his Expedition into an almost empty parking lot where his oversize vehicle took up most of what was striped off to be two compact spaces. Then, after rolling down the windows and ordering Bozo to stay, Dan unbelted Angie and carried the sleeping child inside the building.
She was still wearing her bloodied clothing. He set her down carefully on a bench next to the wall. He had rescued a toy-a pink-and-yellow pinwheel-from the backseat of the Blazer. After placing that near her hand, Dan stepped forward for what he expected to be a protracted battle with the emergency-room clerk. The woman glanced at Angie’s sleeping, bloodstained form and then eyed Dan speculatively, as though she was convinced that Dan was responsible for the little girl’s injuries.
“What happened to her?” the clerk wanted to know.
“She was running around out in the desert without any shoes,” Dan explained. “She has cuts on her face, feet, and legs.”
The clerk shrugged and sighed as if this didn’t seem to be something serious enough to merit an emergency- room visit. “All right, then,” she said. “I’ll need to see proof of enrollment.”
Dan slipped both Delphina’s and Angie’s ID cards out of his shirt pocket and handed them over to the clerk. She studied them carefully for some time. When she finally started typing information into her computer, Dan watched her flying fingers and thought about what else he had found there on the ground, the one item he hadn’t shared with the Pima County investigator-a wallet-size photo of Delphina Enos holding Angie.
In the picture a smiling Delphina had beamed proudly down at her baby daughter while Angie, dressed in a lacy white dress, smiled back. It was a peaceful photo, a loving photo.
She’s wearing a baptism dress, Dan had thought the moment he saw the photo. After studying it briefly, he had slipped it into his pocket right along with the two ID cards.
The clerk finished typing and cleared her throat. “Who are you?” she asked. “Are you the father?”
Dan shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m just the guy who found her.”
“You’re not a relative, then?”
“No relation.”
The clerk stiffened. “If that’s the case, I’m afraid we can’t treat her,” she said, shaking her head dismissively. “This isn’t a life-or-death emergency. She isn’t even bleeding anymore. Have her mother bring her in tomorrow morning. A doctor can look at her then.”
The woman was only doing her job, but Dan felt an unreasoning rage growing inside him. He recognized his anger for what it was. Eye color wasn’t the only thing he had inherited from his biological father. He also had Adam Pardee’s hot temper. It was one of the things about his grandson that Micah Duarte had done his best to counter.
Dan’s grandfather had taught him when to fight and how to fight and when to back off and walk away. As a teenager, Dan had been astonished to learn that Gramps knew karate. Micah saw to it that his grandson was one of the few black belts on the San Carlos.
Calling on those lessons now, Dan forced himself to take several deep breaths.
“Her mother can’t come in tomorrow morning because she’s dead,” he explained to the clerk, keeping his voice low and steady but forceful. “Somebody murdered her earlier tonight out in the desert. They shot and killed the mother and left this little girl alone in the desert. As an Indian she qualifies for treatment at this facility. I want her checked out. If you can’t help me, then let me talk to someone who can.”
Dan knew what Adam Pardee would have done about then. He would have slammed both fists on the counter or knocked something off it onto the floor, preferably something breakable. Dan did what Micah Duarte had trained him to do. While the clerk was thinking about what Dan had said, he walked away from her. He went back over to where Angie lay sleeping, sat down on the bench beside her, crossed his arms over his chest, and waited. He didn’t look at the clerk, but finally he heard her sigh, get up, and walk away from her desk. She went through a swinging door and disappeared.
Sitting there, Dan could still feel the stiff paper from the photo inside his shirt pocket. He, more than anyone in the world, knew what the future most likely held in store for this unfortunate little girl. Yes, Angie had lost her mother. Since Donald Rios had been Delphina’s boyfriend, that most likely meant Angie’s father was no longer a presence in her life, either, making her an orphan twice over.
At the tender age of four she would have few conscious memories of her mother, but Dan understood that in terms of physical remembrances she would probably have even less.
By the time pieces of Delphina’s life had been taken into evidence; by the time her friends and relations had sorted through the dead woman’s belongings and skimmed off what they wanted, Dan knew that there would be precious little of her dead mother left for Angie to cling to-nothing but that one single photo that he had managed to salvage.
And how did Dan Pardee know this? Through bitter experience-because that was the way it had been for him.
Someone probably still had copies of school yearbooks that showed his mother as she had been when she was in high school. And he dimly remembered there being photos of her in their apartment before she died. Those had all been head shots she’d had taken when she was still hoping to find work in Hollywood and going out on interviews and auditions.
He didn’t remember the photos in any detail. What he did remember was that his mother had been beautiful back then-with surprisingly narrow features and a winning smile. None of those pictures, however, had survived the police investigation in the bloodied apartment living room. Or, if they had, none of them had come into her son’s possession once the investigation was over.
Dan had only two things left from his mother and from that time. One was the faded letter, written on a scrap of notebook paper, that Rebecca Pardee had written to her parents back home in Arizona, asking for their help. It was the same letter Micah Duarte had carried in his shirt pocket the day he had come to L.A. to collect his grandson.
The other was a fragment of a set of Spider-Man sheets Dan’s mother had bought for Dan’s bed and had given him for his birthday. It was the same top sheet that anonymous cop had wrapped the little boy in when he had plucked the sleeping child out of his bed. The cop had used the sheet to cover the little boy’s face so he wouldn’t see the awful carnage in the living room and his mother’s blood-spattered body.
Maybe the cop had hoped that if Dan didn’t see it, he wouldn’t have to remember it, either.
Hilda, his foster mother, had washed the sheet, folded it, and put it in Dan’s paper bag the morning Micah had come to fetch him. That and the letter were the only two things Dan still possessed that he knew for sure his mother had once touched. He had treasured the sheet and slept with it in his bed night after night until it was little more than a frayed rag. Before he went to Iraq, he had cut a small piece of it out of the hem-the only part that still held together. He had placed that faded scrap of material inside the envelope along with his mother’s letter to her parents. Dan then placed the envelope inside his wallet. That treasured envelope had gone with him to war in the Middle East and it had come home from the war. It was here with him now.
Taking the photo from his pocket, he opened his own wallet. He thumbed through the contents until, tucked in among his credit cards, he found the envelope with its now-illegible address. He slipped the photo of Delphina and Angie Enos into the fragile envelope next to the faded letter and that precious scrap of material. Then he returned the envelope to his wallet, closed it, and put it away. He would keep the photo safe. Someday he would give it to Angie. It would be the one meaningful gift Dan Pardee could give the little girl-a photo of her mother smiling down at her.
Sitting there in the waiting room, Dan couldn’t help wishing that someone had done the same for him.
Just then the clerk reappeared behind her desk. “Dr. Walker will see you now,” she said, gesturing them toward a swinging door. “Right this way.”
Sells, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona
Sunday, June 7, 2009, 12:00 a.m.
71? Fahrenheit
Lani’s first patient that night had been a snakebite victim. Jose Thomas of Big Fields had been out cutting wood two days earlier. He had picked up a dead mesquite branch only to be bitten on the hand by a rattlesnake lurking in the cooler earth underneath the branch.
