by Beverly Bird
* * *
Mac ground his foot down on the brake again, downshifting hard, as he came upon the turnoff to the mountain. Every instinct he possessed told him to turn, to go back to Kokopelli’s Canyon, to find the bastard who was doing this and kill him with his bare hands. But a more practical voice hissed sanity at him.
The odds were a million to one that the thief would actually be there at the same time he arrived. In the meantime, God only knew where Shadow was. There was a much more reasonable possibility that she could actually be with the man right now, maybe sharing coffee with him, with some relative or friend, never knowing that he was the one who had tried to kill them.
Until he made his move. Until it was too late.
Mac made a choking sound. It made more sense for him to keep driving straight, right down U.S. Route 191 into Chinle. It made more sense to pray like hell that there was a police substation there. It made more sense to enlist the help of the authorities whether he had any respect for them or not, because they presumably had radios and telephones that would link them to other cops all over the reservation. They could put out an alert, find her, protect her, while he tried to put the missing pieces together and figure out who she might have told.
He growled another inarticulate sound and hit the accelerator again. Twenty minutes later, he reached the small town of Chinle. He found the subagency almost immediately, logically situated near the entrance to historical Canyon de Chelly. Behind the front desk was a pretty Navajo girl who was almost certainly too young and inexperienced for what he was about to hit her with. And he was in no mood to coddle her.
“Get on the phone,” he snapped at her. “Call your substation in Shiprock. You need to find out if a woman reported a pot hunter in Kokopelli’s Canyon. Find out who she is and where she might be found, and we’ll take it from there.”
“I—what?” The girl gaped at him.
“Do it.”
She picked up the phone and began tapping in a number. “I should get my supervisor,” she tried.
“That’ll be next. Talk to Shiprock first.”
A few minutes later, she covered the receiver with her hand. “I’m sorry, but there’s been no such report.”
He had already gotten to her. Mac felt as if he were strangling, dying inside. The colors in the room faded.
He pushed away from the counter. “Then find your supervisor. You need to send some men out to that canyon—fast. No horsing around with Indian chindi voodoo first.” She looked horribly insulted. He couldn’t care. “There’s no time,” he went on, “and there’s no chindis. Just a very real, very nasty character who’s left five bodies in a cave there and who’s about to add a sixth if we don’t find him.” Pray God he hadn’t done it already. “Get Shiprock to try to locate the assistant curator at your museum over there.”
The girl looked as if she was going to cry. “Why?” she breathed.
“Because that’s who he’s going to try to kill. And when you find her, I think you’ll find him as well.”
“Wait! We need more information!”
But Mac was already gone. He should have trusted his instincts. He should have gone straight to the canyon. But if the thief had gotten to her on her way down, then it wouldn’t matter anyway. Then it was already too late.
For the first time in his life, Mac knew emasculating, breath-robbing terror. He knew this was a horror he’d never be able to isolate himself from, not if he lived a hundred more years.
* * *
Jericho stood in the doorway of the Navajo Nation Museum, scowling irritably. “Hello?” he called out a second time.
Nobody answered.
“Shadow, damn it, come on. I don’t want to waste all day with this.” His own voice seemed to echo back at him in the silence. Yet the door had been unlocked.
There was too much silence, he realized. The wrong kind of silence. It was more like an emptiness, as though all life had gone from the rooms. His shaman’s instincts prickled the hair at his nape. The strange sixth sense that was as much a part of him as it had been of his ancestors twisted his gut.
He took a slow, cautious step into the building. He avoided the display room with its chindi artifacts and went to the back hallway where the offices were. He poked his head into his sister’s room.
The light was on, but nothing was disturbed. Except...her chair was pulled back from the desk. It had rolled on its little coasters halfway into the room. He stared at it. It was such an inane little thing, but his sister never left a room without putting everything in order first. That chair should have been neatly flush with the desk.
She had been gone for a week. Maybe someone else had used her office and had left it this way, but Jericho didn’t think so. He went back up the hall to Diamond Eddie’s room.
He felt as if he could actually smell the man here, though he knew that was impossible. It was just his instinctive antennae again—that, and the fact that he had never liked the man. He had never quite figured out how anyone living on the Res could find the money to wear three diamond earrings. The room stank of him—of something sour like fear, of something dark like anger.
Jericho didn’t like that at all. But he liked the toppled filing cabinet even less.
He crossed to it and looked down at it. The fear smell was stronger here. He knew beyond a doubt that Diamond Eddie had been standing right here at this place when something had scared him badly enough to make him reel into this cabinet and knock it over.
What? More importantly, where was Shadow?
He moved around behind the desk and looked out the window at the parking lot. Her truck was there. Diamond Eddie’s Cadillac was not.
That Cadillac had always bothered Jericho as well. Excess in anything was not the Navajo way. Anyone who disregarded that doctrine was suspect. They had either converted to Christianity or they were a wolfman—a Navajo witch. But Jericho didn’t think Diamond Eddie was a witch and he had never heard that he’d converted to Christianity. He just got the impression of gluttony, of a man who had wandered a little bit off the Navajo path to hozro, to balance with the universe. Eddie was an oddity, someone to be watched with one careful eye, but Jericho had never been more suspicious of him than that.
