Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 3 - Venus Besieged

by Andrews

  "Because I got a look at him and he has a distinctive limp. Can't be too many guys around here who limp at the hip."

  "Slows 'em down, which is good." Striker's lips pulled back from his teeth in a nearly mechanical grin.

  A fat black bug about the size of a quarter lit on his neatly ironed shirt, and he flicked it off and onto the squad car. Without pause, he pressed his left thumb down punitively on the beetlelike creature, exploding its guts onto the hood of the car, then with a manicured fingernail sent the empty shell sailing out into the wind. While I contemplated the ease with which he'd unnecessarily dispatched the insect, he jotted our cell numbers down.

  "You women know the victim?"

  When I said we didn't, he asked the question again and I repeated that we didn't know him.

  "You're not lyin' to me now, are ya?" He spoke in the patronizing tone I suspected he reserved for scatterbrained women.

  "If we were lying, would we tell you we were lying?" A smart remark, but his smirking questions annoyed me.

  "Step over there." His voice was sharp as he pointed his short baton at my midsection to keep distance between us. "Right over there against the car!"

  A voice in my head said that Officer Tumbleweed had hair-trigger hatred for women who spoke up, and he could be dangerous, and this was the desert, and I didn't want the shifting sands slowly covering our dead bodies. I moved in the direction he pointed.

  "Now, I'm gonna ask you politely again. Are you lying to me?" He spat out the words.

  "I'm a former member of the Tulsa Police Department, an officer myself, Officer Striker, and if you need to verify that, I can give you a number to call—"

  "I don't recall asking for your work history. I asked you a simple question."

  "Where I come from, there are consequences for intimidation, for the sake of intimidation." I held my breath as Officer Striker's anger played across his jaw muscles.

  "May we go, Officer—please."

  Callie's polite "please" seemed to break up the angry energy and help him save face. He swung his baton toward our car muttering, "Go."

  Hearing the ambulance doors slam shut, we pulled out right behind the vehicle.

  "That is one scary damned dude. The only difference between Sergeant Striker and Dwayne-Wayne is the starch in his shirt."

  "You shouldn't have gotten in his face."

  Pausing to think about that, I finally agreed.

  "Was Dwayne-Wayne following Blackstone and lying in wait for him?" she asked.

  "I don't know, but I'd love to shoot the jackass for whaling on a guy forty years older than him, even if it was Blackstone." I rechanneled my anger over Striker.

  "Notice how everything ends up with you wanting to shoot someone?"

  "Which says I'm only a pressed shirt away from being kin to Dwayne-Wayne or Officer Bug Squash, but you have to admit my killing plan does solve recidivism. If you shoot 'em, they don't do the same shit again."

  Callie laughed at me and I enjoyed making her laugh.

  "By the way, have you noticed I'm punching out fewer people than I used to—I must be evolving."

  Callie said nothing in reply, but graced me with a wry smile.

  "We need to locate your friend Manaba and find out what's going on. She and Blackstone looked pretty friendly and then he goes off and gets bumped. Did she set him up?"

  "Manaba's a healer—she's too trained, too honorable."

  "Must be the cop in me but I've seen priests, daycare workers, and doctors do despicable things, yet I've watched hookers do some fairly decent ones. So for me, it's not the profession, it's the person. She's a healer. Good for her. She'll have to prove to me she's not a bad one."

  "Barrett!" Callie said.

  "Damn, I completely forgot about her."

  "Under other circumstances I would consider that a win."

  Callie smiled at me and I decided not to remind her that jealousy wasn't supposed to enter her cosmic consciousness, all the while happy my lover felt a little jealous. It was a sign she was paying attention.

  I drove up to the Little Mojo Grocery and hopped out, walking quickly through the store to see if Barrett was around. She wasn't so I dialed her cell phone.

  "Hi, we came back for you. I'm at the Mojo."

  "Thanks a hell of a lot, Galahad. But you've been gone two fucking hours. Did you expect me to be sitting there chowing down on a can of pork 'n beans?"

