Skeleton Canyon (3 page)

Those visits had continued for a while even after Nacio was released from the hospital and allowed to return home to Douglas. They had ceased abruptly once Aunt Yolanda, alerted by nosy neighbor, came home early one day and figured out that what was going on had slipped well beyond the sphere of ordinary friendship. Since then, the two young people had learned to be discretion itself, but that took work and a whole lot of creativity.

Bree would often come into the station in the late afternoons, pulling up to the full-service pumps about the time Uncle Frank went home for dinner. While Nacio pumped her gas and checked her tires, oil, water, and windshield fluid, while he cleaned all her windows and polished her rearview mirrors, they would hurriedly make arrangements for when and where they would meet again—often at a secluded spot halfway between Bisbee and Douglas on a long-deserted ranch road that ran alongside the railroad line near the Paul Spur Lime Plant.

They both lived for weekends like this one, though, when Bree would tell her parents she was going to New Mexico to visit her friend Crystal Phillips, and Nacio would tell Uncle Frank and Aunt Yolanda he was going camping with some of his friends from school. From Friday night until Sunday after-noon, it would just be the two of them. Usually they would rendezvous at a secret meeting place in the Peloncillo Mountains, east of Douglas, at a wild, deserted place called Hog Canyon. Once they met up, they’d spend the night there, sleeping on an air mattress in the back of Bree’s truck. The next day, they’d leave Nacio’s old Bronco parked out of sight somewhere in the canyon and head out for parts unknown. They loved wandering around in out-of-the way places in New Mexico, an area where they weren’t likely to run into anyone they knew.

Bree always had plenty of money. They went where they wanted with the understanding that by three o’clock Sunday afternoon she would drop him off at his car and they would go their separate ways. That was how this weekend was supposed to work. Now, though, with Nacio unable to get away until sometime Saturday morning, he supposed they would have to scrap the whole thing.

“You look like you just lost your best friend,” Bree said, sitting down on the same bench, but not so close that it looked as though they were actually sitting together.

“Aunt Yolanda’s still sick. Uncle Frank’s taking her up to Tucson to see an internist, and they won’t be back until tomorrow afternoon,” Nacio told her. “I’ll have to close tonight and open tomorrow morning. I’m sorry, Bree. I don’t know what to do.”

Bree had spent every moment of that week longing for Friday, when the two of them could be together. Still, it never occurred to her to argue with him about it or try to change his mind. Ignacio had told her enough about his background—about how much his aunt and uncle had done for him—that she knew he owed them everything. Whatever they needed him to do, Nacio would do without question or else die in the attempt.

“Do you want to come over to the house?” Nacio asked after a pause. “Uncle Frank’s up in Tucson. No one will know.”

“Your neighbor will,” Bree objected. “If she tells on us again like she did the last time, your aunt will have a fit.”

Nacio nodded. “I guess we’ll just have to forget it, then,” he said reluctantly. “Unless you want to go back home and tell your parents you changed your mind and decided to leave tomorrow morning instead of tonight.” Bree considered. It had been hard enough to convince her parents that she needed to go back to Playas yet again. If she retuned home, there was a chance Bree’s father would put his fool down and not allow her to leave a second time.

“What if I went on out to the mountains tonight and waited you to catch up with me tomorrow morning?” Bree asked.

Nacio swung around and stared at her in disbelief. “All by yourself? Wouldn’t you be scared?”

Bree shrugged. “Not that scared. I’d be in the truck. That would he safe enough.” She looked at him and smiled. “Besides, if it means getting to see you later instead of not seeing you at all, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

Ignacio felt a sudden warm glow in his chest, a feeling that came over him whenever he realized how much Bree loved him, how much she cared. Aunt Yolanda was always saying that the only reason Anglo girls hung out with Hispanic boys was because they were sluts, not good enough to catch an Anglo boy of their own. Even so, she said, they always acted like they were better than everyone else and treated their Mexican boyfriends like shit. But Bree wasn’t like that with Nacio Ybarra. Not at all.

“You shouldn’t do that,” he told her at once. “It could be dangerous. There are bears out there, to say nothing of mountain lions....”

“Don’t worry,” Bree returned with a winning and confident smile. “I’ll be fine. No mountain lion in its right mind would dare attack me. I’m a Puma, too, remember?”

