by Aimée Thurlo
“According to John’s brother, nobody has come around looking for us, and no strangers have been by either, though several police cars have been through via the Interstate. I’m glad he was able to retrieve the squad car For us, and am frankly surprised that nobody had it towed away yesterday.”
“Now that I’ve got some practical experience dealing with skinwalkers, and with your night vision, we should be able to track down this woman skinwalker before sunup. If she’s still around, of course.” Diane kept watch out her window as Lee drove beneath the underpass. The scars in the pavement left by the rims of the van yesterday were still obvious.
“We’re past where the truck was waiting for us, and I think there are vehicle tracks over those.’ Lee looked ahead. He didn’t have the headlights on, they weren’t needed, and he was moving slowly so they wouldn’t generate much vehicle noise.
He stopped and looked over the hood. “There’s only one set, so they either came this way, or left, not both.”
“You said earlier that the old Navajo man skinwalker had a pickup?”
“Right. Let’s get out and walk from here,’ Lee suggested, stopping the slow-moving car. “Remember that the mountain lion was cut, but when she changed back into human form, she might have healed. So if the skinwalker, the voting woman, shape-shifted back into an animal tonight, she’s healed up and healthy.”
Lee slipped out the driver’s side, locked the door behind him, and joined Diane in front of the unit. She had the shotgun, and a pistol in her bell.
They moved uphill, not taking the path but moving wide to the left, intending to circle around from above, then eventually reach the van from the opposite side, the direction the black panther had come when it had attacked Diane. The wind was coming from the east, their right, so their scent wouldn’t precede them into the area.
Lee and Diane moved swiftly now that they’d both had the chance to eat and rest up from their ordeal. Diane’s brief possession of vampire powers had resulted in the healing of all her minor cuts and muscle strains, and though no longer a walker of the night, she had bounce in her step again.
Eventually they reached a well-traveled path leading east and west, and Lee pointed out large wolf and cat tracks going in both directions. Diane had a flashlight, but didn’t want to use it.
Taking the path west, they discovered it turned uphill, and soon Lee stopped and pointed to the roof of a small house built into the hillside.
There was a strong lock on the door, but it was simple in design, and Lee had it open in seconds while Diane kept watch. There were no lights on inside, but Diane had her flashlight.
“Whew! Sure smells like animals live here,” Diane whispered. The house had two rooms, one a multipurpose living room-kitchen with a small color TV, an inexpensive wooden table with four chairs, and a small stove and refrigerator. The place was filthy, with dirty dishes in the sink and animal prints all over the worn vinyl floor. Cockroaches scattered from the sink, and flies hovered around a trail of dark splotches on the floor where a cougar had walked through drops of blood. There was a light fixture overhead in the center of the ceiling, but they kept the room dark.
Lee looked into the bedroom, and Diane joined him. There was one large bed, dirty sheets, and a large comforter. Mostly women’s clothes were hanging from a metal rack or tossed over a small dressing table.
“Where did they all sleep?” she asked.
“Together. Navajo witches don’t have the same taboos as the rest of us.” He shrugged, then walked back into the living room.
Once it was clear the place was unoccupied, they left and continued east, staying just below the trail in the forest, moving side by side but fifteen feet apart. Lee kept checking the trees, and Diane, realizing he was looking for mountain lions, kept from walking beneath any trees big enough to hide such predators.
Lee stopped, and pointed ahead to a mound on the ground. Moving closer, Diane saw that it was a wolf, dead of multiple wounds, including a cut on the leg. Whoever this was had died in animal form, and would become fodder for scavengers. A second, older-looking wolf was also dead nearby, probably the one that had attacked Muller and Kurt first.
It took fifteen minutes to move around the location where the van had been parked. Something slipped through the brush just ahead, and both Lee and Diane raised their weapons quickly.
“It’s a coyote. Much too small to be a skinwalker. Let it go,” Lee whispered, then stepped forward.
They moved closer to the van, and saw the scavenged carcass of the long, jet-black panther.
Diane crouched down low and slipped around the side of the van, using her flashlight sparingly. The beam began shaking when she found the first vampire remains. “Ugh. Ingrid’s burned to a crisp, but her clothes are still intact.”
Lee came around from the front of the van and joined her. “It’s a different kind of burning, oxidation still, but not the kind that causes forest fires, fortunately. That’s what happens to the bodies when they’re out in the sun, dead or alive. Remember what it looks like, and you’ll know when a walker of the night has met his or her deadliest enemy.”
Lee walked over to check on the other vampires, and his heart began to beat faster. What if they weren’t there, and hadn’t really died last night like Ingrid?
He stopped and looked down, and he sighed audibly, finding Kurt’s ashes. The branch Diane had jammed into his heart still stood there, pinning his shirt to the ground. Climbing up to the thicket, he also found Muller’s body—at least what he’d become after death. Both bodies had been disturbed, and not by animals.
He went back down to Diane, who was sitting on the step of the van, still searching around Ingrid’s body with her flashlight, her earlier attack of nerves replaced by cool analysis. “Somebody robbed her. Ingrid’s watch and jewelry are gone, so’s her money. Her purse has been searched as well. A human did this.”
Lee nodded. “I noticed the outturned pockets and absence of watches on the men. This isn’t the kind of thing a Navajo would normally do, hang around the dead. I expect it was the work of the surviving skinwalker, who came back after daylight in human form. If it was her, she must have left in the pickup with everything she could take from the bodies and the van. She probably has the weapons we left behind too, including our knives. I doubt we’re going to find her around here. Like John Buck said, the survivor of the pack has moved on.”
