For a long time after Tash returned, things went well. Because of the clouds, it wasn’t too hot. Rain, Juk, returned. The Tohono O’odham planted their fields and the crops grew, and every morning and evening, Sun’s niece and nephew kicked the dust balls. In a village near the Coyote Mountains lived a woman who braided the grass mats upon which the Desert People sleep. This Braiding Woman, Hihgtpag O’oks, was a fast worker. She could weave as many as four large mats in a single day.
One day while Braiding Woman was working, Nephew-of-the-Sun kicked his red ball so hard that it rolled onto the mat the woman was weaving. The woman quickly picked up the ball and hid it in her dress. When Nephew-of-the-Sun came looking for it, the woman claimed she hadn’t seen it. He said that was very strange since he had seen it land on her mat, and some of the dust was still there.
Hihgtpag O’oks—Braiding Woman—still claimed that she hadn’t seen it. After a while Nephew-of-the-Sun grew very angry. “If you keep it, something very bad will happen to you, because the red dust ball belongs to Tash.” After that the nephew went away.
Braiding Woman was very frightened. She called Nephew-of-the-Sun to come back for the ball, but when he did, she couldn’t find it.
On the eighth day after this, around noon when it is very hot and all the animals are sleeping, Braiding Woman became very sleepy. That was strange because she always worked through the day without needing to rest. She asked Cricket—Chukugshuad—to sing to her to keep her awake. Cricket tried, but it was no use. Braiding Woman had to sleep.
AVA RICHLAND, WITH the remains of her blended scotch in hand, sat in solitary splendor in her lushly appointed living room and gazed serenely out through floor-to-ceiling windows at the sunset over the Tucson panorama. From their home, situated on the last buildable lot, high in the Catalinas, she could see almost the whole of the city, stretching for the better part of twenty miles in any direction. Their property line bordered Forest Service land, with the sheer cliffs of the mountain rising skyward less than fifty yards beyond that.
“I built there because of the view,” Harold, the man who would be her husband, had bragged back when he and Ava had first met. “Best view in town. No one can ever top it. I made sure of that.”
Of course, the view would have been better if it hadn’t been for those pesky Dark Sky people. Ava had no patience for what she regarded as a bunch of wild-eyed activists who thought it was so much more important to keep the skies dark for the astronomers at Kitt Peak than it was to have adequate lighting on the city’s streets. Especially now, with the arrival of cataracts—particularly the one in her right eye—she was of the opinion that seeing to drive down the street was far more important that seeing what was happening on Mars.
Ava glanced at her diamond-encrusted Datejust Rolex, one that had once belonged to Alvira, Harold’s first wife, and saw that it was just now seven. In recent years, she would have been at the University of Arizona campus, rubbing shoulders with all the other Tucson VIPs at the Authors’ Dinner for the Tucson Festival of Books. Her good friend Matilda Glassman had always made sure that Ava and Harold were seated at a table with one of the big-name visiting authors.
Ava tended to enjoy those dinners, even if Harold despised them. She had made her way up from some very straitened circumstances, and Ava still got a charge out of being seen in public, where she and Harold were regarded as one of the city’s luminary couples. She liked being photographed at charity events, even if her place in the limelight was due to the size of Harold’s donations. As far as Ava was concerned, people like Matty Glassman were welcome to hustle around and do the actual work.
This year’s Authors’ Dinner was going on without either one of them. They’d had tickets, and Harold had suggested that she go without him, but because she knew that Harold’s son and daughter-in-law, Jack and Susan, would be there too, Ava had declined. She made it sound to Harold as though she couldn’t bear to go without him. The truth was, she didn’t want to be in the same room—even a ballroom—with Jack and Susan. Ava disliked the couple, and she knew the feeling was mutual. If she showed up without Harold, Susan was bound to stop by Ava’s table long enough to make some catty remark about it being such a shame that poor Harold was once again left to his own devices.
Of course, neither Jack nor Susan ever offered to drop by and stay with “poor Harold.” And the man wasn’t exactly on his own, either, since his live-in attendant—what was her name again?—was just a few steps away, at the call of a pager.
Ava could see that Harold was growing frailer by the day, and that was a problem. If Harold died—make that when Harold died—Ava needed to have her exit strategy completely in place. That was one thing she’d always prided herself on having—an exit strategy. No matter what the circumstances, she was always prepared for the moment when she’d be forced to abandon ship.
