Текст книги "Dance of the Bones"

Автор книги: J. A. Jance

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

CHAPTER 12

THE NEXT MORNING COYOTE TOOK the beads and went again to the house of Beautiful Girl and her brother. This time Coyote found the girl with her giwho—her burden basket—ready to go out into the desert and gather plants. She would not even listen to him. She took her basket and left Ban standing there alone.

When Big Man heard this he was very angry. He went to Wind Man—Hewel O’odham—and asked for his help. And so, while Beautiful Girl was alone in the desert, gathering plants, Wind Man came and found her. With a loud whoop, Wind Man gathered the girl up and took her to the top of a very steep mountain that stands all alone in that part of the country—a mountain the Milgahn call Picacho Peak but the Tohono O’odham call Chewagig Mu’uk, Cloud Peak.

Everyone knows, nawoj, my friend, that Picacho Peak is very small, but it is also very steep, so steep that no one has ever climbed it.

In the evening, Beautiful Girl’s brother returned to the house and found it empty. He waited and worried. Finally he went out into the village and told the people that his sister was gone, and the people agreed to help him find her.

The next day the people followed Beautiful Girl’s tracks out into the desert. They found the place where she had stopped to gather plants, and they found her empty burden basket, but that is where her tracks stopped. The people held a council to decide what to do. Coyote came to the council and said that he’d been passing close to Cloud Peak that day and heard the noise of a woman crying. Ban knew that this was very bad trouble because the woman could not climb down.

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 connection to the cartels. But if he was behind this and was directing his brothers to hold her up for more money, he had made a fatal error in thinking that she wasn’t every bit as dangerous as the cartels.

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 flannel shirts, she had handed him to Lani, who had in turn passed him along to Delia.

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.

Lani had taught Gabe that the I’itoi legends in particular were winter-telling tales and were only to be told between the middle of November and the middle of March. Most of the time Gabe was careful to abide by that rule. Sometimes, when it was July and someone who would not live to see another November wanted to hear the story of Old White-Haired Woman or the story of the Peace Smoke, Gabe would tell the story anyway. It didn’t seem to him that I’itoi, the Spirit of Goodness, would mind that in the least.

Only when requested to do so did Gabe visit the rooms of individual patients—the injured, ill, and dying. Even though he had not yet reached cheojthag—manhood—and was not yet a fully grown medicine man, the families of patients told Lani that there were times when having Al Siwani—Baby Medicine Man—visit their loved one was better than having no medicine man at all.

Lani had marveled at how, sitting in quiet hospital rooms and without even having access to her sacred divining crystals, Gabe had often known long before anyone other than the doctors about who would live and who would die. He talked to Lani about those things sometimes, but even then he had instinctively known to keep from mentioning them to the people involved. And when Lani had asked how he knew those things, he could never explain it other than shrugging his shoulders and saying, “I just know.”

Then, for reasons the divining crystals couldn’t or wouldn’t tell her, Gabe had started pulling away. He had stopped coming to the hospital. He had started distancing himself from her. And now, much to Lani’s despair, her connection to Gabe seemed to be severed. He had walked away down the mountain, leaving her behind along with her last-ditch chance to save him from whatever was pulling at him. It was easy, sitting on the mountain, to ascribe what was happening to the Bad People—PaDaj O’odham—who had come up out of the South to steal the Tohono O’odham’s crops and eventually to do battle with I’itoi himself.

So was that what this was all about? Lani wondered. Were the four José brothers with all their family troubles—a dead father and an ailing mother—the cause of all this? Were they somehow a modern-day equivalent of the PaDaj O’odham? And, if so, what did Lani have to do to extricate Gabe from their grasp?

Tossing one more piece of wood onto the fire, Lani slipped into her bedroll. Staring up at the stars, she remembered the story Nana Dahd had told her—the one about the terrible time when Andrew Carlisle, the evil ohb, had captured both Nana Dahd and Lani’s brother, Davy, and held them prisoner in the root cellar. While there, Nana Dahd had summoned I’itoi to help them by singing a chant—a healing chant—speaking in the language of the Tohono O’odham. Lani had heard the chant often enough that she remembered every word, the same way one remembers a cherished lullaby. And it made her smile to know that while the song had been totally opaque to Andrew Carlisle, Davy had heard the words, understood them, and acted upon them:

Do not look at me, little Olhoni.

Do not look at me when I sing to you

So this man will not know we are speaking,

So this evil man will think he is winning.

Do not look at me when I sing, little Olhoni,

But listen to what I say. This man is evil.

This man is the enemy. This man is ohb.

Do not let this frighten you.

Whatever happens in the battle,

We must not let him win.

I am singing a war song for you,

Little Olhoni. I am singing

A hunter’s song—a killer’s song.

I am singing a song to I’itoi,

Asking him to help us and guide us in the battle

So the evil ohb does not win.

