A Man Without Love

by Beverly Bird

  “I can’t think of anyone.”

  “Haven’t forced your services on anybody?”

  “No!”

  “Saved anyone who was supposed to die?”

  “You know I haven’t.” Suddenly she understood what he was getting at. “You think I crossed paths with your wolfman. You think I made him angry.”

  Ellen paled even more. “He’ll be coming after all of us then,” the nurse breathed. “If something happened here at the clinic to upset him...”

  She didn’t like the nurse, but neither could she stand by silently while someone suffered needlessly. She opened her mouth to tell her that it wasn’t their wolfman who had done this, it was Victor. The cloth, the bullet...

  But she couldn’t trust Ellen Lonetree, of all people, with a secret that could cost her her life. She closed her jaw again helplessly.

  “What?” Jericho demanded. He was watching her again in that way he had, as though he could read her heart, her soul, her mind, if she only gave him enough time.

  “Nothing,” she whispered. “I just...I think you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  Something flared in his eyes. Suspicion? Her throat closed uncomfortably.

  “Yeah?” he asked too mildly. “So what’s your theory?”

  “There are an awful lot of people who don’t want me here,” she managed. “Maybe someone’s just trying to scare me off.”

  “It’s not Navajo nature to scare you off. Unless they’re wolfmen, they’ll just ignore you.”

  Catherine shrugged helplessly. They were certainly doing that.

  Jericho peered down into the box. “That thing around its beak mean anything to you?”

  “I...no.”

  He looked at her sharply again, but then he only carried the box to the door. Ellen skittered out of his way and Catherine followed him.

  “What are you going to do with it?” she asked.

  “Burn it. Sing over it.” He placed the box in the dirt outside and looked at Ellen. “I’ll need something flammable and some matches. Anything like that in the clinic?”

  “I’ll look,” the nurse said and hurried off again.

  “Here? Now?” Catherine tried to think fast. Was it possible she could need the thing for evidence or something? She couldn’t imagine why, and Jericho was not going to be delayed anyway.

  “Can’t leave it,” he said. “He might come back for it. Wolfmen don’t like to leave pieces of their work scattered about. He might come back for it.”

  “Then we’d find out who he is.”

  His eyes narrowed on her. “He won’t come in human form.”

  Catherine’s head spun. She was getting that disassociated feeling again. Reality was getting all tangled up with things that couldn’t be, that belonged to another time and world.

  “What will you sing?” she managed. “A whole ceremony?”

  “No. There’s a simple chant to make an enemy peaceful.”

  “Will it work?”

  “Do you care?”

  Yes, she thought. Yes, she did. Even considering that the enemy was Victor, she thought she could use all the help she could get, even if it was just Indian hocus-pocus.

  She nodded, then a new thought came to her, making her feel ashamed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

  His brows rose. “For what?”

  “For being so...so skeptical. I just realized that I’d probably get riled, too, if an atheist tried to tell me there was no God.”

  He was quiet for so long that she didn’t think he would answer. He looked out at the craggy horizon and the looming mountain. Finally, he blew his breath out in a harsh sigh.

  “Don’t sweat it, Cat Eyes. This is a strange, ancient land. Back in the city you’ve got witches and ghosts. We’ve got wolfmen and chindis. Your people don’t talk about them. Mine accept them as part of life. Sometimes it’s hard to cross that line, even for those of us who were born straddling it.”

  Catherine managed a faint smile. “Well, I don’t believe in witches and ghosts, either.”

  Ellen brought the things he needed. Catherine backed away to give him room to work. “I should take the Jeep back to Eddie Begay,” she said finally.

  Jericho looked up as he started the fire. “Yeah? And how are you going to find him?”

  “Shadow said he worked in a garage in Shiprock.”

  “Which one?”

  “How many are there?”

  “Three.”

  She was getting irritated again. “Then I guess I’ll just ask at each one until I find him.”

