NINETEEN

Charlie’s service weapon always traveled with him. But once they’d arrived in Arizona, he’d stashed it on a high shelf in the bedroom closet. Now he retrieved it, tucked it into a waistband holster, and changed into a loose, dark shirt that hung over it.

“So much for spending more time with Eddie. But this is a good idea. I’ll go with Naomi to her office. At least I’ll get to drive the Prius. I’ve always wondered what those things are like. Anybody asks—and I can’t imagine anyone will—I’m shadowing her to see how Navajo prosecutors coordinate with the off-rez authorities. Wish I could go with you and the girls today.”

“I wish you could, too.” Lola moved behind him and put her arms around him. The gun pressed against her. He’d shown her how to shoot one, even offered to buy her one of her own, but she’d always demurred. “I’d do something stupid. My luck, I’d shoot my foot off before I ever got a bad guy. Or you.”

She’d done too many stories over the years on fatal gun accidents, and not a single one about a gun successfully used in self-defense, to feel comfortable carrying one herself. Instead she contented herself with the bear spray that everyone back in their part of Montana carried as routine protection against the grizzlies that favored the same hiking trails, campgrounds, and huckleberry patches as their human counterparts.

She was glad Charlie had a gun, though, and especially glad he’d have one under these circumstances. She didn’t say what she was thinking: that the kind of guy who could brazenly walk up to Edgar and Naomi’s house to deposit a threatening note wasn’t the type to give Charlie an opportunity to shoot first. Be careful out there, she wanted to say. Stay safe. Watch your back. All the clichés.

She didn’t say anything, though—especially not the words her brain screamed at him: that he should be most alert around those closest to him.

Lola may have been worried about Charlie, but everyone else seemed worried about her. By the time she and the girls set out for their excursion, she felt as though she’d reassured the universe that she would be fine on her own.

“Really, it’ll be fun,” she told Charlie. “No, not as much fun,” she added with a wicked grin, trying to lighten the mood with a reference to the previous night. Were those circles under his eyes?

When Edgar asked, she said, “I just want to drive around, get a sense of the place. All I’ve seen is the road to your house, and then to Window Rock and Gallup. I want to see where people live.”

“I swear I won’t get lost,” she told Naomi.

She started to say something pre-emptive to Thomas, but he ducked his head and turned toward the door. Something had come over him since they’d first met. He seemed angry—or maybe exhausted from a night of typing threats and depositing them on the front step. “Bye,” he said, and left without saying where he was going. No one asked. Minutes later, he departed in a series of blasts from his car’s dragging tailpipe.

“I thought he got his car fixed,” Lola said. “When he drove in the other night, I didn’t hear all that noise.”

“Maybe whatever got fixed broke again.” Naomi handed her an insulated bag. “I packed sandwiches for you. You can have a picnic.”

Lola had promised the girls lunch, although she’d imagined something in an air-conditioned restaurant after she finished visiting with Mrs. Begay. From what she’d seen so far, their surroundings did not lend themselves to outdoor dining, unless one enjoyed being baked crispy by a sun only too happy to oblige. But things might be different off the beaten path. Maybe Mrs. Begay could point them to some shady, secluded spot, one that once sheltered a spring of clear, cold water reduced to a bitter trickle.

“Take this, too.” Naomi handed her a jug of water. “Don’t drink it. Keep it in the car in case you break down.”

“Thanks. You saved me a stop at Bashas’,” Lola said. Even though she’d still stop at the reservation’s main grocery store to ask directions to Betty Begay’s place.

At the store, the checkout clerk’s response jolted her. “Are you some kind of reporter?”

“Excuse me?” Lola wondered if she gave off some sort of invisible vibe. She’d emailed a couple of contacts at Agence France-Presse and Der Spiegel before she’d left the house that morning; both had already written stories on the bombings, but Lola offered to keep tabs on the situation to save them the expense of keeping their own correspondents—who were supremely skilled, in the way of foreign correspondents the world over, of running expense accounts sky-high—in Window Rock.

“Reporters are always looking for her,” the clerk said. “Like him.” She pointed with her chin.

A rawboned white guy examining a rack of snack food turned at the clerk’s words. Lola recognized him from the meeting. “And I found her,” he said. He shifted a bag of trail mix to his left hand and held his right out to Lola. “Jim Andersen.”

“You’re a reporter?” Lola tried to keep the incredulousness from her voice. Even by the admittedly loose standards of a newsroom, up close Jim Andersen proved a scruffy specimen, clothes in need of a wash and hair in need of a comb. If she hadn’t seen him at the meeting, she’d have taken him for a backpacker. “You weren’t sitting with the other reporters at the meeting.”

“I’m not mainstream media.” He gave the words a derisive twist. “I write for the Green Coalition newsletter.” He dug in a pocket. “Here’s my card.”

Everything fell into place. The Green Coalition was a loose affiliation of environmental groups that fell beyond the establishment boundaries of organizations like the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club, but still on the right side of the line crossed by ELF. Or at least it purported to be. Lola knew them as one of the groups on Charlie’s radar. If Jim Andersen looked like a backpacker, it’s probably because he was, traveling on a shoestring, staying as close to the land as possible out of a combined concern over his carbon footprint and lack of finances. Lola wouldn’t have put it past him to have hitchhiked to the reservation from wherever he was based. Which was where, she asked him now.

“Wherever I need to be. I came down here from the tar sands in Alberta. I was up there for most of the winter. Now I’m in Arizona in the summer, writing about the mine. I froze there, I’m cooking here. I need a better system.”

You need a bath, Lola thought. He wafted scents of woodsmoke and sweat, common to campers everywhere. But there was something about him, a tense wariness, a shoulders-back, light-on-the-feet stance, ready for quick action. The hair falling to his shoulders was just for show, she decided. “You’re military.”

“Ex,” he agreed.

“How long out?”

“Few years.” He bounced once on the balls of his feet.

“Where?”

“Iraq. We done here?”

Lola wasn’t, but knew she needed to be. She hazarded a single question more. “You’ve already talked to Mrs. Begay?”

“Yeah.” He smacked the trail mix down on the counter and lay a bill beside them. He might not have been a traditional reporter, but he had the same sort of proprietary gleam in his eye that told Lola she wasn’t going to get anything else out of him. “What’s your interest in her?”

Lola pointed through the window toward the girls in the truck that, local-style, she’d left running so as to keep the air-conditioning going and gave him the shorthand version of another of the complex clan relationships Naomi had described. “She’s my niece’s grandmother.” She saw the question in his eyes and offered what she hoped was a plausible explanation as to why, given her family’s close connections to Mrs. Begay, she needed help finding the place. “She told me how to get there, but I wasn’t quite clear. I thought I’d better double-check here.” Hell would freeze over before she asked Jim Andersen for directions. She blew a sigh of relief when he nodded apparent acceptance, scooped up his trail mix, and left.

The clerk rang up her sixteen-ounce bottle of water. “Mrs. Begay is the only person standing up to the mine. Well, not the only one. But the main one. The leader, I suppose.” She paused with her hands over the keys. “You want me to ring up a couple gallons of water? People usually bring her some when they go to see her. What she’s got up there isn’t fit to drink.”

“Make it five,” said Lola.

It took two trips to tote the heavy plastic jugs to the truck, but when she left the store, she had directions to Betty Begay’s hogan in hand.