by Beverly Bird
Dallas couldn’t help himself. He felt dull red heat creep up his neck. Anger and embarrassment filled him. Suddenly he was sorry he had gone to all the trouble of finding the old geezer—and he knew, too, that Uncle Ernie was absolutely right.
“Tell me anyway,” he said tightly.
Ernie tilted his head to the side a bit and shrugged. His feathers trembled. “Okay. I have a little time. That was no badger in your son’s tent, Mr. Belagana. It was the wolfman. There was no badger in your apartment. That was the wolfman, too.” He paused. “I bet you have lots of fancy burglar alarms to protect your Anglo treasures. And they didn’t go off when the badger went inside.”
Dallas felt a sense of cold shock go through him. “That’s right,” he allowed carefully.
“Wolfmen can change shape when they want to. They do it to get in somewhere, to get out, to disguise themselves from those who would know them.”
“So then why the hell didn’t he attack my son when he had the chance?” Dallas demanded angrily, looking for loopholes.
“He didn’t have the chance.”
“Huh?”
“You were there.”
“Of course I was. I wouldn’t send him camping alone.”
“And my clan granddaughter was there as well? Ellen?”
Dallas nodded.
“Then no, he did not have the chance. He was overpowered. There were two of you, one of him, and Ricky was protected by the power of your love. I think this badger-wolfman ran quickly. Am I right?”
“Well, I hit him. It was a pretty good shot.”
“With what?”
“With Ellen’s purse.”
The old man nodded and smiled.
“What?” Dallas demanded.
“Something belonging to her, something relatively personal...yes, that would work. It would have some sense of her spirit, her love, within it.”
“Oh, hell,” Dallas muttered. He was beginning to feel overwhelmed. But he was in for a penny, he might as well throw in the pound, he thought.
“So how do I end this? Protecting Ricky isn’t good enough. I want this...this wolfman character immobilized. Stopped.”
Uncle Ernie nodded and rose from the stool. “Of course you do. An Enemy Way would be best.”
“A what?”
“It is a ceremony to turn the witch’s evil back upon himself. It will not only protect Ricky, but it might give us some clue as to who the wolfman is. Once his evil returns to him, he should sicken, probably die.”
Dallas’s head was spinning. “I don’t want a ceremony. I want to find out who the hell this guy is and put him behind bars.” Then he wondered if the law even convicted for such a thing. He had a wild image of this case in front of a Flagstaff court. Wolfmen, badgers and flying horses. He shook his head.
“An Enemy Way would take at least a week to organize,” Ernie went on as though Dallas hadn’t spoken. “In the meantime, I will talk again to the Holy Ones and find out if they will tell me anything more. I will tremble and see if they won’t lead me to this wolfman. In rare cases it works.”
“Tremble?” Dallas bolted to his feet as well. This was rapidly getting to be too much.
“It’s a trancelike state to open up full communication with the powers. The path I use is called the Hand Trembling Way.” He lifted his hat off his head in a brief salute and started to turn away.
“What can I do?” Dallas demanded harshly. “I’m not going to sit around chewing my nails while you tremble, for God’s sake.” He couldn’t do it. He needed to fight back, to do something to protect his son from—from what?
When had he started realizing that as bizarre as this all seemed, it was a very real threat? A threat to his kid’s life? With the break in and Stan West’s phone call? He supposed now that that was it. Shamen and wolfmen aside, in his world when the cops said something was real, then it was real.
Ernie was looking at some distant point beyond his shoulder. “Where is your boy now?” he asked finally.
Dallas looked at his watch. It was almost five-thirty. “He’s home with a baby-sitter.”
Uncle Ernie frowned. “Go to him. Stay by him. Don’t leave his side until I tell you it’s over.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. You are his protection. I am concerned that his mother appeared to him, of course, but I also fear because our wolfman is not backing off in the face of superior power. He keeps searching for a way to get through. He is desperate.”
Dallas felt cold inside. “What about school?” Half of him couldn’t believe he was asking this. The other half was rapidly becoming terrified.
“Keep him out until this is over,” Ernie said implacably. “Book learning will do him no good if he does not live to use it.”
Oh, God. He realized he was clenching his teeth, that he felt vaguely sick. The old man was leaving.
“Wait!” he called out. Ernie looked back at him. “Do I owe you something for this?”
“I have done nothing yet.”
“You gave me advice.” He imagined these shamen were pretty much like attorneys and doctors. Nothing was free any more.
“Pass on a kindness,” Ernie said finally.
“A kindness?”
“That is what I have done for you so far—given you a kindness. Pass it on.”
“To whom?” he asked blankly. Was he supposed to walk up to some guy on the street and hand him a hundred dollars?
Ernie grinned as though reading his mind. “What of Ellen?” he asked. “You could give her some time, not be so Anglo impatient to have her behave just the way you think she should. You were right about what you told your son. You will not find perfection again. But perhaps you will find something better.”
Dallas flinched, feeling decidedly spooked. Did this old guy know everything? Dallas supposed it was possible. He was way out of his realm here.
“You don’t like me much, do you?” he asked impulsively.
