Stand Down by J. A. Jance Page B

decades. Watching the snake slide silently and safely off into the sparse underbrush served as a reminder that snakes, javelinas, bobcats, deer, and even black bear had been the original inhabitants of this still-­untamed place. Humans, including both the Tohono O’odham and the Apache who had roamed these arid lands for thousands of years, were relative, and probably somewhat unwelcome, intruders. White men, including Amos himself, were definitely Johnny-­come-­latelies in this solitary place.
    Reshouldering his pack, Amos allowed as how he was missing John’s presence about then. These days, he was finding it harder to go back downhill than it was to climb up. And with the weight in the pack? Well, he would have appreciated having someone to carry half the load. John might have said they were quits, but as far as Amos was concerned, they were still partners, and they would split everything fifty-­fifty.
    And there he was doing it again—­thinking about John. An hour or so after the altercation, when Amos had left the bar, he might have looked as though he hadn’t a care in the world, but he did. His heart was heavy. He might have won the battle, but he was worried he had lost the war.
    Despite the fact that they weren’t blood relations, they were peas in a pod. Hot-­tempered? Check. Too fast with the fists? Check. Didn’t care to listen to reason? Check. Thirty years earlier, Amos had hooked up with a girl named Hattie Smith, who had been the same kind of bad news for him as Ava was for John. A barroom fight over Hattie the evening of Amos’s twenty-­first birthday had resulted in an involuntary manslaughter charge that had sent Amos to the slammer for five to ten. He recognized that there was a lot of the old pot-­and-­kettle routine here.
    Yes, Amos had gotten his head screwed on straight in the course of those six years. He had read his way through a tattered copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica that he found in the prison library, giving himself an education that would have compared favorably to any number of college degrees. Even so, he didn’t want John to go through the same school of hard knocks. He wanted to protect the younger man from all that because John Lassiter was the closest thing to a son Amos Warren would ever have.
    John had grown up next door to Amos’s family home. They had lived in a pair of dilapidated but matching houses on a dirt street on Tucson’s far west side. Amos lived there because he had inherited the house from his mother. Once out of prison, he had neither the means nor the ambition to go looking for something better. John’s family rented the place next door because it was cheap, and cheap was the best they could do.
    To Amos’s way of thinking, John’s parents had been little more than pond scum. His father was a drunk. His mother was a whore who regularly locked the poor kid outside in the afternoons while she entertained her various gentleman callers. On one especially rainy, winter’s day, Amos had been outraged to see John, sitting on the front porch, shivering in the cold. He’d been shoved outside in his bare feet and 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 the 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 might have been a slightly different take on the