Текст книги "Dance of the Bones"

Автор книги: J. A. Jance

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DEDICATION

For S-wegi A’an, Red Feather

CONTENTS

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

About the Author

Also by J. A. Jance

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

SOZA CANYON, ARIZONA

MARCH 1970

AMOS WARREN WALKED WITH HIS shoulders stooped and with his eyes and mind focused on the uneven ground beneath his feet. The winter rains had been more than generous and this part of the Sonoran Desert, Soza Canyon on the far eastern edge of the Rincon Mountains, was alive with flowers. Scrawny, suntanned, and weathered, Amos was more than middle-aged but still remarkably fit. Even so, the sixty or seventy pounds he carried in the sturdy pack on his shoulders weighed him down and had him feeling his sixty-plus years.

He had started the day by picking up several top-notch arrowheads. He slipped them into the pockets of his jeans rather than risk damaging them as the load in the pack increased over the course of the day. The one he considered to be the best of the lot he hid away inside his wallet, congratulating himself on the fact that his day was off to such a great start. Over the course of the morning, he located several geodes. The best of those was a bowling-ball-sized treasure that would fetch a pretty penny once it joined the growing collection of goods that he and his foster son, John Lassiter, would offer for sale at the next available gem and mineral show.

Assuming, of course, that John ever spoke to him again, Amos thought ruefully. The knock-down, drag-out fight the two men had gotten into the night before had been a doozy, and recalling it had cast a pall over Amos’s entire day. He had known John Lassiter for decades, and this was the first time he had ever raised a hand to the younger man. The fact that they had duked it out over a girl, of all things, only added to Amos’s chagrin.

Ava Martin, Amos thought, what a conniving little whore! She was good-looking and knew it. She was a tiny blond bombshell type with just the right curves where they counted. Amos didn’t trust the bitch any further than he could throw her.

His next thought was all about John. The poor guy was crazy about Ava—absolutely crazy. As far as John was concerned, Ava was the greatest thing since sliced bread. In fact, he was even talking about buying an engagement ring, for God’s sake!

As for Amos? He knew exactly who Ava was and what she was all about. She wasn’t anything close to decent marriage material. He had noticed the wicked little two-timer batting her eyes and flirting with John’s best friend, Ken—all behind John’s back, of course. And two days ago, when John had been out of town, she’d gone so far as to come by his house—forty-five minutes from town—where she had tried putting the moves on Amos.

That was the last straw. Amos was decades older than Ava. He had no illusions about his being physically attractive to her. No, she wasn’t looking to get laid; Ava was after the main chance.

She knew John and Amos were partners who split everything fifty-fifty. She probably understood that, for the most part, Amos was the brains of the outfit while John was the brawn. Amos was the one who knew where to go seeking to find the hidden treasures the unyielding desert would reveal to only the most persistent of searchers. He knew what was worth taking home and what wasn’t. John was the packhorse who carried the stuff and loaded it into the back of the truck and who carried it into the storage unit.

When it came to selling their finds, Amos had years’ worth of contacts at his disposal, all of them listed in his little black book. He had amassed a whole catalog of gem, mineral, and artifact dealers, some aboveboard and others not so much. He also knew which of those might be interested in which items. Amos did the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing while John handled direct sales at booths in the various venues. John was a good-looking young hunk, which was always a good bet when it came to face-to-face interactions.

Amos suspected that John had gotten into his cups and talked too much about what they did and how much money they brought in, something Amos regarded as nobody’s business but their own. He was convinced that was what Ava Martin was really after—the shortest route to the money. Amos had sent the little witch packing, and he’d had no intention of telling John about it, but Ava had gotten the drop on him. She had told John all about their little set-to. The problem was, in Ava’s version of the story, Amos had been the one putting the make on her. With predictable results.

The previous evening, Amos had gone to El Barrio, a run-down bar on Speedway on the east side of I-10. Years earlier, El Barrio had been within walking distance of the house where he had lived. When developers came through and bought up that whole block of houses, Amos had taken his wad of money and paid cash for a five-acre place up in Golder Canyon, on the far back side of Catalina. The house was a tin-roofed adobe affair that had started out long ago as a stage stop. In town, John and Amos had been roommates. The “cabin,” as Amos liked to call it, was strictly a one-man show, so John had chosen to stay on in town—closer to the action—and had rented a place in the old neighborhood.

