Spike’s plate. “You want it heated up?”
Spike mixed a little of the sauce with the rice, then tasted it. “No, it’s okay.” He tilted his head toward the half-eaten roasted birra in front of Gage. “You’re still the only white guy I know who eats goat.”
Spike dug into his chicken while Gage opened the envelope and thumbed through the thirty pages of police reports about Palmer’s shooting.
“I appreciate you taking over the case yourself instead of leaving it with your underlings,” Gage said. “Anything else besides what’s in here?”
“There’s also a ballistics check on the slug. A. 38. Five lands and grooves, right twist. Could be just about any Saturday night special.”
“What about the shooter?”
“Charlie gave us almost nothing to go on. The guy he described couldn’t have been more average if Charlie had made him up.”
“And that’s what you think he did?”
“The uniforms at the scene pushed him real hard for a description-a dying declaration in case he didn’t survive. All they got was a cardboard John Doe. At first I thought maybe shock scrambled his brain, but it didn’t get any better when I went to see him two days later. It was like he did some kind of statistical survey and came up with the mean…” Spike cocked his head and squinted toward the ceiling, then looked back at Gage. “Is it mean or
