Edge of Dawn

by Melinda Snodgrass

  “Archaeology,” Richard said aloud, and blessed his subconscious.

  “What?” Pamela asked.

  “What the fuck?” was Cross’s version of the same question.

  “I gather you’re thinking about seeding a site?” Grenier drawled.

  Richard nodded. “Find me an archaeologist and some tribes that are native to California,” he ordered Grenier.

  “Better be some unscrupulous ones,” Pamela muttered.

  “If we force the subdivision to relocate a road, or several roads and houses, will it be enough?” Richard asked Cross.

  The homeless god nodded. “These runic power sources are pretty touchy. Mess with the design, and you’ve got nothing but a bunch of twisty lines and traffic snarls.”

  “We’re not likely to change a line and end up with something worse, are we?” Richard asked in an abundance of caution.

  Cross cocked his head, a raptor’s motion. “Huh, that’s kind of interesting. I’ve never thought about that.”

  “Maybe you and I ought to consider that,” Grenier said, and the onetime sorcerer took the onetime god’s elbow.

  * * *

  There were certain uniforms associated with New Mexico, Richard reflected, as he watched Mike Allistaire approach. Not actual native dress, but attire that established culture. There was the New Age hippie babe in the long skirt, tank top, Birkenstock sandals, and graying hair down to her butt. There was the tough Chicano in baggy trousers, black tank top, and leather jacket with silver chains no matter the temperature. There was the Native American lawyer with black hair down to his shoulders, a beaded headband, and a Canali suit. And finally there was the grizzled cowboy.

  Allistaire fit in the last category. He wore blue jeans, a plaid shirt, scuffed boots, a bandanna tied at his neck, a straw cowboy hat with an elaborate silver hatband, and his enormous watchband was formed from large chunks of turquoise. As he entered the dimness of Charlie’s Back Door restaurant, he removed the hat to reveal a thatch of black hair liberally streaked with gray. His luxurious handlebar mustache was more gray than black, and his skin had the consistency of old cracked leather left too long in the sun.

  He slid into the booth across from Richard and gave him a piercing blue-eyed look. “Oort?” he grunted.

  “Yes. How do you do.” They shook hands

  “Your secretary said you needed my expertise,” Allistaire said. He scanned Richard’s suit jacket, tie, and shirt. “You look like a developer. You got some property you want assessed?”

  “No. I have a development I need to … disrupt, and some of the people we contacted indicated you were the man we wanted.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Because I’ve been busted?”

  “It did weigh in our decision,” Richard said, and then tensed because Allistaire’s body language was all too clear—he was pissed.

  Their waitress arrived, fortyish and zaftig with big hair. “You gents decided?” she asked, and her eyes lingered on Allistaire.

  Who was staring coldly at Richard. “Depends on if I stay to eat,” he said.

  “Look, eat, hear me out, and if you leave … well, no hard feelings, and you’ve had a free meal and been paid for a day’s consulting.”

  Allistaire nodded sharply. “Sounds fair. I’ll have the huevos rancheros, eggs scrambled, beans, and can I get carne adovada with that?” She nodded. “And Christmas,” he added, referring to a plate that’s half red chili and half green chili. “And I’ll have a margarita, Silvercoin, rocks, salt, and no mixer. Just lime juice and tequila.”

  “And you, sir?”

  “I’ll also have the huevos, eggs over easy, beans and potatoes, and green chili on the side.” The lips of both the waitress and Allistaire quirked in little sneers. “I have an ulcer,” Richard said defensively. “And milk to drink.”

  She went away, and Richard began to shred his napkin into smaller and smaller bits of paper. “Okay, I seem to have mortally offended you, but you were arrested.”

  “Yeah, for busting up a reception at that dickwad Marvin Klein’s Canyon Road gallery.”

  Richard knew Canyon Road, the premier art street in Santa Fe, New Mexico’s capital city, but he had no idea who Marvin Klein might be. Allistaire sensed his ignorance.

