Shotgun Daddy

by Harper Allen

  “I know what Tye said Jess told him in that last phone call, dammit! And it’s Tye’s prerogative to believe that maybe this time one of Jess’s half-cocked enthusiasms might have proved to be right and he’d found evidence linking the problems at the Double B to Del’s Vietnam past. But although I loved the guy as much as anyone else here, that doesn’t stop me from remembering some of Jess’s other zany obsessions, and I don’t buy into this one, either. Yeah, we were wrong about Andrew Scott, and yeah, now we need to start from scratch to figure out who Leo was, but—”

  “We were wrong about Scott? Who says so?” His questions had come out of him in the same parade-ground bark as Del’s, Gabe remembered with a touch of embarrassment. But it had served to silence the chatter. Connor had raked a hand through his hair.

  “The Bureau says so.” His tone had been bitter. “They might have said so days ago, except the officious pencil-pusher who was Scott’s FBI contact was more concerned about keeping the juiciest whistle-blowing file he’d ever stumbled across to himself than cooperating with his peers.”

  He’d nodded grimly at Gabe. “It’s true. Scott contacted the feds when he quit Crawford Solutions. Said he’d discovered evidence of financial chicanery on Dixon’s part, but when he tried to tell Jess of his findings, Jess refused to hear a word against the man who’d been with him from the start. They almost came to blows over it, and the only reason Scott didn’t just keep quiet after that and let Jess go down the tubes was that when he thought it over, he realized he would be doing his country a disservice by allowing Dixon to destroy the company. The Pentagon’s only one branch of the government that Jess developed cutting-edge software for,” he ended heavily.

  “So all the time we’ve been begging the feds to find Scott and bring him in, they’ve had him tucked away in a safe house somewhere while they’ve been building a case against Dixon?”

  Out of habit, Gabe recalled, he’d looked at Caro as he’d posed his question—to get her reaction. She’d looked back at him with no expression at all in those blue eyes, and for a moment he felt as if he’d just stepped into an elevator and found it wasn’t there.

  Which was stupid, he thought bitterly.

  “That’s what Higgins, the pencil-pusher, was so reluctant to divulge,” Connor had drawled. “His star witness up and disappeared on him before he could arrange to get him under wraps. My contact at the Bureau says the unofficial take on the situation is that Higgins mishandled Scott so badly that Scott lost confidence in his ability to keep him safe if he testified against Dixon, and decided to give the whole thing up and disappear. But the bottom line still remains, Gabe—Scott isn’t Leo. He was gunning for Dixon, not allied with him.”

  Maybe that was Connor’s bottom line, Gabe thought now as he began to descend the porch steps. It probably should be his, too, but it wasn’t.

  His bottom line was that Caro had lied to him.

  From the darkness came the thump of a porch chair’s front legs making contact with the floor. “I figured she must have told you, from the way the two of you looked when you came back from Albuquerque this afternoon. Or maybe…” Del gave a low whistle. “Yeah, that’s how it happened, didn’t it. She didn’t tell you, but somehow Kanin had figured out who Emmie’s daddy was and he spilled the beans.”

  Gabe whirled around, raw fury spilling through him. He re-mounted the steps two at a time.

  “So help me, Hawkins, I’ve had to take you riding me about everything under the sun since the day I came here, fifteen years ago. But this is off limits, do you hear? She’s off limits! And if you say one more word on the subject I’ll—”

  “You’ll what, Riggs?” There was a cold edge of contempt in Del’s tone. “You’ll walk out? Hell, go ahead. That’s what she was afraid you’d do, so why not prove her right?”

  “You’ve got it wrong,” Gabe said thickly. “She was afraid I’d stay.”

  A thought struck him, and he stiffened. “You knew, obviously. You knew Emily was my daughter and you kept it from me. There never was that much between us, Hawkins, but what little there was ends here. I’m through with you and the Double B.”

  “Going back to the desert, Riggs?” Del’s voice sharpened. “Or back to the job? It suited you, I’ll admit. You got flown into some godforsaken spot, laid your life on the line to bring a father or a son or a mother back to their family, and then you did it all over somewhere else. You put families together again. You made them whole. You were so busy doing that, you never had to think about the gaps in your own life.”

