by Lukens, Mark
“What is it?”
“Jake Phillips called me down to a dig site … a cave, and we found a city inside that cave.”
“A city?” Alice was getting excited.
“Yes, an undiscovered city. But there was more than that. An even bigger discovery.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to talk about this on the phone. Only in person.”
Alice took her time thinking it over.
“Okay,” Alice finally said. “I’ll call someone I know. It may take a little while, but I’ll call you back as soon as I get a hold of him. Is this number you’re calling from a good one to call you back at?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
“Thank you so much, Alice. You don’t know how much help this is.”
“I just want you to know that this friend of mine will hear you out, but there’s no guarantee that he will decide to take you to Joe Blackhorn. Is that understood?”
It was the best she could do, Stella realized. “Of course.”
After Stella hung up the phone, she and Cole had had their disagreement about meeting with Alice and whoever else was coming with her.
Then, forty-five minutes later, Alice had called back and told Stella to meet her and her friend at a gas station on the outskirts of Sanostee off of Route 491 in two hours.
Stella told Alice that they would be there and hung up the phone. They could be at that location in an hour.
“I still don’t like this,” Cole said again. “It doesn’t feel right.”
“You don’t like what?” David asked from the back seat of the truck.
Stella spun around and smiled at David. “Look who’s finally awake.”
David smiled back at her. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Number one or number two?” Stella asked.
David held up one finger.
“I’ll pull over,” Cole said.
He slowed the pickup truck down and pulled off of the ribbon of blacktop that ran down through the breathtaking landscape all around them. The scenery looked both beautiful and dangerous at the same time.
Many people thought the southwestern desert was a barren and lifeless place, Stella thought. Many people thought it looked like the dunes of the Sahara or something, but these lands that she’d come to know so well were a beautiful place, a myriad of colors, and layers upon layers of ecosystems making up one giant living world out here.
“It’s cold out there,” Stella told David once the truck had stopped. “Button up your coat.”
Cole got out of the truck, but he left it running. Stella knew he had his nine millimeter on him in his coat pocket and she had hers with her. She got out and opened the back door of the king cab for David who hurried out into the cold.
Stella walked with David away from the truck.
“Over there by that rock,” she told him. “Not too far away.”
He smiled at her and ran across the dirt and sand to the large collection of rocks. He stood in front of the rocks and a moment later he was peeing.
Stella smiled. This almost felt normal, and she wondered if this is what being a mother felt like.
A snapping of brush startled her.
Stella’s hand was in her coat in a flash, her fingers curling around the gun handle.
“Cole,” Stella said in a low voice. She glanced back at the truck and saw that he had his hand inside his coat pocket like he was ready to draw. He was looking up at the endless blue sky where some buzzards were circling overhead.
Another snapping of brush. Louder now and closer.
“David, you almost done?” Stella asked as she walked a few steps closer to him.
“Almost,” he said.
There was something in the brush only a few yards away. More than one of them.
“I think we’ve got a problem,” Cole said from right behind Stella.
CHAPTER 43
New Mexico—Navajo Reservation
Cole had seen the buzzards land on the rocks all around them on both sides of the road. The buzzards just sat there, perched on the rocks, staring at him with no fear. Cole thought he could see intelligence in those eyes.
He glanced up and down the road again; it looked like a black ribbon heading up into the rocky hills. No cars or trucks in sight, no sounds except the cold breeze and the rustling in the brush all around them.
Across the road he saw a coyote come out of the brush and stand at the edge of the road. The animal just stood there, its eyes on Cole the whole time. And in those eyes he saw the same intelligence that he saw in the buzzards’ eyes.
It was the Ancient Enemy inside that coyote … Cole was sure of it. Inside the buzzards, too.
Cole hurried around the back of the pickup truck to Stella, his hand inside his coat, ready to draw his gun.
“I think we’ve got a problem,” he told Stella, startling her.
But then they both looked over at the brush just beyond the rocks and saw the animals coming out slowly: two more coyotes, a jackrabbit, four rattlesnakes slithering forward. All of them were just staring at them, watching them with those same intelligent eyes.
David hurried back to them, staring at the line of animals as he ran into Stella’s arms.
“I think we need to get back to the truck,” Cole said. “We all just need to walk together very slowly.” He had his gun in his hand, his finger on the trigger. “I’ll watch the animals. You two just get back to the truck.”
Cole didn’t look at Stella or David—he kept his eyes on the line of animals, his gun aimed at them. The rattlesnakes had curled up into coils, their rattles shaking. He heard Stella and David running across the sand to the waiting truck, the motor still rumbling.
That thing can turn the truck off, Cole thought. It can destroy the engine in a second if it wants to.
But the truck was still running. Maybe David was blocking that thing’s power somehow. Maybe David was getting stronger with each confrontation with that thing, whether he realized it or not.
Cole backed up to the tailgate of the truck, and then he backed up to the driver’s side corner. He turned his back on the animals from the brush and kept an eye on the coyote that stood motionless across the road. He shifted his eyes to the buzzards perched up on the rocks in the distance as he ran to the driver’s door.
