Suburban, motioned Andrea inside, and went to work.
Larry Stryker woke up from his unintended nap and was surprised to see how much time had passed. The beer in the bottom of the bottle was too warm to drink. Looking at his watch, he sighed. Larry was tired. The morning heat had taken it out of him. Tomorrow he’d tell Al that he was through with golf for the summer. It was too damned hot to play.
For two cents he would have retreated to his room right then, undressed, and gone to bed. Still, tired as he was, he really did need to go downstairs and feed her. Whatever else Larry had in mind, he had no intention of starving the girl.
Had Gayle dropped by, he might have risen to the occasion and done something more creative, as he usually did on Saturday afternoons, but Gayle continued to be so besotted with Erik LaGrange that her showing up wasn’t likely. To Gayle’s credit, she didn’t flaunt her boy toys around Larry, and he was grateful for that. He was also grateful for what few crumbs of attention she deigned to give him now and then.
He went into the kitchen and dropped a hamburger patty into a dirty frying pan. Tired as he was, he found himself looking forward to the feeding. What was this one’s name again? He liked to call them by name occasionally, but in order to remember, he’d have to check in his most recent notebook. He kept a record of each girl’s name there, along with a set of her photos.
Down in the basement, this one would smell the meat frying. She’d be expecting the food and dreading it at the same time, but today she had nothing to fear. Physically Larry wasn’t up for anything more than watching her eat. He’d often let the girls go hungry for a while-twenty-four hours was just about right. When they were that famished, watching them eat was a real turn-on. He particularly liked the greedy way this one tore into her food. Even though he knew she didn’t want it and would have preferred to starve herself to death, but when she was hungry enough, she couldn’t help herself, either.
It intrigued him that all the girls seemed to have one thing in common: they were terribly self-conscious about eating in front of him. It was almost as though having him observe them eat made them forget how to perform the simple mechanical functions of chewing and swallowing. He wondered sometimes if their shyness was due to the fact that he was watching, or if it was because they were always naked when they ate-they were naked and he wasn’t.
Once, before he began relying on the premade hamburger patties, one of them had choked on a chunk of gristle in the piece of meat he had given her. She had choked and gagged and finally spit it out, but he had forced her to eat it anyway. She had chewed and chewed and chewed for what seemed forever before she was finally able to choke it down. That was the ultimate power over someone-to know you could, if you wanted, force them to eat their own vomit.
That was actually what Larry liked most-having them fear him. The more his girls tried not to submit, the better he liked it. When he was with Gayle, she was the one who called the shots, but that was about her needs, not his. In the basement, he was the one in control, but even there Gayle held the ultimate veto power. She would arbitrarily change girls on him. Just when he had one trained the way he wanted, Gayle would take her away. Then he’d have to do without until she came up with a replacement. Fortunately there was always a new girl available. Gayle would make a few inquiries, and within days or weeks, a new one would appear, drawn from the plentiful stock to be found at one of the many detention centers served by Medicos for Mexico.
Larry wondered sometimes about that first girl in Mazatlan-the one Gayle had served to him with her limbs bound by Gayle’s own brightly colored scarves. After her “session,” the girl had been given money and food and sent on her way, but all that had happened while Larry was in the shower. Gayle told him she had helped the girl dress and had taken her home, but now, given what had happened to the ones who had followed in her footsteps, Larry doubted that was true. The way Daniella was starting out-Larry had no difficulty remembering her name-she most likely would have turned into a two-bit whore. Gayle had probably done the little slut an enormous favor by putting her out of her misery before she had a chance to grow up. As for the girls since then? For them, too, growing up had never been in the cards.
Carrying the plate of food-the hamburger patty, a spoonful of cold refried beans, and a chunk of stale tortilla- Larry went to the basement door and unlocked it with the key he always carried on his belt. As soon as the door opened, he knew something was different. The emptiness of the place blew up around him-along with a coppery telltale odor he recognized at once. Even before he started down the stairs, he knew what to expect. Still, he was astonished by the carnage Gayle had left in her wake.
Usually when this happened, Larry had done something wrong. Either he’d made some kind of blunder at work or done something Gayle didn’t approve of, and this was her way of punishing him for it. She never told him in advance when she was going to rob him of his latest plaything, and she never did it while he was home. Gayle would come to the house, use her own keys to gain access, and then leave the mess for him to find-and clear away-on his own.
Shaking his head, Larry returned to the kitchen and dumped the food into the garbage. Then he went out to the garage for the power washer he would need to take the bloodstains off the basement’s polished concrete floors and walls.
When she murdered Roseanne Orozco, Gayle Stryker had been cleaning up after her husband. One way or another, Larry had been cleaning up after Gayle ever since.
Gabe “Fat Crack” Ortiz sat in the warm sun and considered his life. By Tohono O’odham standards, he had lived to a ripe old age-seventy-two. More and more he was thinking about what Looks at Nothing had once told him.
“I have lost my sight,” S’ab Neid Pi Has had told his new protege as they raced toward Diana Ladd’s Gates Pass home in Fat Crack’s speeding tow truck. “I have not lost my vision.”
Only lately had he begun to have a partial understanding of what had happened eight years earlier, when Delia’s great-aunt Julia Joaquin had come to see him. As one of the movers and shakers in the village of Little Tucson, the old woman was ushered into the tribal chairman’s office with appropriate ceremony. Fat Crack had greeted her formally and in their native language. He’d been prepared for a certain amount of small talk, but Julia got straight to the point.
“Do you remember my sister’s daughter, Ellie Chavez?” Julia asked. “And her little girl, Delia?”
Fat Crack had closed his eyes and remembered that little girl with her luminous brown eyes, watching him from the shadows of Sister Justine’s garage as he labored to put the dead Falcon back together. He remembered how, later on, he had heard that Ellie Chavez had finally divorced her husband about the same time she graduated from college. He had also heard rumors that she’d taken a rich Anglo woman to be her lover, but Gabe Ortiz paid little attention to gossip.
“I remember them both,” he said. “I knew them when Ellie was leaving to go to school-left and didn’t come back.”
Julia frowned. “Things were bad between her and Manny. When one of the sisters from Topawa found a way for Ellie to go to college, she didn’t want to miss the chance. I lost track of Ellie years ago, but I’ve stayed in touch with Delia. Her mother has a doctorate now and lives somewhere back east.”
“And Delia?” Fat Crack asked. “The last I heard she was going to law school.”
Julia Joaquin nodded. “She works for the BIA in Washington, D.C.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Fat Crack said. “We need good Indian lawyers in Washington.”
“I’m worried about her, though,” Julia said. “I’m afraid something’s wrong. She’s married now, to that Philip Cachora.”
“Philip Cachora?” Fat Crack repeated. “From Vamori?”
“From Vamori originally,” Julia said. “He met Delia at some fancy party in Washington.”
Gabe Ortiz closed his eyes and considered the odds against such a thing happening. The idea that two people born a few miles apart on the same Arizona Indian reservation would meet, fall in love, and marry in a big city on the far side of the continent seemed highly unlikely.
“Philip Cachora has been gone for a long time, too.”
“Even longer than Delia,” Julia Joaquin agreed. “He went off to Santa Fe to become an artist. And I guess he did, too.”
“Why are you worried?” Fat Crack asked.