  “Klein? Has a seven-thousand-square-foot monstrosity on the ski road that he calls a house. Who knows how many city councilors he had to bribe to get that through permitting. Then there’s the giant gallery specializing in ancient Native American artifacts, and a martini bar where the Palace restaurant used to be. That was a great restaurant, and a real historical building—it was a whorehouse back in the nineteenth century, and now it’s a yuppie flesh market.”

  It was a seemingly inexhaustible flow of words, but Allistaire finally circled back to Klein.

  “Anyway, he’s a pot hunter and a grave robber, and I just wanted to make sure those asswipes in the press knew it. He bought this fourteen-hundred-acre ranch up around Abique ’cause he knew there was a pueblo on it. We’d been urging the state to buy the property so we could excavate and catalog the findings, but he beat us to it and gave the rancher enough money that the jackass just rolled over. Klein’s been digging up graves for the grave goods and selling them for a fortune to Eurotrash. So I pointed it out at his fancy-ass reception.”

  “And got arrested,” Richard finally got in.

  “Yeah. And lost my job with the state archaeology department. Dickheads. Since then it’s been contract work for me. And the economy has really tanked since all that craziness out east two years ago, so it’s been damn hard to make a living.”

  He was referring to the gate that had opened in the countryside near Washington, D.C., a gate Richard had managed to close, but Richard didn’t enlighten Allistaire to that.

  “Actually, I think you’re the perfect man to help me with my problem,” Richard said.

  Allistaire stared suspiciously at the younger man. “I’ll listen, but no promises.”

  “I need to shift a road or a house in a subdivision that’s being built in southern California. It doesn’t need to be by much, and as an incentive I can tell you the people behind this subdivision are the same group behind that craziness out east.” Richard comforted himself that what he’d said was seventy percent true. “Anyway, we thought maybe archaeology might offer a solution. Maybe if they found a site…”

  The archaeologist was already shaking his head. “You don’t want to seed a site. It’ll never stand up. Maybe for a few weeks or months, but the fraud will be exposed. It’s not as easy as throwing some pot shards and an arrowhead into the dirt. You have to find a place where the soil has been cut away, and pick the strata that would correspond with the period that would have supported that society. Also, archaeologists look for more than a few artifacts. There needs to be evidence of habitation—fire pits, middens, that kind of thing. Now maybe you can fake the trash, but the fire pits are tough. We carbon-date the charcoal, so you either have to find wood from that period and burn it, or charcoal from that period and lay it in place.”

  Richard’s gut started to hurt, and an incipient headache fluttered around the edges of his eyes. The waitress arrived with the food. The scent hit Richard’s nose, bounced into the back of his throat, traveled to his stomach, and he gagged. Allistaire tucked into his food, alternating bites with sips of margarita. Somehow talking also occurred.

  “What you really need…” chew, swallow, gulp “… is an Indian.” Chew, swallow, gulp.

  His side was hurting, he was nauseated, and the remark just hit Richard wrong. Before he could call them back, the words were out. “And what flavor would you recommend? Navajo? Arapaho? Hopi? Apache? Cherokee?”

  Allistaire gestured with his fork. “Sarcasm, right?”

  “Got it in one.”

  “Look, your plan won’t work, but there’s one that will. But you have to have a Native American”—he stressed with an eye roll for further punctuation—“partner.”

  “Okay, I’m l
istening.”

  “You need to use a TCP, traditional cultural property. You get an Indian, preferably more than one Indian, and he claims that a certain place in this subdivision is a shrine or a sacred area. He then threatens to sue if they build on that site.”

  “But it’s Orange County California. There won’t be anything to see.”

  “And that’s cool. Your Native American’s response will be, ‘No, you can’t see it because white men can’t see it, but we know it’s there, and it’s very, very sacred.’”

  “What kind of thing are we talking about?”

  “It can be anything. A tree, a rock, a hillside. The hot springs at Ojo Caliente are sacred to some Mexican god’s granny. She’s supposed to live in one of the pools.”

  “And this TCP thing really works?” Richard asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Developers hate two things—spending money and bad press. You get a tribe suing you, and you’ve got both in spades.”

  Seeing a possible solution had done wonders for his appetite. Richard took a bite of the huevos and even added a cautious amount of green chili. “Not to be indelicate, but how do I find … a willing partner for this?”

