A Man Without a Haven

by Beverly Bird

  But when she pulled into the subagency parking lot, maneuvering carefully with the horse trailer, she hesitated again. She put the truck in neutral and jiggled her toe against the gas pedal, thinking.

  Mac Tshongely was probably on the level. And what a shame it would be to send some poor Navajo cop into that horrible canyon for nothing. But what if he wasn’t legitimate? Something wasn’t right about him. Five hours of riding and driving hadn’t changed her impression of that. She looked down pensively at the small piece of ice blue pottery that she had laid on the seat beside her. If she had found it on the canyon floor, it wouldn’t have disturbed her particularly. But on the trail leading out of the canyon? Someone had to have dropped it there. Someone taking pottery away from Kokopelli’s Canyon.

  Mac Tshongely? Legitimate archaeologists packed their finds much more carefully than that—too carefully to be losing bits and pieces of it.

  Abruptly she put the truck in reverse. No one would be in the subagency now but the dispatcher anyway. Everyone in town would be either at the Burger King or the coffee shop eating lunch. She would go to the museum first. It would give her time to do a little investigating, to think this through more clearly.

  Diamond Eddie was in his office. He heard her footsteps in the museum lobby and came out, fairly buzzing with the kind of nervous energy that apparently didn’t need food for sustenance. Shadow had worked here for seven years and she couldn’t ever remember seeing him eat.

  “Yutaheh,” he said in traditional Navajo greeting.

  “Yu te,” she muttered back. “I need to use the computer.”

  “That’s your job, señorita.”

  “Knock it off, Eddie. You’re not Mexican, and I’m not working today.”

  He shrugged, following her into her office. He was barely taller than she was. The three diamonds at his left ear twinkled in the fluorescent overhead light when she hit the wall switch. As usual, he moved closer to her than he had to.

  “But Spanish is such a romantic language, no?”

  “No.” She turned her back to him, leaning over the computer, turning it on. When he pressed himself into her back, she paused to elbow him hard.

  “Go away,” she snapped without looking at him. “I’m tired and I’m cranky and I’m in no mood for your antics today.”

  “Ah, but you’re still beautiful.”

  Well, at least somebody thought so. Apparently the man in Kokopelli’s Canyon hadn’t been very impressed. The thought jolted her and Shadow turned back to face her boss.

  “There’s something I need to do here, Eddie. Can I have some privacy?”

  “You’re beautiful even with dirt smudged on your cheek,” he went on, licking his finger, making a move to wipe it off. Shadow reared back.

  “Please.”

  He held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. Maybe someday you’ll change your mind.”

  “Maybe.” Who knew how desperate she’d feel when thirty-five came sneaking up out of nowhere and nailed her? She looked at the little Navajo closer. No. No way. She wasn’t even desperate now, just...itchy. And befuddled. Wondering how her life had come to be the way it was.

  Diamond Eddie left, and she followed him as far as the door to close it behind him. Then she went back and sat down at the computer. If Mac Tshongely was indeed authorized, where was that authorization most likely to come from? The Smithsonian was always a logical place to start. They gave grants to three area universities that she knew of—New Mexico, Arizona State and the University of Arizona. Then there was the Chaco Culture National Historical Park just east of the Res. They always had somebody working out of there, too.

  She used the modem to access Chaco first. They were a rough-hewn bunch over there. Tshongely seemed to fit their mold.

  Nothing. Okay, back to the schools.

  She tried New Mexico and came up with zilch again. By the time she drew a blank with ASU as well, she was thinking that there was nothing legitimate about him at all unless some Utah college worked in the field and had sent him. University of Arizona proved equally fruitless.

  She sat back, rubbing her temples. Was it possible he worked directly for the big guys themselves? She made a phone call and found out how to access the Smithsonian personnel and grant files—illegally, but who was going to split hairs when she was trying to do them a favor? She tapped in, but then she found herself strangely reluctant to type out his name on the keys.

  She hardened her jaw and did it. FILE NOT FOUND.

  “Damn it.” She was more distressed at his perfidy than she knew she ought to be. But he had said he was authorized. If he was legal in any way, shape or form, then the tribal council would have to know of him. But she couldn’t access their brains by modem—checking with them would necessitate a trip over to their headquarters. And for some reason she couldn’t understand, she didn’t want anyone to know she was doing this.

  Maybe it was just the little added bonus that a computer file would probably cough up all kinds of personal info about him.

  She sat back in her chair, sighing. What kind of a man strolled naked from his tent in the moonlight when there was a stranger sleeping ten yards away? What kind of man made it clear that she was intruding, then offered to help her get settled—in a manner of speaking?

  And why in the hell had he stopped her this morning? Why hadn’t he just let her go?

  She typed again, grasping at straws, trying Hopi phonetics to spell his name this time. Finally his file leapt onto the screen. Shadow sat back. A Smithsonian file. So he did work for the head honchos. She gave a shaky little breath and leaned forward again to read.

  “Tshongely, Mackenzie.” Now there was a mouthful. No wonder he had shortened it. “Birthdate 29 May,” and he was thirty-seven years old. Her brows went up. “No permanent address. No telephone. Mail received General Delivery, Winslow, Arizona.”

