Dance of the Bones Read Free

rattlesnakes emerging from hibernation were out in force. In fact, halfway back to his truck, a diamondback, almost invisible on the sandy surroundings, slithered past him when he stopped long enough to wipe away sweat that was running into his eyes. That pause had been a stroke of luck for both Amos and the snake. If left undisturbed, snakes didn’t bother him. Most of the time, they went their way while Amos went his. But if he’d stepped on the creature unawares, all bets would have been off. One way or the other, the snake would have been dead and, despite his heavy hiking boots, Amos might well have been bitten in the process.
    Amos’s lifetime search for gemstones, minerals, fossils, and artifacts had put him in mountains like this for decades. Watching the snake slide silently and safely off into the sparse underbrush served as a reminder that snakes, javelina, bobcats, deer, black bears, and jaguars had been the original inhabitants of this still untamed place. Humans, including both the Tohono O’odham and the Apache who had roamed these arid lands for thousands of years, were relatively new and probably somewhat unwelcome intruders. White men, including Amos himself, were definitely Johnny-­come-­latelies.
    Reshouldering his pack, Amos allowed as how he was missing John’s presence about then. These days, Amos was finding it harder to go back downhill than it was to climb up. And with the added weight in the pack? Well, he would have appreciated having someone to carry half the load. John may have said they were quits, but as far as Amos was concerned, they were still partners, and they would split everything fifty-­fifty.
    And there he was doing it again—­thinking about John. An hour or so after the altercation that night, when Amos had finally left the bar, he might have looked as though he hadn’t a care in the world, but he did. His heart was heavy. Having won the battle, he feared he had lost the war.
    Amos and John were no kind of blood relations, but they were peas in a pod. Hot tempered? Check. Too fast with the fists? Check. Didn’t care to listen to reason? Check. Forty years earlier, Amos had hooked up with a girl named Hattie Smith who had been the same kind of bad news for him as Ava was for John. A barroom fight over Hattie the evening of Amos’s twenty-­first birthday had resulted in an involuntary manslaughter charge that had sent Amos to the slammer for five to ten. He recognized that there was a lot of the old pot-­and-­kettle routine going on here.
    Yes, Amos had gotten his head screwed on straight in the course of those six years in the pen. He had read his way through a tattered copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that he found in the prison library, giving himself an education that would have compared favorably to any number of college degrees. Even so, he didn’t want John to go through a similar school of hard knocks. He wanted to protect the younger man from all that because John Lassiter was the closest thing to a son Amos Warren would ever have.
    John had grown up next door to Amos’s family home. They had lived in a pair of dilapidated but matching houses on a dirt street on what was then Tucson’s far west side. Amos lived there because he had inherited the house from his mother. Once out of prison, he had neither the means nor the ambition to go looking for something better. John’s family rented the place next door because it was cheap, and cheap was the best they could do.
    To Amos’s way of thinking, John’s parents had been little more than pond scum. His father was a drunk. His mother was a whore who regularly locked the poor kid outside in the afternoons while she entertained her various gentleman callers. On one especially rainy winter’s day, Amos had been outraged to see John, a mostly toothless eight-­year-­old kid, sitting on the front porch, shivering in the cold. He’d been