Big Medicine (A John Tall Wolf Novel Book 5)

by Joseph Flynn

  John thought for a moment and asked, “Did you try to use your phone to find your missing computer? You know you can do that, right?”

  Yvette Lisle smiled indulgently. “Yes, I know that.”

  “And?”

  “That feature apparently has been disabled on number one.”

  “Do you know how?”

  She shook her head. “Not my area of expertise.”

  “Mine either, but I can probably find someone who would know. Maybe the feature can be restored, possibly without even tipping off the thieves.”

  Dr. Lisle said, “That would be helpful, but only if they haven’t already copied the data to a thumb-drive.”

  John sighed and nodded. “Well, if they haven’t done that, and by some small chance the kids who took number one aren’t tech-savvy, maybe we’ll be able to turn the find-me feature back on and erase all the information on the computer remotely, too.”

  That caught White River by surprise. “Is that possible?”

  Both John and Dr. Lisle said, “Yes.”

  But she added, “I’ve backed up all my data on this machine, but I added my commentary on the process and future exploration only on number one.”

  John said, “And in the name of security you didn’t put your ideas on the cloud, so you can’t recover them that way.”

  Yvette Lisle nodded.

  The best-laid plans, John thought.

  Then he turned to his great-grandfather and said, “Before I forget, why do you think the kids who took Dr. Lisle’s computer know what they stole?”

  “My speculation is the adults behind the plan told them.”

  “Told them what?” John asked.

  White River said, “That this is how the scales will be balanced. When the white men came to our lands, they brought illnesses with them that we could not fight, and those diseases killed more of us than all of their guns combined.”

  John understood the corollary. “And now, if Native Americans are behind this theft, they might be the only ones who will have protection against MRSA and maybe any other super-bugs that crop up. This time it will be everyone else who suffers and dies.”

  John’s scenario made Dr. Lisle’s face go pale.

  “Oh, my God,” she said, “I never wanted to have anything like that happen.”

  John believed her. There was nothing to say someone with a medical degree couldn’t also be an accomplished actor, but likely not to the point of having blood drain from her face. Then John had a thought that made him feel more than a little uneasy.

  He looked at White River and asked, “Grandfather, did you ever learn what happened to your other great-grandson, Bodaway? The last I saw of him, he seemed to be plunging to a certain death, but his body was never found.”

  The mention of Bodaway’s name made White River slump in his chair.

  He shrugged in an attitude of defeat. “I have not heard of or from him. My heart breaks whenever I hear his name. I blame myself for …”

  The old man could not bring himself to complete his thought.

  John felt a pang of regret for causing him pain.

  He’d have to tread more carefully, should he need to bring up Bodaway’s name again. He’d also have to intensify his search for Marlene Flower Moon. Bodaway had shot her, and she was not one to either forgive or forget. She was one to stalk and get even, as John well knew. If anyone had a fix on what had happened to Bodaway, it would be her.

  Trying to raise everyone’s spirits, Dr. Lisle said, “There is one thing in our favor.”

  “What’s that?” John asked.

  “Well, anyone who’s mathematically literate can read the scientific notation in my work, but the narrative voice recounting observations, hypotheses and future direction, they’re not written in English or any other Western language. Not even any Asian language.”

  That left an easy conclusion for John to draw. “You wrote in Umo-ho, the language of your tribe.”

  “One of them, anyway. Another part of my heritage, as you probably guessed, is French by way of Quebec.”

  “Your name and your eye color are clues,” John said with a nod.

  “Yes. Anyway, finding someone who can read Umo-ho might slow the thieves down a bit.”

  John glanced at White River, saw the old man was not as sanguine.

  The reason not to be optimistic was obvious.

  If Bodaway were involved, it would be a lot easier for him to find an Indian who could read Umo-ho than it would be for a white thief.

  John stood up and helped White River to his feet. He gestured to Dr. Lisle to join them.

  “Where are we going?” the old man asked.

