Hour of the Hunter

At the sound of the second gunshot, Davy almost burst into tears. Once more Rita shushed him. “Ready now,” she whispered. “When the key turns, open the door and run.”

“I’ll kill you,” the man was saying over and over outside the door. “I’ll kill you.”

Davy’s heart leaped to his throat. His mother was still alive. Would she be when the door opened? He crossed his fingers and tried to remember how to pray.

The key filled the lock. The tiny keyhole-shaped patch of light disappeared, but the key didn’t turn. The door didn’t open.

Again they waited. Davy heard another sound now-the Bone, scratching frantically at the back door, wanting to be let in. Oh’o was home, but he couldn’t get inside to help them.

And then, miraculously, the key did turn. Davy shoved the door with all his might, flung it open, and dashed outside. In the middle of the room, he encountered a man-at least it looked like a man-crawling toward him on his hands and knees. This terrible apparition, its face a misshapen mass of bloodied blisters, must be the ohb.

Pausing long enough for only one look at that terrifying visage, Davy turned and raced for the sliding glass door.

The pain was terrible, beyond anything he could have imagined, but what was worse, Carlisle feared Diana Ladd had escaped. He started toward the door.

“Where are you, bitch?”

“Here,” Diana responded from someplace else in the room. “I’m behind you.” To decoy Davy’s safe escape, she wanted Carlisle’s attention focused solely on her.

“Where?”

“Right here,” she answered again, and it sounded as though she was laughing at him.

Doggedly, like an unstoppable monster from an old B-grade movie, Andrew Carlisle whirled and came crawling toward her, but before he made any progress, something heavy landed on his back. Horrified, he felt a dog’s inch-long canines plunge into the back of his neck.

Too stunned to move and trying to stem the flow of blood from her own arm, Diana could do nothing but watch. The dog was everywhere at once, huge jaws snapping. He leaped up and backward and sideways, always staying just out of the man’s reach. Finally, Bones’s jaws closed over Carlisle’s wrist.

While the man howled in inhuman rage, the dog shook his massive head. Bones crunched in Carlisle’s mangled wrist. Tendons and nerves snapped like so many broken rubber bands.

Arm upraised, owij in hand, Rita emerged from the root cellar ready to do battle. She, too, stood transfixed, watching the man struggle to escape the attacking dog. Trying to save his mangled wrist, Carlisle attempted one last kick. The dog let go of the hand and pounced on the foot. As the dog’s jaws closed once more, Carlisle folded himself into a fetal position.

Rita remained where she was for a moment, surveying the room, while Carlisle sobbed brokenly. “Get the dog off me. Please, get him off.”

The Indian woman pocketed her owij. It was no longer needed. Across the room, she saw both the knife and the gun. She hurried at once to retrieve them. Only when she had them both firmly in her possession did she speak to the dog.

“Oh’o, ihab.” The dog came to her side at once, wagging his tail, waiting to be petted. “Good gogs,” she crooned, patting his shaggy head. “It’s over.”

Rita turned from the dog and placed the gun in Diana’s lap. “Here,” she said. “If you wish to shoot him, now’s your chance. Do it quickly.”

Diana looked from Rita to the stricken form of Andrew Carlisle, who lay sobbing on the floor in a widening pool of his own urine. Finally, Diana looked down at the gun and shook her head.

“No,” she said. “I don’t have to now. It wouldn’t be self-defense.”

A radiant smile suffused Rita’s weathered old face. “Good,” she said. “I’itoi would be proud of you.”

Behind them, Brandon Walker burst into the room. Bone turned to fend off this new attack, but before he could, the oven door blew its hinges with a resounding thump, knocking the dog to the floor.

Crying and laughing both, Diana knelt beside Bone and cradled his massive head in her lap. The dog looked up at her gratefully and thumped his long tail on the floor. He wasn’t hurt, but it had been a hard day for a dog. He didn’t want to get up.

Detective Farrell and Myrna Louise arrived just ahead of a phalanx of police cars dispatched by Hank Maddern at the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. For the first time in her life, she refused Andrew’s summons when he asked for her. Stone-faced and without getting out of the car, Myrna Louise watched while her son was loaded into a waiting ambulance. Ironically, he was taken first. Of all the injuries, his were deemed the most serious.

But not serious enough, Myrna Louise thought bitterly, not nearly serious enough. If she’d been lucky-and she had never been lucky where her son was concerned-Andrew would have died. Someone would have put a bullet through his wretched head and taken him out of his misery, the way they used to do with rabid dogs.

After that, another stretcher came out of the house with someone strapped to it. The old Indian woman-what was her name again-limped heavily along beside the stretcher and climbed into the waiting ambulance to ride to the hospital, although she herself didn’t seem to be hurt.

A few minutes later, Myrna Louise recognized Diana Ladd. She, too, was carried past the detective’s car to an ambulance, with a man walking along beside her. Thank God they weren’t dead, Myrna Louise thought gratefully. She never could have lived with herself if that had happened.

Myrna Louise sat there quietly, knowing that eventually it would be her turn to answer questions. What would she say about Andrew when they asked her? Tell the truth, she thought. And what would happen when the neighbors on Weber Drive found out that Andrew Carlisle was her son? Would they still speak to her?

Myrna Louise sighed. She could always move again, she supposed. She’d done it before. Maybe she’d get herself one of those U-Hauls. What did they call that, “an adventure in moving”? She’d drive herself far away and start over again, somewhere where nobody knew her.

But first, she thought, she’d have to get herself a driver’s license, and maybe even a pair of glasses.

Davy sat in the crack and waited. That’s what he would call it from now on, I’itoi’s crack. He wondered how it would feel to be a fly and to go back down to the house. He would be able to see what was happening, but nobody would know he was there. He wanted to know and yet he didn’t. He was afraid to know.

His mother was still alive when he ran past her, and so was Nana Dahd, but were they still? He couldn’t tell. Bone had wanted to come with him, but he had ordered the dog to stay. Now, he wished he hadn’t. Why didn’t Bone come looking for him? Why didn’t someone else?

While he watched, a string of cop cars came streaming down the canyon road, lights flashing. It looked like a parade, except it wasn’t. There were no floats, no marching bands. The police cars were all going to his house. What would they find there? Would his mother still be alive?

When he first reached the cleft in the rock, he was panting, out of breath, afraid that the terrible man was right behind him. Now, as more time passed, he wondered who would come for him. Nana Dahd had been very specific about that. She had told him he must wait until morning, wait for someone he knew.

He shifted his body. The sharp rocks behind his back were growing uncomfortable. What if they forgot all about him and nobody came? Maybe he’d end up living there forever. How long was forever, anyway?

Three more sets of flashing lights came down the winding road and pulled in at the driveway. How many police cars did it take? he wondered. What was happening? He kept thinking his mother would come for him or Rita, but the longer it went without anyone coming, the more he was afraid they were dead.

What happened to you after you were dead? That was one of the things he was supposed to talk about with Father John the next time he saw him. Davy thought about Father John lying there so still on the root-cellar floor, and he thought about what the priest had said as they were leaving to take Bone to the vet.

How had that prayer gone? Davy squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated, trying to remember the exact