“Until five o’clock in the morning? According to Tom Edwards, five was the last time your mother called looking for you.”
“Great,” Brandon muttered, shaking his head. “That’s just great. A little privacy might be nice.”
Maddern heard the edginess in Brandon’s voice and dropped the subject. “Does your dad have money?”
“With him? A little, maybe, but not much.”
“What kind of credit cards? Any bank cards?”
“No. Mom took those away. The department-store cards as well. He probably has a Chevron and a Shell. Maybe a couple of others.”
“That’s where we’ll start then, with gas stations.”
They headed north on Swan, stopping at every gas station along the way where Brandon knew his father had a working credit card. They went west on Broadway and south again on Alvernon. At a Chevron station on Alvernon south of Twenty-second Street, they finally hit pay dirt. The young Mexican kid tending the pumps remembered Toby Walker well.
“Hey, man, I thought it was crazy. This guy comes in wearing pajamas and no shoes, driving a county car, and wanting to know how to get to Duluth. Where the hell is Duluth?”
“Minnesota,” Brandon said quietly.
“Duluth,” Maddern repeated. “Why Duluth?”
“It’s where he grew up. On a farm outside Duluth.”
The attendant thumbed through the credit-card receipts. “Here it is. Tobias Walker. He took 15.9 gallons of premium and said something about a farm, about going there for dinner. He asked me how to get back over to I-10, and I told him.”
They drove to where Alvernon intersected with the freeway. “Which way?” Walker asked. “He’s got plenty of gas. He could drive two hundred and fifty miles in either direction without having to stop for more.”
“At least we know what to do now,” Maddern said.
“What’s that?”
“Call the Highway Patrol. If your dad’s out on the freeway, it’s not just our problem anymore.”
Public transportation as known in the Anglo world was nonexistent on the reservation. Hitchhiking was the alternative.
As Fat Crack left Casa Grande for Sells late in the afternoon, he stopped for a hitchhiker just inside the reservation boundary. Fat Crack could tell from the way the man shambled after the truck that he was drunk, but he offered a ride anyway. “Where to?”
“The Gate,” the man said. “I just got outta jail, and I want to get drunk. It sure was bad in there.”
For an Indian, this was a talkative drunk. Fat Crack found himself hoping his rider would pass out and sleep until they reached Sells.
They drove past the turnoff to Ahngam. “Do you know Eduardo Jose?” the rider asked.
Fat Crack nodded. Eduardo Jose’s bootlegging exploits were legend.
“His grandson’s sure in big trouble,” the man continued. “They brought him in to the jail this morning. For raping and killing a white lady.”
“That’s too bad,” Fat Crack told him.
They drove for several more miles in stony silence. Both of them knew full well that Indians who went to jail for raping white women didn’t generally live long enough to see the inside of a courtroom, let alone a penitentiary.
“He bit her,” the man said much later. “What kind of a sickness would make him do that?”
But a stunned Fat Crack didn’t answer right away. “You say he bit her?”
The man nodded. “Her
The hairs on the back of Fat Crack’s neck stood erect under his gray Stetson. He had heard once before about someone who did that to women, a killer who bit off his victims’ nipples. It had happened to Gina, his cousin. Supposedly, Gina’s killer was dead.
The cab of the tow truck was suddenly far too small, and the hot air blowing through the opened windows took Fat Crack’s breath away.
Just as Looks At Nothing, despite his blindness, had known unerringly where to find the shady grove of trees, Fat Crack knew at once, despite the fact that Gary Ladd was dead, that there was some connection between this dead woman at Cloud Stopper Mountain and his cousin, found murdered in the
Unable to do anything else about it, Fat Crack tightened his grip on the steering wheel, and he began to pray.
Diana must have slept. When she woke up, it was early evening. She dressed hurriedly and guiltily, worrying about what Davy was up to.
She found him on the living-room couch. She could see his head over the back of the couch and see Bone’s long, curving tail sticking out from in front of it.
“Are you hungry?” she asked, pausing in the doorway.
Davy didn’t look up. He was working on something in his lap, staring down intently, lips pursed, shoulders hunched, brow furrowed.
“What are you doing?” Diana asked when he didn’t answer.
She walked up to him and peered down over his shoulder. His lap was full of whitened yucca leaves. In his hand was the small awl Rita had given him for his birthday.
“What in the world are you doing with Rita’s yucca?” Diana demanded. “You know you’re not supposed to touch those.”
Davy looked up at her, his eyes filling with tears. “I’m trying to make her a basket,” he said. “But I don’t know how to do the center.”
Chapter 10
When he left the storage unit, Andrew Carlisle took with him only the hunting knife. The blade had been honed to a razor sharp edge, which years of careful storage hadn’t dulled. The knife was big enough to be deadly, but small enough to conceal in the brightly colored summer bag among his other purchases.
Back in the Valiant, he drove to the Reardon Hotel off Fourth Avenue. He had checked his bank balance and found that he didn’t have as much cushion as he wanted. Once finished with Diana Ladd, he would disappear. He needed cold hard cash, running money. He wanted it quickly and from a quarter where no questions would be asked.
When it came to not asking questions, the seedy Reardon suited his purposes admirably. Carlisle had heard about the hotel and bar and its singular clientele from some of the other residents of the joint.
Joint. Thinking about Florence in that jarring bit of jargon always brought a mental smile to Carlisle’s Ph.D.- trained ear. Phraseology wasn’t all he’d picked up in prison, not by a long shot. There were always lessons to be learned in that all-male, survival-of-the-fittest environment where sex was a valuable commodity, a bargaining chip. It was a milieu that regarded small men as prized possessions, and Andrew Carlisle was a small man.
Once he understood that exploitation was inevitable, he surrendered willingly and made himself available to the highest bidder, to partners who could make the physical pain and mental degradation most worth his while. He closed his mind to the reality of it even while it was happening, and learned to stand outside himself during the blowjobs and the rest, to calmly total up the privileges each encounter would give him, all the while keeping score of what the outside world would owe him once it was over-the world in general, and Diana Ladd in particular. Every blowjob, every bloody submission, had its price.
Carlisle registered at the Reardon Hotel under an assumed name. The guys in Florence claimed the queers at the Reardon to be easy pickings for an apparently willing stranger. Prison gossip suggested that the closeted homos