  Allistaire just blinked at him. “What do you think?” And he rubbed his fingers together in the universal gesture for money.

  “That seems pretty … indelicate, and frankly rather … racist.”

  “You really are a white yuppie liberal, aren’t you?” Richard started to bristle but ultimately couldn’t deny the accuracy of the label. He nodded. Allistaire continued. “Look, the poorest minority group in the country are Native Americans. Average median income on the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota reservation is between twenty-six hundred and thirty-five hundred dollars a year. Yeah, the casinos have helped, but the situation’s pretty dire with most tribes. And I bet they could find a religious dispensation for screwing over a developer and keeping some rich whites from getting to build a couple of McMansions.” He cocked his head to the side, a smile playing beneath his mustache. “In fact, it’s a real Coyote move.”

  Coyote, the trickster who often helped humankind. Without knowing it, Allistaire had said exactly the right thing, because Kenntnis—the man … creature who had brought Richard into this secret war—had told Richard he had been known by many names, among them Prometheus, Lucifer, Loki, and … Coyote.

  Chapter

  FOUR

  A rental car had been waiting for him at John Wayne Airport, a name that left Richard baffled and bemused. He’d made a joke about it at the Avis desk, and the clerk told him that the Burbank airport was named after Bob Hope. Richard had tried to fathom the California fascination with actors and failed.

  Now he was driving up a rutted dirt road into the arid and stony mountains east and south of Anaheim toward one of the many Cahuilla reservations in central and southern California. Like in other parts of the West, the Native Americans of California had been hounded out of the fertile areas and relegated the poorest parcels of land as a grotesque booby prize.

  Heat shimmers danced on the rocks, and even the gray-green chaparral looked like it was wilting in the fierce heat. Richard tried not to, but his eyes flicked down to the temperature readout on the dashboard of the Ford Impala: 117 degrees. No wonder the struggling air conditioner was doing little to dry the damp place in the small of his back. Thinking about that area made him aware of the sword in its holster digging into his kidney.

  He shifted, trying to find a more comfortable position, and grimaced when that pulled on the stitches in his side. The success of the entire mission was dependent on what happened when he reached the Cahuilla town of Tecolote. He hoped his diplomatic skills were up to the task.

  Minutes crawled by, and Richard scanned the landscape for any sign of life. High in the brass-bright sky, a black speck hung like a mote in heaven’s eye. It resolved into a bird. After seven years out west, he had learned to recognize vultures, and they still gave him the creeps. The car nosed over a final, rocky ridge, and he looked down on the reservation. Richard, working with his staff back in Albuquerque, had picked Tecolote because this particular group of Indians had been granted a paltry eleven and a half acres to call their own. According to their website, they had a fire truck, purchased after the community hall had burned down last fall, and forty-two people of some varying degree of kinship to each other. The desperate poverty would, he hoped, make the Cahuilla amenable to bribes.

  Tecolote wasn’t much different from some of the small Navajo and Pueblo reservations he had visited in New Mexico. There were a dozen or so sagging, rusting trailers, each with a satellite dish reaching toward the sky. There were a couple of houses, one built out of wood and sheets of plywood, and another out of stone. There was a pack of mangy dogs lying in the shade provided by the trailers. Whenever they gave themselves a desultory scratch, clouds of dust puffed up. There were three tiny children clad only in T-shirts playing in a cheap rubber wading pool under the watchful eye of an elderly woman who shucked corn while she sat on the steps of a trailer.

  The children gaped at him. The woman stared at him with that flat, hard expression you saw in the faces of people who had been isolated due to poverty and race, and assumed every white man in a big car was bad news. It wasn’t just paranoia, Richard reflected. For people like these, that was often the case.

  The dogs set up a ululating chorus of bays and barks announcing his arrival, and they came racing toward the car as he pulled to a stop. They flung themselves against the doors. As their claws scrabbled at the metal, Richard pictured long scratches in the paint and reminded himself of the rental car mantra—no curb too high.