  “The gaps like having a father who didn’t stick around?” Gabe laughed incredulously. “Hell, that was Jess’s problem, not mine. I got along all right without an old man, just like Tye did with an absentee father he barely knew and just like Connor, who saw his die when he was a kid. I was a Double B bad boy, Del. Most of us came from backgrounds like that.”

  “But no one else who came here built such high walls around himself in consequence,” Del answered flatly. “And you never really let the barriers down, did you. Not between you and me, not between you and your friends here, not between you and Caro. I went to bat for you when I learned Emily was yours, you know. I tried to convince Caro she should tell you. But she was right not to, I see that now.”

  There was just enough light for Gabe to see Del’s hawklike gaze narrow at him.

  “Your little girl’s part Dineh, like you. If you never make peace with that part of your heritage, how will you ever pass it on to her when the time comes?” Del’s voice lost its edge. “Yeah, whoever your father was, he walked away from you, and I know it must have felt like your mother did, too, when she died. I suspect that’s why you decided at an early age to walk out on people yourself, before they could do it to you. But it’s time to forgive that Dineh woman who gave birth to you and loved you. It’s time to take back the part of you that’s her.”

  Del stood. “I know Alice Tahe’s sent messages through Joseph, asking you to come and see her. I know you’ve ignored those messages. Maybe if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have screwed everything up so badly.”

  Without another word he went into the house. Through the screen door, Gabe saw him set the coffeepot on the stove.

  The Lieutenant had lost it, he thought grimly a few minutes later as he strode through the dark yard to the darker silhouette of the horse barn. Maybe it was his worry over Greta that had muddied his thinking, maybe it was the stress of the incidents that had occurred at the Double B over the past few months, but whatever it was, Hawkins had it all wrong.

  “Yah-ta-hey, Runner-with-the-Wind.”

  He kept his voice low as he approached the stall, but even so, he knew the Appaloosa had heard the traditional Dineh greeting. For the first time in hours he felt a little of the tension drain from him.

  Everyone else called the stallion Chorizo. A sixteen-year-old Gabe had taken one look at him and known immediately that that wasn’t his real name. He’d privately christened him Runner-with-the-Wind, and although Chorizo had never allowed anyone else to ride him, Runner-with-the-Wind had flown through more than one long-ago dawn with Gabe on his back.

  Gabe hesitated, and then unlatched the stall door.

  “The moon is a sliver, Runner-with-the-Wind,” he said softly. He slid one hand into the coarse mane and with the other touched the ruined right side of the stallion’s face. Like everyone else at the Double B, he knew the story of how Del had rescued Chorizo as a colt from a brutal owner, but too late to prevent the man from permanently scarring the animal’s face and psyche. Unlike almost everyone else, Gabe had never feared that the Appaloosa’s famously wicked temper would be turned on him.

  “The moon is a sliver, the world is dark, and somewhere on the Dinetah is an old lady. She’s probably asleep. If she is, at least we’ll have ridden through the night together, and that will be a memory worth making. Shall we go, Runner-with-the-Wind?”

  The Appaloosa whickered softly as he was led from the stall. Reaching the open d
oors of the barn and tightening his grasp on the animal’s mane, Gabe swung himself up with unconscious ease.

  A stray shaft of starlight cut through the darkness and glimmered faintly on the silver and turquoise cuff banding his left wrist. Gabe frowned, and for no reason at all fear flickered momentarily through him. The horse beneath him whickered again, this time more insistently.

  The fear fell away. He took a deep breath. Then he touched his heels to the Appaloosa’s flanks, and Runner-with-the-Wind lived up to his Navajo name.

  Forever after, Gabriel Riggs never forgot that ride through the dark to the Dinetah. Neither, he suspected, did the horse everyone else called Chorizo. At some point they seemed no longer to be two separate beings, but to have melded into a single, perfectly balanced entity.

  And at some point Gabe became dimly aware that he wasn’t riding alone.

