A crude, one-lane, timbered bridge crossed the creek ahead of them. Jennie's guess about the creek was borne out when the old man told David to stop at the bridge.
"We'll have to leave the car here, off to the side where it won't obstruct anyone," Mooncrow said, finally. "No one will be along to bother it."
David simply nodded. Intuition had told both of them to dress for hiking, and now she was glad that they had, for Mooncrow led them right down to the creek bed, where they followed its path for at least a half mile. It was pretty rough hiking. None of the flood-control projects had gotten this far up the creek. It was full of downed trees, old tires, even a dead car. Rocks ranging from the size of a bowling ball to the size of that old car studded the bottom of the ravine, but above their heads Jennie winced at the thickets of wild plum and plenitude of blackberry vines; the going would be no easier up there.
Finally, Mooncrow held up his hand, as they reached a grove of ancient willows, cottonwoods, and redbuds. He looked around, as if he was taking his bearings, and then scrambled up the bank using the exposed roots of a willow with a trunk that must have been two feet in diameter.
David and Jennie followed, to find him holding to the trunk with one hand as he examined every inch of the ground around the willow, frowning. She couldn't see anything here, and she wasn't prepared to use that inner vision just at the moment. The willow that Mooncrow stood beneath would probably wash into the creek after a few more big storms; fully a third of its roots were exposed. Across from them was the silted area that had been the old creek bed; now it supported a flourishing community of saplings, weeds, and brush. Up and down the creek bed was more of the same.
But Mooncrow kept peering around, and finally looked down through the mat of willow roots. And then he blanched.
"What's wrong, Little Old Man?" Jennie asked quickly. "What have you found?"
"It is what I have not found, Kestrel," he replied, as David reached out to steady him. His voice was strong, but his hands were shaking. "It is what I have not found."
He sat down then, on the roots of the willow; Jennie joined him, with David on the other side. "You know that I told you how Watches-Over-The-Land had defeated an evil man," he said. Jennie nodded; this was for David's benefit, for he had not heard the story. "It was needful for him to drown that evil man, and then bury him. Needful to drown him so that his blood could not touch the earth, escape, and take his spirit with it; needful to bury him, so that his spirit could not wander, so that it would be held in place by the earth. If that man had become like the mi-ah-luschka, he could have found others to work through. It was here that our ancestor buried that man, with a willow planted over his body to hold him there." Mooncrow's face grew bleak. "But nothing lasts forever, and the willow did not hold him. Look-"
He pointed down below, where the creek had obviously changed its course and undercut the willow. "See, how the water came and washed everything from under the roots? The willow, I think, ate most of the bones, as Watches-Over-The-Land intended, but the evil one's spirit-bundle was buried there with him, and it-it is gone. I can feel it."
David shook his head, but Jennie felt the blood draining out of her face as well.
"These things, these spirit-bundles, can be doorways," Mooncrow explained for David's sake. "They can allow things through them. So now the bundle is loose in the world, and so is the spirit of that evil man. He can work through whoever takes up the bundle; and the longer he works through that person, the more likely it is that he will be able to take the place of anyone who touches it. This is something that he was working toward, to be able to live on this earth forever, by sending others through his spirit-door and taking their place."
David's forehead wrinkled. "But-I don't see the point-"
Mooncrow stared down at the water, as if he was demanding that it give up its secret and tell him where the bundle was now. "The point is that this evil one wanted life forever, and power, and he got his power through hate. He will make that hate grow, here and now. He will poison the earth to give him power over it. So wicked was he that he had no spirit-animal; he created his own, neither bird nor insect, neither animal nor serpent. He made it out of all of these things, so that it would serve him rather than guide him. And he made it corrupt, so that it would poison all that it touched. That is what made him so evil. That he would corrupt anything, so long as he had dominion over it."
David stared at the old man, his own face going pale, and Jennie wondered if he, too, had a dream like hers, of a poisoned earth, and dead eagles lying in the ashes.
"I had a dream, the night of my vision-quest," he said slowly. "I was in a place like Tulsa, but with absolutely no people, completely virgin wilderness. Everything was great-and then this-this monster came, and it was like you just described, it wasn't animal or bird, but it had pieces of all kinds of things, only twisted and distorted. Wherever it went, things just died as it passed. I was really afraid, and I hid from it."
Mooncrow nodded, listening closely, and clenched his jaw. "You are new in your Medicine, and should not have seen this spirit-thing, unless it had gotten a great deal of power. And it should not have been able to kill things in the spirit-world unless it was as powerful now as it was in our ancestor's time." Jennie felt her heart sink at his words; he saw her expression, and nodded, confirming that her feelings of danger and dread were not misplaced. The warm sunlight seemed to thin, and a chill crept over her.
"This is a bad thing, David," Mooncrow said then. "This is a very terrible thing. Somehow, we must find whoever has this spirit-bundle; we must take it away from him, and we must do what our ancestor did, so long ago."
He looked out over the creek, and his face was a mask that hid every emotion but determination. "We must catch the beast, David. Then we must take its power, and cage it. Somehow."
Rod Calligan doodled idly on the pad on his desk, and weighed out his options.
