Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [131]
Those three words finally rang a bell—Medicos for Mexico. That was the volunteer medical organization her mother had suggested Lani work for rather than going with Doctors Without Borders. Lani struggled to remember what her mother had said about the people who had been friends years earlier back when both women were still on the reservation. But why is this woman so dangerous? Lani asked herself. And what does she have to do with me?
Not able to summon any answers on her own, she picked up Smitty’s phone and called her mother. “Who is Gayle Stryker?” Lani asked when Diana answered.
“She and her husband are old friends of mine,” Diana said. “You’ve met them, haven’t you?”
“Not that I remember,” Lani said. “But I saw their picture in the paper this morning.”
“So did I,” Diana said. “I’m sure they’re really broken up over what’s happened to that nice young man who worked for them.”
“You knew him?” Lani asked. “The man who was in jail?”
“I met him a couple of years ago,” Diana said. “At a banquet in the Strykers’ honor.”
As Lani listened to her mother’s answers, she knew that what Diana was saying wasn’t enough. There was something more. Maybe Diana didn’t even know the problem existed, but Lani had to find out what it was. She tried to frame her questions in a way that would unmask the difficulty.
“Have you seen them recently?” Lani asked.
“Not for years,” Diana said. “Your father may have, though. He didn’t say for sure, but I know he was thinking about it.”
“About seeing the Strykers?”
“Well, one of them, anyway,” Diana said. “Years ago, Larry Stryker was one of the doctors at the hospital in Sells. He was working there when that girl whose case Dad’s working on was murdered. Dad was going to try to see Larry yesterday to see if he could find out who her attending physician was at the time she was hospitalized.”
Lani’s body was suddenly strung so tight she could barely breathe. Even without Looks at Nothing’s crystals, before Lani’s eyes the flesh was sloughing off Gayle Stryker’s photograph, leaving behind nothing but a gaping skull.
“Did he?” she asked, trying to keep the quiver out of her voice. “Do you know if Dad saw him…or her?”
“I have no idea,” Diana answered. “Things were so hectic yesterday with the funeral and everything, I never got around to asking him. Why do you need to know?”
“I was just wondering,” Lani answered lamely. “I saw the picture and remembered they were friends of yours.”
“You’re right,” Diana said. “They are. How’s the car?”
“Smitty’s working on it,” Lani said.
“Good,” her mother told her. “If anybody can get those stains out, Smitty’s the guy.”
Lani put the phone down and then stared out at the traffic going past on South Fourth. All her life she had heard stories about how, on the day Nana Dahd needed Looks at Nothing’s help, she had sent her nephew, Fat Crack Ortiz, to fetch him.
The Gadsden Purchase of 1852 had divided the ancient lands of the Tohono O’odham, leaving part of the tribe in Mexico and the rest in the United States. S’ab Neid Pi Has, a wiry old medicine man, had lived in a Tohono O’odham village just south of the border. Fat Crack had agreed to go on what he was convinced would be a fool’s errand. He drove as far as The Gate—an unsupervised and unregulated border crossing on the reservation—that allowed tribal members access to friends and relations on either side of the international border.
Because Looks at Nothing’s village had no telephone access, Fat Crack expected to have to park on the United States side of the border and then hitchhike or walk to the medicine man’s village. Instead, and much to his surprise, he found the blind old man resting in the shade of a mesquite tree patiently awaiting Fat Crack’s arrival. Somehow, without having to be told, he had sensed Nana Dahd’s need of him and had made his way to The Gate fully expecting that someone would arrive