Finally he decided that the best thing to do was to tell the truth. That was how Gramps had always dealt with tough things-by saying straight out whatever was going on rather than by beating around the bush or trying to fudge what needed to be said.
“Angie,” Dan said gently, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this. Your mommy is dead.”
Angie’s enormous eyes welled with tears. “I thought she was asleep.”
Dan shook his head. “I know,” he said. “But she wasn’t.”
For a long time, Angie sat there quietly, staring at him through her tears.
“My dog died,” she said finally. “He ran out into the road and got run over by a truck. Mommy said that dying meant he wouldn’t be back. Does that mean my mommy won’t be back?”
“That’s correct,” Dan said. “She won’t be.”
“Not ever?”
“Not ever.”
“Is she in heaven? Mommy says that when people die, they go to heaven.”
“I’m sure that’s where she is,” Dan said with a conviction he didn’t necessarily feel. For his own part, Dan Pardee had stopped believing in heaven and hell a long time ago.
Angie put down her spoon and pushed the food tray away. “I’m not hungry,” she said.
Dan carried the tray across the room and put it on a dresser. “Of course you’re not.”
“Who’ll take care of me, then?” Angie asked. “Donald?”
Which meant Dan had to deliver the next blow as well. “Angie, Donald’s dead, too. Just like your mommy.”
“Who, then?” Angie asked.
Dan shrugged. “Do you have a grandpa and grandma? Maybe they’ll look after you.”
“Grandpa’s sick,” Angie said.
“What about your father?” Dan asked. The name Joaquin Enos was also listed on Angie’s enrollment card. “You have a father, don’t you?”
Angie simply looked at him and didn’t reply. That in itself was answer enough. The father had never been a factor in the Angelina Enos equation, and he wouldn’t be one now.
“Don’t worry about it,” Dan said. “I know how hard it is not to worry, but someone will look after you, Angie. Right now, you should probably lie down and try to get some sleep. We’ll sort all this out tomorrow morning.”
She reached out and grabbed hold of Dan’s hand. “Will you stay here with me?”
“I will,” he said. “But first I need to go out and feed Bozo and give him some water.” Dan also needed to call in and let Dispatch know that no one was out on patrol in his sector right now. Given the obvious police presence at Komelik, it didn’t seem likely that a major number of illegal entrants would be attempting to use that route tonight. As far as Dan was concerned, his presence at Angie Enos’s bedside was far more pressing.
“You’ll come right back?” Angie asked. “You promise?”
“I promise.”
Telling the lady at the desk that he was just stepping outside for a moment, he hurried over to his Expedition. There he let Bozo out of the SUV long enough for the dog to relieve himself. Then Dan poured a couple of bottles of water into the metal bowl he kept in the back of the luggage compartment. While Bozo lapped up the water, Dan unwrapped the two sandwiches and gave them to the dog. All he reserved for himself were the bags of chips. Then he called Dispatch.
All that took time. When Dan finally made it back to Angie’s room, he expected her to be sleeping. She wasn’t, primarily because by then a night nurse was in the room, taking her vitals.
“I knew you’d come back,” Angie said.
Dan nodded. “I told my boss that you needed Bozo and me to stay here for right now.”
“Bozo is his dog,” Angie explained to the nurse.
Unimpressed by this tidbit of information, the nurse rolled her eyes.
When she left the room, Dan eased his long frame into a chair that didn’t necessarily fit his body, or any human body for that matter. It looked like a chair, but it was the least comfortable specimen of chairness Dan Pardee had ever had the misfortune of encountering. As soon as he settled into it, however, Angie reached out again, took his hand, and fell fast asleep.
Dan sat in almost that same position for the next three hours. He stirred only when his feet went numb or his hand did. And while he sat there, a file drawer he usually kept closed and safely locked away from conscious thought popped open-the file drawer marked “Adam Pardee.”
Safford, Arizona
1979
E ven from prison Adam Pardee had refused to sign over his parental rights. As a consequence, Micah and Maxine Duarte had been forced to go to court to gain custody of their grandson. Fortunately Micah’s boss, a prosperous Safford area dairy farmer, was able to help them find an Anglo attorney who made it possible for the Indian couple to navigate the Anglo legal jungle.
When it was time to enroll Dan in kindergarten, the guardianship issue had been settled to the satisfaction of the courts, perhaps. In the court of public opinion, and more important at Fort Thomas Elementary School, Dan Pardee’s status was still very much in doubt.
Although Micah Duarte soon morphed into Dan’s beloved Gramps, his wife, Maxine, was another matter. She was always kind to Dan-kind but distant. Up until her death five years ago, she had always been Grandmother, never the less formal Grandma. Maxine had looked after Dan and cared for him, but she had seemed incapable of allowing herself to unbend in the presence of her dead daughter’s child. To Dan’s knowledge, his grandparents never discussed Rebecca, or if they did, it certainly wasn’t in Dan’s presence. Maybe part of Maxine’s reticence had to do with the fact that Dan looked so much like his father, although no one had mentioned it at the time. Dan found that out for himself much later while doing Internet searches into his own history.
Even as a child, Dan Pardee had had his father’s eyes. As he grew, he developed his father’s height and long legs, as well as his rangy good looks. All of that meant that Dan didn’t fit in well with the other kids on the San Carlos. He was neither fish nor fowl. He wasn’t Apache enough for some or Anglo enough for others.
And his troubled family history often caused difficulties as well. For one thing, school and Sunday school programs often focused on holidays with traditional “family values.”
Art projects to make greeting cards to celebrate Mother’s Day or Father’s Day didn’t take into account the feelings of a kid whose father had murdered his mother. There weren’t any cards that covered that contingency. When it came time to do a “family history” project for eighth-grade social studies, Dan flunked it fair and square. He wouldn’t answer the questions and didn’t turn in the paper. His teacher was baffled. Gramps was not.
As an eighth grader, Dan hadn’t wanted to know any of that ugly stuff, but while he was sitting in Iraq with time on his hands and computer access, he had made it his business to track down everything the Internet had to offer on Adam and Rebecca Pardee. Surprisingly enough, there was plenty of material available with the click of the mouse.
For one thing, an enterprising true-crime writer named Michaella Reece had written a book called The Return of the Stuntmen, which was a book about three different Hollywood stuntmen who had gone off to the slammer for one crime or another, only to be welcomed back to the Hollywood fraternity once they had paid their respective debts to society. By the time Dan knew the book existed it was out of print, but he had ordered a used copy from Amazon.
It turned out that the three men had a lot in common in addition to being stuntmen, including a long history of dishing out domestic abuse. They had all murdered women. One, Adam, murdered his wife; the second, his stepmother; the third, his girlfriend. And they all got slaps on the wrist with sentences in the seven-to-ten-year range with time off for good behavior. And they all went straight back to work once they got out of prison. The book had been published several years earlier, however, and Dan wondered how much work stuntmen were getting these days in the face of competition from computer-generated graphics that tossed images around rather than flesh-and-blood people.
In reading the book Dan saw the head-shot photos of his mother once again. Rebecca Duarte Pardee had been beautiful, even with her long dark hair turned into a froth of seventies-style curls. It galled Dan to realize that his