Ten years earlier, when she’d nailed Harold, Ava had thought she’d finally found a ship she wouldn’t have to abandon. True, Alvira hadn’t been entirely cold in her grave before Ava made her move. But Harold was considered a great catch. If she hadn’t gone after him when she did, someone else certainly would have.
Harold was at the top of the heap in Tucson at the time, and not just in terms of housing. He was tall, handsome, and rich, and he hadn’t yet had either of his two debilitating strokes. Through a series of strategic marriages and at least one tactically brilliant divorce, Ava had been lucky enough to position herself on the fringes of Harold’s circle of friends. Younger than most of the other women in the group, she’d had beauty on her side, to say nothing of a sexual appetite Harold was determined to satisfy. He hadn’t been quite up to that task, but Ava was discreet about it. What the poor man didn’t know about his inadequacies couldn’t hurt him.
Ava had taken up with a somewhat older man, thirty years and counting, fully expecting that after putting in some time reveling in his lavish lifestyle, she’d be left to live out her days as a well-heeled widow. Harold had redone his will shortly after he and Ava married. His kids weren’t left out in the cold by any means, but neither was Ava. A short time later, however, his busybody son, Jack—a lawyer himself—had seen to it that the will was rewritten. This time the house and most of Harold’s assets were locked up in a complicated marital trust that didn’t exactly turn Ava into a pauper, but it meant putting a trustee—who just happened to be one of Jack’s best buds—in charge of her purse strings. The trust meant Ava wouldn’t be able to make a move on any of those assets—including unloading that huge house in which she had a life tenancy, or even their getaway condo in San Carlos, Mexico—without the trustee’s explicit, written permission. As far as Ava was concerned, that was the last straw. She had stopped playing Mother-May-I a long damned time ago!
That was when she began working on this most recent exit strategy. As she had fought her way up from the bottom of the heap, she had been careful not to burn any bridges. She didn’t send out Christmas cards to folks from her old life, but she still knew where useful people were and how to get in touch with them. She remained friends with the people she had enlisted to help dispose of the treasure trove she had lifted from Amos Warren’s storage locker. Even then, she had been smart enough to realize that she was dealing with top-drawer goods. With access to Amos Warren’s little black book, she’d been able to make sure she sold to only the best possible folks.
Ava had started out in the drug trade, back when trafficking had been a wildly profitable freelance operation—back before the cartels got involved and smuggling became a far more dangerous and murderous occupation. She and a girlfriend, or a boyfriend as the case may be, would drive down to Nogales or Naco or Agua Prieta, smile and wave at the customs guy, and be back home with the goods, free and clear, in a jiffy. And she’d always been smart enough at it that she’d never been caught.
Big Bad John Lassiter had been dazzled by her looks. Amos Warren hadn’t. Worried that he might turn her in, she’d taken him off the board. The poor sap had probably thought she was bluffing when he saw the gun pointed at him. Too bad. You snooze, you lose.
The fact that Ava had been able to make off with a fortune in artifacts after Amos’s death was nothing more than a happy coincidence, one that she had used to good advantage. The resulting money had made possible a complete makeover, one that had given Ava entrée into one of the top-tier escort services in town. From there it had been only a small step to her first upwardly mobile set of marriage vows.
Over the years, however, she hadn’t crossed any of the useful people from the bad old days off her list. Guys she knew from her earlier drug-dealing exploits—the ones who were still alive, anyway—were easy to find because many of them were still in prison and could lead her to a whole new generation of useful contacts. Someone she had met in her escort-service days had turned into a very capable forger who could, with a few strokes of a pen, turn a blood diamond into a conflict-free one that was good to go for two to three times what she paid for it initially. And that was Ava’s focus these days—smuggling diamonds. Blood diamonds could be bought on the cheap. Certified diamonds went for a bundle, and that was the whole idea—buy cheap and sell high.
Why diamonds? She’d been in the illicit Indian artifact business for a while, but pots were usually too hard to find. Diamonds were easier to come by, and they weighed a lot less. At the moment, nobody, including the cartels, Border Patrol, and the occasional robber, seemed to be looking for diamonds, at least not so far.