Nacio was still laughing as Bree stood up and walked away with her hips swaying and her ponytail bouncing playfully hick and forth in the warm summer sun.

CHAPTER TWO

Joanna Brady stopped at the door of her daughter’s room and peered inside. Ten-year-old Jennifer Ann was sitting cross-legged in the midst of what looked like chaos. Frowning in concentration, she was going down a list checking off items as she went. The next day she was due to leave home for a two-week stay at Whispering Pines, a Girl Scout camp located in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson.

“How’s it going?” Joanna asked.

“Okay,” Jenny replied. “I think I have everything. All I have to do now is get it into the duffel bag.”

“Do you want some help?”

“No, Mom,” Jenny replied. “The directions say I’m sup-posed to pack it myself.”

“All right, then,” Joanna said. “But don’t stay up too late. Tomorrow’s a big day.”

Feeling slightly useless, Joanna backed away, went to her own room, and got ready for bed. The swamp cooler was running. She usually turned it off overnight, but the last few days had been so miserably hot that tonight she left it on.

“See there?” she said, addressing her husband Andy and counting on the drone of the cooler to cover her voice. After all, Andy had been dead since the previous fall, the victim of a Colombian drug lord’s hired assassin, but Joanna Brady still talked to him sometimes, especially at night when she was all alone in what had once been their bedroom. “That’s what happens. Kids grow up, and then they don’t need their parents anymore. Not even to pack their bags.”

She paused, as if to give Andy an opportunity to respond, but of course, being dead, he had nothing to say.

“What I can’t figure out,” she continued, “is if this is the way things are supposed to be, why do I feel so awful about it?”

Since Andy’s death, his daughter, Jennifer, had gone through a dozen different guises and stages—from bossy to totally pliant and passive, from a whining clinging vine to this new stage of haughty independence. Faced with the prospect of Jenny’s being gone for two whole weeks, her mother could have handled a bit of clinging right about then.

Closing her eyes, Joanna lay there and waited for sleep to come. If
Andy was still here and we were both handling this together,
she thought,
maybe it wouldn’t be so hard.

For a Friday evening it was still surprisingly quiet in the Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge in Old Bisbee’s Brewery Gulch. So to this shift, Angie Kellogg, the bartender, had had little to do other than making sure her two regulars—the toothless Archie McBride and hard-of-hearing Willy Haskins--were supplied with beer and an occasional vodka chaser.

The two were both retired underground miners. They loved to regale Angie with tales of Bisbee’s glory days, of how things used to be when payday weekends in Brewery Gulch had been nothing but boozing and brawling good times. In nine months of working at the Blue Moon, Angie had come to have a genuine affection for the two old men. Even half drunk, they always treated her with a degree of old-fashioned gentlemanly respect and never failed to apologize when one of them made an inadvertent slip and used what they considered a bad word in front of her. Even when they reached a point where she had to cut them off, they hardly ever gave her a hard time about it. Instead, they’d just get up and leave.

“No problem. We’re eighty-sixed, old buddy. Little lady’s jus’ doin’ her job,” the more sober of the two would say to the other as they fell off their bar stools and headed for the door. “See you tomorrow.”

Angie would nod and wave. “See you,” she’d say. And after they left, she would stand there marveling at the fact that she liked them and they liked her. In her previous life as an East L.A. hooker, those kinds of easygoing relationships had never been possible. But here in Bisbee, Arizona, they were. Not only was she friends with those two harmless but kindhearted drunks, Angie also counted among her pals the local sheriff, Joanna Brady, and a Methodist minister by the name of Marianne Maculyea. In fact, on her days off, Angie sometimes baby-sat for Marianne and her husband, Jeff Daniels. She would take charge of their rough-and-tumble daughter Ruth while Jeff and Marianne took Ruth’s twin sister, Esther, to one of her all too frequent visits to the cardiologist at University Medical Center in Tucson.

There were times on those days while Angie was pushing Ruth’s dual but half-empty stroller up and down the sidewalks of Tombstone Canyon that she almost had to pinch herself to believe it was real. Day after day, month after month, she was beginning to learn that the lives most people lived were far different from the abusive one she had left behind three separate limes now—first with her father in Michigan, next with her psychotic California pimp, and finally with her sinister and deadly boyfriend Tony Vargas. She had come to Bisbee convinced that the whole world was out to get her.