He hopped inside the truck and then closed and locked the doors. He shifted into drive and peeled out of the sand and back onto the road, the rear tires spinning on the pavement for a minute, barking in the air before they caught traction.
“You see that?” Cole said as he sped down the road. “Those animals. That thing … it was in them somehow.”
“We’re okay,” Stella said and looked at Cole. “I think it’s getting more and more afraid of David.”
They locked eyes for a second, and then Cole looked back at the road.
Maybe she was right, Cole thought. Why hadn’t those animals attacked? Why hadn’t the Ancient Enemy shown itself just now? They were isolated out here in the middle of nowhere. What easier time was there?
But maybe it was David holding that thing back. It was still afraid of David, like Stella had just said. Maybe it was more afraid now than it had been in the cabin. More afraid than ever. Was David really getting stronger?
“I’m hungry,” David said from the back seat.
It was such a normal thing for a child to say that Cole almost barked out a laugh and a sob at the same time.
Stella turned around in her seat and handed David a McDonald’s bag. “Here’s a sandwich and some hash browns. They’re cold now, but still good.”
David didn’t complain. He took the bag from her. “Can I have one of the Yoo-hoos in the cooler?” he asked.
“Sure,” Stella told him.
David opened up the cooler in the back seat and cracked the can open.
Stella turned back around and stared out the windshield.
Things had gone somewhat smoothly since they had
left the Mountainside Inn behind and the three dead bodies, Cole thought. The Ancient Enemy hadn’t shown itself again until now.
“I still don’t feel right about this meeting,” Cole finally spoke as he drove down the road, his hands gripping the steering wheel so hard it felt like he could’ve snapped it if he wanted to. He couldn’t seem to relax. Not only was there the threat from the Ancient Enemy, but they had the cops to worry about. He couldn’t let the cops take David.
“Alice is the only one I can trust,” Stella said. “There are some other people I could’ve called, but she’s the only one I can trust, the only one who knows people who can find Joe Blackhorn.”
“We’ll get to this gas station early. If anything seems funny …” He let his words hang in the air.
Stella just nodded. She was learning to trust Cole’s instincts. He had developed almost a sixth sense when it came to trouble from the cops. If something was wrong at this gas station they were going to, then she was sure he would be able to tell.
CHAPTER 44
Cody’s Pass, Colorado
Special Agent Palmer drove to the other side of Cody’s Pass, to a neat little neighborhood sprawled up into the foothills of the mountains, which rose up sharply out of the valley. Some of the houses in the neighborhood were perched up several levels above the rest of the development. He drove halfway up into the hills and parked in front of a middle class home.
He got out and walked up a set of steep wooden steps to the front porch where Cassandra and her parents were already gathered and waiting for him. He flashed his badge and ID at them as he walked up and introduced himself.
Cassandra’s parents welcomed him inside their home with nervous smiles and quick little gestures.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Cassandra’s mom asked as she closed the front door. “We just made a fresh pot of coffee.”
Palmer could smell the coffee mixed in with some kind of vanilla-scented candles burning somewhere in the house. He smiled at her. “No thanks.”
The parents sat down close to each other on a loveseat next to the recliner where Cassandra sat. Palmer sat down on the last piece of available furniture—a couch against the wall right underneath some kind of abstract painting. Cassandra’s parents didn’t seem like they had any intention of leaving their teenaged daughter alone with him, so he took his notebook out.
Cassandra looked nervous.
“How are you doing?” Palmer asked and forced a smile on his face—a smile felt like a foreign thing to him these days.
She smiled back. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
The parents seemed to beam with pride at how politely they had trained their daughter.
“No need to be nervous,” Palmer told Cassandra. “I just want to ask you a few questions about a woman and a boy who came through your checkout lane yesterday afternoon. I know you’ve already answered some questions for the police, but I just wanted to ask you a few more. Would that be okay with you?”
She nodded and seemed to be bracing herself.
“Are these people suspects?” Cassandra’s mother asked with a dramatic clutching of hands in front of her, eyes wide with alarm that perhaps her daughter had been within arm’s reach of actual fugitives.
“We don’t know yet,” Palmer answered and looked at Cassandra’s parents who were huddled together on the loveseat.
He turned back to Cassandra. “How did the woman and the child seem to you when you checked them out at the store?”
“Uh … they seemed normal, I guess. The kid was real quiet.”
“Did the woman seem nervous to you? In a hurry? Scared or angry?”
Cassandra thought it over for a moment. “Not angry. But she seemed like she was in a hurry. Maybe nervous. I don’t know. Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. Just give me your honest impressions. That’s all. There aren’t any right or wrong answers here.”
She smiled again—an awkward teenager smile.
“Do you remember what the woman bought when she was in your checkout line?” Palmer asked. The police would have a list from Cassandra’s cash register, but he wanted to hear what she had to say.
