“That’s not going to happen,” Ava vowed aloud to herself as she returned the pot to its place on the shelf. “Not, not, not!”

Taking her new drink in hand, Ava made her way into the bedroom—­into her bedroom; she and Harold had separate bedrooms these days. Setting her untouched drink down on the counter in the bathroom, she ducked into the attached walk-­in closet. In the backmost wall, in the section behind her floor-­length gowns, was the wall safe in which Alvira, her predecessor, had once kept her considerable collection of jewelry, which had, of course, been divvied up between Harold’s two kids upon Ava’s arrival.

Harold could no longer get around well enough to get to the safe on his own. He had no idea that Ava had long since changed the combination, and for good reason, too. That was where she was slowly accumulating her supply of diamonds along with a collection of forged passports, IDs, and preloaded credit cards. It was also where she kept a collection of burner phones. Just because she knew how to get in touch with ­people didn’t necessarily mean that she wanted them to be able to get back in touch with her.

Taking one of those out, she consulted the little black book that also resided in the safe. She found the number she needed and made the call. There was no sense in stalling around about it. She had made her decision.

Big Bad John Lassiter had to go, the sooner the better!

CHAPTER 4

THEY SAY IT HAPPENED LONG ago that Young Girl—­Chehia—­from Rattlesnake Skull village, was out walking in the desert where she found a young man who was injured. He was lying under a mesquite tree, crying. Young Girl knew at once that Young Man was Apache, Ohb. Even though she did not speak Young Man’s language, Young Girl knew that he needed help.

You must understand, nawoj, my friend, that the Apache and the Desert ­People have always been enemies. When I’itoi created everything, he loved the Tohono O’odham, the Desert ­People. They were friendly and industrious, so I’itoi kept them living close to his sacred mountain, Ioligam, where they stayed busy in their fields, growing corn and wheat, melons and squash.

But I’itoi found the Apache troublesome. They quarreled a lot and they were very lazy, so I’itoi sent them to live on the far side of the desert. There they found plenty of animals to hunt, but it was hard to grow food. And so, whenever the Apaches grew too hungry, they would ride across the desert to steal the food the Desert ­People had grown.

When Chehia, Young Girl, found the injured man, she could have just walked away. But he cried so piteously that she did not. Instead, she helped him to a nearby cave and hid him there. Every day, she would slip away from the village and bring him water to drink and food to eat. Soon he grew well enough to return to his own ­people, but by then Young Man and Young Girl had fallen in love. He asked Chehia to run away with him, but she was afraid to leave her own ­people.

One day, when she brought Young Man’s food, he pointed off across the valley to a place where smoke was rising in the air. “Those signals are signs that my ­people are coming,” he said. “You must run back to the village and warn yours that they are in danger.”

LANI’S BODY TENSED WITH UNEASE as Leo Ortiz turned the Toyota Tundra off the highway and headed down Coleman Road. The three of them—­Leo Ortiz, Lani, and Leo’s son, Gabe—­had driven the whole way from Sells in almost total silence, one broken only by incessant clicks from the video game Gabe was playing on his phone in the backseat.

Off to the left, Lani could see the charco, the water hole, that in her mind still belonged to the long-­abandoned village of Rattlesnake Skull. Now, as often happened when she was upset, the almost invisible pin-­sized flaws on Lani’s face—­ones she covered each morning with deftly applied makeup—­began to prickle and itch. She knew what was causing the old ant bites to burn—­Rattlesnake Skull charco was where all this had started so many years ago. The water hole was where the authorities had found the body of Gina Antone, a teenage Tohono O’odham girl who had been tortured and murdered by an evil ohb-­like Anglo named Andrew Carlisle. Garrison Ladd, Lani’s mother’s first husband, had been a suspect in that case right along with Carlisle.

In the course of the homicide investigation, Diana and the dead girl’s grandmother, Rita Antone, had been thrown together. To everyone’s amazement and to the dismay of the ­people on the reservation, the two women—­the Indian and the Anglo, the old Tohono O’odham widow and the young Milgahn one—­had become fast friends.

On the reservation, Rita Antone, originally from Topawa, had long been known as Hejel Wi i’thag, Left Alone. At the time, Diana, a teacher on the reservation, had been living in a teachers’ compound mobile home in the same village. United in their mutual loss and grief, the two women had left the reservation behind and moved to Tucson, where they had worked together to rehab a ramshackle river-rock house in the Tucson Mountains. When Diana’s son, Davy, was born, Rita looked after him and became the boy’s beloved Nana Dahd, his godmother. Years later, when Lani was adopted into the Ladd/Walker household, Rita Antone became Lani’s godmother, too.

Lani was eleven years younger than Davy. Even though Rita was elderly by the time Lani showed up, it was Rita who had schooled both children in the sacred traditions and legends of the Tohono O’odham. She was the one who had taught them the endangered ancient art of basketmaking and had pointed out and given names to the various herbs, plants, and fruits that were at home in the Arizona desert. Rita had carefully described how some of the plants were useful in the healing arts while others were used in religious ceremonies. She also made sure they could easily recognize and avoid the ones that were poisonous and even deadly.

And it was through Rita that Lani had come to the attention of Brandon Walker and Diana Ladd.

Lani had begun life on the Tohono O’odham as the neglected child of a jailed father and a runaway mother. Abandoned while still a toddler, Clemencia Escalante, as Lani was known back then, had been left in the care of an impoverished, aged, and exceedingly deaf grandmother in the village of Nolic, which means The Bend. During the summer months, the older children in Nolic had helped look after Clemencia, but once school started, the baby, little more than a year old, had been the only child left in the village.

On a warm September afternoon with her caretaker sound asleep, Clemencia had somehow made her way outside—­probably through a door left open to allow a bit of breeze into the rough adobe house. Outside and unsupervised, the child had wandered away from the house. Eventually she had become trapped in a nest of Maricopa harvester ants, whose venom is legendary. There was little doubt that she had screamed as the ants bit into her because she was still screaming an hour or so later when the school bus dropped off the other children. The children were the ones who found her, not the grandmother. Lack of hearing was the reason the grandmother hadn’t heard the child screaming, but for the authorities, an even greater concern was that she had failed to notice that the little girl had gone missing.

Close to death from the poison of literally hundreds of bites, Clemencia had been transported first to the Sells Indian Hospital. When her condition worsened, she was taken to the ER at Tucson Medical Center. At the time, Wanda Ortiz, Fat Crack’s wife and Gabe’s grandmother, had been the social worker in charge of Clemencia’s case.