Navajo Courage

by Aimée Thurlo

“What we know so far is that the person after us is undoubtedly nuts, but he’s also very intelligent,” she said, thinking out loud. “He’s proficient in Navajo ways, but he’s also up on modern technology and knows how to tamper with brakes. He may have even grown up working on cars.”

  “I suspect that he’s also enjoying himself. By keeping us looking over our shoulders, he diverts us from paying closer attention to the case,” Luca said.

  “Maybe it’s Stephen Browning,” she said, taking a bite out of her green chile burger, scarcely aware of its spicy heat.

  “No, I don’t think he’s our man,” Luca said after a beat. “But I think he’s an important part of the puzzle. Maybe Browning’s Navajo source is using him to keep tabs on what we’re doing.”

  “What really worries me about our suspect is how easily he blends technology and cultural beliefs—and uses both to terrorize,” Valerie said. “This is one scary dude.”

  “In this case, fear’s a good thing. It’ll make you more cautious.”

  “Do you fear him?” she asked, and saw his eyes flash with an emotion she couldn’t easily define.

  “What I feel isn’t fear,” he said slowly. “It’s outrage. I want to collar this person who profanes our ways and desecrates everything I value. It’s not just about justice—it’s about restoring the hózhq.”

  Before she could reply, the tech who’d worked on their car entered the restaurant. He looked around, saw them, then walked over.

  “The car’s clean,” he said, handing Valerie the keys. “The lab scanned from bumper to bumper for GPS signals and only got the one from the standard department unit. You might want to bring your vehicle in once a day for a quick scan, just to make sure it stays that way.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” she said.

  “That extra GPS is in the glove compartment—and it’s still broadcasting the vehicle location. I was told you had plans to retain custody of it for a while.”

  “We do,” Luca answered.

  After the tech left, Valerie focused her attention back on Luca. “So now we lure this killer out into the open, someplace where we can take him down.”

  “Exactly.”

  Although that one word was spoken without inflection, she saw something deadly flicker in his eyes.

  “I’m tired of playing by his rules,” he added.

  There was a change in him—a renewed determination to catch this suspect. Maybe it was pride—he hadn’t liked becoming the killer’s prey.

  “He’s upped his game. By sabotaging the brakes, he wasn’t just playing with my life—he endangered you,” Luca said, his voice as brittle and cold as ice.

  The realization that it wasn’t pride—it was protectiveness—hit her hard. A gentle warmth spiraled through her. Instantly aware of the turn her thoughts had taken, Valerie looked away and, searching for a distraction, took a final sip of coffee.

  “This is our fight, and we won’t lose,” she said.

  “No, we won’t—and when it’s over, you and I will celebrate…in ways we shouldn’t think about now.”

  His voice was rough and his eyes held a dark edge. She stopped breathing and her heart leaped to her throat.

  Fate was playing a joke on her. If she lowered her guard, Luca would steal her heart, then one day disappear from her life forever. Like it had been for her mother, she’d spend a lifetime sighing over what might have been.

  “Let’s go talk to the captain,” Valerie said in a hardened voice as they left the café. “It’s time to bait the trap.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Since the plan required close coordination and visual contact, they were forced to wait until the next afternoon. Their morning was spent catching up on paperwork and in meetings, ironing out the details of what would be a multijurisdictional operation.

  When they finally set out at two-thirty, the GPS that had been planted on Valerie’s unit was now in one of the cup holders. Unfortunately, the serial number had been scraped away and no fingerprints had been found on it. It all went to prove that their prey—seriously disturbed or not—was still able to think clearly enough not to leave evidence behind.

  Valerie drove north on the interstate out of Albuquerque. An unmarked patrol unit with two plainclothes officers was behind them but staying well back. Two other patrol cars would follow on a parallel route. Their own departmental GPS system would allow them to know where every other unit was, keeping the operation from getting bunched up or spread too thin.

  Ten minutes later, they turned west off the interstate, taking the exit to the east, then crossing over the highway west into the small city of Bernalillo. Soon they were heading south on a two-lane road.

  Luca watched in the side mirror. “A white Ford sedan took the same exit off the interstate. Now it’s looped around and coming our direction.”

  “Good eye. I’ll call our backup and see if they can read the license plate.” Valerie made a quick call on the tactical channel. “It appears that the same vehicle has been behind us all the way from Albuquerque, closing in then fading back. They’re trying to get close enough now to read the plate.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t spook this guy….”

  “Or lose our target, in case this vehicle isn’t the right one,” she added, completing his thought.

  “He just took a right,” Luca said, turning his head to look back. “It doesn’t look like he was our tail after all.”

  “The vehicle’s stolen,” the dispatcher said, his voice coming over the radio clearly. “The tags don’t match the description.”

  Valerie cursed under her breath. “He’s either onto us, or we’ve stumbled across a car thief.” She glanced into the rearview mirror, braked hard then slid the unit around in a moonshiner’s turn. “Hang on!”

  “He’s back on the main highway, heading north again,” Luca said. “We need to set up a roadblock before he gets to the freeway.”

  “I’ll stay with the target. Call it in to the Sandoval County team. They’re on standby and this is out of my jurisdiction,” she said.

  As Luca picked up the radio, he realized it was already too late to block the interstate. The white car screeched to the right again, racing south.

  Luca called dispatch and instructed their parallel backup to block the frontage road ahead.

  “They’ve got a spike belt, and time to place it,” he said.

