But as for the rest of Arnie’s advice…Joe shook his head. It was a female who’d caused all his problems. The last thing he needed was another woman in his life. For any reason.

It was nearly dusk when Joe pulled up to his grandfather’s log hogan just outside Tuba City. Noticing the single light on inside, he abruptly remembered that tonight was Monday, Charley Youngblood’s poker night. If Joe’s grandfather followed his usual routine, he wouldn’t be back until nearly midnight, after doing his best to fleece those he called his closest friends. Joe may as well head for home. Fence-mending was going to have to wait until tomorrow.

But as he drove away, Joe found the thought of home particularly unappealing. The house always seemed emptier following one of his weekends with Jonny. It seemed filled with the hollow echoes of his son’s voice. His constant questions. His high-pitched squeals and shouts of triumph when he beat Joe, as he was all too apt to do, in a video game. The clever arguments he came up with to avoid bedtime, which showed a devious ingenuity beyond his five years.

Those echoes could ambush a man when exhaustion had lowered his defenses. Could play on his deepest fears and fan them into full-blown panic. Joe wasn’t going to be a weekend father permanently. Some days, clinging to that belief was the only thing that kept him sane.

But it was the threat of those echoes that now had him avoiding home. Rather than taking the turn that would eventually carry him to his house, he veered west, deliberately blanking his mind.

He and Arnie, part of a multiagency task force, were close to an arrest in the crystal meth case they were working and they’d worked later than usual. Dusk was already settling over the area, constructing shadows out of the cottonwoods and juniper trees that posted sentry in the vast space between houses. Housing developments were becoming more common on Navajo lands, but many of the people, including himself, valued a more isolated existence.