Read Online Hour of the Hunter by J. A. Jance - Free Book Online Page A

stay here. You're hurt, too."
    Beating him off with a club was all that would have kept Davy Ladd from clambering into the Grand Prix.
    He sat in the front seat, not crying but shaking silently, his bloody face pressed to the inside of the windshield as the car raced up the steep mountain road, straightening the curves, clinging to the pavement on the outside edges.
    At one point, the man tossed him a white handkerchief.
    "Christ, kid, use this, will you? You're getting blood all over my car."
    When they reached the top of the mountain, the car screeched to a stop in the parking lot.
    "which way?" Davy pointed toward the garage. The door was closed.
    Davy scrambled out of the car and ran toward the gift shop. It was after four and the place was closed, but Davy pounded on the side door, the one Nana Dahd had used earlier. when Edwina Galvan finally opened it, he flung himself at her.
    "It's Nana Dahd! You've got to help her. She's hurt bad."
    "What happened?"
    The dam broke. Suddenly, Davy Ladd Was sobbing SO badly he could barely talk. "A cow," he mumbled. "A cow in the road."
    ,where?" Edwina demanded, but he didn't answer. She grabbed his shoulders and shook him. "Where did it happen?"
    "Down on the flat. Almost to the highway."
    Just then a piercing alarm sounded all over the complex at the top of the mountain. The man from the Grand prix dashed out of the garage followed by the ambulance. Two other men appeared from nowhere and ran for the ambulance.
    It's at the bottom of the mountain," one of them shouted back at Edwina.
    "Radio Sells for another ambulance."
    Edwina nodded and turned to go back inside. Holding Davy's hand, she intended to take him with her, but he pulled free and darted away, climbing back into the front seat of the Grand Prix just as it started out of the Parking lot behind the Speeding ambulance.
    No matter what, Davy Ladd's place was with Nana Dahd.
    "The pain was bigger than she was and hotter than the sun. It burned through her, seared through her, until she couldn't think, couldn't breathe.
    Where's 01honi? she wondered. She had called for him, but he didn't answer. Where was he? Was he dead? No.
    That was impossible. That couldn't be, but where was he?
    She asked the man, a man who was there trying to talk to her through the mangled window of the truck, but she could no longer translate the funny white words. The only words that made sense to her now were those of her childhood, the Papago ones. The man shook his head helplessly. He didn't understand, either.
    "Where is Olhoni?" she murmured again and again.
    "Where is my bald-headed baby?"
    There were other cars now, other people. Rita could hear them, could see feet where faces ought to be. were they Upside down or was she?
    What had happened? And where was Olhoni?
    And then the pain. The pain that was bigger than she was grew even larger. It was a pain bigger than the stars and the sky and the universe. The pain was everything.
    She heard a noise and realized that someone had cut a hole in the door of the truck. Her body was flowing out through that hole-her body and her blood.
    They were moving her now, moving her out onto the ground and strapping her down to a board or a stretcher of some kind. That was when she started to fight them. The heavy white strap locked her to the board just as another strap long ago had once locked her to a bed.
    She fought them like a smart cow fights when she knows she's being led to the slaughter. The pain was blinding, but she fought through it, fought beyond it. She might have won, too, but suddenly Olhoni was there, kneeling at her side, pleading with her to be still.
    "Let them help you, Nana Dahd," he begged. "Please let them help you."
    She looked up then and saw that beyond Olhoni some of the other faces swarming above her were Indian faces.
    She wondered where they'd come from, or if they had been there all the time.
    A few of the men were trying to pick up the stretcher with her on it.
    She could tell