Do not look at me, little Olhoni,

Do not look at me when I sing to you.

I must sing this song four times

For all of nature goes in fours.

But when the trouble starts,

You must remember all these things

I have sung to you in this magic song.

You must listen very carefully

And do exactly what I say.

If I tell you to run and hide yourself,

You must run as fast as Wind Man.

Run fast and hide yourself

And do not look back.

Whatever happens, little Olhoni,

You must run and not look back.

Then, as seamlessly as if it were a new track on a much-loved CD, the next war chant returned to her as well, with every word and every nuance intact. And as Lani recalled the words, she was once again inside Betraying Woman’s hidden cavern beneath Ioligam, trapped there with her own personal evil ohb. Mitch Johnson, deputized by Andrew Carlisle to kill her, had been waiting for Quentin Walker—the brother who was not her brother—to return. It was while she and Mitch waited in an ugly, lingering silence that Lani had finally understood what would happen: once Quentin returned, Mitch Johnson would kill them both.

Lani had closed her eyes then, making the darkness of the cavern even darker. And now, sitting outside by the fire, she closed her eyes again. As she did so, all the sensations of that long-ago time came spooling back to her along with the words to the chant. She could smell the sharp, acrid stink of Mitch Johnson’s sweat; she could feel the calming touch of the damp soil against her skin; she could hear, somewhere in the far distance, the tiny drip of water; then suddenly and overhead, she felt the gentle touch of a bat’s wing, ruffling her hair and telling her what she must do:

Oh, little Nanakumal who lives forever in darkness,

Oh, little Nanakumal who lives forever in I’itoi’s sacred cave,

Give me your strength so I will not be frightened,

So I will stay in a safe place where the evil ohb cannot come.

For years Betraying Woman has been here with you,

For years your Bat Strength has kept her safe,

Waiting until I could come and set her free

By smashing her pottery prison against a rocky wall.

Keep me safe now, too, little Nanakumal,

Keep me safe from this new evil ohb.

Teach me to be juhagi—resilient—in the coming battle

So this jiawul—this devil—does not win.

Oh, little Nanakumal who lives forever in darkness,

Whose passing wings changed me into a warrior,

Be with me now as I face this danger.

Protect me in the coming battle and keep me safe.

Even as Lani had sung those words long ago, with Mitch Johnson listening and not comprehending, she had realized that the chant had contained words that were hers and not hers, all at the same time. Her people believed in singing for power, and her words had come unbidden from some ancient magic place, the same place Rita Antone had tapped into as she sang her warrior chant to Davy Ladd even longer ago. It was no surprise that the words gave Lani comfort now—the same kind of comfort and strength they had given her in that earlier time. Somehow she knew that in I’itoi’s world, those two other times and this time were all the same.

Realizing she was growing drowsy, Lani looked at the fire and resisted the temptation to add another log. The fire had burned long enough that there would be plenty of coals to last until morning. Then she snuggled into her bedroll. The ground may have been hard beneath her body, but she was too tired to notice.

CHAPTER 13

THE BROTHER OFFERED TO PAY I’itoi for saving his sister, but all the Spirit of Goodness asked for was a bobcat skin to hold arrows. Then Beautiful Girl and her brother went back home. Before many days passed, Coyote came once more to the home of Beautiful Girl with another message from Big Man, saying that the girl must marry Big Man. This time the brother was in the house and heard what Coyote said. The brother told his sister to pay no attention to that no-account Coyote and to get rid of him because he might have mange.

This made Coyote very angry. He said that if Beautiful Girl did not marry Big Man, then the man would come along with the people from his village and kill both Beautiful Girl and her brother. Then Coyote went away.

The brother and sister talked things over. Beautiful Girl said she did not want to marry Big Man. She said she did not want to marry anyone. She said that if trouble came, she would run away to the Eastern Sky—Si’al tahgio Kahchm. She said that she would stay up there in the Eastern Sky and only show herself to those who rose early in the morning to do their work. She said she would smile on the people who rose early and make them smile in return.

The brother, too, said he would rather live in the air, but he said that sometimes he would like to come back to the earth. He said he would like to come back with a bounce and a shake so people would know he was there.

When Coyote went back to the village and told his story, Big Man was very, very angry. He called all his friends together. The next day Big Man and his friends took their bows and arrows and went looking for Beautiful Girl and her brother. The girl saw them coming and tried to warn her brother, but he didn’t seem to care very much.

As Big Man and his friends came closer, Beautiful Girl saw there was no hope, so she hurried off to the Eastern Sky just as she had said she would do.