  A man without a home?

  “Will not work with team.” That was even odder, unless he really was a pot hunter. Then he would want all the privacy he could get.

  Shadow scrolled down. He had two degrees, a bachelor of science and a master’s, both from Arizona State. She would have found some trace of him there after all if she had used the right spelling. He didn’t appear to have a wife, but there was a father who lived on the Hopi Mesas and a brother who seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time in the Arizona prison system. He had been published many times, and his current grant had something to do with Kokopelli himself. He wouldn’t be the first archaeologist who had tried to prove that the legend had actually lived and breathed, but Shadow was disappointed. It was such a mundane goal. He’d seemed too hard to be sucked into that fanciful game. He had struck her as the type who would try to unearth proof of something that really mattered—like where the Anasazi had gone and why.

  She rubbed the back of her sore neck and left the file, turning the computer off. So that was that. Mac Tshongely had papers directly from the Smithsonian. She could go home now, take a sweatbath, and nap in her own bed. She could forget this business. The Kokopelli chindis could have him.

  Except something still didn’t feel right about the whole thing. Why wouldn’t he work with a team? Maybe she should go back, she thought, just to watch him for a little while, just to...make sure.

  She was out of her mind.

  One night in that place had practically undone her. Was she actually considering spending several nights there? She was due for a vacation, but there was absolutely nothing wrong with Phoenix or Tucson or Palm Springs. Maybe that was actually what she needed—to get off the Res for a little while, to go somewhere where nobody knew her name. She had some money saved; it didn’t take much of her salary to live out here. She picked up the phone to dial an airline, then put it down again slowly.

  That wouldn’t fix whatever was wrong in Kokopelli’s Canyon. And something was. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she felt it on a subconscious level, a vague sense of misgiving right in the pit of her stomach. T
here was no rational explanation for that potsherd on the trail, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t using it as an excuse to stay away while Cat and Jericho had their baby.

  Worse still, it didn’t mean that something about Mac Tshongely, something about him personally, wasn’t calling her back.

  She groaned, closing her eyes. Was she that desperate? On some hidden level, did she think that if she hung out there long enough he might finally touch her with those rough, cool hands? That was pathetic! But...there was some lure of delicious danger about him, some squirming curiosity that couldn’t be sated by the computer. She remembered the naked moonlit image of him at the refuse midden and something in the vicinity of her middle tightened again with a painful ache. She groaned and jumped to her feet to pace.

  A man without a home. Why?

  In the end none of it mattered. Mac didn’t want her and Jericho didn’t need her this time, whether he knew it or not. So she would follow her instincts purely for their own sake. She leaned down and pulled open her bottom desk drawer. There was a pile of steno books in there—her job demanded a lot of meticulous note taking. She found one with a relative abundance of blank pages and left her office.

  Diamond Eddie was in the display area, talking to a family of tourists. Summer on the Res was tapering off, but there were still stragglers who wanted to see scalps and peace pipes. Unfortunately for them, the Navajo had never believed in scalping and all the pipes they had ever smoked with the white man had long since been destroyed in anger.

  She waited until the family had moved on and approached Eddie. “I’m taking a week off.”

  He looked startled for a moment, then he shook his head. “Shadow, Shadow, when will you learn to ask a man for what you want, instead of telling him? When you smile, a man would give you any wish.”

  She forced a meaningless grin. “I wish to take a week off, and I have some time coming to me.” She turned to leave.

  “Where will you go?” he called after her. “Acapulco? California? You should have company.”

  “Kokopelli’s Canyon, and I’ll have company.” Whether Mac likes it or not. “Some guy’s digging up there,” she explained from the door. “He’s got credentials, but it wouldn’t be the first time somebody used their papers to slip a few things away on the side. I found a piece of pottery on the trail leading out of there, so that’s a pretty clear indication that somebody is taking stuff out of there. I’m going to write down everything he pulls out of the ground. Then I’ll compare it with the Smithsonian list of what they collect from him and make sure he’s not keeping anything for himself.”

  Diamond Eddie scowled. “There are four ruins up there. He could be working for a long time. What good is a week going to do?”

  “Well, it’s a place to start.”

  “He’s not going to sell anything he takes while you’re there. He’ll wait and take those pieces after you’re gone.”

  “If he’s smart.” But he was. At least he seemed to be, and all those degrees and published works had to mean something. “If he thinks I’m smart,” she added, and that remained to be seen.

  She went outside, then stuck her head back in. “My brother will probably come around looking for me. Tell him I’m fine and not to worry.”

  She’d worry enough for both of them. She was clearly out of her mind.

  * * *

  It was midnight before she got back to the rim. She hesitated there, remembering the gun he had.

  His fire was mere embers. She didn’t see him, even though the moon was getting full and there was a lot of milky light. He was probably fast asleep inside his tent. If he had been any other man, she would have been reasonably sure she could get down to the canyon floor without waking him. Uncle Ernie himself had tutored her in the art and value of silence.

