“Okay then,” Micah Duarte said. “Let’s go home.”

San Diego, California

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 9:02 p.m.

59º Fahrenheit

“N ine-one-one Emergency. What are you reporting?”

The woman on the other end of the line sounded nervous and uncertain. Louise Maynard was accustomed to that. Ten years into doing the job, Louise was used to prying the necessary information out of whomever was calling.

“It’s my sister,” the woman said shakily.

“Name?” Louise asked.

“My name or my sister’s?” the woman asked.

“Both,” Louise told her.

“My name is Corrine Lapin,” she said. “My sister’s name is Esther, Esther Southard. She lives in Thousand Oaks.”

The caller couldn’t see it, but by then Louise was shaking her head in frustration. “Excuse me, ma’am, but you’ve called the emergency communications center in San Diego.”

“I know,” Corrine said. “That’s because I’m in San Diego. Yesterday was my birthday, and Esther didn’t call. She always calls on my birthday. I’m probably just being silly, but I’m worried that something is wrong.”

As far as Louise was concerned, calling because someone has missed your birthday wasn’t exactly like calling 911 to report that your fries at McDonald’s were served cold, but it was close.

“This line is for emergency calls only.”

“But it is an emergency,” Corrine insisted. “I was afraid if I tried calling the Thousand Oaks Police Department that they’d just blow me off.”

Louise understood that Corrine might well be right. After all, all 911 operators weren’t created equal.

“So what’s going on?” Louise asked.

“There’s no answer at Esther’s house,” Corrine said hurriedly. “And I’ve tried calling her cell, too. At first the calls kept going directly to her voice mail. Now it says that her mailbox is full, and she hasn’t called me back.”

“Maybe she’s just busy,” Louise suggested.

The caller immediately rejected that idea. “She sent me a text message on Monday saying that she and her husband were taking the kids and going away for a few days. She said they’d be driving up through Yosemite, but I’m worried something has happened to them. Maybe they’re lying in a ditch somewhere. Esther is like superglued to her iPhone. She doesn’t go anywhere without it.”

Louise had heard lots of wild things in her years as an emergency operator, and she had developed an instinct for what was bogus and what wasn’t. This sounded real.

“Give me your sister’s address,” she said now. “I’ll contact Thousand Oaks PD and have them look into it.”

“Thank you,” Corrine said. “I’m sure everything is fine. Esther will probably be mad at me for pushing panic buttons, but things have been so tough for them lately. Her husband, Jon, lost his job. She was afraid the bank was going to foreclose on their house.”

Nodding, Louise typed that information into her computer as well. The story was sounding more and more plausible by the moment.

“Why don’t you give me your contact information,” she said pleasantly to Corrine. “Just in case the responding officers need to get back in touch with you.”

When Corrine hung up a minute or so later, Louise could hear the relief in her voice, but Louise had a bad feeling about that. She suspected that Corrine Lapin’s relief wouldn’t last very long. Job losses and home foreclosures were up all over California. So were cases of murder and suicide.

With a click of her mouse, Louise passed Corrine’s information along to her 911 counterparts in Thousand Oaks. That done, she knew the situation was out of her hands. Unless a case made it into the local media, Louise never knew about what happened later, and that was just as well.

Not knowing all the gory details was what made it possible for her to do her job. Otherwise she would have been paralyzed every time she took a new call.

Yes, Louise Maynard was far better off not knowing about what had happened to Corrine Lapin’s sister Esther because she had a hunch that whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good.

Sells, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

Sunday, June 7, 2009, 3:10 a.m.

65º Fahrenheit

Dan heard the thump, thump, thump of the approaching helicopter rotors. The familiar racket was enough to rouse him out of a restless sleep. For a moment he was back in Iraq, reaching for his weapons, bracing for action. Then he realized where he was-in a hospital room in Sells, Arizona, with a little orphaned Indian girl named Angie sleeping peacefully in the hospital bed beside his chair.

As the sound of the arriving helicopter jarred him awake, he forced his stiff body upright and sprinted toward the door and down the hall. Bozo was fearless about almost everything but not about helicopters. Suicide bombers didn’t scare him. Exploding IEDs didn’t bother him, either. His sensitive nose was able to sort out the presence of explosives, so he knew they were there and he was able to warn Dan.

Helicopters, on the other hand, could drop out of the sky toward them with no advance warning. One had done so when they’d been out on patrol. It was brought down by a handheld missile launcher, and it had fallen to earth only a few yards from where Dan and Bozo had been on patrol, killing both crew members on board.

As Dan bounded out the front door of the hospital, he saw the medevac helicopter landing in a far corner of the parking lot. He could also hear Bozo. Confined in the Expedition, the dog was on full alert and barking frantically. As Dan made for his vehicle, he caught sight of a patient being wheeled toward the helicopter.

Dan opened the door and Bozo leaped out, crashing into Dan in the process and almost knocking him over. The dog continued to bark, warning everyone within hearing range of what he perceived as a dire threat.

“It’s okay, Bozo,” Dan said, catching the dog by his collar, holding him, and calming the terrified animal as best he could. “It’s not going to hurt you.”

Bozo remained unconvinced. He continued to bark until the helicopter took off once more, disappearing into the moonlit distance.

While a pair of orderlies walked the empty gurney back into the hospital, Dr. Walker came across the lot.

“Bozo, I presume?” she asked. “He sounds pretty fierce.”

“That’s Bozo sounding scared as opposed to sounding fierce,” Dan told her. “He’s frightened of helicopters.”

“Really?” she asked.

“Really,” Dan said.

Dr. Walker didn’t ask why Bozo was scared of helicopters, and Dan didn’t go into it. He was afraid he was going to get a lecture on all the noise. This was a hospital zone, after all.

“You left him out here in the car?” she asked.

“He’s fine,” Dan said. “He would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the helicopter.”

Bozo had quieted now. As Dan went to get the water bowl and a couple more bottles of water, Dr. Walker reached out and patted the dog’s head.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “The helicopter, I mean. We had a snakebite victim. We managed to get him stabilized enough to have him transported to the Phoenix Indian Medical Center.”

Dan Pardee knew all about the Indian Medical Center in Phoenix. It was where his grandmother, Maxine Duarte, had died. While undergoing chemo, she had developed a raging infection and had died of it with so little warning that Micah, at work in Safford, hadn’t been able to make it to the hospital in time.

“You’re staying the whole night?” Dr. Walker asked.

Dan nodded. “I told Angie about her mother,” he said. “I also told her that I’d stay with her until someone comes to pick her up later this morning.”

Bozo finished drinking the water, then walked over to one of the back tires to raise his leg.

“You’re sleeping on one of those god-awful chairs in Angie’s room?” Dr. Walker asked.

Dan nodded. “Not the best,” he agreed, “but I’ve slept in worse places.”