St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

last time at the grave, memorizing small details of color and temperature, wind and scent. After a few moments she sensed a flicker of motion on the ridge that defined the other side of the valley. She looked up just in time to see two silhouettes drop down the far side and out of sight.
    Someone hadn’t even cared enough to stand outside the fence.
    When I get to know Miss Winifred better, I’ll have to ask her who else wants to dance on the Senator’s grave.
    The only tears cried at this funeral had been clawed out by the icy wind.

TAOS
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
3
    THE DURAN FAMILY LIVED ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF TAOS , BEYOND THE TOURIST AREA with its timeless adobe buildings and modern parking meters measuring out minutes in silver coins. The Durans inhabited a Taos few visitors saw, a place of modest houses crouched among winter-bare pastures, surrounded by willow-stick and barbwire fences.
    John drove into a narrow adobe garage that had once been a tack room and turned off his truck. Though the building was more than two hundred years old, it had been wired in the twentieth century. Motion-sensing lights flashed to life, revealing every timeworn adobe brick. The space itself was clean. Neither of Dan’s parents tolerated garbage, clutter, or worn-out machinery tossed around the property. Some of the neighbors felt that every man had a right to his own junkyard, but no one got upset about it either way. New Mexico had a long history of live and let live.
    “You think Mom’s back from the pueblo yet?” Dan asked.
    John glanced at his watch. Two o’clock. “She should be. She teaches after the noon mass.”
    “Still doing English?”
    “It’s what the kids need most. She does some simple math, too.”
    Dan shook his head. “She never gives up, does she?”
    “That’s why I love her. Heart as big as the sky. You should get a good woman to make you happy.”
    “I’m already happy.”
    “Really? You better wear a sign. Otherwise your expression will scare small children.”
    “Yeah yeah yeah,” Dan said without much heat. He knew his father was right, but that didn’t change his memories of the past twelve years, the years when he’d experienced firsthand just how much of an animal man could be.
    He shoved the memories away. They didn’t have anything new to teach him. He didn’t have anything new to bring to them. That was why he’d come home, hoping to find something new, something worth the pain of living for it.
    John waited, hoped, but Dan didn’t say another word. “You’re like your mother. You keep it inside.”
    Dan didn’t answer.
    John didn’t expect him to.
    The back door opened before Dan put his foot on the first step up to the narrow porch. Diana’s hair was short and dark black except for a wide streak of white at her left temple, legacy of a nameless ancestor. Her eyes were as dark and clear as ever, and her smile just as unexpected in her serious face. Gently rounded and as determined as any man, Dan’s mother was the light of many lives, including her son’s.
    “That was certainly a long walk,” she said, watching him climb the stairs. Though she didn’t say anything, concern for his injury was in her eyes and in the troubled line of her mouth. “You must be freezing.”
    Dan scooped her up in a hug and set her down gently. “I’m too big to freeze.” He sniffed the air that was rushing out of the kitchen. “What’s that?”
    Diana gave John a worried look. He shook his head slightly.
    “Posole soup and fresh tortillas,” she said, frowning. “I’ve got the woodstove going. Come in and warm your—Get warm,” she corrected quickly. Dan didn’t like discussing, or even acknowledging, his injured leg. Despite that, she couldn’t help wanting to ease the pain she saw occasionally in his face. “And carnitas. You didn’t eat much breakfast before you left.”
    Dan’s gentle smile was at odds with the grim lines that usually bracketed his mouth. “I’m not a teenager anymore, Mamacita . I’m all grown up.”
    “But—” She bit back her worry. Her son wasn’t a child to be fussed over, yet she had a lifetime of nurturing reflexes that made her want to coddle and cuddle him. “Coffee, too. Just the way you like it.”
    “Hot as hell and twice as bitter,” John said unhappily. “Whoopee.”
    Diana stood on tiptoe and kissed her husband’s mustache. “I made a second pot for you.”
    Dan heard his mother giggle like a teenager behind him and knew that his