  “To the U.S. Patent Office. If someone is able to decipher Dr. Lisle’s work, it’s reasonable to think they’d want to establish legal ownership of their stolen goods.”

  “What?” Dr. Lisle said, outraged by John’s notion.

  “Makes sense, doesn’t it?” he asked.

  “Yes, damn it, it does.”

  John said, “I don’t know where the Patent Office is, but it has to be in town here somewhere. I’ll look up the address on my phone.”

  Dr. Lisle said, “I know where it is. It’s not in DC; it’s in Alexandria, Virginia.”

  A suburb. John said, “Close enough. Let’s go.”

  Los Angeles, California

  “I’m finished with the LAPD,” Emily Proctor told Rebecca Bramley as the two women sat in Rebecca’s office. “It’s not official yet, but it will be soon.”

  Taking the most obvious of guesses, Rebecca asked, “You hit the glass ceiling already?”

  Emily shook her head. “It’s not that. It’s … well, my dad told me I should look for a nice young lawyer or aspiring politician, both of which he’d once been. To find the man of my dreams, he meant.”

  “Uh-huh,” Rebecca said. “I bet that went over big.”

  “He told me never to date another cop. Said it’d be courting disaster.”

  Rebecca said, “So that was just what you did. How’d your father take that?”

  “He told me he’d be there whenever I needed him. For someone with one foot in the law and the other in politics, he’s a prince.”

  “Which is something you can’t say about your cop boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Does he outrank you?”

  “He didn’t at first; he does now,” Emily said.

  “Direct line of command?” Rebecca asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s good. How’d he get promoted: merit, connections or both?”

  “Both.”

  “The connections just made things faster and inevitable, right?”

  “They did.”

  Rebecca said, “So what happened, he got bossy?”

  Emily shook her head. “Just the opposite. He said he’d fix it so I got promoted within a year. He’d pave the way for me. I’d deserve the increased rank, of course, because I would earn it. He’d just see to it that my good work was never overlooked.”

  “And the kicker is?” Rebecca asked.

  “After he got done outlining our glorious police futures, he asked when and where I’d like to get married.”

  “Romantic,” Rebecca said, “but, let me guess, you don’t want to be anyone’s lifelong protégé, always one step down the ladder, on the job and, inevitably, at home, too.”

  Emily laughed without humor. “Yeah, until he retires and moves on to his next wife.”

  If he waited that long, Rebecca thought.

  She said, “Does he know you’re going to leave LAPD?”

  “Not yet.”

  “But you haven’t made wedding plans, right, so he knows things aren’t quite going according to his plan.”

  “We’ve stopped seeing each other. I’ve told him to stop calling me. But he thinks, and even says, it’s just a temporary thing. He says I’ll see he’s right before long.”

  Rebecca shook her head, and Emily misinterpreted.

&n
bsp; “You think you’re going to have too many hassles with the LAPD if you hire me?”

  “Hell, no. You’ve got the job if you want it.”

  “Great … but why’d you shake your head?”

  “I was thinking about men, how some can be louses while others are so great.”

  Emily had noticed Rebecca’s wedding ring the first time they’d met.

  “Yours is great?”

  “He is. But let me tell you about this other guy in the RCMP. He’s why I’m living in the States right now.” Rebecca told Emily about her set-to with Sergeant Serge Marchand up in Canada, and how she’d cost him one of his testicles with a well-placed kick. “I don’t know how something like that would play in this country, but I’ll back you up, come what may.”

  Emily raised a fist in solidarity. “Thank you. My dad will represent us pro bono, if we need any legal help.”

  “Good,” Rebecca said. “So now that I’ve hired my first staff investigator, all we need to do is find our first client.”

  Emily smiled. “I’ve got one for you. I didn’t think it’d be polite to show up empty-handed.”