When Amos had gone to El Barrio that night, he had done so deliberately, knowing it was most likely still John’s favorite hangout. Amos’s mind was made up. He went there for no other reason than to have it out with John. Either Ava went or John did. Amos had been sitting at the bar, tucked in among the other twenty or so happy-hour regulars and sipping his way through that evening’s boilermaker, when John had stormed in through the front door.

“You bastard!” the younger man muttered under his breath as he slid uninvited onto an empty stool next to Amos.

John was hot tempered, and Amos knew he was spoiling for a fight—something Amos preferred to avoid. He had come here hoping to talk things out rather than duking them out.

He took a careful sip of his drink. “Good afternoon to you, too,” he responded calmly. “Care for a beer?”

“I don’t want a beer from you, or anything else, either. You keep telling me that Ava’s bad news and claiming she’s not good enough for me, but the first time my back is turned, you try getting her into the sack!”

“That what Ava told you?” Amos asked.

“It’s not just what she told me,” John declared, his voice rising. “It’s what happened.”

“What if I told you Ava was a liar?”

“In that case, how about we step outside so I can beat the crap out of you?” John demanded, rising to his feet.

Looking in the mirror behind the bar, Amos saw the reflection of John as he was now—a beefy man seven inches taller than Amos, thirty pounds heavier, and three decades younger, with a well-deserved reputation as a brawler and an equally well-deserved moniker, Big Bad John. Amos’s problem was that, at the same time he saw that image, he was remembering another one as well—one of a much younger kid, freckle faced and missing his two front teeth. That was how John—Johnny back then—had looked when Amos had first laid eyes on him.

Amos knew that in a fair fight between them, outside the bar, he wouldn’t stand a chance; he’d be dog meat. John may not have been tougher, but he was younger, taller, and heavier. By the time a fight was over, most likely the cops would be called. One or the other of them or maybe both would be hauled off to jail and charged with assault. Amos had already done time, and he didn’t want anything like that to happen to John. That in a nutshell took the fair-fight option off the table. What Amos needed was a one– or two-punch effort that put a stop to the whole affair before it had a chance to get started.

As the quarrel escalated, tension crept like a thick fog throughout the room, and the rest of the bar went dead quiet.

“I don’t want to fight you, kid,” Amos said in a conciliatory tone while calmly pushing his stool away from the bar. No one noticed how he carefully slipped his right hand into the hip pocket of his worn jeans, and no one saw the same hand ease back out into the open again with something clenched in his fist. “Come on, son,” he added. “Take a load off, sit down, and have a beer.”

“I am not your son!” John growled. “I never was, and I’m not having a beer with you, either, you son of a bitch. We’re done, Amos. It’s over. Get some other poor stooge to be your pack mule.”

Big Bad John Lassiter never saw the punch coming. Amos’s powerful right hook caught him unawares and unprepared. The blow broke John’s cheekbone and sent him reeling backward, dropping like a rock on the sawdust-covered floor. Big John landed, bloodied face up and knocked cold. In the shocked silence that followed, with all eyes focused on John, no one in the room noticed Amos Warren slip the brass knuckles back into his pocket. No, it hadn’t been a fair fight, but at least it was over without any danger of it turning into a full-scale brawl.

As John started coming to and tried to sit up, several people hurried to help him. Amos turned back to the bartender. “No need to call the cops,” Amos said. “Next round’s on me.”

As far as the bartender was concerned, that was good news. He didn’t want any trouble, either. “Right,” he said, nodding in agreement. “Coming up.”

It took several people to get John back on his feet and work-wise. Someone handed him a bar napkin to help stem the flow of blood that was still pouring from the cut on his cheek, but the wad of paper didn’t do much good. The damage was done. His shirt was already a bloody mess.

“See you tomorrow then?” Amos called after John, watching him in the mirror as he staggered unsteadily toward the door.

“Go piss up a rope, Amos Warren,” John muttered in reply. “I’ll see you in hell first.”

That was the last thing John had said to him—I’ll see you in hell. They’d quarreled before over the years, most recently several times about Ava, but this was the first time they’d ever come to blows. In past instances, a few days after the dustup, one or the other of them would get around to apologizing, and that would be the end of it. Amos hoped the same thing would happen this time around, although with Ava standing on the sidelines fanning the flames, it might not be that easy to patch things up.

Lost in thought, Amos had been walking generally westward, following the course of a dry creek bed at the bottom of the canyon, some of it sandy and some littered with boulders. During monsoon season, flash floods carrying boulders, tree trunks, and all kinds of other debris would roar downstream. As the water level subsided and the sand settled, there was no telling what would be left behind. In the course of the day, Amos had seen plenty of evidence—spoor, hoof prints, and paw prints—that indicated the presence of wildlife—deer, javelina, and even what Amos assumed to be a black bear. But there was no indication of any recent human incursions.