  The truth of the matter was that she needed to make a phone call. She didn’t want to place it from the clinic, even assuming the mobile phone could handle long-distance calls. She’d never used one before and couldn’t be sure, but she was certain that she didn’t want this call to be traceable.

  The fire was burning. The stench of the bird made her throat close and her eyes water, but it had no appreciable effect on Jericho. Maybe he was the wolfman, she thought wildly.

  “How’re you going to get back?” he asked.

  Catherine hesitated. She hadn’t thought of that.

  “Hang on five minutes and I’ll follow you.”

  Panic made her heart skip a beat. First of all, she didn’t want to be trapped in that Rover with him for what—a hundred miles? And secondly, her instincts for self-preservation told her it would be best if no one saw her making the phone call. She had to decline the offer...but there really was no other way.

  “How about if I go ahead and you can meet me there?” she said finally.

  He nodded without arguing with her. “It’s the Exxon.”

  “Thanks.”

  She was halfway to the Jeep when his voice stopped her again. She turned to look back at him. He stood, tossing the stick from hand to hand as the small bonfire leaped and spat.

  “Just out of curiosity, what had you planned to do with this?”

  “Beat the hell out of anyone who came within striking distance.”

  He made an odd sound in his throat and snapped the stick in half over his knee, feeding the pieces into the fire. Catherine flushed, then her jaw dropped.

  He was laughing.

  It was a deep, almost rusty sound that rubbed warmly across her skin and tickled something inside her. The reflex transformed him and left her reeling as no voodoo owl ever could.

  She hesitated, but the broken burning stick was a pathetic weapon. She grinned and shrugged.

  Jericho laughed harder.

  * * *

  Catherine kept her eye on the rearview mirror as she drove, expecting to find him coming up hard behind her. But apparently the chant he planned was long enough to suit her purposes. She made it into the town without him and dropped the Jeep at the Exxon station.

  Eddie wasn’t in, but she wrote him a note of thanks and left it in the office with his keys. Then she went next door to a motor inn that advertised a coffee shop on the sign outside.

  She heard mingled voices, tangled languages, as soon as she stepped into the lobby. She followed the sounds. The coffee shop was packed. Tourists with children sat at the counter among Anglo businessmen and Navajos in jeans, cowboy hats and neat bolo ties.

  Civilization. She passed through it reluctantly to a pay phone on the far wall, wishing she could sit down and join them for a while and talk about innocuous things such as the weather here.

  Instead, she placed a call back to Boston. “Horace Schilling,” she said when the line picked up, then she was put on hold again until the man’s rich baritone came back to her. “It’s Catherine Landano.”

  There was a brittle silence as this sunk in. “So where the hell are you?” Schilling asked.

  Catherine bristled. “Watching out for my own hide,” she snapped. “I didn’t fare very well when you guys were doing it.”

  His lack of a response was all the agreement she would get. “How are you?” he asked finally.

  “Alive. Are you t
racing this call?”

  “I can.”

  That told her all she needed to know. She would have to make it quick. “Where’s Victor?”

  “Right here in Boston.”

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “He’d have his bail revoked if he left.”

  Catherine gave a wild little laugh. Still, after everything, the authorities underestimated him.

  “Check and make sure,” she said. “I’ll call you next week. When’s the trial?”

  “December seventeenth.”

  “For my attempted murder, or for the whole thing?”

  “We’re still trying to piece together corroborating evidence on his associations and that business about the senator. We can’t take it to trial on your testimony alone. It wouldn’t even pass the grand jury.”

  They had told her all this before, and Schilling knew it. He was just rambling, trying to keep her on the line.

  “If Victor is there,” she interrupted, “watch him closely, and I think you’ll find something to prove out his associations. If he’s there, then he’s got one of his goons out here, trying to frighten me. There’d have to be some kind of contact between them, wouldn’t you think?”

  “Where’s here?” Schilling asked without answering.

  “I’ll call you next week.”