He had hoped that he'd seen the last of the Talldeer girl, when he hadn't heard or seen anything at all from her. The cops had gone off to pretend they were investigating, but there were no real leads, and he and they both knew it. The P.I. herself hadn't even set foot on the property once that he could prove. Maybe, he thought, she had taken the presence of the trap he'd,left as evidence that her people were involved, after all, and had told the insurance company so. Or at least, she had told them she could not disprove the allegation. But it seemed that she was not going to give up, after all; Smith had just called with the bad news that she'd been put on indefinite retainer by his company. Sleighbow was higher up than Smith; there was nothing Smith could do to get her dropped.
If she'd been put on retainer, it meant that she had found something suspicious, and she'd convinced Sleighbow that more work needed to be done. Probably by telling him her suspicions, possibly by giving him her evidence. Very bad news.
So she was playing her cards very close to her chest, so close he'd had no inkling she'd found anything, and she evidently had sources he hadn't traced. Sooner or later, she was going to find something out. She had the bomb, after all, or at least he had to presume she had it; so she had at least one piece of real, hard evidence that might be traced back to him. If she could do that, she could argue convincingly that if he had planted one bomb on his own property, he could have planted more than one.
That would be more than enough to start a real investigation with him as the suspect, instead of the half-hearted investigation the cops had going now.
Then, if anyone started to look closely at the Riverside Mall project, all his layers of concealment would peel away, and it would become fairly obvious that the project was marginal at best.
Then if the insurance company-or worse, the Feds!- ordered an investigation of their own, everything would come tumbling down.
He reached into his pocket for the fetish-bundle; it had become something like a worry stone for him, and just simply handling it always calmed him. This time was no exception; as his hand closed arou
nd the leather, confidence quelled the rising panic. There was no real need to worry. After all, he had run deals along the edge of the shadow before. He hadn't ever needed to use final solutions, but he'd always had them in reserve. There was no real difference between planting a trap to get rid of the girl, and ordering her hit-other than the fact that it took control out of his own hands.
If the Talldeer girl actually had anything on him, there would be Feds crawling all over here even now. So she didn't have anything solid, only suspicions. You couldn't convict anyone on suspicions; hell, you couldn't even get an indictment on suspicion.
So, since she wouldn't fall into his traps, he was going to have to take the direct approach to getting rid of her, even though it would be a bigger risk to delegate that task to someone else. Tulsa was a bigger city than people realized; it had its share of scum and lowlifes. If you were truly desperate, there were even punks who would fill your contract for as little as fifty bucks. But those were generally burned-out druggies, and dangerous to use; the going rate was about five thousand for a pro.
But with a pro there would be nothing leaving a trail. Not with the people Rod intended to use. Those fifty-buck punks were extremely unreliable, the five-hundred-dollar hit men would sometimes come back looking for blackmail. Rod had used the latter, now and again, but never for anything that he could be blackmailed over; most smart contractors knew muscle. Not Mafia-related, of course; that was out of his league. Just guys who, a hundred years ago, would have been rustlers and horse thieves. Rod used guys like that to strong-arm reluctant farmers or homeowners into selling at a reasonable price, or to scare tenants into moving without riling complaints with the authorities about substandard construction. He knew the right jargon, things that sounded perfectly normal on the phone.
But this time, Rod would take out his contract with a real workman; someone you saw once if at all, paid in advance, and never heard from again.
Except that the target came down with a bad case of death. And it always looked like suicide, a hit-and-run, or another tragic case of random violence. Pretty girls were raped and killed all the time. And if the pretty girl was also a P.I., well, she just had been in the wrong place, and hadn't been careful enough. It'd be good for about two nights on the local news, and wouldn't even make the nationals.
Pros didn't leave tracks. And they didn't come back after blackmail money. It was bad for repeat business.
Smith ought to know some pros in this area . . . he'd certainly hinted that he did.
Should he call Smith in on this? That was the question. He rubbed his thumb over the leather of the fetish and looked out the window, noting absently the small flock of scrawny black birds in the tree outside. Funny; they were absolutely silent, so they weren't blackbirds, starlings, or grackles. They were too thin to be ravens, and too big to be crows.
Still, weren't black birds some kind of omen of death? Maybe that was the sign he ought to move on this. Let them 'pick the Talldeer girl's bones, not his.
He called Smith back.
"I need someone," he said. "A reliable Tulsa mechanic. I think our equipment needs about five grand worth of work."
"I have just the right men," Smith said.
"John Smith" hung up the phone, jaw clenched, and a vein in his temple starting to throb. Not that he cared if Calligan had the chick rubbed out; in his opinion, it should have been done before this. No, the real problem was that Calligan was stupid and small-time; if things went wrong, he could implicate Smith.
No-if anything went wrong, Calligan would implicate Smith. He would sing so fast and so well, they'd put him in the opera.
Even if things didn't go wrong, there was no guarantee that Calligan would stay quiet. He was getting nervous; sounded a little hysterical whenever Smith said anything about Talldeer. In fact, if he'd tried something of his own to get rid of the girl, he probably left a pretty messy trail behind him.
Damned amateurs.
It might not be a bad idea to collect a little insurance of his own.