  Cree Indian Reserve — Beaver Lake, Alberta, Canada

  Two years earlier, Coyote had marooned Bodaway, also known as Thomas Bilbray, on the Cree Nation’s reserve at Beaver Lake. The reserve was only 105 kilometers (65 miles) northeast of the provincial capital of Edmonton, which hosted a metro area population of over a million people. Bodaway, however, was confined to the reserve which, in his opinion, was in the middle of fucking nowhere, and had a population of 400 full-time resident Indians.

  He might have attempted to break out after his wounds had healed and his broken bones had knitted, albeit at eccentric angles. The locals had any number of four-wheel drive vehicles he easily might have stolen, as they left their keys in the ignitions. There were open roads leading both south to Edmonton and north to the province’s largest city, Calgary. Should he be pursued by any ordinary hunter, Bodaway was sure he could have eluded capture and found a way to get back to the United States. Once there, he could have hidden out somewhere in the vast reaches of land and the hundreds of millions of people.

  The problem was, Bodaway was a prisoner of neither manacles nor iron bars but of the chains of memory. He still had horrifying recollections of Coyote’s teeth seizing his throat. He still felt the heat of being scalded by Coyote’s piss. His ego yielded to being branded a speck of mouse shit. All these torments danced before his eyes daily and, worse, filled his sleep every night.

  Coyote had told him not to set foot off the reserve or she would introduce him to further, even more gruesome, terrors. The mere idea that such things were possible made him shudder. So Bodaway wasn’t going anywhere.

  Not physically, anyway.

  Like many other isolated rural communities, the reserve was replete with short-wave radio rigs. The Cree, in the fashion of other rustics, knew better than to count on uncertain modern communications infrastructure. When all else failed, a tried-and-true battery-powered ham radio might be the last thing to save your ass when the going got rough.

  Bodaway bought an old radio that a local had replaced with a new model. He’d only had to offer a gullible Cree the promise of an eventual payment. Well, that and the thrill of meeting someone famous among his kind. Bodaway had mentioned the fact that his great-grandfather was Alan White River, the man who’d stolen the Super Chief locomotive.

  News of that feat had reached even the native population of Canada.

  It was a coup that was growing to mythic proportions, gladdening the hearts of native bands everywhere. When Bodaway, in all honesty, spoke of the critical role he’d played in the train’s theft, his status among the Cree became one of grudging acceptance.

  His welcome wasn’t warmer because the locals also knew that Bodaway was being punished by a great power. Still, the reserve’s chief thought he at least deserved the company a ham radio could provide — with the understanding that it would have to be paid for eventually or it would be reclaimed.

  So, in the wee hours of the present night, trying to put off his inevitable nightmares as long as he could, Bodaway listened to assorted discussions of the news of the outside world. He heard what was happening in the U.S. and locally. That was how he found out that the Cree were at odds with the provincial and federal governments in Canada.

  The Indians claimed that Alberta and Canada collectively had failed to “manage the overall cumulative environmental effects of development on core Traditional Territory.”

  Meaning nearby oil sands exploitation and other intrusions on nature were screwing with the Cree’s treaty rights to “hunt, fish and trap in perpetuity.” Indians were the original North American environmentalists.

  Bodaway loved hearing news of the conflict. He saw the situation as a golden opportunity to stir up some trouble and ennoble himself within his new community. That idea also gave rise to another.

  If he could cause trouble in Canada, he might also do the same elsewhere. He might not have an internet connection, but his ham radio had the U.S. within easy reach. Why not use that range to become a folk-hero south of the border, too? The quaintness of his means of communication would only make him seem more authentic.

  He looked for opportunities, playing off themes and memes he heard on the airwaves. He soon had ideas aplenty. He especially liked a discussion he happened upon regarding antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The topic was almost enough to make Bodaway believe in a Great Spirit. Talk about the white man finally getting his comeuppance.

  He couldn’t have thought of a more fitting end to the white man’s occupation of all the lands he had stolen. Well, the white man along with everyone else who’d followed him to North America. The only people who should survive were the ones who got there first.