  "Sorry, but we had to follow Blackstone, who was attacked by Dwayne-Wayne—"

  "What kind of bubba name is Dwayne-Wayne?"

  "A guy who's nuts and drives a white truck—but not as nuts as Officer Striker who—"

  "I got a lead on Little Horse's place," she interrupted, obviously not interested in my desert sagas. "So I called a cab and got back to my car, and I'm on my way out there now."

  I had to hand it to Barrett for sheer butch bravado. "Listen, don't go way out of town by yourself," I pleaded.

  "Oh, thanks for caring, you who left me at the Mojave-mart," Barrett snapped.

  "Listen, which direction are you headed?"

  "Signal's breaking up. I'm heading toward the reservation. I've got to find Ramona." And before I could answer, the line went dead.

  "I don't feel good about this," Callie said.

  I hated it when Callie and I had the same bad vibrations.

  "Can we get a cappuccino?" I asked, maxed out. "And we've got to get back and walk Elmo."

  "I think we should go after Barrett. She could be in trouble."

  "She's fine. Caught in a skip zone. I'll ring her again later." I didn't know if she was caught in a skip zone or not. I wanted to skip looking for her right now.

  "We should find her."

  "My entire screenwriting hiatus in Sedona is a debacle and my love life isn't much better, thanks to Barrett. She fucked up my screenplay, fucked the attorney, and now she's trying to fuck my day."

  At Callie's reprimanding look, I spun the car around and headed back toward the reservation to search for Barrett, saying nothing to Callie as we drove the next thirty miles and I continued to call.

  As the vast landscape opened up around us with its spotty dwellings and side roads, Callie spoke first. "This isn't getting us anywhere. We have no idea which way she went. Even when I concentrate on her, I get nothing."

  "Well, if you're getting nothing, I'm sure not driving around in the sand any longer, because I started getting nothing hours ago." Using a side road to spin the car a hundred and eighty degrees, I headed for civilization. "I need coffee."

  Thirty minutes later, we pulled up on a cliff flanked with chic adobe shops, parked in the back near the store entrances, and went inside where the view included not only merchandise, but beautiful valley vistas through the plate glass.

  I ordered a triple grande non-fat cappuccino, two sugars stirred in, and Callie ordered a tall caramel frappuccino.

  "I wonder how many adjectives we can list preceding our drink before we become suburbanite assholes?"

  "Don't say that," Callie warned.

  "I'm at three: triple, grande, and non-fat, if you don't count the sugars. I'm damned near there. I think if I ever add 'with whipped cream and a mocha topping,' someone should shoot me."

  "There you go with the shooting thing again. Energy draws energy."

  "Obviously, because I've got you drinking tall caramel fraps. Remember when you used to order a Coke? See how simple that sounds. I'll have a Coke."

  "Are you feeling stressed? I notice when you're stressed you start overanalyzing things and you get sarcastic."

  "I don't think it's overanalyzing. I think it's knowing at exactly what point in my purchasing habits I become a shallow jackass. I'm on the lookout for that."

  "Take it off your list, darling. I'll let you know if you ever get there. I'll look out for it." She reached over and held my hand, and I figured maybe it was these kinds of moments that being married might be like—having someone who pledged to look out for me. Keep me from
becoming shallow. What more could I ask from matrimony?

  We took our drinks back to the car and proceeded to the cabin, where Elmo greeted us with one open eye, not offering to raise his jowls off the floor, apparently bored with our having to go out even more than he did. Callie took her cell phone and disappeared into the bedroom.

  I tried Barrett's cell again, but apparently wherever she was required smoke signals and that irritated me even more, as if it were Barrett's fault that cell towers weren't readily available.

  That's when it dawned on me that I owed Wade a call, and as I dialed, our last conversation replayed in my head. Wade answered immediately.

  "What's up with Ramona?"

  "Missing," I said, and intentionally went quiet. He breathed. "Okay, it's obvious you and Ramona are buds because otherwise how would she have known I had a basset hound and that it was a he? I never told her that. So you two must chat each other up." Silence ensued and it crossed my mind that Wade could have slept with Ramona, but I quickly pushed that thought away. "So are you gonna tell me what you know about her disappearance, or do you just want me to flounder around in the sand out here?"

