Desert Run by Betty Webb Read Free Book Online Page A

don’t look fine.”
    â€œI’ve just got a lot on my mind these days. Look, I’m due at a meeting in just a couple of minutes, so if you’re done…”
    â€œI can take a hint.” Before leaving, I showed him the note Tesema had written granting me permission to retrieve his paycheck. After a phone call to smooth my way, he said, “The detectives have finished going over Tesema’s room. I advise picking up his check as soon as possible. After that, you never know. I might not always be here to run interference.”
    I started to ask what he’d meant by that, but before I could, he hustled me out the door and closed it between us.
    ***
    Tesema’s apartment was in Mesa, a city of approximately a half-million people. To get there from Scottsdale, you have two choices: the always crowded freeway or down Pima Road to McDowell, the recently widened six-lane highway through the narrow end of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Reservation. The day being so beautiful, I opted for the latter.
    Although the reservation did not share Scottsdale’s manicured elegance, the wild, wide-open spaces were a respite from the city’s ever-increasing skyline. Thanks to the casinos that opened several years back, the Pima Indians, whose fortunes hovered near the poverty line for decades, were enjoying boom times. Houses had replaced the old shacks, and new pickup trucks sat in their driveways. The raven-haired children who played in front of the day care center wore new clothing emblazoned with the logos of rap groups and action film stars, but horses still grazed under the mesquite trees and wild javelina still drank from the irrigation canals. There was little traffic along McDowell other than a few gravel trucks from the local quarries. Once, out of habit, I mistakenly took the dirt turn-off toward Jimmy’s trailer, the one he’d bought when he moved back from Utah five years earlier in search of his Native American roots. I realized my error as I pulled into the gravel drive.
    I had always liked Jimmy’s trailer, an old Airstream. His uncle, who owned a body shop, had decorated its exterior with paintings of Earth Doctor, the father-god who had created the world and everything in it; and his adversary, Elder Brother, from whom he’d fled into a labyrinth beneath the earth. Between them, Spider Woman tried to make peace. Strife was a constant, the trailer told me. In your time here, walk gently upon the earth, respect the animals, and leave your descendants a name that can be spoken with pride.
    In the back, rooting around the prayer lodge Jimmy had constructed out of mesquite branches and native grasses, were a javelina sow and her three piglets. I watched them for a while, enjoying the wind as it swept across the mesquite-dappled fields, listening to the piglets’ grunts as they dug in the soil for tasty roots. When the little family finally moved away, annoyed by the two laughing Pima teenagers who galloped their horses through the brush toward them, I turned the Jeep around.
    How could Jimmy could abandon such riches?
    ***
    The Ethiopians lived near the Mormon Temple in a one-bedroom apartment so decrepit it should have been condemned. The walls looked like they hadn’t been painted since Ernst was a U-boat captain, but layers of paint still managed to cement the windows shut so that the small living room was hot and stuffy. Cheap linoleum designed to look like bricks covered the floor, but was so thin in some areas you could see the black backing. The few pieces of furniture were limited to a wobbly kitchen table and chairs, and a ratty brown sofa the men had probably recycled from a nearby alley. The apartment wasn’t completely bleak. Rada and his roommates had livened up the place by thumb-tacking brightly colored African folk art posters on one wall and several hand-carved crosses to the other.
    A man introducing himself as Goula Hadaradi, the only