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.