It is 1953. March. A good time to be a kid in Tucson, Arizona. It's the windy month and the afternoons are for kites—kite fighting—a rough, take-no-prisoners war in the sky. The six boys and a girl of a three-block area just north of Grant Road are the "Sky Pirates." When the air is still, the pirates take to their desert islands to hide treasure and fight other marauding bands in often-bloody battles for dominance. Another wind, a dark storm blows through the neighborhood leaving some people dead and others missing. It all starts with the dead man on the corner. The Sky Pirates team up with an old Apache, Niño Cochise, in a fight for their lives against local gangsters. The bad guys start it, the "Pirates" take them on, and Niño ends it...the Apache way.And Niño doesn't believe his father, Taza, died of "pneumonia" in Washington, DC in 1876. Was he murdered? He needs to find out. Maggie O'Brien watches and waits. She has the story of a lifetime. She just needs proof.The story, characters, and events are fictional. The locations are real.