At a point where the canyon walls narrowed precipitously, Amos was forced off the bank and into the creek bed itself. And that was when he saw it—a small hunk of reddish-brown pottery sticking up out of the sand. Dropping his heavy pack with a thud, Amos knelt on the sand.

It took several minutes of careful digging with his bare fingers for him to unearth the treasure. Much to his amazement, the tiny pot was still in one piece. How it could have been washed down the stream bed and deposited on a sandy strand of high ground without being smashed to bits was one of the wonders of the universe. Amos suspected that the sand-infused water of a flash flood had buoyed it up before the water had drained out of the sand, leaving the pot on solid ground.

Once it was free of the sand, Amos pulled out his reading glasses, then held the piece close enough to examine it. He realized at once that it was far too small to be a cooking pot. Then he noticed that a faded design of some kind had been etched into the red clay before the pot was fired. A more detailed examination revealed the image of what appeared to be an owl perched on top of a tortoise. The presence of the decorative etching on the pot along with its relative size meant that the piece was most likely ceremonial in nature.

Still holding the tiny but perfect pot in his hands, Amos leaned back on his heels and considered the piece’s possible origins. He wasn’t someone who had a degree in anthropology, but he had spent a lifetime finding and selling Native American artifacts from all over vast stretches of Arizona’s desert landscapes.

Years of experience told him the pot was most likely Papago in origin. Sometimes known as the Tohono O’odham, the Papagos had lived for thousands of years in the vast deserts surrounding what was now Tucson. This particular spot, on the far southeastern flanks of the Rincon Mountains, overlooked the San Pedro Valley. It was on the easternmost edge of the Papagos’ traditional territory and deep into the part of the world once controlled and dominated by the Apache. Had a stray band of Tohono O’odham come here to camp or hunt and left this treasure behind? Amos wondered. More likely, the tiny artifact had been a trophy of some kind, spoils of war carried off by a marauding band of Apache.

Since the pot had clearly been washed downstream, there was a possibility that a relatively undisturbed archaeological site was sitting undiscovered farther up the canyon. There were several professors at the U of A who would pay Amos good money as a finder’s fee so they could go in and do a properly documented excavation. As to the pot itself? Regardless of where it was from, Amos knew he had found a remarkable piece, one that was inherently valuable. The curators at the Heard Museum would jump at the chance to have a whole undamaged pot for their southwestern collection. Amos knew that most of the pots on display in the museum had been pieced back together, and there was a reason for that.

The Tohono O’odham believed that the pot maker’s spirit remained trapped inside her pots. As a consequence, when the pot maker died, tradition demanded that all her pots be smashed to pieces. So why was this one still whole? That made the theory of it being stolen goods all the more likely. Apaches would have no reason to adhere to Tohono O’odham customs. Why free a dead enemy’s spirit? What good would that do for you?

Wanting to protect his treasure, Amos put the pot down and then tore a strip of material from the tail of his ragged flannel work shirt. The material was old and thin enough that it gave way without a struggle. He wrapped the pot in the soft cloth. Then, stowing the protected pot as the topmost item in his bag, he shouldered his load and headed back to the truck. It was early afternoon, but he wanted to be back on the far side of Redington Pass early enough that the setting sun wouldn’t be directly in his eyes.

Making his way back down the stream bed, Amos kept close watch on his footing, avoiding loose rocks wherever possible. With the heavily laden pack on his back, even a small fall might result in a twisted ankle or a broken bone, and one of those could be serious business when he was out here all by himself with no way of letting anyone know exactly where he was or summoning help. And rocks weren’t the only danger.

On this late spring afternoon, rattlesnakes emerging from hibernation were out in force. In fact, halfway back to his truck, a diamondback, almost invisible on the sandy surroundings, slithered past him when he stopped long enough to wipe away sweat that was running into his eyes. That pause had been a stroke of luck for both Amos and the snake. If left undisturbed, snakes didn’t bother him. Most of the time, they went their way while Amos went his. But if he’d stepped on the creature unawares, all bets would have been off. One way or the other, the snake would have been dead and, despite his heavy hiking boots, Amos might well have been bitten in the process.

