Page 8 of It Takes a Thief

“Everyone okay with the Boners?” was Ogden’s first question. That was our calling card, all right. Is everyone okay. No one ever called anyone without there being some dramatic crisis. It was the way of our world.

“Right as rain,” I lied, “but can you tell me something, Ogden? You grew up on the Four Corners Rez, right?”

I knew he tried to stay cheerful, but a definite veil of darkness went down over his face. “Right,” he said cautiously. “In Ganado. Beirut.”

I was confused. “Beirut?”

“Yeah. That’s what they called the projects out there around Fort Defiance. Anson’s short pants days were wasted there too.” Anson was another Bent Zealot, a half-Navajo blanket-ass whose own shitty childhood rivaled mine. They had all made something of themselves, pulling themselves up out of the muck to help others. That’s what I wanted to do, not install stents in the hearts of geriatric perverts who would live to molest someone another day.

I had a lot to learn. “Well, I just had an idea. I want to work out there. Do some good at a clinic or something.”

Ogden snorted. “If you can find a clinic there. They’re few and far between. And so riddled with rats and germs it was a miracle if you walked away unscathed.” That was one reason I loved Ogden. He could use a word like “unscathed” and not sound like an uppity apple—red on the outside, white on the inside, a guy who’d lost touch with his roots, someone like Ford. “Someone would get sick, we’d haul them away from the clinic. It was only good for flu shots, or if you got the clap.”

“Well, that’s my reasoning. I can bring enlightenment to the Rez.”

Ogden laughed. Damn, he was beautiful, like almost all the Zealots. “They could sure use you, Madison. You gonna quit your hospital job?”

“Maybe take a sabbatical.” It sounded quite proper, almost holy, if I called it a sabbatical. “I’m sick of operating on the hearts of twisted old white men.”

“Bilagáanas.”

“What?”

“White men.”

“Oh. Yeah. That.”

“You’ll have to learn Diné if you want to work out there.”

None of this shit had occurred to me. Like a privileged little ivory-skinned gal, I had assumed I’d just walk into a clinic there and take over. “What, they don’t speak English?”

“Some of the older folks don’t. Our mother never learned. Hey. Let me ask you something. Ford okay with you taking a sabbatical?”

I paused. I hadn’t expected anyone to ask me that. Ford cared so little about what I did these days. But then I’d never done anything like this. “It’s all good,” I said unconvincingly. “I just really, you know, need to do something different. I’m ready to crush it.”

“I get that. Haven can be such an annoying Dom. Sometimes I feel like he’s hovering over my shoulder, micromanaging my life.”

I was stunned. Somehow, Ogden had understood my predicament. Had my girls blabbed around town about my gripes with Ford? How did Ogden get that just from one short FaceTime chat?

Then I remembered. At the Four Corners rally, I’d said some off-the-cuff remark about Ford in front of Ogden, Haven, and a few other Zealots. Since most of them were gay, I imagined they’d sympathize. We saw a leather-clad biker leading a sweetbutt around by a leash and collar. I think I’d rolled my eyes and said something like, “Yeah, that’s something Ford would do.” I was just kidding, and I thought everyone got that! But maybe it gave them the idea that not all was perfect in paradise.

I got the number of Ogden’s brother, Galileo. He still lived in Chinle, near Canyon de Chelly, scraping out an existence with the sheep left behind by their mother. He’d know of a clinic, and who to contact there.

Though June was sticking her head out the back door and wrinkling her nose at all the cigarette smoke, I didn’t go right back. I took my vape pen from my bra—an excellent place to store things like that, you’d better believe—and took a few solid hits off my brother-in-law Lytton’s Young Man Blue strain. I knew this wake-n-bake behavior wouldn’t stand me in good stead. I was a mother of two young kids, for crying out loud. Before I went to work at the clinic, I’d quit weed for good. And the Tango & Cash.

At the time, I wasn’t worried that my decision to take a temporary job far from home would affect anything. No matter how far I wandered, my inner self would stay the same. I’d been hopelessly addicted to Ford since I was practically a child. He was in my cells. He occupied my DNA.

This move said nothing about my steady, unfailing love for him. It said everything about my state of mind, which was unsteady as fuck.

CHAPTER FOUR

FORD

We hadn’t all tried to crowd into Slushy’s tiny office behind the Hip Quiver indoor archery range in quite a while. Fact, I think the last time we had a sit-down here was the time some hipster found a dead Ochoa at our bud and breakfast up on Mormon Mountain. I’d thought we’d disposed of all those guys appropriately, but apparently one still lingered under one of the docks out back.

That time, we needed a serious sit-down with Slushy to put a spin on the story or not even the most stoned space cadets would come stay at Rocky Mountain High. Slushy invented a brilliant caper—to plant a fake news story how the Ochoa had been running from the law when he had a heart attack and fell under our dock. It worked. Even more business flooded into the B&B after that, some wanting to see where the unfortunate beaner met his maker. Like one of those haunted hotels.

Now we were looking at the opposite side of the coin, victimized by flaming fake news ourselves. Flaming, as in the gas coming out of the alleged Boner’s butt when he lit a match to it. Already, Faux Pas reported people jiving him as he rode by, saying shit like “have a nice trip, hot butt” and “meet you on the moon, rocket ass.” It was fucking humiliating, and exactly the opposite of the serious, deadly image we wanted to project.