Hour of the Hunter

He took another swipe at his forehead with a damp paper towel and waited for a guard to bring Andrew Carlisle into his office.

“Damn legislature,” he told a fly that sauntered lazily across the stacks of file folders on his desk. Why couldn’t those idiots down in Phoenix find money enough to fix the prison’s damn refrigeration units? The air- conditioning always went on the fritz the minute the temperature climbed above 110.

Buildings in the capitol complex in Phoenix were plenty cool. He’d damn near frozen his ass off when he’d gone there as part of the official delegation begging the legislative committee for more prison money. They’d as good as said it didn’t matter if it got hot for the prisoners. After all, “Prisoners were supposed to be punished, weren’t they?” “What about the guards?” Warden Franklin had countered. “What about the other people who work there?” “What about them?” the committee had said. They didn’t give a shit about the worker bees. Nobody did.

Irritably, Mallory slapped at the fly, but it eluded him and flew over to the window just as Mendez, Mallory’s assistant, knocked on the door and put his head inside the sweltering office. “Carlisle’s here,” Mendez said.

“Good. Send him in.” Ron Mallory mopped his brow, knowing it wouldn’t do any good. His face would be sopped with sweat again within moments. God, it was hot!

Ron Mallory had conducted hundreds of prerelease interviews in the time he’d held the job. There was a standard protocol. Where are you going to stay? What kind of work do you have lined up? But this wouldn’t be a standard interview, because Andrew Carlisle wasn’t a standard prisoner.

As soon as the guard led Andrew Carlisle into the room, Mallory noticed that even in this terrible heat the man wasn’t sweating. Guys who didn’t sweat usually pissed Ron Mallory off, but he liked Andrew Carlisle.

“Is this when I get the ‘go-and-sin-no-more’ talk?” the prisoner asked good-humoredly.

Carlisle eased himself into a chair in front of Mallory’s desk without waiting for either an order or an invitation. Between assistant superintendent and prisoner, there existed a camaraderie, an easy give-and-take, enjoyed by no other inmate in the Arizona State Prison.

Ron Mallory appreciated Andrew Carlisle. Intellectually, he was several cuts above the other prisoners. Carlisle conversed about politics, religion, philosophy, and current events with equal facility and enthusiasm. Under the guise of working together as inmate clerk and warden, the two men had carried on six years’ worth of wide- ranging discussions, exchanges that made Assistant Superintendent Mallory feel almost scholarly.

“That’s right,” Mallory responded with a chuckle. “‘Go and sin no more.’ Couldn’t have said it better myself. I’m sorry to see you go, though, Carlisle. Once you’re gone, who’s going to keep this office in order, and who’ll help me finish my book? How about screwing up and coming back for a return engagement?”

“I won’t screw up,” Carlisle declared.

Mallory nodded seriously. “I’m sure you won’t, Carlisle. You’ve more than paid your debt to society. As far as I’m concerned, you never should have been here in the first place. Don’t quote me, but if every poor bastard who ever killed or fucked a drunken Indian got sent up here, we’d be more overcrowded than we already are. That judge in Tucson just got a hard-on for you. The important thing now is for you to put it all behind you and get on with your life. What are you going to do?”

Andrew Carlisle shrugged. “I don’t know exactly. I doubt the university will take me back. Ex-cons don’t quite meet the hiring and tenure guidelines.”

“It’s a damn shame, if you ask me,” Mallory said. “You’re one hell of a teacher. Look at what you’ve done for me. Here I am on Chapter Eleven and counting. I’m going to finish this damn book, dedicate it to you, and buy my way out of this hellhole of a dead-end job, and you’re the one making it possible.”

Carlisle smiled indulgently, waiting in silence while Mallory studied the contents of the file folder in front of him. “Says here you plan to go back to Tucson. That right?”

Andrew Carlisle nodded. “I’ll hole up in some cheapo apartment, maybe down in the barrio somewhere.”

“And do what?”

“Work. I’ve got a book or two of my own to write.”