Amos’s lifetime search for gemstones, minerals, fossils, and artifacts had put him in mountains like this for decades. Watching the snake slide silently and safely off into the sparse underbrush served as a reminder that snakes, javelina, bobcats, deer, black bears, and jaguars had been the original inhabitants of this still untamed place. Humans, including both the Tohono O’odham and the Apache who had roamed these arid lands for thousands of years, were relatively new and probably somewhat unwelcome intruders. White men, including Amos himself, were definitely Johnny-come-latelies.

Reshouldering his pack, Amos allowed as how he was missing John’s presence about then. These days, Amos was finding it harder to go back downhill than it was to climb up. And with the added weight in the pack? Well, he would have appreciated having someone to carry half the load. John may have said they were quits, but as far as Amos was concerned, they were still partners, and they would split everything fifty-fifty.

And there he was doing it again—thinking about John. An hour or so after the altercation that night, when Amos had finally left the bar, he might have looked as though he hadn’t a care in the world, but he did. His heart was heavy. Having won the battle, he feared he had lost the war.

Amos and John were no kind of blood relations, but they were peas in a pod. Hot tempered? Check. Too fast with the fists? Check. Didn’t care to listen to reason? Check. Forty years earlier, Amos had hooked up with a girl named Hattie Smith who had been the same kind of bad news for him as Ava was for John. A barroom fight over Hattie the evening of Amos’s twenty-first birthday had resulted in an involuntary manslaughter charge that had sent Amos to the slammer for five to ten. He recognized that there was a lot of the old pot-and-kettle routine going on here.

Yes, Amos had gotten his head screwed on straight in the course of those six years in the pen. He had read his way through a tattered copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that he found in the prison library, giving himself an education that would have compared favorably to any number of college degrees. Even so, he didn’t want John to go through a similar school of hard knocks. He wanted to protect the younger man from all that because John Lassiter was the closest thing to a son Amos Warren would ever have.

John had grown up next door to Amos’s family home. They had lived in a pair of dilapidated but matching houses on a dirt street on what was then Tucson’s far west side. Amos lived there because he had inherited the house from his mother. Once out of prison, he had neither the means nor the ambition to go looking for something better. John’s family rented the place next door because it was cheap, and cheap was the best they could do.

To Amos’s way of thinking, John’s parents had been little more than pond scum. His father was a drunk. His mother was a whore who regularly locked the poor kid outside in the afternoons while she entertained her various gentleman callers. On one especially rainy winter’s day, Amos had been outraged to see John, a mostly toothless eight-year-old kid, sitting on the front porch, shivering in the cold. He’d been shoved outside in his bare feet wearing nothing but a ragged pair of pajamas.

Amos had ventured out in the yard and stood on the far side of the low rock wall that separated them. “What’re you doing?” Amos had asked.

“Waiting,” came the disconsolate answer. “My mom’s busy.”

For months Amos had seen the cars coming and going in the afternoons while old man Lassiter wasn’t at home. Amos had understood all too well what was really going on. He also knew what it was like to be locked out of a house. Back when he was a kid the same thing had happened to him time and again. In his case it had been so Amos’s father could beat the crap out of Amos’s mother in relative peace and quiet. What was going on in the Lassiter household may have been a slightly different take on the matter, but it was close enough.

Without a word, Amos had gone back inside. When he reappeared, he came back to the fence armed with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

“Hungry?” he asked.

Without further prompting, the boy had scampered barefoot across the muddy yard. Grabbing the sandwich, he gobbled it down.

“My name’s Amos. What’s yours?”

“John,” the boy mumbled through a mouthful of peanut butter.

“Have you ever played Chinese checkers?”

John shook his head. “What’s Chinese checkers?”

“Come on,” Amos said. “I’ll teach you.”

He had hefted the kid up over the low wall built of volcanic rock, shifted him onto his hip, and carried him to his own house. That had been their beginning. Had Amos Warren been some kind of pervert, it could have been the beginning of something very bad, but it wasn’t. Throughout John’s chaotic childhood, Amos Warren had been the only fixed point in the poor kid’s life, his only constant. John Lassiter Sr. died in a drunk-driving incident when his son was in fourth grade. By the time John was in high school, his mother, Sandra, had been through three more husbands, each one a step worse than his immediate predecessor.

Despite his mother’s singular lack of parenting skills and due to the fact that the kid ate more meals at Amos’s house than he did at home, John grew like crazy. More than six feet tall by the time he was in seventh grade, John would have been a welcome addition to any junior high or high school athletic program, but Sandra had insisted that she didn’t believe in “team sports.” What she really didn’t believe in was going to the trouble of getting her son signed up, paying for physicals or uniforms, or going to and from games or practices. Amos suspected that she didn’t want John involved in anything that might have interfered with her barfly social life and late-afternoon assignations, which were now conducted somewhere away from home, leaving John on his own night after night.