  Catherine disconnected hard and fast and wondered if she had talked too long. She had a sinking feeling that she might have. Then it vanished under the assault of a hot, probing sensation at the back of her neck.

  She turned quickly. Jericho stood in the door of the coffee shop, watching her.

  Chapter 8

  He didn’t say anything for a long time. They went back to the Exxon to get his Rover, then they drove a full eighty miles at a speed that had her pulse slamming. By then the tension of his stony silence would have had her blurting anything at all.

  But he didn’t immediately mention the phone call. “You need a gun,” he said instead.

  She looked over at him, startled. “I thought they were illegal on the reservation.”

  “Antiquated law tracing back to the days when the government didn’t want us to arm ourselves for fear we’d fight back.” Then his jaw relaxed a bit. “It’s possible to get a special permit from the tribal council now. Their major concern is that visitors will come onto the Res and hunt out all the wild game that remains. Not to mention the fact that when people get drunk they tend to shoot each other.”

  “Oh.” Catherine watched the sage and the rabbitbrush whiz by outside the open window. Slowly, her stomach unknotted. “Can you shoot a wolfman?” she wondered aloud. “Can you kill one by ordinary mortal means?”

  What was she asking? Her problem was definitely Victor. She couldn’t imagine how he might have known about the Navajo significance of the owl, but the bullet wound and that little gag on its beak left very little doubt. Even if she wanted to believe she had irritated the wolfman—and it was almost a preferable alternative—that piece of cloth wouldn’t let her.

  Jericho seemed to consider her question. “No,” he said finally. “Not really. They can only be destroyed by magic or by fire. But that’s not who you want to shoot, is it?”

  She flinched, then it came to the tip of her tongue to lie. The fear she had been living with for so long now made her defensive. She wanted to feign confusion, pretend she didn’t understand his question. But she knew instinctively that Jericho Bedonie would not tolerate a lie. He would shut her out again and this time he wouldn’t thaw.

  Catherine found that she couldn’t bear the thought. She knew, somehow, that it would leave a gaping hole in her life. Perhaps this odd relationship would never lead anywhere; perhaps they were simply too different. There was his relationship with Ellen to consider as well. But if she lost him now, she thought she could be losing the tantalizing possibility of something more glorious and passionate than she had ever imagined.

  “No,” she heard herself admit quietly.

  “Who then?” he asked.

  She rubbed a hand over her eyes and shook her head. “I can’t tell you that.”

  He took his eyes off the road to study her for too many moments. Then, to her surprise, he nodded. “Okay.”

  He would respect that, she realized. He was a private man and he would allow the same privacy in others.

  “Don’t rule a wolfman out, anyway,” he urged. “They know things.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Whoever he is, he knows whatever you’re not telling me.”

  Her heart lurched. “That’s not possible.”

  He cocked a brow at her. “Think about your own ghosts and ghoulies.”

  “I told you I don’t believe in them.”

  “Doesn’t matter. They’re supposed to be omniscient, right?”

  She nodded reluctantly.

  “Same goes for our wolfmen.”

  Catherine hugged herself against a shiver. If she could somehow manage to contact Schilling next week, if he told her the FBI had turned up no connection between Victor and a hired man, then that would almost force her to contemplate a supernatural alternative. She had been trained in science; she had an analytical mind that needed rules. She didn’t want to be forced to step beyond them.

  “I think,” Jericho continued, “that our wolfman sees you as a threat. You tried to save Lisa, tried to interfere with his magic. He’s warning you off.”

  “Then why not leave something that tied into her? Why leave hints of...” What happened with Victor. “Of something else entirely?”

  “He’s going for your most vulnerable point.”

  Jericho finally turned onto the clinic road and parked the Rover. He shifted a little behind the wheel to face her more fully.

  “I’ll talk to the council about a special gun permit anyway,” he said finally. “No sense in leaving you with a blind side.”