He left his desk and took a quick walk outside, to a public telephone kiosk. Not one right outside his building, but one further down in the office park. He always had a roll of quarters with him, just in case.
He waited ten minutes, then called the same number he'd given Calligan.
"Fixers," said the voice on the other end.
"I need some custom work done on my car," he replied. "Something really special." That was the code that he needed a safe line to talk openly.
"Give me your number; I've got a customer. I'll call you back." Brusque, businesslike, calm. These were real professionals, probably the best in Tulsa. They should be; they'd taken care of a number of embarrassing little problems for prominent people. For instance, that evangelist with the awkward and talkative relative. . . .
Smith gave the man the number of the pay phone and hung up. A few minutes later, it rang.
"About that custom job. Yeah?" It was not the same voice. He had expected that.
"Your people just got a call from a man who wanted an Indian girl shut up," he said, quietly and calmly. "I sent him to you. We've got a deal, but he's making me nervous. His name's Rod Calligan."
"Construction." Smith's estimation of the men went up a notch. "He insisted on payment-in-person. You want some insurance on him, or do you want him shut down?"
Smith had thought about that while he made his walk and waited for the phone to ring. Calligan was still useful. "Insurance," he said. "He's got a wife and kids. Get rid of his target first, then pick up the family. Maybe get rid of the wife to prove we're serious. Make sure the Indians get the blame for all of it, so far as the cops are concerned."
"Easy, but it'll take some time to fill Calligan's contract, so it won't happen right away," the man replied. "Make your deposit, send us the spec sheet on him. That'll be fifteen. As soon as we get it, we'll open the policy for you, and fill your order as soon as we take care of Calligan's." Send them all the details on Calligan with their fee, in cash, that meant, to their mail drop. Untraceable cash. It would take him a little work to collect the money-he had it, but he would want to get it in thousand-dollar lots, from several places, to make sure he didn't get sequential bills. "That'll do fine. Expect it in a few days," he told the man, and hung up.
So much for Rod Calligan and his little problem. You just had to know who to call.
Toni Calligan held back tears with the last of her strength; she was just about ready to sign herself into the asylum. She was afraid to let the kids out of her sight, after the attack on Ryan. Things kept happening, inexplicable things, but worst of all, so far as her sanity was concerned, they never happened when Rod was home.
Rod Junior had tattled; he'd told Rod how he'd come home to find Toni crying at the kitchen table after Ryan's near accident. She had been able to keep Rod from finding out about that for maybe five minutes; after a brief session of bullying, he had the story of the near miss out of her.
Unfortunately, she had,not gotten the stranger's name and phone number, so there was no one to corroborate her story but Ryan.
Now Rod was accusing her of making things up, and getting Ryan and Jill to tell the same stories. The few incidents that she had evidence of he somehow twisted around to being her fault, saying she was careless, a bad mother.
And somehow he'd found out what that one repairman had said about the dryer.
That was when he really lost his temper with her, which lately hadn't been very good, anyway. He'd taken it out on her ... he hit her, telling her she deserved it, deserved to be punished, because she was not only unfit to be the mother of his good son, Rod, but was crazy and was making the other two crazy, and he was just going to have to beat the craziness out of her.
Her life had become a nightmare.
But the real nightmare was not the attacks on her children, or even the bruises that Rod's beating had left.
The real nightmare was that she was beginning to think he was right. She was go
ing crazy.
She didn't know what else to think, after what had happened this afternoon when she'd been making spaghetti sauce in the pressure cooker.
She had just put the pot on the burner. She had turned around to pick up a pot holder, and had looked up at a sudden movement, thinking one of the kids had come in.
There was an Indian in her kitchen.
An Indian with a mohawk, some kind of shell necklace around his neck, a blanket tied around his waist, fringed leather pants-carrying a hatchet with a shiny metal blade in one hand, some kind of wooden club in the other. And his face-it had such an expression of hate that she shrank back with a little squeak of panic, so terrified her voice wouldn't work.
Then he was gone. Just gone. He didn't leave, he vanished, completely.
Just as Ryan appeared in the doorway.
It couldn't have been more than thirty seconds from the time she'd lit the flame to when the Indian vanished into" thin air. She wasn't sure what warned her, then; some instinct, God only knew. But the moment Ryan appeared, she knew, something horrible was going to happen, and she just leapt on him, tackled him, and pulled him to the floor right outside the kitchen.
Just as the pressure cooker exploded.
She got both of them just out of the way of the shrapnel- for the pot had literally exploded, rather than having the lid blow off.
She sat there on the floor with Ryan and they both cried for a while. Then she got him calmed down, extracted a promise from him not to tell his daddy, and ventured into the kitchen. There was only one thing to do, if she didn't want another lecture-or worse-from Rod. She had to get the mess cleaned up, hide the damage from a cursory examination, and get some other kind of dinner going before he got home. And how she was going to explain this if he did find out, she had no idea.
Maybe she wouldn't have to. Rod never came into the kitchen if he could help it. A few hours with some plaster would take care of the holes in the walls and ceiling, and he probably wouldn't notice the dents in the fridge even if he did come in.
Sacred Ground Page 27