“He’s good at making money, usually for everybody, but he’d also cut out his mother’s eyes and sell them if he thought nobody was looking, know what I mean?”
The outside of Mora’s was plain adobe, but the inside was lavish. Rich Berber carpet, a nice oak fire going to ward off the morning’s chill. Bobby noticed vents for central heat and air, the walls lined with paintings and books, and centered in the front room was a massive cherrywood desk. A dark haired man sat at it in a big leather, high-backed chair. “May I help you?” The man asked.
Bobby said, “The girl that came to you this morning? What was it she wanted?”
The man steepled his fingers, elbows on the desk. “I don’t talk about my clients, Mr…”
“The girl’s my daughter,” Bobby lied, “I’m tryin’ to find her.”
“Yes, the cocaine. She took it from you?”
Bobby tried to cover, but Mora saw it in his eyes, and his demeanor changed. “I think maybe you should leave. We have nothing more to discuss.”
“Oh yeah we do.” Bobby almost smiled.
Mora’s face flushed, “Get out of here!”
“You sent those two men to rob her, steal back the money you gave her? Man, you’re a real piece of work.”
“I’m going to call the police if you don’t leave immediately!”
“The police don’t come here. You know it, I know it. Unless you’ve got somebody in that back room you want to call, I’d suggest you shut up.” Bobby turned to go, then stopped, “If she’s hurt, or if they took the money from her, I’m coming back here for you.”
“You think you can hurt me? Well, I can-”
Bobby was across the desk and had Mora by his shirt, pulling his face close, “Believe it.” He let Mora go and walked out the door.
***
Anda walked to the small green area and found a tiny seep, running a trickle of water an inch wide into a twenty-foot long patch of green grass before disappearing into the earth. The skeletons of two ancient cottonwoods stood as sentinels farther down the shallow draw. They were weathered to tall stumps, the enormous branches long ago dropped to litter the earth around them like the severed arms of combatants.
Anda drank, rested, drank again, then again. The water was delicious. She leaned against a boulder and, out of the corner of her eye saw a small cave. Mountain laurel screened the mouth, and the roof, what she could see of it, was black with smoke from ancient fires. Gray, burned rock blended with the hillside below it, testament to the Old Ones cleaning refuse from their shelter thousands of years ago.
It would be a good place to rest, she thought. She was tired, more tired than she had ever been. She removed her shawl, unfolded it and filled it with pulled grass. When she had enough, she carried the bundle on her shoulders and walked to the cave.
The interior was small, no larger than her tiny home on the edge of the great canyon. The cave roof was black from ancient fires and the floor was uneven. Fine gray dust covered the floor and rocks.
It was the walls she liked, though. Hundreds of painted figures and designs: reds, yellows, blacks, some orange, others white, covered the rock. There were mystical figures of square-bodied men with stick arms and rays coming from their heads, others shooting arrows or throwing spears, farther along the wall would be images of deer with arrows and lances in them. In one area of the cave, a recent slab of wall had separated and dropped away, revealing other long hidden paintings. One animal was strange to her. It was big and humpbacked, with curved tusks and shaggy shoulders. Other strange ones were like sheep with very large, curled horns. There were bears and two large mountain lions done in faded ochre, caught in motion as if running along the upper parts of the walls. A foot above the back floor was another type of large cat, one she had heard of in legend but never seen. It was stocky, powerful looking, with an open mouth showing long teeth, and its hide was yellow, covered in black spots. A jaguar. Hundreds of other paintings were of lines, or jagged marks she took to be mountains, and wavy ones that might be rivers. Colorful circles and dots and square designs filled every spare spot and overlapped other paintings.
Anda relaxed and found a place to put down her grass bedding. She rested until later that day when the sun was setting at the horizon. A fist-sized spot of light needled through the brush at the cave mouth and slow-motioned across the back wall, lighting a small area of rock like the beam of a flashlight. It slipped across a narrow horizontal crack and Anda thought she saw a faint glimmer in the shadow. She went to the crack and looked. Something was there, but her hand was too big to reach it, so she went to the cave mouth, found a long twig and came back, digging with the stick until she eased the thing from its hiding place. Anda held it in her hand and felt its weight. It was a large flint projectile, the likes of which she had never seen.
In the mountains near her home Anda and her family regularly found stone arrowheads so they weren’t unknown to her, but this one was beautiful. Reddish dust coated it, and the pearl gray, translucent flint was exquisitely flaked along the edges. She held it in her palm, and the point extended beyond her fingers while the base reached her wrist. It was half as wide as her palm. The most unusual things to Anda were the concave depressions running up both sides of the blade, reaching from the base to a third of the way toward the point. The flutes felt smooth and slick as she ran her thumb along them. The delicate, flaked edges were so sharp she cut her finger and didn’t feel it, but saw the small bead of blood. Anda sucked on the finger and put the large Clovis point in a pocket in the folds of her skirt before returning to her makeshift bed. She felt safe here, safe enough to spend the coming night. The Old Ones had made this a place of magic.
CHAPTER 7
The redheaded female reporter hurried across the hospital room and shoved the microphone an inch from Hunter’s mouth. “Agent Kincaid, how does it feel being in the same room with your brother?”
Hunter glanced at Ronnie, who shrugged his shoulders like, What can I do? She said, “Feels fine.” Hunter slid by them to Belinda’s bed, making sure she sat on the opposite side from her brother. “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine, baby,” Belinda said. Hunter heard the reporter whispering a hushed play-by-play to the camera behind them.
“What happened?”
“Oh, I’d surprised Ronald with a visit several days ago, and I went out today while he was at work. It was lonely at his house, and I needed some things…I guess I took my eyes off the road for a second, and the next thing I know they’re putting me in an ambulance and bringing me here.”
“What does the doctor say?”
“He says I’m lucky. No broken bones or cuts. He said I’d be bruised and sore for a while, and he wanted to keep me overnight because of the bump on my head.”