  That part he never recalled very clearly. When he tried to afterward, he found he could only bring to mind impressions—impressions of others keeping pace with him in the night; impressions of triumphant cries echoing all around him—cries in a language that weren’t English, but that he found he could understand easily; impressions of copper-tan skin like his, straight dark hair like his, brief flashes of white as his shadowy companions smiled at him in recognition and welcome.

  And then they were gone—if, as he wondered for the rest of his life, they had ever really been there and hadn’t been phantasms conjured up by the exhilaration he’d felt during his ride. They were gone, he was on the Dinetah, and although he had never visited Alice Tahe before, Gabe knew with certainty that the traditional hivelike structure he was looking at was her hogan.

  He slipped from the Appaloosa’s back, and with that same unsettling certainty knew there was no need to secure the animal.

  “You are late, my son.”

  For a man who’d always figured he had steady nerves, Gabe came pretty damn close to jumping about a foot in the air. He could barely make out the small, sturdy figure of the old lady standing by the entrance to her hogan.

  “Late, Grandmother?” It seemed right to address her that way. “I came as fast as I could.”

  The dreamlike state he’d been in during that wild ride through the dark suddenly dissipated, and cold sanity returned. Okay, Hawkins, Gabe thought, I came to the Dinetah. I saw Alice Tahe, like you said. And now I think I’ll just turn around and go—

  “You delayed as long as you could.” There was sharp condemnation in the old lady’s voice. “Even now, when there may be no time left, you delay. But you are the only one of the three who ever came at all, my son, and that may yet save those he wishes to destroy. Come, all is ready.”

  Without waiting for his reply, Alice Tahe turned and entered her hogan. And after a moment’s hesitation, Gabe followed.

  The first thing he noticed was the dry, spicy scent of some kind of grass being burned. A thin tendril of smoke rose from a scraped-out hollow in the center of the neatly brushed earth floor of the hogan, and he realized that the spicy scent was coming from the smudge-fire smoldering there. The smell wasn’t unpleasant—the opposite, in fact—but the smoke drifting through the room stung his eyes enough to make them water a little.

  Alice Tahe’s eyes, however, were bright and snapping in their nests of wrinkles. Del had said she’d seen her hundredth birthday, and looking at her, Gabe believed it. She wore the traditional dress of a Dineh woman, a many-tiered skirt topped by a silver-buttoned, velveteen blouse, and her hair was pulled into a tight bun at the back of her head and bound by white yarn, also in the traditional Navajo way.

  He felt suddenly ashamed of the churlish way he’d put off coming to see her, and of his impatience a moment ago. She’d gone to some trouble to set the stage for what she wanted to say to him, obviously, although how she’d known he would come tonight he still hadn’t figured out. But that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that an old lady who still clung to the ancient beliefs and stories of her ancestors had welcomed him into her home. The least he could do in return for her courtesy was to listen with respect to her, agree with whatever she had to say, and then take his leave of her, again with the respect her age deserved.

  “You think that is how this meeting will go, my son?” Those snapping eyes lit briefly with a flash of humor as they looked at him. “Humoring an old lady, leaving with a polite smile? I had heard you had strayed far from the path. I didn’t know how far. Sit.”

  How the hell had she read his mind like that? Gabe realized his mouth was open and closed it hastily.

  “I said sit! Your time is running out!”

  Below the quick anger in her tone was a more elusive emotion. As he followed her example and lowered himself to a cross-legged position on the opposite side of the smudge-fire from her, he realized what that emotion was.

  Fear.

  Alice Tahe was desperately afraid. It was there in her voice, it was in the slight trembling of her hands that he’d taken for an effect of her advanced years, it was all around him in the close, smoky atmosphere of her hogan. She was terrified. And her terror had a name.

  “Skinwalker…”

  The voice inside his head sounded exactly like Alice Tahe’s. Gabe realized that his eyes had fallen closed, most likely to shut out the smoke, and he snapped them open again.

  She was asleep. Her head had sunk down onto her chest and her breathing was deep and sonorous. A smile touched the corners of his lips. Feisty as she was, when you came down to it, she was just an old lady who’d stayed up half the night waiting for him, and she’d fallen—

  SILENCE!