Uncle Ernie grinned. “I like you fine. I will like you even more when you find hozro. Now go home to your son, Mr. Belagana.”
With that he left as suddenly as he had appeared. Dallas paid his check fast, getting the extra fourteen dollars to bail out his car, then he hurried back outside into the blinding high-desert sunlight.
When he looked around the parking lot and up and down the street, he saw no sign of the mysterious old shaman.
* * *
It was almost midnight when he got back to Flagstaff. Something was ticking in his engine so he drove more slowly. Between these excursions to the Res and all his work down in Phoenix, he had been putting a lot of hard miles on the car. He should have had it tuned up while it was in for painting, but it was too late now. He left the car in the condominium parking lot and moved wearily for the lobby doors, rubbing the back of his neck.
He would feel better when he saw Ricky, he realized. The boy would probably be asleep by now, despite his intentions to wait up for him. But when he saw him, when he touched him, he would feel fine.
Then, Dallas decided, he was going to do exactly what Uncle Ernie had said, no matter how crazy it sounded. He was going to keep him out of school, wasn’t going to let him out of his sight until this whole mess was over. Unfortunately, he still didn’t know what he was going to do about the shaman’s admonitions regarding Ellen Lonetree.
He reached the glass doors and found that they were locked for the night. He wondered if the wolfman had come to vandalize his apartment after eleven o’clock, too. Had the animal—or whatever form it had taken—breached this downstairs security as well? He pulled his wallet out to hunt for his pass card, the one he could slide into the little slot beside the doors so they would unlock for twenty seconds. The explosion that came from behind him drove him with such force the doors shattered.
He fell into the lobby in a hail of sparkling, raining glass and orange light. He felt the sting of the glass cutting him and he put his hands up instinctively to shield his face, then he was on
his knees, on his feet, blood burning and sliding into his eyes, looking back. Rage filled him, rage and fear and disbelief. It was his own car that was a ball of fire now, orange and red and yellow flames leaping for the sky.
The manager’s apartment door was flung open behind him and the man came out in his underwear. Then there were more people, all running, and someone was shouting about calling the fire department. But Dallas was thinking clearly now, as if the heat from the flames had honed his mind, had burned away his shock. The door had shattered a second before his card had tripped the lock. Security had been breached and distant sirens were already screaming.
Ricky.
The elevators would be frozen as well—another security trick—so he raced for the stairs, his lungs burning before he reached the third floor, from the smoke he had inhaled, from terror and something else cracking inside him, the part of him that could take another blow and survive. Good Lord, no. But he knew before he reached the twelfth floor, knew before he ran down the corridor, knew before he found his own door unlocked.
He barreled inside, breathing hard. The sofa was pulled out from the wall again. He grabbed it, dragging it further, and it fell over under the force of his adrenaline. Mrs. DiNardo was there, bound, gagged, her eyes huge and terrified.
He left her.
He ran for the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the closets, grabbing doors, flinging them open. A crashing, cracking sound filled the apartment, but there were no voices, no life. Please, God, let me hear it: Hey, Dad, what are you doing? But there was nothing.
Dallas sank down on his own bed and covered his face with his hands. A black pain filled him, twisting in his throat, choking him.
Ricky was gone.
Chapter 15
Where were they?
Ellen sat in her car in front of the Shiprock chapter house, her heart alternately skipping then clenching as each car that came toward her on Route 504 failed to be a black Jaguar. Had she actually left the telephone message she thought she had left, or had that old baby-sitter screwed it up somehow? Her head felt so foggy lately, so cloudy with tension that she couldn’t think clearly enough to be sure. She looked at the dashboard clock again. It was nearly one o’clock.
He was still angry.
The thought flashed at her, then she shook her head. Even so, she knew him well enough now to be pretty sure he wouldn’t just leave her sitting here, waiting. He was too considerate, too good and kind even under the worst of circumstances. When she had started this whole mess for him with that letter, when she had first seen him dragged to that meeting at the orphanage, he had been polite. Hot and angry, certainly—his temper had come off him in waves. But he had been excruciatingly polite through it all.
So something was wrong.
She reached for the ignition and turned the key again. The Toyota coughed, complained, then the engine finally turned over. She turned the wheel hard and drove out of the parking lot without any true idea of where she was going.
Flagstaff. It came to her as she reached the main Shiprock intersection and impulsively she ran the light. Horns blared and she vaguely heard someone shouting at her through her open windows.
She drove westward and the certainty grew. At first it was just an itch inside, a subtle demand that she do something, find them somehow. By the time she passed the Chuska Mountains, it was something strangling and tight that had her about the throat. Ricky, something had happened to Ricky, the wolfman had gotten him and she hadn’t been there. Why hadn’t she been there?
She made a moaning sound and pressed down harder on the accelerator. The Toyota’s engine began trembling. If it got her to Flagstaff she would buy a hundred new engines.
“Just get me there,” she prayed aloud. “Holy Ones, please, just get me there.”
She tore past the Hopi Res and Tuba City and picked up Route 89 south. The smell of smoke, of something burning, started drifting through the heat panels on her dashboard by the time she reached the outskirts of Flagstaff. That was okay, she thought desperately. Now she could walk if she had to. But she found the turnoff to Dallas’s condominium complex and her car was still running.