THE RATTLE OF AUTOMATIC GUNFIRE echoing across the landscape startled Lani awake. The rest of the desert had fallen eerily quiet. Lani held her breath, listening, but she wasn’t the only one who sensed danger. So did the Little People—Ali-chu’uchum O’odham—and the insects fell quiet as well. It was oppressively dark. The fire had died down, and the moon had crossed over to the back of Ioligam, leaving that part of the mountain entirely in shadow.

Lani had heeded her husband’s advice. She had come on the campout armed and had slept with her Glock under her bedroll. Retrieving it, she stood up and crept over to the edge of the clearing. Concealed by the sheltering manzanita, she peered down at the desert below. For a time—she wasn’t sure how long—nothing happened. A long time later another blast of distant gunfire made its way up the mountain.

Lani darted to her backpack and dug through it until she found her cell phone. Although she had confiscated Gabe’s phone, she had kept her own, turned off and tucked securely in an outside pocket. It seemed to take forever for the device to finally come online, but when it did, there was no signal, as in zero. She tried sending a text to Dan, but it bounced back as undelivered. The population in this part of the reservation was too scarce to warrant the building of private cell towers, and the tribe couldn’t afford to install them, either.

Shaking as much from fear as from the cold, Lani wrapped the bedroll around her shoulders and returned to her lookout point. Even though the phone hadn’t worked, the bright light from the screen had momentarily left her night blind. Once she could see again, she spotted a pinprick of light, bouncing here and there in a back-and-forth movement across the desert landscape far below.

In the dark, Lani couldn’t be sure, but she suspected the action was in the neighborhood of Rattlesnake Skull charco. Pulling her eyes from the moving light—a flashlight, presumably—she stared off across the valley at a place where the lights from a single vehicle driving westbound on Highway 86 had just rounded the low-lying hill a mile or so from the reservation boundary.

Lani knew that a permanent Border Patrol checkpoint was situated another mile east of the hill, just before the bridge over Brawley Wash. She had heard the gunfire quite clearly, and she knew that sound travels a long way on a still desert night. But she also knew from things Dan had said that the checkpoint guys generally spent the long chilly nights huddled around a space heater inside their guard shack with their music turned to the max. The fact that there were no red lights flashing on the approaching vehicle indicated that this was most likely a private one rather than some kind of patrol car. Or, if it did happen to be an official vehicle—Border Patrol, Law and Order, or Highway Patrol—it was someone doing a routine patrol rather than responding to a specific incident.

As she watched, the flashlight was extinguished. A moment later, a pair of headlights bloomed in the desert on what she was now sure was the near side of Coleman Road, the Rattlesnake Skull village side of the road. She watched, puzzled, as the headlights seemed to move backward along what had to be Coleman Road. When the vehicle reached the intersection with the highway, she thought at first that it was turning right to head into Tucson. That was exactly what Lani wanted to see happen. She glanced at her watch. The illumined dial said 4:16. If the driver turned right and headed into Tucson, the cameras at the checkpoint would maintain an exact record of who had passed that way at that hour of the night.

Unfortunately, the vehicle backed onto the highway, then changed gears and drove in the opposite direction. The whine of rubber on blacktop as the vehicle gathered speed carried across the desert to Lani’s mountain perch. She watched and listened until first the headlights and finally the taillights were obscured by the bulk of Ioligam itself. Long after the lights disappeared, she could still hear the whine of tires. So he was driving in a forward gear now, but he had driven for the better part of a mile in reverse. Why would he have done that? Why?

As the sound faded, so did Lani’s immediate sense of danger. Whoever had been down there shooting off a weapon was gone now. She staggered back to the fire. As she sat down to warm herself, she was filled with a smothering sense of foreboding.

Something was terribly wrong. That sense had been with her since she was first jolted awake, but it was only as the fire flared up with newly added wood that she allowed that terrible misgiving to turn into a cohesive thought. Gabe! What about Gabe? When he stormed off the mountain, he must have passed that way, but surely that was hours ago. He couldn’t possibly have been involved in whatever had just happened down there. Surely not.

Shortly after the sounds from the one vehicle disappeared, Lani heard another one approaching and slowing. She stood up again and peered down the mountain as this new vehicle turned onto Coleman Road. Searchlights mounted on the roof sprang to life and probed the surrounding landscape. It seemed to her that some of the rays were pointed toward the same spot from which the gunfire had come, but by then the bad guys were gone. There was nothing left to see. In any case, the unsuspecting vehicle continued southward to Coleman Road.

With nothing else to be done, Lani heated a pot of water and made herself a cup of prickly pear tea. Then she sat with her trembling hands cupped around the metal cup, hoping the heat from that would help settle her. At last, seeking reassurance, she reached for her medicine basket.

Her first inclination was to open the pouch that held the wiw, the sacred tobacco, but she didn’t. Her throat, unaccustomed to smoking, was still raw from the night before. Instead, she located her divining crystals. Had things gone differently that night, she might have given them to Gabe. Since they were still in her possession, she spilled them into the palm of her hand and then, one by one, she held them up, peering at the flickering flame through each hunk of crystal.