  He couldn’t tell if those lolling tongues and rows of teeth were doggie smiles or held a more sinister warning. He also knew huddling in the car wasn’t going to win him any points. Richard took a deep breath, picked up his Yankees ball cap from the passenger seat, and pulled it on in the probably vain hope it would protect him from the blazing sun. He opened the door and stepped out into a blast of heat that seared his lungs and sucked the moisture from every pore as he broke out in an instant sweat. California was supposed to be so great, Richard thought. Thus far he had found it to be a hellhole.

  “Down!” he ordered the lunging dogs, and amazingly all of them save the Chihuahua obeyed. The Chihuahua took a grip on the tassel of his loafer and started pulling. Richard resisted the urge to drop-kick it into the wading pool.

  The door of the stone house banged open, and a man emerged, tucking his shirt into jeans washed so many times they were more white than blue. He had a barrel chest and bandy legs, and long black hair hung raggedly to his shoulders. A few more doors banged and more men arrived. The man from the stone house stood well back from him and called, “Our kids are going to school.”

  Allistaire had mistaken Richard for a real estate developer. Now he’d been mistaken for a truant officer. Richard wasn’t sure if that was a step up or a step down. He held out a hand in a pacifying gesture. “I’m not from the government.” Tension leached out of a few shoulders. “I’m a…” policeman, his mind wanted to say, but that was probably worse than a bureaucrat, and it wasn’t strictly accurate any longer. He decided on brutal candor. “Look, I’m rich. I need you to do me a favor and I’ll pay well for it.”

  Glances were exchanged all around, and the old woman on the trailer steps gave an almost imperceptible nod.

  “Okay, come in,” said the barrel-chested man. He turned and headed toward the stone house. “I’m Johnny Calderón,” he threw back over his shoulder. “I lead this band.”

  “Pleased to meet you. Richard Oort.”

  Inside there was a window air conditioner blowing full blast. The pages of the top magazine on a stack of Popular Mechanics fluttered in the breeze. The front door kept opening and closing as more people drifted in. Burly men, a few sporting tattoos that indicated military service. Slim youths with hair so black it gleamed. And an old man with sunken cheeks, who settled into a chair by the cool air. No women, how
ever, until the old woman arrived carrying a big jug of lemonade. Richard wanted to kiss her. He removed his cap and thrust it in his jacket pocket, then took out a handkerchief and mopped his face and neck.

  “Hot, huh?” Calderón said as he pulled back his hair and confined it with a rubber band

  “Yes, very. It’s hot in New Mexico too, but not this bad.”

  “Huh, New Mexico.” He paused. “Long way to come for a favor. Don’t you have any Indians to screw over in your part of the world?”

  Looking into those dark eyes, Richard realized that Johnny Calderón was a very shrewd guy. Peddling bullshit was not going to fly. Calderón grabbed a chair, spun it around, and straddled it, arms resting along the back. Nobody offered Richard a chair.

  Richard cleared his throat. Knowing it forcibly displayed his nerves but unable to prevent it. “I read about your situation. How the community center burned down and there’s no money to build a new one. How you’re trying to buy fifty acres from your neighbors, but they’re not budging on the asking price. I know unemployment is chronic.” He paused and surveyed the ring of implacable faces, and hurried on. “I’m prepared to rebuild your center, buy the fifty acres, and build and staff a health clinic.” Richard tilted a hand toward Calderón, physically passing the conversational ball.

  “And what do we gotta do to earn all this unsolicited generosity?” Calderón asked.

  “Violate your religious beliefs.”

  That got a reaction. People shifted, and there were even a few basso rumbles from the circle of men. Calderón shrugged. “I’m a lapsed Catholic. Not sure how that’s going to help you,” he said.

  “Not Christian beliefs. Your traditional beliefs.” There were more rumbles at that and more than a few head shakes. Richard held up a hand. “Just hear me out. I need to shift a road or a house in a subdivision that’s being built down near Anaheim. I’d thought about seeding an archaeological site, but an archaeologist told me it wouldn’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny.”

  “He’s right. You can’t just throw around pot shards and arrowheads. You gotta show habitation, middens, fire pits,” the old toothless man said.