Until now.
He picked up Eddie’s phone and punched in the number for the mobile unit he had bought for his house while Catherine was pregnant. She picked up on the third ring. He could hear Ryan fussing in the background and it was almost enough to make him smile.
“Shadow been there?” he demanded without preamble.
“Well, hello to you, too. Where are you?”
“The museum. She’s not here.”
There was a long silence. “Did she decide to drive into Albuquerque herself?” It wasn’t like her to do that without letting them know, Catherine thought, but Shadow had been anything but herself lately.
“Her truck’s here,” Jericho responded.
Catherine was quiet again, thinking. “I don’t like the sound of this,” she said finally. In the year she had been on the Navajo reservation, she had learned a certain healthy wariness. Strange things could happen here, things she had never before believed in. Moreover, the Res was big enough, empty enough and remote enough to occasionally attract an unsavory character or two.
“I don’t like it either, Cat Eyes,” Jericho answered on a long, drawn-out breath.
“Do you think you and Ernie missed some of her chindi poison?” she ventured.
“No. I think this is a threat of the real flesh and blood kind.”
Up on the mountain, Catherine’s breath caught. That scared her. That was never her husband’s first suspicion. Why now?
“It has something to do with that canyon,” she said impulsively. “She was fine until she went up there that first day to look into the pot hunter. Then it was like everything went to hell in a hand basket.”
“You’re saying I ought to drive out there.”
Cat knew it was probably the last
thing in the world he wanted to do. He was the strongest man she had ever known—yet anything supernatural touched the deepest, darkest Navajo part of him. He was also the most protective man she had ever known, when it came to the people he called his own.
“Jericho, you have to. It’s what you do. You help people. In this case, it’s Shadow. And for some reason, that canyon is the most logical place to start looking for her—or at least for some clue as to where she’s gone.”
She heard him give a rough sigh. “You’re right. Okay, I’m going. But I don’t know when I’ll be able to get to a phone again.”
“You don’t have to worry about it. We’re here and we’re fine. Shadow’s the one who’s missing. I’ll see you when I see you.”
Jericho held the phone away from his ear to look at it a moment. “I love you,” he finally answered. “Have I told you that lately?”
She laughed huskily. “Just don’t bring me any more flowers. My system can’t handle it.”
“Wouldn’t dare,” he muttered. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I can, as soon as I know something.”
Catherine started to hang up, then she hesitated. “Be careful.”
“Yeah,” he answered quietly. “I have that instinct, too.”
Chapter 17
The sight of the mountain hit Shadow hard—like a sweet dream that had somehow plunged into nightmare, memories of glory and pain flashing at her out of sequence. She had only been gone from it for a few days, yet it felt like a lifetime.
Even worse was the way Diamond Eddie had tied her wrists together. It reminded her of the skeletons in the cave. They laid in her lap as his Cadillac bumped up the trail to the first foothill. Please, Holy Ones, let Mac be gone from here. The prayer was a litany in her head and her heart, sounding over and over as they left the car and struck out up the mountain on foot.
The biggest problem with dying, she thought a little crazily, was that she would never know if Diamond Eddie had found Mac. Surely it had occurred to the little weasel by now that she wasn’t the only threat to his cache. Mac Tshongely knew about it, too. Of course, Mac probably wouldn’t do anything about it. She had told him that she would go to the subagency. Why would he bother? No, he would probably go on his wandering way, maybe thinking of her sometimes, aching for her once or twice, but he would never open old wounds by stopping to inquire about a pot thief if he happened to be passing a Navajo tribal-police subagency.
So if Diamond Eddie disposed of her, he would be relatively safe. Shadow stumbled and Eddie pushed the barrel of the gun into the small of her back.
“Oh, stop it!” she snapped. “You’re no more a tough guy than you are Spanish! I hate your airs. Did I ever tell you that?”
“I could kill you right here, señorita,” he reminded her.
“But you won’t,” she retorted.
“And why do you think that?”
Shadow had no idea. She was just talking, irritating him, because it made her feel better, because it was infinitely preferable to going docilely to her death and never knowing what had happened to Mac.
Please, Mac, be gone, she prayed again. She noticed that Eddie was huffing badly from the physical effort the steep trail required. Then she heard the misstep of his feet as he skidded on a rock.
It was almost impossible to climb this trail in regular shoes, she thought. She hesitated just enough to glance down and behind her. He wore loafers.
Now.
Shadow ran. She took in a healthy breath of air and scrambled while he was still trying to reclaim his balance. He was behind her so she went up, crashing into brush, a cry of frustration catching in her throat. He would probably shoot, she knew that, but his arrows had been wild and maybe he couldn’t aim a gun any better. It was a chance, only a chance, but it was the only one she had.
She stumbled onto clear trail again and kept running, but her own balance was off with her wrists tied together. She brought them up to her mouth and pulled savagely at the rope with her teeth, finally getting it free. Then she heard one of his bullets ping off a rock to her left and she screamed.