  "She has a client in Sedona, an Indian guy she helped on some deal about his hunting ground. He called her up and said he was in trouble and needed her help. She called me that night she was supposedly kidnapped to say she was going off to meet him, and she swore me to secrecy for his safety. I didn't get the damned name." Wade's voice clearly said he was beating himself up.

  "So it's possible she's on a business trip and she's okay?"

  Both of us were silent this time, not believing it.

  Through the window, I saw Manaba approaching and I finished up with Wade, telling him I'd be back in touch, as Callie jumped up and greeted her at the door.

  "Twenty years ago..." Callie said softly, and it amazed me the way Callie and Manaba began conversations in the middle with no preamble.

  Manaba bowed her head as if praying or contemplating or perhaps ignoring us. Finally, she said, "We were seventeen, and I was in love with her. He hated her for that, and when she died he was accused of her death but acquitted."

  "But he did it?" Callie asked, and Manaba didn't answer.

  "Why does Luther have such a hold on you?" I asked, and his name seemed to propel Manaba across the floor as if she was running from him right now. It was obvious she was hiding the truth and, unable to exit through her mouth, it was finding its way out through her incessant body movements.

  "If truth is your own personal territory, maybe you will visit it more often." I paraphrased her admonishment to me. She looked at me in that dead-stop stare she always gave Callie, the look that went into me and through me, and seemed to decide perhaps I was more than she had seen on her first cursory visit.

  "My grandmother had two daughters: my mother, who was raised by my grandmother in the tradition and gave birth to me, and my mother's sister, who had a child—the child of a white man. My mother's sister died in childbirth." Manaba spoke in a formal way about her aunt. "My grandmother raised the baby, named him Yiska, meaning 'the night has passed,' and treated him as a Navajo child in the old ways. Grandmother insisted Yiska would be Indian, even though Yiska's birth caused her daughter's death."

  Manaba sat quietly awaiting our questions, but out of respect neither of us said anything.

  Finally, she spoke again. "He wanted to be me, following in my grandmother's footsteps, but he is a man and not fully of the blood. He has powerful anger and his anger brings his power."

  "Did he kill Nizhoni?" I asked.

  "No," she said emphatically, and as if the wall had opened up and let him in, Luther Drake appeared, frightening us all with his stealth and cunning.

  "Are you telling the story of our growing up?" His voice dripped with revulsion as he pulled up a chair and straddled it, resting his arms on the back of it, his forearm revealing a long, recent scar as if slashed by the teeth of a wild animal. Placing his chin on his hands, his dark eyes fathomless caverns, black holes, he said, "You ignored me in school for her, then you ignored me again for the next one. But Nizhoni is not dead at all, is she, Manaba? I might not have known, had it not been for your newest one." He indicated Callie with pursed lips, in what seemed a mockery of old Navajo ways.

  My thoughts raced back to the day we dug up the grave and how Luther was the man who had jumped into the pit and pried open the lid where the bones lay. Whose bones were those? My mind no sooner registered that question than the answer flew from his lips.

  "You and I know the bones of animals."

  "She went over the cliff when the wolf attacked her. You know that, you were there," Manaba said flatly, and I looked at Callie, questioning if she knew Luther had been at the death scene.

  "And you threw your cape across her and hurled her over the cliff. So you murdered your lover when she wouldn't leave you alone, as you murdered your lover Kai, and you wanted everyone to believe I did it, when all the while it was you!" He thrust a finger at her in a violent gesture. "Evil cannot be suppressed forever, and your evil lies are the source of my anger!"

  He stood up, knocking the chair over, and whirled out the back door, the air in the space he occupied inverting on itself, sucking all oxygen into a small vortex that seemed to pull the breath from my own chest. A small black crow feather fluttered to the floor.

  When I looked at Callie, I saw something even more frightening. She was clutching her throat and gasping. Jumping up to perform the Heimlich maneuver, not knowing what she might have swallowed, I was held back by Manaba, who leaned in quickly and grappled with something unseen at Callie's throat, blocking it in the air with her forearms and wrestling it away. Callie took her hands from her throat and sucked in air.

