Dan shrugged. “Beats me,” he replied. “She’s little. Four… maybe five years old.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Brian Fellows said. “If the bad guy thinks she can identify him, her life won’t be worth a plugged nickel.”
That was Dan’s assessment as well-that once the killer learned of Angie’s existence, the child might well become a target. He also worried that if CPS got involved, the situation could be even worse. “Protective” might be CPS’s middle name, but when it came to holding off killers, CPS would be about as useful for Angie as having a “no contact” order is for your run-of-the-mill domestic-violence victim.
The Law and Order patrol car returned, followed by an aging Ford F-100 pickup truck. Both vehicles parked on the shoulder of the road. An older man, slightly stooped and wearing blue jeans with frayed cuffs around a pair of down-at-the-heels cowboy boots, stepped out of the truck. His passenger, a woman of about the same age, stayed where she was.
With Officers Ramon and Mattias flanking him, the old man limped slowly past the Blazer to the spot where the young Indian man lay on his back. The old man looked down at the victim for a long moment, then nodded.
“It’s him,” he said stoically. “That’s my boy.”
Then, without another word and without a hint of a tear, the old man walked back to the pickup. He spoke to the waiting woman in Tohono O’odham. You didn’t need to speak the language to understand the anguish and to hear the quiet dignity those words expressed. Then, leaving the woman to her own grief, Thomas Rios returned to the little group of officers, where Officer Ramon made the official introductions. Dan wasn’t surprised to see that Thomas Rios was someone he already knew.
“There’s a little girl here,” Detective Fellows said to Thomas. “Can you tell us who she is?”
“That’s probably Angie, Delphina Enos’s little girl. Delphina is… was… Donald’s girlfriend. He had bought her a ring. He was going to ask her to marry him.”
“And Ms. Enos lived where?”
“In Sells,” he said. “But her family lives in Nolic. She was a nice girl.”
“To your knowledge did either of these people have any connection to the drug trade?”
Detective Fellows was the one who asked the question. The old Indian examined him with a long piercing look before he replied.
“No,” he said finally. “Not at all. Donald was a good boy-a good man. He didn’t do drugs. He didn’t drink.”
“You know that Donald and Delphina aren’t the only victims here tonight?” Fellows asked.
Thomas Rios nodded. “Yes. Martin told me. An old Milgahn man and woman, right?” he asked.
“Yes,” Fellows said, pointing. “He drove that white Lexus.”
“I knew him,” Thomas said quietly. “He asked me if I would let him look around my land. He was searching for a deer-horn cactus. I told him about this one.” He waved in the direction of the faded lantern and the ironwood tree.
“He wanted to find some to show to his wife,” Rios continued. “He told me yesterday that he’d be bringing her here tonight to see the flowers. It was supposed to be a big surprise.”
It was a surprise, all right, Dan thought.
After that, they walked around to the front of the old man’s pickup. He stood with one boot resting on the bumper and answered the officers’ many questions with a soft-spoken style that was equal parts quiet dignity and unyielding endurance. Listening and watching carried Dan back to that other time, that long-ago time, and to another old Indian man.
Los Angeles, California
October 1978
The next morning Dan had awakened in a strange household, with people he didn’t know. The strangers were kind enough to him. They fed him and gave him clean clothes to wear, but they didn’t answer his many questions. Halloween came and went. Dan didn’t get to go trick-or-treating. His mother had bought him a Spider-Man costume to wear, but that hadn’t come with him the night he had been carried out of the apartment. If anyone ever went back to retrieve it, Dan never saw it.
Dan kept asking where his mother was and when she would come to get him. He noticed that when the woman bothered to answer him at all, she said that she didn’t know, but that someone else, someone who wasn’t Dan’s mother, would come for him soon. His father had told lies all the time. Dan noticed that the woman never looked at him when she said those things, and Dan suspected that she was lying, too.
Dan was only four years old at the time. He wasn’t able to put all his feelings into words, but he finally figured it out, even though no one said so in so many words. He finally came to understand that something terrible had happened to his mother. Maybe she was hurt. Maybe she was sick. He tried not to think about the sounds of his parents quarreling on the far side of his bedroom door. He tried not to think about all those noisy firecrackers exploding out in the living room, but as the long lonely days passed one after another, he finally realized those noisy pops he had heard hadn’t been from firecrackers, not at all.
Dan had seen his father’s gun. Adam Pardee kept it on a high shelf in the closet. He often told Danny that he’d take his belt to him if he ever so much as touched it. Dan knew he could have reached the shelf if he had tried, if he had climbed up on a chair, but he never did. Daniel maybe didn’t believe what the nice woman told him about someone coming to get him, but harsh experience had made him believe in Adam Pardee’s belt.
Then, one morning-several days later, although in Danny’s mind it seemed much longer-the woman had rushed Dan through his cold cereal at breakfast and then had herded him into the bathtub.
“Your grandfather’s coming to get you,” she announced with a cheerful smile. “Isn’t that wonderful!”
It wasn’t wonderful for Dan. He didn’t know his grandfather, had never met him, didn’t know he had one.
“What grandfather?” he asked.
“Why, your mother’s father,” she replied, sounding surprised. “He’s coming all the way from Safford, Arizona, to pick you up and take you home.”
Dan knew that wasn’t right. Home was here in California with his parents, not in Arizona with some stranger. He didn’t even know where Arizona was. It sounded like it was far away.
An hour or so later Dan found himself sitting on the sagging couch in the living room waiting for the doorbell to ring. He was dressed in faded jeans and an equally faded Star Wars T-shirt. The clothing was several sizes too large for him. The remainder of his meager possessions-a toothbrush, a comb, a small tube of toothpaste, and a freshly laundered and neatly folded Spider-Man bedsheet-had been packed into the paper bag that sat on the couch beside him.
When the doorbell rang, he raced to answer it. As soon as he flung the door open and saw who was outside, Dan knew there had to be some mistake.
The wizened, wiry old man standing on the front porch might have been a cowboy straight out of the Old West. He came complete with boots, belt, and a pearl-button Western shirt. That wasn’t so bad. The real problem was that he was an Indian. Dan had seen Indians before-in the movies and on TV. The man’s coal-black straight hair was slicked down and combed back flat on his head. His face was both broad and angular. His skin was brown, much browner than Daniel’s. His eyes were almost black. Dan’s were light brown-almost hazel.
“Daniel?” the old man asked.
All Dan could do was stare and nod wordlessly.
The stranger held out his hand, but Dan backed away from him.
“My name is Micah,” the old man said. “Micah Duarte. Rebecca, your mother, was my daughter. I’ve come to take you home.”
Was. Dan heard the word and understood at once what he had just been told, what the smiling woman hadn’t been willing to tell him. This was like in the movie when Bambi’s father comes to Bambi after hunting season and says, “Your mother can’t be with you anymore.”
Leaving the stranger on the porch, Dan walked away from the door, climbed back up on the couch, and clutched his paper bag to his chest. He did his best not to cry.
His father hated it when he cried. “Don’t be a sissy,” Adam Pardee always said. “Only sissies cry.” Dan had cried in the movie when Bambi lost his mother, but he didn’t cry for his own mother, not then, not with that strange Indian man watching him.
The woman bustled in from the kitchen, smiling and wiping her hands on a towel as she approached the man