She wasn’t sure if what she saw was in the crystal itself or if it was only in her mind’s eye, but it was the same image she had seen in the sacred smoke—a woman, a Milgahn woman who, despite being Anglo and not susceptible to Staying Sicknesses, was also a Dangerous Object.

Lani understood this even though she couldn’t explain it. And without knowing what kind of Dangerous Object the woman was, it was difficult to tell what kind of treatment might be required.

And so, warmed by the fire, and with Morning Star gleaming in the east, Lani closed her fist around the stones and began to sing:

Oh, I’itoi who is also Spirit of Goodness and Elder Brother,

Please hear me as your daughter calls to you

Asking for your help. A dangerous object is loose in the world.

A dangerous object with silver hair and white skin.

I do not know who this woman is, but she is a danger,

A danger to a boy named Gabe Ortiz who is the son of my heart.

Help me to see my way to find this evil woman.

Help me understand why she is a danger.

Help me to protect Gabe, Elder Brother,

In the same way Nana Dahd protected Davy,

In the same way Betraying Woman protected me.

We need your help so the ghostly woman does not win.

As the sun came up over the distant Tucson Mountains in the east, Lani sang the song over and over, always in sets of four, because four is a magic number all by itself; because all of nature goes in fours.

“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU mean, one of them got away?” Ava demanded into the phone. “How is that even possible?”

“Sorry. I was struggling with Paul, and the youngest one got loose. I’m looking for him now.”

“Sorry my ass! You should be way more than sorry. What about the diamonds? Did you find them?”

“Not yet, but once I catch up with Tim . . .”

“He’s what, twelve years old? Thirteen? You just let him take off and now you can’t find him?”

“I know which way he went. I’ll find him.”

“You’d better,” Ava said. “I want my diamonds back, and I want that damned kid taken out. Those asshole Indians stick together like dog shit on a shoe.”

“What about Max?”

“What about him?”

“Once he hears about what’s happened . . .”

“Don’t worry about Max. You take care of the kid and retrieve the diamonds. I already told you, I’ll handle Max.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the man said. “I hear you loud and clear.”

Bristling with anger, Ava closed the phone. She heard the nurse out in the kitchen, banging around, starting another pot of coffee, and fixing Harold’s breakfast. Ava didn’t usually put in an appearance until all that had been handled. Right now, she needed to make sure the Max José problem would be handled sooner rather than later.

The crew she had in Florence had come in handy on more than one occasion. One was a guard; the rest were inmates—lifers, mostly, with nothing more to lose. When they did a job for her, she made sure that all payments went to family members who were far enough removed from the action that nothing could be traced back to the actual doers or traced back to her, either.

Ava’s operation was small enough not to attract attention from the cartels, and deadly enough that people usually did exactly as they were told. As for the guy who’d just called her? He was a dead man walking even if he didn’t know it yet. Once he recovered her diamonds, he’d be gone, too. The desert was a big place with plenty of hidey-holes where dumped bodies would never be found.

Ava finished her calls, knowing she’d done all she could for the time being, then she went back to bed, hoping to grab a little more sleep. It was going to be a busy day.

SOME TIME LATER, AFTER SUNRISE, Lani was startled out of her contemplations by yet another gunshot—a single one this time. Once again, she peered off the mountain, scanning the desert for any signs of life. No vehicles were visible. Was this related to what had happened earlier? In the silence that followed the gunshot there was no way to tell.

Leo Ortiz arrived a couple of hours later, at ten past eight. By then Lani had packed up her stuff and Gabe’s as well. She’d also doused the fire with the remainder of her water and carefully buried the ashes. She heard Leo’s powerful pickup growling its way up the mountain long before the man himself appeared outside the clearing.

Lani had considered hiking down the trail to meet him, but in the end, she simply sat beside the backpacks and waited. When Leo finally showed up, he was panting with exertion. He looked around the clearing and frowned. “Where’s Gabe?” he asked.

That was not the question Lani was expecting. Her heart fell. Her stomach clenched. “Isn’t he home?”

“He wasn’t when we got home this morning. Why isn’t he here?”

“He got mad at me and left,” Lani admitted. “He said he was going home.”

“You let him walk off just like that?” Leo demanded accusingly. “You should have called. It was just a dance. I would have left there in a minute to come get him.”

Lani didn’t lie and claim she had tried to call. Instead, she held up her useless cell phone. “No signal,” she said.

“There’s a radio in the truck,” Leo said. “I can call home on that.”

The trip down to the truck was made in heavy silence. Leo was naturally quiet, but he was also angry, and Lani knew it. As for Lani? If Gabe wasn’t home, if he had been the target of some of those gunshots . . . She couldn’t bear to consider it.