“You’re certainly right about it being a woman.” Diane set the shotgun down across her knees, still searching around with the flashlight.
“What did you see?”
Diane aimed her light at the purse. “Ingrid’s makeup is missing too.”
“So we’ll watch for the young woman with the streak in her hair, okay? But I doubt she’ll ever be coming back here.” Lee wondered what he’d do if he encountered the skinwalker in her human form again. Could he kill someone who looked so much like Annie?
“Well, we’ve already discussed what to do next. Do we go ahead with that plan now?” Diane looked up at him.
“It’ll be the only way to bring New Mexico back to normal, And some law-enforcement officers will finally get some sleep.” Lee nodded.
“And the military and State Department, as well as the German government, will be the ones with sleepless nights for a while. But that’s where it all started, I suppose.”
Together, they walked quickly back to his patrol unit, and five minutes later, half of New Mexico was on the way to the foothills east of Fort Wingate.
Diane ran with Lee to her apartment door. “I wonder what the neighbor will think. I’ve never brought a man home. Well, I didn’t till I met you.” She sighed.
“Is that a good sigh, or a bad one?”
“How about an honest one? I can’t say any more than that at the moment, I know I’m not the only woman in your life.” She took off her jacket and started to sit down on the sofa, then caught herself and stood. “I’m too dirty to sit down, aren’t I?”
St
anding in the middle of the floor, she slipped off one of her shoes, then the other. Walking to the entrance to the short hallway, she turned to Lee. “I get I the shower first!”
Lee looked down at his own dusty, dirty clothes, then shrugged. “Its your apartment. Just don’t use all the hot water, okay?”
He sat down in the middle of the floor, eased down into a reclining position on the carpet, and went to sleep, his pistol by his side.
Lee woke up a half hour later. Diane, barefooted and wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans, was staring down at him pensively. “You could have used the couch, or the bed. Everything around here can be cleaned, you know.”
“Don’t know your rules—yet. Thanks anyway. I slept on the floor a lot when I was a kid.”
“You ought to know by now I break a lot of rules. At least I have since I met you. Now go ahead and take a shower. I’ll fix us some breakfast, and maybe even lunch. You have a hell of an appetite.” She started for the kitchen area.
“I’ll have to go back out to the car and bring in the shotgun and that uniform I borrowed.” lie put on his cap and sunglasses, then his leather driving gloves. “I also have the rest of that bottle of sunblock.”
She picked up his pistol from the carpet. “Don’t leave home without this either. We still have an enemy or two out there looking for us.”
He nodded, taking the pistol and sticking it into his pocket. “Keep yours handy too.”
“Right.”
He hurried out to the ear. With the sunblock on, he would be safe probably for an hour or more, but it never paid to take his time outside, he’d learned.
Five minutes later, he was back up in the apartment and in the shower, and fifteen minutes after that, they were together in the kitchen area, fixing breakfast and listening and half watching the television, which was across the room on a stand.
Every local television station and the cable news networks as well were talking about the unfolding story, which had interrupted regular programming.
Lee leaned back in his chair, shaking his head after listening for a full ten minutes. “So Wolfgang Muller and his companions were terrorists after a shipment of ‘enriched uranium’ that had been stolen in transit during World War II. I guess this is as close as they’re ever going to get to the truth. What happened to rookie Benny Mondragon and all those soldiers will never reach the light of day. I doubt any records survived without being censored or maybe even doctored by the spy Nazi Germany had in place. I wonder if any of the men who took out the bodies and cleaned up the ambush site back in ’45 are still alive?”
“Maybe somebody will finally come forward, though I doubt they knew about the plutonium,” Diane said.
“The whole incident never made the newspapers back then except as a vaguely worded vehicle accident. No one in the military or scientific community ever said a word or wrote anything down officially about the theft, and I searched all the records I could find when they became declassified. When the atomic bomb was finally tested and successful, what some of the observers called the second sunrise, all attention was focused on ending the war.”
“Well, the feds and state officials still had to give a reason for sealing off the area. If the feds had said plutonium this morning, it would have definitely caused a panic.” Diane took a sip of coffee.
“At least John Buck will be given a fair shake. He’s a hero now, along with his brother, for discovering the terrorists with the uranium and arranging for what some out-of-the-loop reporters are calling Navajo Justice. The land the feds are giving him in exchange is more than fair, along with all that financial compensation.” Lee pushed his cup away, having finished a second cup, and knowing even that wouldn’t keep him awake today.
“The press is still tiptoeing around the news that Navajos were involved, and used wolf hybrids and a trained black panther to attack Muller and the Plummer couple. Then the hogwash that the Navajos burned the bodies. The dead wolves are being treated like heroes for stopping foreign terrorists. Maybe the wolf-reintroduction program will finally get some respect in New Mexico.”
“Well, we’re off the case now, officially, though we probably haven’t heard the last of it.” Lee walked over to the window and made sure the curtain was tightly drawn.
Diane shrugged. “I’m glad, at least, that we’re not part of the team looking for the three Navajo women and the old man who lived in that house. Dead skinwalkers will be hard to find, and we’re the only ones who can close that case. Well, and John Buck. But I think he and his brother will keep their mouths shut.”
“Well, he and we know there’s one other Navajo out there, that woman, who knows some of the truth, and we don’t want to attract her attention,” Lee continued. “But I’m going to track her down, you know, I have to. She knows what I am.”
“And we still have to find the other skinwalker, the woman who killed my partner. That’s how I got into all this with you in the first place.” Diane nodded. “Count me in on the hunt.”