changing vehicles added a complication, but the whole point of being competitive-of being able to capitalize on situations where other people faltered-was being flexible enough to go with the flow. The idea was to take the unexpected and turn it from a liability into an advantage.
'Hang on here a minute,' Mitch said to Quentin. 'And if my food comes before I get back, you leave my hamburger alone.'
'Sure thing,' Quentin said.
Mitch walked out to the far corner of the parking lot where he had left the Subaru. There, he unlocked the tailgate, opened the wooden crate, and checked on Lani, who appeared to be sleeping peacefully. Putting on his rubber gloves, he removed Lani's bike from the crate. Hurriedly he wheeled it over to the orange Bronco parked nearby, an orange Bronco with a temporary paper license hanging in the window next to a prominently displayed as is/no warranty notice. Predictably, the Bronco wasn't locked. Mitch hefted the mountain bike into the spacious cargo compartment and then went over to secure the Subaru.
'Sweet dreams, little one,' he said to a sleeping Lani as he once again closed up the crate. 'See you after your brother and I finish up at the house.'
When Mitch went back inside, the food had been served. Mitch ate his lousy hamburger and watched Quentin wolf his. There was something about the man that wasn't quite right. There was a nervous tension in him that Mitch didn't remember from the night before, but he put his worries aside. Whatever was bothering Quentin Walker, that little dose of scopolamine Mitch had dropped into Quentin's first beer would soon take the edge off. In fact, Mitch's only real concern was that Quentin was far more smashed than he should have been. With Quentin drunk, Mitch worried that even a little bit of Burundianga Cocktail might prove to be too much.
The overheated afternoon had cooled into a warm summer's evening when Quentin and Mitch Johnson finally left the bar. Quentin blundered first in one direction and then in the other as he attempted to cross the parking lot. He finally came to a stop and leaned up against the Bronco to steady himself.
'Geez!' he muttered. 'That last beer was a killer. Hey, Mitch,' he said. 'You wouldn't mind driving, would you? The food didn't do me a bit of good. I'm having a tough time here. I can give you directions, no problem, but with my record, I can't afford to be picked up DWI.'
'No problem,' Mitch said. 'Where are the keys?'
It took time for Quentin to extract the keys from his pocket and hand them over.
'You don't mind, do you?' Quentin whined.
Mitch shook his head. 'Not at all,' he said. 'After all, friends don't let friends drive drunk.'
Detective Dan Leggett was pissed as hell. 'What do you mean, you've recalled him?' he demanded.
'Just that,' Reg Atkins, the night-watch commander, returned mildly. 'We can't send a team of crime techs out there until Monday morning. You know as well as I do that Sheriff Forsythe won't authorize any overtime right now, at least not until the start of the new fiscal year. Overtime is to be scheduled only in cases of dire emergency. One busted Indian and a pile of bones don't qualify, at least not in my book. And in case you're wondering, the same thing goes for deputies. Brian Fellows is off the clock as of fifteen minutes ago and the guy you sent out to Coleman Road just got called to a car fire out by Ryan Field.'
Less than six months from retirement, Dan Leggett was a member of the old guard. As someone who still owed a good deal of loyalty to the previous administration, he was a pain in Sheriff Bill Forsythe's neck. Anybody else in his position might have shut up and let things pass. Not Dan Leggett. He was an unrepentant smoker, a loner, and a rocker of boats.
'You called them off?'
'Damned straight. If you think we're going to have a deputy camped out by a charcoall weekend long, you're crazy as a bedbug.'
'But I want those bones examined.'
'Well, go get them and bring them back to the lab yourself, if you're so all-fired excited about them. There are plenty of people to work on them if you ever get them here.'
Without another word, Dan Leggett stormed out of Reg Atkins's office. Ever since Brandon Walker had been voted out of office, this kind of shit had been happening-especially to older guys, the ones who had been around long enough to know the real score. He had been a rookie deputy toward the end of Sheriff DuShane's term in office. There had been lots of crap like this back then. It looked as though things had come full circle.
But if Sheriff Bill Forsythe thought he was going to run Dan Leggett off a day before his scheduled retirement day, he was full of it. And he wasn't going to be bamboozled out of properly investigating these two possibly related cases.
At the charco even though the deputy was long gone, nothing seemed to be disturbed. Since Deputy Fellows had already made plaster casts, Dan Leggett simply drove as close as he could to the pile of bones without getting stuck in the sand. After extracting a trouble light from the trunk, he examined the grisly pile by the trouble light's eerie orange glow.
There was nothing but partial skeletal remains here now, but Detective Leggett realized this had once been a living, breathing human being. A person. Somebody's loved one. As such, whoever it was deserved some respect, certainly more than being tossed haphazardly in the trunk of an unmarked patrol car.
'Sorry about this,' Dan said aloud, addressing the skull whose empty eyes seemed to stare up at him. 'But this is the only way I can think of to find out who you are and what happened to you.'
After that murmured apology, he put on his disposable gloves and loaded the bones into three separate cardboard evidence boxes. It was the best Dan Leggett could do.
He took the boxes back to the department and then lugged the surprisingly lightweight stack into the crime lab. 'What's this?' the lab tech asked, opening the top box and peering inside.
'It's what's left of a body,' he told her. 'When you take them out of the box, I want every single one of them dusted for prints.'
'Come on, Detective Leggett. Fingerprints?'
'I'm an old man who's about to retire,' Dan Leggett told the thirty-something technician. 'Humor me, just this once. And while you're at it, fax a dental photo over to that Bio-Metrics professor at the U. Who knows, we might just get a hit on his Missing Persons database.'
As tribal chairman, Gabe Ortiz could easily have gone straight to the head of the line at the feast house in Little Tucson. But that wasn't Fat Crack's style. Instead, an hour or so before the Chicken Scratch Band was scheduled to play, he and Wanda were standing in line waiting to be admitted to the feast house along with their bass-guitar-playing son, Leo, and everyone else who was waiting to eat.
Gabe could remember a time, seemingly not that long ago, when all the guys in the band had been old men. Times had changed. The problem was, the members of the band had always stayed pretty much the same-middle- aged. That was still true. What was different was that Gabe Ortiz was well into his sixties and one of the band members was his unmarried, thirty-eight-year-old son.
They filed into the feast house and took seats at the tables. Moments later, Delia Cachora herself showed up carrying plates. She set two plates down in front of Gabe and Wanda and then went back for more.
Leo caught his father's eye. 'When are you going to put in a good word for me with that new tribal attorney?' he asked.
'What do you want me to tell her?' Gabe asked. 'That you're a good mechanic? You've never worked on a Saab in your life.'
Leo laughed. 'I could learn,' he said.
Delia Chavez Cachora had returned to the reservation driving a shiny black Saab 9000. In the reservation world where Ford and Chevy pickups ruled supreme, Delia's car had created quite a stir-especially when word leaked out that the Saab's leather seats were actually heated. In the Arizona desert, heated seats were considered to be a laughably unnecessary option. After months of driving in gritty dust, its once shiny onyx exterior had acquired a perpetually matte-brown overlay.
'Why don't you talk to her yourself?' Wanda asked impatiently. 'She won't bite.'
'I knew her in first grade,' Leo said. 'But I don't think that counts.'
Delia returned to the table with two more plates, one of which she put in front of Leo Ortiz.
'Delia,' Gabe said, 'this is my son, Leo. He says you were in first grade together. He wants you to know that he's a pretty good mechanic.'
Leo Ortiz shrugged. 'You never can tell when you might need a good mechanic,' he said with a laugh. 'Or a