  And that was where Bodaway’s glee dissolved.

  Hell, if some kind of super-bug could kill everyone else, it wasn’t going to give Native Americans a pass. They’d be cut down like everyone else. For their people, it would just be one final defeat by biological warfare.

  In fact, Native Americans, along with other poor people, would likely be the first to go.

  As part of his daily physical rehabilitation discipline, Bodaway forced himself to limp around his tiny cabin for hours on end. Logs blazed in the fireplace but still he was cold. His gene pool had been formed in the heat of the American Southwest not the cold of the Canadian Northwest.

  People were supposed to adapt to their conditions, but Bodaway hadn’t. Cold was yet another misery he had to bear. He was sure Coyote had considered that when she’d chosen his place of confinement.

  Despite his abiding physical discomforts, Bodaway found that pacing helped him to think more clearly and, better yet, more imaginatively. His first insight had been that his engineering education and skills might be traded with the inhabitants of the reserve for tangible returns, durable goods, if not money.

  The first thing he’d done was pay off his ham radio with a stove repair.

  He used the same means of exchange by doing car repairs, electrical wiring jobs, plumbing projects and, most grandly, he designed a new sewage system for the whole community.

  In return, Bodaway had gained triple glazed windows for his cabin, which made the winter cold somewhat less unbearable. The Cree brought him fresh fruit and vegetables in season and fine cuts of meat to see him through the winter. His body would never be truly whole again, but he was becoming stronger.

  His new prized possession, to supplement his radio, was a MacBook Pro the chief had purchased for him in Calgary. The Cree had their own cell tower. The tribe held its ham radios in high regard, but they weren’t Luddites. When it worked, modern technology was fine.

  With his new computer, Bodaway could do more extensive research into the matter of deadly bacteria and how they might be thwarted. Preferably, selectively. That might seem to be a horrible idea to some people. Hell, most people. But Bodaway thought it was a fine plan.
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br />   After all, where were the bleeding hearts when his people all but got wiped out?

  Nowhere at all.

  So Bodaway searched the internet, looking for advances in how to kill superbugs.

  It wasn’t long before he found the name Yvette Lisle. He thought at first she must be French. But a little digging showed she was at least half Native American. A story in the Washington Post said she was working on a new approach to defeating MRSA.

  Wanting to know more about the woman herself, his search showed she was a member of the Omaha Tribe — the Upstream People. Her immediate family, on its Native American side, had been literate for only two generations. That suggested an impressively fast-rising learning curve for Dr. Lisle.

  On an impulse, Bodaway looked up the meaning of Dr. Lisle’s first name.

  Yvette: A French name meaning archer.

  Perfect, he thought. All she needed now was the right target.

  Santa Fe, New Mexico

  Hayden Wolf and his wife Serafina Wolf y Padilla sat at their kitchen table having a late lunch. Each of them, as aging parents were wont to do, was thinking of the inheritance they would leave to their son, John Tall Wolf. They were well pleased with the character traits they’d helped to instill in him. He was honest, kind, generous, and a supple thinker.

  He was also big and strong. The potential for those qualities had been part of his genetic legacy from his biological parents. The Wolfs had nothing to do with that, but they had nourished him through a good diet, regular exercise and unstinting love and guidance.

  Financially, he would be more than well provided for. Not that he would be rich. But with his monetary inheritance, his salary and his eventual pension, he should be more than comfortable.

  Both Wolfs had been delighted when John had brought Rebecca Bramley to meet them in New Orleans. They couldn’t have hoped for a better daughter-in-law. Lovely, smart, strong, professionally accomplished. Now, if only she and John could find a way to live together.

  The fact that John and Rebecca were separated by the width of the country bothered both Hayden and Serafina. The elder Wolfs had never been distant from each other for more than a week during their marriage. How could John and Rebecca have a life together when they lived so far apart? How could they start a family, if that was what they wanted?