Amos knew that the good kids were the ones who were involved in constructive activities after school. The bad kids were mostly left to their own devices. It came as no surprise to Amos that John ended up socializing with the baddies. By the time the boy hit high school, he had too much time on his hands and a bunch of juvie-bound friends.

As a kid, Amos had earned money for Saturday afternoon matinees in downtown Tucson by scouring the roadsides and local teenager party spots for discarded pop bottles, which he had turned over to Mr. Yee, the old man who ran the tiny grocery store on the corner. When Amos happened to come across some pieces of broken Indian pottery, Mr. Yee had been happy to take those off his hands, too, along with Amos’s first-ever arrowhead. From then on, the old Chinaman had been willing to buy whatever else Amos was able to scrounge up.

Once Amos got out of prison, he discovered there weren’t many employment options available for paroled felons. As a result, he had returned to his onetime hobby of prowling his surroundings in search of treasure. He knew the desert flatlands like he knew the backs of his own hands, and he knew the mountains too, the rugged ranges that marched across the lower-lying desert floor like so many towering chess pieces scattered across a vast flat board—the Rincons and the Catalinas, the Tortolitas, the Huachucas, the Whetstones, the Dragoons, the Peloncillos, and the Chiricahuas.

Now, though, with the benefit of his store of prison-gained knowledge, Amos was far more educated about what he found. He was able to locate plenty of takers for those items without the need for someone like Mr. Yee to act as middleman. He earned a decent if modest living and was content with his solitary life. Then John Lassiter got into trouble and was sent to juvie. Amos, claiming to be the kid’s most recent stepfather, had bailed him out and taken him home. From then on, that’s where John had lived—in the extra room at Amos’s house rather than next door with his mother.

By then Amos could see that the die was cast. John wasn’t going to go to college. If he was ever going to amount to anything, Amos would have to show him how. From then on, Amos set out to teach John what he knew. Every weekend and during the long broiling summers, John went along with Amos on his desert scavenger hunts. Most of the time John made himself useful by carrying whatever Amos found. Nevertheless, he was an apt pupil. Over time he became almost as good at finding stuff as Amos was, and between them their unofficial partnership made a reasonably good living.

Not wanting to attract attention to any of his special hunting grounds, Amos usually parked his jeep a mile at least from any intended target. This time, he had left the vehicle hidden in a grove of mesquite well outside the mouth of the canyon. Approaching the spot where he’d left the truck, Amos caught a tiny whiff of cigarette smoke floating in the air.

John was a chain smoker—something else the two men argued about constantly, bickering like an old married couple. This time, however, Amos’s spirits lifted slightly as soon as his nostrils caught wind of the smoke. This out-of-the-way spot was a place he and John visited often. Maybe the kid had come to his senses after all and followed him here. Maybe it was time to apologize and let bygones be bygones, and if John wanted Ava Martin in his life, so be it.

Once inside the grove, Amos looked around and saw no sign of John or of his vehicle, either. That was hardly surprising. Maybe he had chosen some other place to park. There was always a chance John had gone out to do some scavenging of his own.

Amos turned his attention to the pack, unshouldering it carefully and settling it into the bed of the truck. He reached inside the pack, and his searching fingers located the bundle of wadded-up shirttail. Feeling through the thin fabric, he was relieved to find that the pot was still in one piece.

A new puff of smoke wafted past him. That was when he sensed something else, something incongruous underlying the smell of burning cigarette—a hint of perfume. He turned and was dismayed to see Ava standing a mere five feet away, holding a gun pointed at Amos’s chest.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded. “Where’s John?”

“Don’t move,” she warned. “I know how to use this thing.”

“Where’s John?” Amos repeated. “How did you even know to come here?”

“John brought me here several times. You know, for picnics and such. He told me this was where you’d be today.”

Outrage boiled in Amos’s heart. John had brought Ava to this very special hunting ground, one Amos had shared with no one other than John?

The depth of John’s betrayal was breathtaking. Amos took a step forward. “Why, you little bitch . . . ,” he began, but he never had a chance to finish his threat.

Ava had told him the truth. She really did know how to use the weapon in her hand. The first bullet caught him clean in the heart. Amos Warren was dead before he hit the ground. The second and third bullets—the unnecessary ones? Those she fired just for good measure, simply because she could. And those were what the prosecutor would later label as overkill and a sign of rage when it came time to try John Lassiter for first-degree murder.