That answered one question, shattered one distant hope. He wasn’t so infatuated with her that he wouldn’t kill her.
She didn’t dare look back. She shoved past obstacles when the trail narrowed and leapt rocks where they would have impeded her. She ran blindly and came to the top of the trail long before she expected to.
She skidded to a stop, teetering dangerously, and looked wildly down into the canyon. Mac was gone.
She hadn’t been prepared for the relief. It drained her. She wasn’t expecting such terror. She was truly alone here. Until this moment, until she saw it with her own eyes, she hadn’t dared allowed herself to believe it.
She was on her own...and Diamond Eddie was right behind her.
She took a deliberate step over the rim and plunged. This time her shoulder crashed hard against an outcropping. She shrieked with the impact and with the shattering pain it brought. When she hit the bottom she rolled out of habit and felt her bones crunching against each other. But there was no time to acknowledge the agony it brought. She lunged to her feet again, running.
The cave. Of all the places to go, that would be the worst—she would be trapped there. But for some reason the image of it filled her head, demanding that she run there. And in the end, there was nowhere else for her to go anyway, she realized. She didn’t want to face him in area she was unfamiliar with. At least she knew the cave—the only other places she had spent time in were the switchback and the open canyon floor.
Besides, Diamond Eddie was afraid of She Who Waits.
She reached the cliff dwellings and hauled herself up, even as another gunshot sounded from behind her. She clung to the wall of rock and craned her neck to look back. Eddie was halfway down the cliff face she had plunged over, almost exactly level with her, and he was shooting down the canyon in her direction.
Two shots gone. Depending upon the make of his gun—she hadn’t noticed—he could have as many as seven left. She kept going.
Her shoulder throbbed and shot white-hot pain down her arm. She reached the first apartment room and the wide fissure she and Mac had crawled out from. She wriggled her way into it and dropped, rolling again. Pain took her breath and siphoned her blood, leaving her momentarily dizzy. She lay on the floor beside She Who Waits, groaning.
“Help me,” she whispered to her. “Please, please help me.”
She got to her feet again and climbed over the low wall into the other room. It was so dark, too dark, and she didn’t have a flashlight this time. She dropped to her knees and skimmed her good hand over the floor, groping for Mac’s gun in the blackness. She was pretty sure she had lost it when she had fallen in here a lifetime ago.
When her fingers actually closed over it, she was almost shocked. She hadn’t really expected to find it. She picked it up and looked down at it dumbly. Finally, for the first time, she felt a surge of adrenaline, of something like optimism. Things were going her way. With just a little more luck, maybe she could get out of this.
The rock above her head shrieked and scraped. She gasped and looked up just in time to see it open and Diamond Eddie’s face appear in the hole.
No more time.
She got up again and vaulted over the low wall into the other room. He shot the gun behind her. The bullet ricocheted wildly with echoing pings that filled her head. The dying reverberations made her ears ring.
Three bullets gone now.
She hurried back to She Who Waits and crouched in the small area beside her head, near the boulder she and Mac had climbed up on. She had the gun aimed at the upper moving wall by the time Diamond Eddie appeared on the other side.
“Okay,” she gasped, “okay. I’m armed now, too, Eddie. If you pull your trigger, so will I. Only mine’s snake load. I don’t even have to aim and you’ll be hurt enough that you’ll never get out of this canyon alive.”
He hesitated. “Shoot one. Prove it.”
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Shadow laughed wildly. “Like hell. I’ve got six left. How many do you have?”
Slowly, carefully, he came over the wall. He started to push the top rock closed behind him. Scant sunlight slanted down from the fissure over her head, and more thin light seeped in from the other room and the hole there. If either place were sealed off, it would take a long time for their eyes to adjust to the altered meager light that remained.
She decided to shoot one of the snake load bullets after all. The pellets spattered the rock over his head, raining down on him. Their impact was deflected, but she knew they had to hurt. He threw his hands up with an odd stricken sound and backed away from the moving wall.
“Leave the wall where it is,” she ordered. “I want to be able to see your finger on that gun.”
Actually, he had closed the wall just enough that she could barely see his gun at all. And surely he knew that. His own eyes told him how dark it was in here, and he probably couldn’t see her weapon either. But she thought he was nearing a stage of full-blown panic.
His breath was still coming fast and hard. He wasn’t so out of shape that he shouldn’t have recovered from the mountain climb by now, even if he’d chased her at a run across the canyon floor. It was the only true edge she had. She had to use it.
“So when was your last Blessing Way, Eddie?” she asked conversationally.
“What?” Even with that single word, she heard his voice trip. Thank you, Holy Ones, thank you. She had been right. He was scared in here.
“Your last Blessing Way. You know, to keep chindi evil off you. I had one this weekend. How about you?”
He didn’t answer.
“That long, huh? Too bad. I think I can feel her. Of course, she’s not going to come after me. I’m covered, and you know how that goes. Chindis prey on the weak. Sort of like wolfmen. They can’t hurt you if you’re well protected. So I guess She Who Waits will be coming after you.”