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At last Beautiful Girl’s brother decided to ask I’itoi—the Spirit of Goodness—for help. He called for Messenger, Ah’atha. The brother dressed Messenger in white eagle feathers and sent him to see I’itoi. Spirit of Goodness listened to Messenger and decided to help. He took the seeds from a gourd and planted them at the base of the mountain, then he began to sing. Soon the seeds began to sprout. Before the end of the day the gourd vines had grown so tall that they covered the steep sides of the mountain. Beautiful Girl was able to climb down safely.
WITH THE HELP OF SEVERAL glasses of Pig’s Nose scotch, Ava went to bed earlier that evening than she would have otherwise. Several hours later, she was awakened from a deep sleep by the sound of a cell phone clattering noisily across her bedside table. It was another of her burner phones, one that she always kept nearby with the ringer turned on silent and the phone set on vibrate.
“Hello.” She didn’t need to ask who was calling, because there was only one person who had the number. “What’s up?”
“He didn’t deliver the shipment.”
Ava sat bolt upright in bed. “What do you mean, he didn’t deliver?” she demanded. “Didn’t the package make it across the border?”
“It came across the border, all right, but our guy wants more money.”
Ava was outraged. “Are you kidding me? He’s holding my damned diamonds for ransom?”
“That’s how it sounds.”
“How much does he want?”
“Twenty thou.”
“That’s highway robbery—twice what we’ve paid him before.”
“Well,” Ava’s caller replied with a chuckle. “You know what they say about no honor among thieves. He claims he needs the money. He says his mom is sick, and he’s looking after his younger brothers.”
“Too bad for him,” Ava replied. “Turns out now he’s lost his job, too. I want you to take care of this.”
“As in . . . ?”
“As in take care of it!” Ava snapped. “As in make a statement. As in do whatever the hell you have to do to get the job done. As in let other people out on the res know that I am not to be trifled with. I want those three José boys wiped off the face of the earth.”
“Yes, ma’am, I’ll take care of it.”
“Before you do,” she added, “I want you to make Carlos tell you what the hell happened to my diamonds. I want them back. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said again. “I certainly do.”
As he hung up, Ava thought the poor man sounded a bit shocked and more than a little cowed. It must have been hard for him to imagine that she had so casually condemned three members of a single family to death. He shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, this wasn’t Ava Richland’s first rodeo, and it wasn’t the first time she had issued someone’s death sentence, either. In fact, now that she thought about it, this probably wouldn’t be the last time.
Ava was relieved that she now had other people to do the dirty work for her, so it was no longer necessary for her personally to be the one pulling the trigger. Max José had worked for her for one reason only—because he understood that what she was doing had no co
Ava went into the kitchen and started the coffee. It was just after midnight. Harold wouldn’t awaken for several more hours. She knew that three-fourths of the José problem would be handled, but now, while she had a little peace and quiet to herself, Ava needed to make some private phone calls and arrange to deal with Max. What’s more, once and for all, she needed to take care of John Lassiter.
The man had already had two separate trials. If Ava Richland had her way, he sure as hell wouldn’t have a third one.
AFTER GABE LEFT, LANI SAT by the fire for hours, wrapped in her bedroll and gradually feeding the remaining pieces of wood into the flames. Her work as an ER physician meant that she was accustomed to working odd hours, especially nighttime hours. So she didn’t try to sleep. Instead, she stayed awake, thinking. For a while she let herself meander through the old stories, the ones she had learned from Nana Dahd and from Fat Crack. And since Gabe wasn’t present to hear them, she told them to herself—the story of Bat bringing fire as well as the story of Beautiful Girl who would eventually become Evening Star.
Finally, though, her thoughts drifted to Gabe. She wandered through her collection of memories about him, remembering the things about him that had endeared him to her as a child, starting with the night he was born.
Lani and Delia Cachora hadn’t exactly been friends back then. When Delia first arrived back on the reservation, the fact that Fat Crack had chosen, doted on, and mentored both of them had caused an odd kind of sibling rivalry to grow between the two young women. They were still wary of each other at the time of Fat Crack’s death.
On the day of his funeral, after the nightlong feast in the village of Ban Thak—Coyote Sitting—Delia’s water had broken. Lani was still in medical school, but she had realized at once that the baby was coming too fast to make it to the hospital before he was born. That was how Gabe Ortiz became the first baby Lani Walker ever delivered, turning the backseat of Diana Ladd’s fully restored Buick Invicta into a makeshift delivery room.
Wanda Ortiz, Fat Crack’s widow and the baby’s grandmother, had taken the squalling child and dried him on clean towels from the feast house. Then, after wrapping him in one of his father’s immense fla
Lani still remembered how she had felt in that moment. The baby was a gift through time. He had been passed down from Nana Dahd’s grandmother, Understanding Woman, to the next generation, to Rita Antone and Looks at Nothing. They had passed the gift on to Rita’s nephew, Fat Crack, who had done the same, passing the baby along to the next generation—Lani and Delia. It had seemed to Lani then, and still did, that the Elders, Kekelimai, had entrusted the care and keeping of this precious child to new hands, with the expectation—the requirement—that he be kept safe.
Gabe had just turned eight when Lani first became aware of how different the little boy was. Lani’s mother had been dealing with some health issues, and the mental symptoms had been far more troubling than the physical ones. Although Lani and her father never came right out and discussed the situation, they were both convinced that Diana was losing it—that she was drifting into some kind of dementia situation or perhaps starting down the slippery slope into early-onset Alzheimer’s.
The real culprit had been a simple matter of adverse drug interactions, but it was Gabe who had helped Lani understand that Diana was having hallucinations—that she was carrying on long heart-to-heart chats with Andrew Philip Carlisle, the crazed convicted killer who had once tried to murder her and who also happened to be dead. Lani’s dad had always credited her medical skills with sorting out Diana’s situation, but Lani herself knew that it was Gabe—born long after Carlisle had gone to what she hoped was his just reward—who had brought the matter to her attention.
Instinctively being able to suss out something like that was a medicine man kind of thing. For the next three years, Gabe had followed Lani around like a puppy dog. On Tuesdays and Thursdays after school he would come to the hospital’s dialysis unit, where he seemed to function in the dayroom as a pint-sized medicine man, singing the healing chants Lani had taught him and reciting the ancient stories and legends for the patients. Long boring hours in the dialysis unit could be shortened by hearing the stories and legends of I’itoi someone remembered hearing long ago as a child living in one of the villages—in Ge Oithag, Big Fields, or Komlick, Big Flat Place.