Telling Fortunes in Phoenix

Eddie

Johni looked very lady-like and subdued for a change. She looked at Eddie with a cocked eyebrow.

“I guess the kid was here, after all,” he said. “Looks like he stole your keys while you were out.”

He heaved himself off the porch and started following the tracks he could see in the yard, little footprints, one depth coming toward the bunkhouse, various deeper depths going away. Johni trotted along behind him as he followed the multiple marks around to the back of the stable.

She pointed to where the footprints ended and narrow wheel tracks began. “The donkey cart’s gone.” She pushed past him, through the unlocked barn office to the interior gloom of the stable. “The burro’s gone.”

Eddie suddenly got over being mad. Often he felt his role was inadequate and she could easily hire some dumb lunk to replace him. Now, though, he knew he was contributing to their business. He was, after all, a trained investigator.

“Well,” he said, “they couldn’t have gotten far.”

The trail was easy to follow. Deep tracks headed straight away from the ranch punctuated once by fresh burro droppings. The air was warming but cool enough, and he set out at a jog, following the hard-packed center of a wash that snaked along to the west and then north. Twenty minutes later the dry creek bed ran parallel to the highway before curving behind a rise. He found the cart there, abandoned. No children and no burro.

His two inadequate naps had left him hyper-alert with an overlay of dark depression. He stood in the dry river bed looking at the burro cart.

Two tracks scuffled out of the wash, one set the small sandaled feet he recognized from the stable with another made by larger running shoes, maybe a man’s size eight. Here again were signs that loads had been carried, deeper footprints toward the highway and lighter on return. The kids had been carried to a car, the wheels left their mark on the sandy shoulder of the highway.

Where was the burro? The harness lay in a heap while a morning breeze whiffled about and Eddie saw tracks made by sandals and hooves filling with dry sand. Before they disappeared entirely he saw they led to the far edge of the wash where the ground became rocky and hard. The burro had run off that way, urged by the boy. Had he gone with it? All he knew for certain was that some children had been put in a car and the donkey had gone up the hill.

He trudged back to the ranch but approached the last bit in concealment. He was afraid there would be police and immigration vehicles and wasn’t greatly relieved to find the yard quiet. Those kids were with an adult. It was only a matter of time.

He told Johni what he’d found. She scrubbed her fingers through her scalp, pulling some of the long blonde hairs out of her now untidy braid. She stared down the graveled road leading to the highway.

“Get out of here, now,” she said. “We can’t be found together and I need you to get me out if worse comes to worst.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

Johni turned her ice blue eyes on him, the pupils wide and dark now that the heroin had washed out of her system. “You’ll think of something. You don’t want me to stand trial.”

Eddie suppressed a shudder as he realized, of course, that she was right. He couldn’t do anything here, anyway.

“I’ll get these guys out of here,” she said, nodding her head to the bunk house. “I’ll run them over to Casa Grande today.”