  Catherine hesitated, then she blurted, “If you’re willing to accept that the owl might be the work of something more mortal, then why can’t you believe the same thing about the Mystery Disease?”

  “Because I never saw the Mystery Disease sneaking in a phone call in Shiprock.”

  She flushed and fumbled for the door handle. But when she was out, she couldn’t help looking back at him.

  “Why are you doing this? Why are you helping me? I thought you wanted me to turn tail and run.”

  His gaze fell to her mouth and everything coiled inside her all over again.

  “That would be safest,” he said quietly. “But I’m beginning to think you’re not going to do it.”

  * * *

  He returned on a quiet afternoon, after Shadow had given Ellen a lift home. Catherine was alone, cleaning one of the back rooms. She heard his boots on the floor out front and her heart squirmed dangerously. She grabbed a paper towel to dry her hands and went to meet him.

  “Lock up the clinic,” he said curtly.

  His arrogance irritated her all over again. When he snapped his fingers, everyone jumped, and he had clearly come to expect it. Catherine tossed the paper towel in a trash can and crossed her arms over her chest instead.

  “No.”

  His brows shot up. “Come again?”

  “The last time I checked, this place was under the jurisdiction of the IHS. Since I’m the only representative of the Service here, I guess I should be the one to decide when we close.”

  “Fine. Do it.”

  She fought the urge to stomp her foot in temper. “Why?” she demanded.

  “Because I want to make sure you know how to use this gun, and I’m not going to do it here. I’m not in the habit of arming someone if it’s going to come back to haunt me.”

  Her eyes widened. “You got the permit?”

  He reached beneath his jacket to pull out a small revolver tucked against his waist. He held it out to her and she reached for it, but then he pulled it back.

  “Target practice first.”

  “I can shoot it.”


  “Mind if I don’t take your word for it?”

  He turned away from her and went outside. Catherine hesitated. It truly irked her to let him win, but she wanted—needed—that gun. Suddenly she realized how very tired she was of being a victim, of running and hiding and fearing. She had to be able to fight back with something other than a flimsy stick, and she couldn’t blame him for not wanting to give a gun to someone until he was sure she knew how to use it.

  She flipped the Open/Closed sign on the window and followed him out. He was already clear across the parking area and she had to run to catch up with him.

  “Where are we going?”

  “There’s a little canyon about a quarter mile from here. The walls should stop the bullets from going anywhere they’re not supposed to.”

  “You’re being a little overly cautious, don’t you think?”

  “Just saving myself some work. Ten-to-one Ellen and Shadow would have me replacing the clinic windows, if you shot them out. Then there are the innocent passersby out on the road to consider.”

  Catherine gritted her teeth.

  They reached the canyon and climbed, sliding, down its steep walls. When they reached the bottom, she looked around. It was less than a city block wide, and maybe three times that long. Red rocky soil crumbled down from the sides, and the floor was littered with gnarled, water-starved juniper trees.

  They were completely isolated here, out of view from the road and the clinic. Something tickled down Catherine’s spine. She wasn’t sure if it was trepidation or the titillating prospect of being so very alone with him again.

  Jericho handed her the gun and pulled a full speed-loader out of his jeans pocket. “Go for it, Cat Eyes.”

  Her chin came up. “All right. I will.”

  She opened the gun and placed the speed-loader in position. Then she felt his hand in her hair.

  Her heart slammed as he combed his fingers through it and fanned the curls out in the sun. She looked up at him, her throat going dry. Was he going to kiss her again? Did she want him to?

  Yes. God help her, but she did. It was crazy to start anything with him. She had too many secrets and she had a life to go back to. He had Ellen. But when she looked at him, none of that seemed to matter at all.

  He hadn’t spent much time outdoors with her, Jericho realized. Now he noticed that her roots were a deep, rich copper color. They gleamed like fire in the sun, like the wild, inner flames he’d felt in her when he’d had that lapse of sanity and kissed her. Irrepressible, untamable, the color even glinted through the black dye. His stomach tightened.