  "Are you alright?" I asked and hugged her to me.

  "He's trying to frighten you," Manaba said.

  "What are you talking about?" I asked, but Manaba ignored me.

  "Is what he said true? Did you hurl her off the cliff?" Callie asked.

  "Yes," Manaba replied quietly, and then she too turned and walked out of the cabin.

  I shivered. "What the hell happened to your throat?" She rested her cheek against my chest, her small arms pulled in tightly, her fists balled up and tucked between us as if she wanted to be shielded by as much of me as she could.

  "An attack," Callie said, and I knew she was referring to the same kind of attack that had occurred while she was sleeping. "He believes Manaba loves me."

  "He and I are on the same page when it comes to that."

  "She admitted to killing Nizhoni," I said, but Callie softly refuted Manaba's confession, saying she had only admitted to hurling the girl off the cliff.

  "'Hurled' is pretty final. She's lying to you," I said without malice.

  "Maybe she did throw her off the cliff but didn't kill her, Teague. The net. Maybe she intentionally threw her into the net." Callie pulled back from me.

  "Why? And do you know what kind of shot she'd have to be? She'd have to be the Michael Jordan of the Sonora. The odds of my catching that net were a million to one. I don't think it could happen twice."

  "Maybe she threw her off the cliff to save her."

  "Like Vietnam: we destroyed the village to save it?"

  "I'm trying to figure it out, that's all."

  "You won't give up on her. God, she and Luther are really a pair."

  "That's what I'm getting—that they're a pair," Callie said. "He's in love with her. Perhaps lovers in another lifetime. Whatever it is, they're locked in a struggle that goes beyond this one, and his jealousy of everyone and everything is making him insane."

  "Can we go home to L.A.? This whole thing is taking place in a dimension I wasn't trained for. I think we should just get the hell out."

  Callie turned her focus entirely on me. "It's not what you think, Teague. It's not sexual desire. It's a power struggle at a very high level, and the loser could die."

  "I believe that, Callie, and I'm not going to l
et it be you. He thinks you're the competition now—like he thought Kai was and Nizhoni was."

  Suddenly, her mind seemed to be transported to another place as she whispered, "The dream I had—the duck with the ribbons tying everything together—a male duck is a drake...tying the three deaths together."

  My flesh rippled in response to her words.

  "You're getting chills," she said. "That's a sign of affirmation."

  Chapter Seventeen

  I vehemently punched the End Call button on my cell phone as if it were personally responsible for my inability to reach Barrett after hours of trying. "No answer. I think we need to get a guide who can lead us to Little Horse."

  "Even Manaba doesn't know where he is," Callie said.

  Glancing out the window I spotted a tall, scrawny boy leaping across the lawn toward the cabin. He banged on the door before I could get to it, and standing before me was the kid from the grocery store. He looked shy and made no eye contact as he talked.

  "Hi, uh.. .my mom said you guys were looking for Little Horse."

  I asked him to come in, but he scuffed his beaten-up tennies on the porch steps and insisted his feet were muddy from being down at the creek.

  "My day off. I work tonight," he said. "Uh...I can, uh...tell you how to get up there. I worked his mules for him up at the trail ride one summer."

  I couldn't believe our good luck. Fern's kid knew where Little Horse was.

  "I could draw it...but it's kinda complicated. I got a guide map back at my place and I'll loan it to you." I thanked him and he promised to bring it before dark.

  "Carrot boy saves the day," I said. "He's got a map!"

  "You see, you thought he was useless and stupid," Callie reminded me.

  "I did. So did I misjudge him or did he become useful and bright because I told his mom he was going to turn out that way, or is he really only useful and bright on this singular occasion—"

  "Or are things what you name them?" Callie kissed me. "You're very sexy."

  "Let it be so." I grinned. "Let's go to the hospital and find out why Dwayne was trying to kill Blackstone and why Blackstone was whispering in dark corners with Manaba. Is he covering up for her or did she send him out into the desert and set him up?"