For most “two-for-one, early-release prisoners,” the word work should have included an employer’s name, address, and telephone number, but Mallory regarded Carlisle as an exceptional prisoner. In his case, exceptions had been made.

“What will you live on in the meantime?”

“I still have some money left from when they sold off my house to pay attorneys’ fees. As long as I don’t live too high on the hog, I can survive until the first advance comes in.”

Ron Mallory nodded his approval. “Good plan,” he said. “Hell of a plan. You’ll make a fortune.”

“I hope so,” Andrew Carlisle replied.

Mallory pulled a small rectangular piece of shiny paper from the folder and passed it across the desk. “Here’s your bus ticket to Tucson,” he said. “The guard will take you to collect your personal effects and whatever money is in your account. Now get the hell out of here and knock ’em dead.”

Carlisle accepted Mallory’s abrupt dismissal with good grace. “I’ll do that,” he said, pocketing the ticket and then reaching back across the desk to give Ron’s pudgy hand a firm shake. “And you keep on writing.”

“I will,” Mallory responded fervently. “Count on it.”

Carlisle smiled to himself as he left Mallory’s office. Mendez, sitting at his desk in the outer office, noticed the smile and assumed it had something to do with his release, but it was really over Ron Mallory’s unfortunate choice of words. Funny that he would say it just that way-knock ’em dead.

For those were indeed Andrew Carlisle’s intentions. His version of “knocking ’em dead” had nothing to do with the literary endeavor that he had already been working on in secret during his enforced six-years’ worth of spare time.

He would knock a certain someone dead, all right, although he didn’t yet know how. He didn’t yet know where to find his intended victim, either-if she was still on the reservation, or if she’d left there and moved on. Finding her would take time, but he had plenty of that. He had all the time in the world.

A guard took him to Florence and put him on the Tucson-bound Greyhound. At Marana, he got off and walked back under the freeway to the entrance ramp on the other side. He put down his bag and stuck out his thumb, angling for a ride northbound to Phoenix.

He’d go to Tucson eventually, when he was ready, but first he wanted to talk to his mother. Myrna Louise would be surprised and happy to see him. She was always good for a handout.

Davy Ladd knew his mother was working, so he spent the morning outside, along with Bone, a scrawny black-and-tan mutt with predominantly Irish wolfhound bloodlines. The dog, fierce-looking and bristle-faced, with a squared-off, rectangular head the size of a basketball, was never far from the boy’s heels.

The two of them hiked up the mountain behind Davy’s house, scrambling over warm red cliffs, straying further than they should have from the house. As the hot sun rose higher overhead, both boy and dog went looking for shade. Bone crept under a scrubby mesquite, while Davy hunkered down in the narrow band of shade at the foot of a perpendicular outcropping of rock.

It was there he found the cave with an opening so small he didn’t see it for a while even though he was sitting right next to it. Poking his head in, he decided it wasn’t a cave after all, because caves were flat, and this one went up and down like a tall chimney in the rock. A circle of blue sky showed at the very top. He wiggled through the small opening and found that, once inside, there was barely room enough for him to stand up straight. Despite its small, confined size, the place was surprisingly cool. Davy warily checked it for snakes. People and dogs weren’t the only ones who needed to escape the heat.

Suddenly, outside, Bone set up a frantic barking. Peering out, Davy saw the dog, nose to the ground, searching around wildly. Hide-and-seek was a game they played sometimes-the solitary child and his singularly ugly dog-pretending to be scouts heading off a band of marauding Apaches, maybe, or hunters stalking mule deer in the mountains.

With a joyous bark, the dog discovered the boy’s hiding place. Panting, he thrust his big head into the opening and tried to climb in as well. There wasn’t room for both of them to be inside at once, and Davy came out laughing. It was then he heard Rita calling him from far below.

“Come on, Bone,” the boy said. “Maybe it’s time for lunch.”

But it wasn’t. Rita Antone, the Indian woman who lived with them and took care of him, waited in the yard with both hands planted sternly on her hips as the boy and the dog returned from the mountain.