  This time Gabe did jump. His startled gaze took in Alice’s still-bowed head, her closed eyes, her closed and wrinkled lips. It had been her voice he’d heard. But that was…impossible.

  Impossible in the Belacana world. Not in the Dineh one. You are lucky—you can cross back and forth between the two, although until now you have not chosen to do so. You have lost your way, haven’t you, my son.

  There was compassion now in that unspoken voice. But he didn’t need compassion from a woman he didn’t know, Gabe thought uncomfortably, especially since there was no reason for an old Dineh lady to feel sorry for him.

  He opened his mouth to tell her so as politely as possible, but before he could, he heard a second voice in his head.

  Yes, Grandmother, I have. I lost it so long ago that I don’t even know when I took the wrong path. And only recently have I realized I’m the only one traveling this lonely road, and that if I keep on it I’ll lose my soul.

  The second voice was his own. But he hadn’t spoken those words, Gabe thought in confusion. He hadn’t even intended to say them. They’d just come out of…

  …his innermost thoughts. Even as the incredible realization hit him, Alice Tahe spoke—except that wasn’t what she was doing at all, any more than he had been.

  You are right. Your soul is in jeopardy. But until a man knows where to find his soul, how can he keep it safe? That is the first question I ask you, and one you must answer for yourself. My second question is no question, but a warning—there is an evil that walks like a man and talks like a man. But this evil is no man, it is a ghost.

  The ghost our people call Skinwalker. His eyes closed, Gabe nodded. The Dineh legends say he can take whatever form he wishes and—

  Skinwalker is no legend! The sharpness had returned to her. He is real and he means to bring death to all you hold dear. Coming here has given you strength, but you need to be stronger still. And there is no more time….

  “The past has become the present. The circle has come around.”

  With a small shock Gabe realized that Alice Tahe had spoken the last two sentences aloud. He opened his eyes, and through the now-swirling smoke he saw her gaze fix on him.

  “The past has become the present and the circle has come around? I don’t understand,” he began, but she cut him off.

  “You must find understanding. Your child’s life depends on it—her life,
and the life of her mother. Now go. Take my prayers with you, my son, and go!”

  The smudge-fire flared suddenly up and the smoke billowed thickly. Gabe tried to get to his feet but the choking miasma overwhelmed him. He made a second attempt, and this time he seemed to feel strong arms helping him up and bearing him out of the hogan.

  “The past has become the present. The circle has come around. The past has become the present. The circle has…” Still muttering Alice’s cryptic phrase, groggily he raised his head. Somehow he had ended up back on his hands and knees again, he thought in frustration. He reached blindly out in front of him, and felt something. He grasped it and hauled himself to his feet.

  “Stay where you are, mister! I’ve got a double-barreled shotgun pointed right at you.”

  The unmistakable sound of a bolt-action being levered into place accompanied the crisp warning. A moment later light flooded the scene, and instinctively Gabe threw up an arm to shield his eyes.

  But not before he saw who had delivered the warning. It was Del, and he was standing only feet away…

  …on the porch of the Double B.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Let’s see if I’ve got this right. One second you were at Alice Tahe’s hogan, and the next thing you knew you were here at the Double B looking down the barrel of my gun?” Del’s grunt was disgusted. “Hell, when I checked the barn a few minutes ago at your request to make sure Chorizo was back in his stall, maybe I should have looked for an empty bottle or two. I’ve never known you to handle your problems by drowning them in alcohol before, Riggs, but I guess there’s a first time for everything. Go sleep it off, and let everyone else get back to their beds, too.”

  A spark of anger flared in Caro. Crustiness was one thing, but as was all too usual when he was confronting Gabe, Del had just stepped over the line. About to tell him so, she suddenly stopped herself.

  Gabriel Riggs didn’t need her to go to bat for him. Gabriel Riggs had made it clear that he didn’t need Caro Moore, period. And although for a while she’d begun to hope that situation might have changed, today she’d realized that it never would.