Dance of the Bones Read Free Page A

shoved outside in his bare feet wearing nothing but a ragged pair of pajamas.
    Amos had ventured out in the yard and stood on the far side of the low rock wall that separated them. “What’re you doing?” Amos had asked.
    â€œWaiting,” came the disconsolate answer. “My mom’s busy.”
    For months Amos had seen the cars coming and going in the afternoons while old man Lassiter wasn’t at home. Amos had understood all too well what was really going on. He also knew what it was like to be locked out of a house. Back when he was a kid the same thing had happened to him time and again. In his case it had been so Amos’s father could beat the crap out of Amos’s mother in relative peace and quiet. What was going on in the Lassiter household may have been a slightly different take on the matter, but it was close enough.
    Without a word, Amos had gone back inside. When he reappeared, he came back to the fence armed with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
    â€œHungry?” he asked.
    Without further prompting, the boy had scampered barefoot across the muddy yard. Grabbing the sandwich, he gobbled it down.
    â€œMy name’s Amos. What’s yours?”
    â€œJohn,” the boy mumbled through a mouthful of peanut butter.
    â€œHave you ever played Chinese checkers?”
    John shook his head. “What’s Chinese checkers?”
    â€œCome on,” Amos said. “I’ll teach you.”
    He had hefted the kid up over the low wall built of volcanic rock, shifted him onto his hip, and carried him to his own house. That had been their beginning. Had Amos Warren been some kind of pervert, it could have been the beginning of something very bad, but it wasn’t. Throughout John’s chaotic childhood, Amos Warren had been the only fixed point in the poor kid’s life, his only constant. John Lassiter Sr. died in a drunk-­driving incident when his son was in fourth grade. By the time John was in high school, his mother, Sandra, had been through three more husbands, each one a step worse than his immediate predecessor.
    Despite his mother’s singular lack of parenting skills and due to the fact that the kid ate more meals at Amos’s house than he did at home, John grew like crazy. More than six feet tall by the time he was in seventh grade, John would have been a welcome addition to any junior high or high school athletic program, but Sandra had insisted that she didn’t believe in “team sports.” What she really didn’t believe in was going to the trouble of getting her son signed up, paying for physicals or uniforms, or going to and from games or practices. Amos suspected that she didn’t want John involved in anything that might have interfered with her barfly social life and late-­afternoon assignations, which were now conducted somewhere away from home, leaving John on his own night after night.
    Amos knew that the good kids were the ones who were involved in constructive activities after school. The bad kids were mostly left to their own devices. It came as no surprise to Amos that John ended up socializing with the baddies. By the time the boy hit high school, he had too much time on his hands and a bunch of juvie-­bound friends.
    As a kid, Amos had earned money for Saturday afternoon matinees in downtown Tucson by scouring the roadsides and local teenager party spots for discarded pop bottles, which he had turned over to Mr. Yee, the old man who ran the tiny grocery store on the corner. When Amos happened to come across some pieces of broken Indian pottery, Mr. Yee had been happy to take those off his hands, too, along with Amos’s first-­ever arrowhead. From then on, the old Chinaman had been willing to buy whatever else Amos was able to scrounge up.
    Once Amos got out of prison, he discovered there weren’t many employment options available for paroled felons. As a result, he had returned to his onetime hobby of