“I don’t usually pay a lot of attention to what people buy,” she answered. “But it seemed like this lady was stocking up on stuff. She had toothbrushes … three of them. A small tube of toothpaste. Different kinds of snacks.”
These sounded like the same things Stella and David had bought at the gas station store a few days earlier. The most interesting thing was that she’d purchased three toothbrushes … so the other person still had to be with her and David at the time.
“And she paid with cash?” Palmer asked.
“Yes.”
Palmer already knew that Stella had paid with cash … twenty dollar bills, and the police were comparing the serial numbers with the stolen money from the bank. But Palmer already knew they were going to match. He already knew that Stella and David were traveling with one of the bank robbers for some reason. It didn’t make a lot of sense. Was Stella in on the bank robbery the whole time? Maybe she and the robbers had set up a robbery at the dig site, taking something valuable they wanted from there. And then they had traveled up here to Colorado to rob a bank. Then they turned on their own crew, killing all of them, and then they fled to … Travis’s house to kill his family? And then what? Back here to Cody’s Pass? To a hotel where they murdered even more people, including Travis? And what did the little boy David have to do with all of this? If they had killed all of those scientists and grad students down at the dig site and they wanted to flee as quickly as possible, then why would they go all the way to Iron Springs to kill David’s parents and then abduct him? Stella Weaver didn’t have any kind of criminal record—she was squeaky clean. What would make her go along with all of these gruesome killings so suddenly?
There was something he was missing … large pieces of the puzzle that he couldn’t see yet. It seemed like he had missed something important down in New Mexico, some clue that he had overlooked.
He thought about the Mountainside Inn. Why would Stella, David, and the bank robber she was traveling with stop there? Stella had checked in with a fake name and wrote down fake info for a vehicle. Palmer had checked the footage from the CC cameras in the lobby, but there was a lot of interference on them, and they stopped working altogether before showing exactly how Bruce Goldman and the hotel clerk were killed.
Why would Travis follow Stella and David to the Mountainside Inn? Why were Travis’s mom and sister slaughtered? Why was Travis’s dead father dug up and taken there? Why was he shot in the head? Why did Travis have his mother’s finger with him? Why wasn’t there a trace of DNA evidence at any of the murder scenes? And there was no DNA evidence that Stella or David had ever been inside Nora Conrad’s house—their killers had to have been someone else.
Palmer smiled at Cassandra, getting his mind back on the interview in front of him. “Anything else you can think of that seemed strange to you about them?”
Cassandra shook her head no. “They were bundled up in coats. And they looked … they looked kind of dirty.”
“Dirty?”
She smiled, revealing a mouth full of braces. She glanced at her parents like she was waiting for approval to say something impolite.
Her mother gave her a solemn nod to keep going.
Cassandra looked back at Agent Palmer. “I don’t want to be mean, but they kind of smelled bad.”
Palmer couldn’t help chuckling a little and his laughter seemed to set Cassandra more at ease. “Smelled bad? Like body odor?”
“Yeah. But it was more than that. There was another smell, like smoke. It was kind of faint, but …”
Palmer nodded, the image of the smoldering cabin flashed into his mind for a moment. He jotted down a few notes in his notebook and then smiled at Cassandra. “Thank you. You’ve been a lot of help.”
Cassandra smiled back at him and then she looked at her parents, who got up and walked
Palmer to their front door. All three of them watched Palmer walk away from their front porch to his car.
Palmer got inside of his rental car and started it. He sat there for a moment with the engine running as he stared down the street. He was tired and this case was just spinning around in circles in his mind. None of it was making sense. What was he missing?
He thought of Captain Begay down at the Navajo Reservation and his talk of skinwalkers and other ancient legends.
CHAPTER 45
New Mexico—gas station
Cole had staked out the gas station and he felt as good as he could about this meeting. He told Stella that he was going to wait in the pickup truck while she and David went inside to meet with Alice and the man she’d brought with her. He was sure that this friend of Stella’s wasn’t going to talk freely with him sitting there.
She reluctantly agreed.
Cole watched Stella as she turned around in her seat and explained to David that they were going to see a shaman who could help him with his power. But first they needed to find this shaman, and these people were going to help with that.
“My friend is going to ask me some questions about what happened to your parents,” Stella told David. “You have to be ready for that. She may even ask you about it.”
David nodded.
“Just answer whatever you feel comfortable with, okay? If you don’t feel like answering a question or talking about something, you don’t have to.”
David nodded again, and Cole could see that the kid was close to tears.
“I don’t want you to be scared, David,” Stella told him. “You know I would never do anything to hurt you.”
“I know,” David whispered.
Cole’s attention was drawn to two vehicles that had just pulled up at the far end of the gas station parking lot, where the newer diner had been built. A beat-up pickup truck followed a small import car. After the vehicles parked, a skinny woman with gray hair got out of the small car that was covered in dust. A tall, thin man with a long dark ponytail got out of the battered GMC pickup truck that had different colored fenders and big tires on the back.