She stopped in the parking lot and got out, then she looked around dumbly. Impossibly, the smell of smoke was stronger now. There was something wet and ashy in the air, like a fire doused. Then she saw the charred skeleton of a burned-out car. Her heart spasmed and almost stopped.
She pressed a hand to a sharp pain there and prayed that she wouldn’t pass out. The car was unidentifiable, but she knew somehow that it was the Jaguar. Two men worked over it, sifting, moving pieces of it here and there.
Had Ricky and Dallas been in it?
“What happened?” she asked the technicians. They looked up at her blankly and she knew that they had no great authority—they were just somebody’s underlings wrapping up the job of releasing the car to the junkyard or wherever it would go.
“What happened?” she demanded again anyway, but then she didn’t wait for an answer. She ran for the lobby.
The glass doors had been broken, and plywood was tacked up to cover the frames. She raced inside to the elevator, pounding at the UP button. When she stepped inside the car, she realized she was crying silently. Her skin was cold, so cold, but her tears were hot, scalding paths down her cheeks.
She stepped out of the elevator on the twelfth floor. So many people. Men stood about smoking although signs on the wall prohibited it, and nosy neighbors paused each time they passed apartment 1212. Ellen moved past them, their faces looming at her, their eyes following her curiously.
She began running again halfway down the corridor. She reached the apartment and a police officer blocked her way.
“Please, I have to get in there!”
“Let her through.” The voice was Dallas’s.
He was alive.
The cop stood back and waved Ellen past him and she burst into the living room, her heart thudding sickly. Dallas had been pacing—she could tell by the way he was standing, his arms loose at his sides, his legs frozen in midstride. He stared at her, his face too tormented to be readable. He hadn’t slept, she thought absurdly. There were blue shadows under his eyes and several small cuts on his forehead. His face was haggard, not strong any more but haunted, not surviving any more but holding on. It was painful to look at, and his grief came at her palpably, unbearable to feel.
“Ricky,” she breathed.
“He’s taken him.”
She cried out, feeling the strength and the warmth slide from her body. She swayed and he caught her, crossing the room toward her fast, but his grip wasn’t comforting. His fingers bit into the flesh of her arms, hurting her, then he pushed her back against the wall, trapping her there.
“Tell...me...what you...know.”
She opened her mouth but only a groan came out.
“Why are you here?” he demanded. “Why would you come here? You knew something happened. How did you know?”
He thought she had done something, she realized wildly, that she was somehow responsible! She had to tell him the truth. Nothing, nothing, was as horrifying, as terrible as what he was already thinking, and if she did it badly, then there wasn’t time to care.
“No!” she gasped. “I’m his mother, Dallas. I didn’t hurt him, I didn’t take him and I don’t know who did! Please!” Her throat was closing, her tears coming harder. She pushed the words out fast before she couldn’t say any more. “I just knew... I knew something was wrong when you didn’t show up. So I came.”
It was all she could manage. She realized he was looking at her blankly. He didn’t understand what she had just told him, wasn’t putting two and two together. Then his face changed. She cried out again wordlessly as shock, then betrayal and rage flashed into his eyes.
“His mother? You?”
She nodded spasmodically. He let her go fast, snatching his hands away. He paced back into the room, violent energy and anger making his movements jerky. Something in her heart cracked
and bled.
“That’s why you—no—” he broke off hoarsely, turning on his heel to look at her again. Something ticked at his jaw. She felt sick.
“No,” he went on. “I’m not going to guess any more. You’re going to tell me, from beginning to end, from that damned letter you wrote until now, everything there is to tell me. Because somewhere in this whole long, sordid story there’s a clue, there’s a reason, there’s something to tell me where the hell they’ve taken my kid!”
She shook her head. “That—that part doesn’t have anything to do with me. Uncle Ernie—”
“Screw Uncle Ernie!” he roared.
“No! Dallas, we need him! We need him to get Ricky back!” It was the only certain thing in her head, something driving and demanding that wouldn’t let her go. His eyes narrowed on her.
“I’m going to get Ricky back. You’re going to get the hell out of our lives. After you tell me what’s going on.”
She shrank back. But she had known he would feel like that—of course she had known—and there would be time later to cope with the pain, the loss. Now she had to make him understand.
“Ernie can tremble,” she managed.
He took a step closer to her. “I am in no mood for this Navajo hocus-pocus,” he warned, his voice deadly now, too quiet.
“You have to be! This hocus-pocus has Ricky! Wait!” she cried when he would have argued again. She had to say something, had to come up with some argument that would reach him.
“What else can you do here?” she tried desperately. “Pace? Wait? Agonize? We’ll go back to the Res. We’ll find Uncle Ernie. I’ll tell you everything while we drive.”
He looked at her disbelievingly. “I’m not leaving the phone.”
“We can call in every half hour or—or however often you want to! We’ll hear as soon as the cops know anything. But in the meantime, we can be doing something!”
He was considering it. She could tell, could see the thoughts flickering over his face, could see him measuring them, weighing them. Please.