Joanna Brady and Marianne Maculyea had been the first people to break through Angie’s barriers of distrust. With men it was harder. All her life, Angie’s good looks had made her p target for the unwanted attentions of almost every man she met. For years her body had been her only bartering chip. Men had preyed on that and she had hated them for it. Men were always the bad guys in the piece, from Daddy right on down the line.

Living in Bisbee, people like Marianne’s husband, Jeff Daniels, and Angie’s boss at the Blue Moon, Bobo Jenkins, were gradually causing Angie to wonder if it was time to rethink her position. Maybe all men
weren’t
inherently bad. For one thing, neither Jeff nor Bobo had ever made a single pass at Angie, welcome or otherwise. Nor had there been any off-color remarks. Angie herself had told Bobo about her past, and she was sure Jeff knew about it as well. Nevertheless, both men treated her with a kind of brotherly respect that somehow made her feel both protected and appreciated. Still, being around them—especially alone—made her nervous. She couldn’t shake her very real apprehension that at any moment one of them might turn on her and demand something she wasn’t prepared to give.

The outside door swung open, and a tall, gangly man walked partway into the bar. He was still holding the door open and peering around uncertainly when a gust of dry wind blew in behind him. His straight, straw-colored hair stood on end. Self-consciously, he tried to smooth it with one hand, but it didn’t work very well.

At the end of the bar, Archie and Willy stopped their constant bickering long enough to turn and examine the new arrival. The Blue Moon survived on a clientele of regulars. Only the most intrepid of tourists ventured this far up Brewery Gulch. Obviously the stranger wasn’t a regular, but he didn’t have the look of an ordinary tourist, either. Tanned and fit, he might have been in his early to mid-thirties. He was dressed in a set of camouflage shorts and shirt with a pair of well-worn hiking boots on his feet.

“So what have we got here?” Willy demanded loudly. “Some kind of Boy Scout?”

Angie shot Willy a withering look. “You hush, Willy, or you’re out of here.” She turned back to the newcomer with a welcoming smile. “What can I get you?”

“I’m looking for someone,” the man said with what sounded like an English accent. “Her name’s Angie. Is that you?”

Years of wariness asserted themselves. Angie’s smile cooled. Tony Vargas was long dead, but that didn’t mean one of his old associates wouldn’t come looking for her someday. Still, this lanky, loose-jointed blond giant of a man didn’t look like anyone the swarthy Tony Vargas would have counted among his acquaintances.

“That’s me,” Angie replied. “What do you want’?”

Instead of moving forward, the man stood where he was it stared at her, saying nothing.

“Well,” Angie insisted.

“My name’s Hacker,” he said, taking another tentative step or two into the bar. “Dennis Hacker, the Bird Man. Remember? You wrote and asked if you could come see my parrots.”

Dennis Hacker had come to Angie’s attention when his name appeared in the
Bisbee Bee
in conjunction with a homicide case. A dynamite explosion had destroyed a cabin in the Chiricahua Mountains near Pinery Canyon. Hacker, a witness to the exploit, was reported to be a naturalist on an Audubon Society-funded mission to reintroduce parrots into the southeastern Arizona mountains. Living in captivity, the parrots had somehow forgotten a few of the more important survival basics, including the vital ability to break open pinecones. Hacker had of himself in the role of teacher and patiently instructed his pupils in pinecone-opening techniques before setting them free in the wilderness.

Intrigued by this information and excited by her own fledgling interest in birding, Angie had written a note to Hacker, sent in care of the Audubon Society, asking if it would be possible for her to drive up to the Chiricahuas and try to catch glimpse of his birds. The letter had been sent with high hopes, but after weeks and months passed with no answer, she had pretty much forgotten about it.

“Hey, Angie,” Archie offered gallantly. “If this guy is botherin’ you, just let us know. Me and Willy may be old, but the two of us can handle him if you need us to.”

Ignoring him, Angie stared at Dennis Backer. “That was ages ago,” she said. “When I didn’t hear back from you, I thought you didn’t like having visitors or maybe—”