A year or so earlier Ava and Harold had been returning to the United States from their condo in San Carlos with a jar full of peanut butter, which Ava had salted with diamonds. South of Nogales, they’d been pulled over by a bunch of gun-toting banditos posing as Federales. The crooks had happily relieved Harold of his wallet and Ava of her purse, making off with close to a thousand bucks in cash, but they had completely missed the diamond-stuffed peanut butter jar sitting in plain sight in the picnic cooler. The crooks hadn’t been any the wiser, and for that matter, neither had Harold.
Ava no longer brought the goods across the border herself; that was far too dangerous these days. Now she had a small crew of worker bees to do that part of the job. She figured it would only take a couple more shipments to have enough to make a break for it as soon as Harold corked off, which might well be sooner than later.
The problem was, she had recently learned that a ghost from her past was about to surface. What she didn’t need right now was anything at all that would call attention to her earlier life. Unfortunately, according to the newspaper that morning, Big Bad John Lassiter’s name was once more in the news. If he ended up back in court, someone might well dig deep enough into the past to learn that a girl named Ava Martin, now Mrs. Harold Richland, had been a prosecution witness in both of John’s previous murder trials. That might be enough to bring her entire enterprise crashing down around her ears. There was no way in hell she was going to let that happen.
Ava’s drink was gone. She was ready for another. Before she got up to pour it, she kicked off her high heels. Most women her age had given up wearing heels by now, but not Ava. Whenever Harold was up and about, she was careful to dress the part. A dyed-in-the-wool Republican, he had always raved about Nancy Reagan. In Ava’s continuing effort to give Harold no cause for complaint, she emulated Nancy in every way—right down to the pearls, the chic size four tailored suits, and the high heels. That evening, though, since Harold had already checked out and gone night-night, she let her stockinged feet revel in the lush living room carpeting.
At the bar, Ava refilled her glass—no ice—and stood staring back and forth between the two trophies she had held back when she had sold off Amos Warren’s goods. One was a tiny pot, a miniature olla, that she had kept and treasured from the moment she pulled the cloth-wrapped piece out of Amos Warren’s stolen backpack. The other was a serving-tray-sized flat hunk of limestone with the skeleton of what looked like a crocodile fossilized inside it. That hadn’t come from the backpack. Ava had stolen it from Amos’s house when she’d cleaned that out, too. She wouldn’t have had any idea what it was had Amos not gone to the trouble of sticking a helpful label on the back. Printed in fading but still readable ink on a piece of masking tape were the words Phytosaur, Willcox Playa, 1967, followed by the initials AW.
For some reason, those two pieces had captured Ava’s imagination—the tiny pot and the Gila-monster-sized fossil. After Amos’s death, she had revisited the area around the crime scene numerous times. Johnny had taught her enough about searching for artifacts that she had known to go looking farther upstream, and she had lucked out, finding a whole other treasure trove of unbroken pots. Each of those she’d sold to the highest bidder without a second thought.
But Fito, as she called her fossilized treasure, and the tiny pot were hers to keep, and she had never considered selling either one. Instead, she had displayed them together, in one home after another, as she gradually moved up in the world to ever more upscale digs.
In this house, for instance, high in the Catalinas, Ava kept the olla on a clear glass shelf high above the bar, the humble piece of reddish clay keeping company with Harold’s first wife’s collection of elegant Rosenthal crystal stemware. The rock platter, along with its nightmarish, toothy captive, stood on the counter, propped against the bar’s mirror, where it served as a somewhat fierce background to Harold’s collection of expensive booze.
Taking the pot down from its place on the shelf, Ava stood there for a time, absently tracing the tips of her fingers over the faint image that remained stubbornly etched there—a tortoise and an owl. She often wondered about them—about why those two images had been placed there together. They seemed so different, and yet here they were in some kind of mysterious juxtaposition.
It was as her fingers slid thoughtfully across those mysterious figures that she reached a final conclusion about what she should do—a decision she’d been wrestling with all day long, since the moment she had seen the article in the newspaper.
After all these years, there was a good chance that Big Bad John Lassiter was about to have yet a third trial for a murder Ava herself had committed. She had dodged that bullet the first two times, but what if new information had come to light, especially something that might implicate her?
“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!