  But this wasn’t any man. And her flashlight batteries were going out again—she had already changed them once in her careful, painstaking climb up the mountain. She had left the mare at home this time.

  She took a tight breath and called out. If she tried to sneak in without waking him, he would probably shoot her.

  “Yutaheh!” What were the odds of him speaking Navajo?

  “Yu te.”

  Shadow screamed and spun. He was right behind her.

  One look at his face had her instinctively retreating. If he had resented her intrusion before, now he was menacingly angry. She put a hand out instinctively as though to ward off a blow, and felt her heel slide on the edge of the rim where the rocky surface began to crumble.

  “Oh, hell, not again,” he groaned.

  She felt her balance sway and knew it was going to be a bad fall this time. She had a pack on her back and it was heavy; it wouldn’t let her roll. The earth gave way beneath her and she pinwheeled her arms, struggling desperately to right herself. But it was too late and the pack gave the upper half of her body too much weight.

  He came with her.

  One moment there was only air, and then his body slammed into hers, so much bigger and stronger, absorbing the first bone-jarring bump. His hard arms came around her, then somehow he was at her back, her pack between them, his legs tangled with hers as they fell. They rolled, then came to an abrupt stop that had her jaws snapping together. Shadow bit her tongue hard and felt blood pooling in her mouth.

  She had landed face down and she spat it out. Her cheek was pressed flat and hard against a rocky ledge, and his full weight was on top of her. Between that and the pack, she could barely breathe. She craned her neck, gasping for air, and saw that he had managed to grab hold of one of the juniper branches with his left hand. That and the ledge had broken their fall.

  Then she saw that his right arm was close against her right shoulder and that at the end of it, in that hand, was the gun.

  “Don’t move,” he snarled.

  Chapter 4

  Shadow couldn’t have moved if she had wanted to.

  Her heart was still galloping from the surprise he had given her, and from the sickening, plummeting sensation of the fall. Numbing fear filled her at the tone of his voice and the curl of his finger so near the trigger guard. And finally, awareness of him came sliding through her, fluid and hot and breath robbing. There was every indication that she was going to get hurt here, yet suddenly the thing uppermost in her mind was the feel of him.

  His left leg was lodged between her and the canyon wall. But his right one was between hers, his hard thigh pressed intimately against her. She felt heat pooling deep inside her in response. She had worn shorts instead of jeans, because she wasn’t riding this time, and his skin felt as cool and rough against her inner thighs as she had thought it would. The weight of him was solid and powerful.

  “I’m alone,” she gasped. “I didn’t bring the cops.”

  “Why?” he growled. “Why’d you come back here? What the hell do you want from me?”

  Her head swam with too many answers to that one, answers she wasn’t sure she fully understood herself. “Can we talk about this in an upright position?” she groaned.

  “I’d prefer it.”

  Shadow flinched. She was painfully aware of him, and he wanted nothing more than to get away from her.

  “So move,” she snapped hoarsely.

  “Believe me, I’m working on it.”

  Then she realized the problem. There was really no way for him to do it without both of them plunging all the way to the bottom this time. The ledge was too tiny. Unless...

  “Put your hands on either side of my head and get to your knees,” she suggested. It was a few moments before he responded, but then he did it fast and almost violently, tossing the gun over the edge to get it safely out of the way. It went off as it hit the floor, an explosion that made her flinch, and she held her breath as she waited for the bullet to ricochet off all that rock. But there was only one distant ping, then silence except for the echoing reverberations.

  “Can you see a handhold?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

 
; “Take it.”

  “I already have,” he said tightly.

  She felt him moving upright, smoothly for a man of his size. “Where are your feet?” she asked.

  “Between your calves.”

  “Step between me and the wall.”

  Shadow felt him move and she rolled half onto her back so that she faced the outside of the ledge. They had fallen about halfway down. Moving as little as possible, she struggled out of her pack.

  “I’m going over,” she said.

  He looked down at her incredulously.

  “I managed it the first time without getting hurt,” she pointed out. “I should be able to do it again, especially since I’m dropping deliberately this time. You go up.”

  “Yes, ma’am. You’re damned good at giving orders.”

  “Then save your own stupid hide,” she hissed. “I really don’t care how you do it. I was just trying to help.”

  There was a short silence. “Fair enough,” he conceded finally. “You got us into this, so you can get us out.”

  “I did? You sneaked up behind me like some kind of commando guerrilla.”

  “I was trying to find out who was coming up the mountain, trying to be quiet and doing a bad job of it.”

  Shadow flushed. It was true that she had stumbled into the brush once or twice the first time her flashlight had gone out, but she wasn’t going to dignify his observation with an answer. She swung her legs over the edge, belly down, then she inched out farther until she was barely holding on with her arms.

  She let go, her legs slamming painfully against the wall, but there was little she could do about that. She felt skin tear from her knee and she winced. But just as she had told him, she knew how to fall. She made her body go limp and loose and when she landed she protected her head, rolling onto the canyon floor.

  She let out a harsh burst of breath, gingerly checking for injuries. The knee was the worst of it. She sat up and looked to see how he was faring.