  The white car had a good lead but Valerie, going over ninety already, was closing the gap.

  Their prey slowed suddenly, brake lights flashing, then turned off the highway, pulling up beside an old pickup.

  “He’s making a run for it,” Luca said, throwing the car door open and jumping out before they slid to a stop.

  Ahead, a long-haired man wearing sunglasses, a stocking cap, baggy jeans and a loose-fitting shirt was sprinting down the wide ditch bank. He was racing directly toward an old man and a boy who were fishing in the clear irrigation ditch.

  The fishermen turned in surprise just as the running suspect brushed by them hard, shoving them both into the water.

  Luca was less than twenty-five yards from him when the suspect suddenly stopped, pulled out a gun and fired at him. Luca dodged to the left, barely missing a passing car.

  Luca drew his own pistol, but as he glanced quickly to his right, he saw the boy in the ditch wildly waving his arms and fighting to stay above the waterline. The old man was in trouble, too.

  The suspect fired again, the bullet whining past Luca. The shooter, now in the road, pointed his weapon at an approaching driver, obviously planning to hijack the man’s vehicle.

  Forced to decide between continuing pursuit or saving two innocent bystanders, Luca jammed his pistol back into his holster, dropped his borrowed cell phone on the ground then jumped into the twenty-foot-wide ditch feet-first. The boy’s head was barely visible now. Luca made his way through the stream and had just grabbed hold of the Pueblo boy when Valerie ran up.

  “Go after the suspect. I’ve got
things here,” he called out.

  As she raced off, he pushed the boy out onto the steep bank. He then swam after the older man, who was clinging to a branch and trying to pull himself out of the water.

  Moments later, father and son were on dry land. The shivering Pueblo man hugged his son tightly and tried to thank Luca.

  “What you’ve done…” he said, his voice choked with emotion.

  “My job, that’s all,” Luca said. Then, knowing they were okay, he took off, hoping to catch up to Valerie and the suspect.

  Luca raced around a curve, still on the ditch bank. A hundred yards ahead Valerie was walking in his direction, talking on her cell phone. A man in a gray suit was following several feet behind her. He was also using a cell phone.

  Seeing Luca, Valerie shook her head. “The perp carjacked a blue sedan and kept going. I’ve called it in. The driver is Hubert Schultz, a salesman,” she said, gesturing to the man behind her. “At least he wasn’t hurt.”

  Schultz had stopped and was waving one of his arms in the air as he argued with someone.

  “What did the victim see?” Luca asked, walking with Valerie back to the location where the civilians had been shoved into the irrigation canal.

  “Mostly the muzzle of a gun. Mr. Schultz was told not to look at our suspect’s face, so he complied. All I got from him was that the man’s skin was dark, like an Indian or Hispanic. He was clean-shaven, his hair looked phony, like a wig, and his sunglasses looked expensive, not the drugstore kind. According to Schultz, the man was in his thirties, at least, and the stocking cap had a Lobo logo on it—UNM,” she added.

  “There must be thousands of those around. Mall Mart carries them even up in Farmington,” Luca said. “But we still have the GPS, so the suspect’s bound to surface again. He doesn’t know we’ve found his tracking device. Of course all bets are off if he left the receiver in the car he abandoned back up the road.”

  “According to my last contact with dispatch, the Sandoval County deputies were going to check it out,” she said, looking down the road. Two hundred yards away, a squad car was parked beside the abandoned white sedan, and officers were conducting a search.

  A moment later, Valerie learned that their subject hadn’t left anything important behind, like a GPS receiver.

  “He must have taken the GPS with him. But we know what car he’s driving at this moment and its license number,” Luca pointed out.

  “Right. Let me check and see if anyone’s spotted Mr. Schultz’s vehicle. I already gave dispatch the tag number,” she said, punching a number on her cell phone.

  The Tewa Pueblo man and his son came up to them just as she ended the call. “My name is Lawrence Gonzales,” he said. “I guess you were after that man for more than speeding?”

  Luca nodded.

  “Maybe I can help you then. Do you think that was the killer who profanes everything he touches?”

  Luca nodded somberly, curious as to why the man had made that connection. He was about to ask when the man continued.

  “I’m Tewa and so’s my son. Like you, I’m Ke,” he said, still looking at Luca.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak the language of your tribe,” Luca said.

  “I’m a medicine man,” he answered. “Ke means Bear, and we’re called that because at the time of the beginning, a bear was seen to treat its own wounds, like humans do.”

  “But I’m not a medicine man,” Luca said, noting that the Tewa man was looking at the medicine bundle he carried on his belt.

  Lawrence looked at Luca, surprised. “Strange. I felt…something…when you passed. A power.”

  “I’m a Navajo police detective on special assignment.” As he spoke, Luca realized that the fetish in his pocket felt heavier than usual. Aware that it would need tending to since he’d gone into the water, Luca brought the cougar out of the jish and dried it off.

  This time, instead of placing it back in its pouch, he removed one of the leather strands that held the pouch closed, looped it around the fetish and hung the cougar around his neck.

  As Luca glanced at the Tewa medicine man he saw him smile. “You’re a hunt chief, or as we call them, Pi xen,” Lawrence said, “but you’re even more than that…. You’re what we know as tsiwi, those with the sweeping eyes, a predator against witches. Your spiritual brother, the cougar, will hunt with you as you continue your search for the witch—and you will win.”

  “I won’t give up until I do,” Luca said with a nod.

  “You helped my son and me. Now let me repay you.”

  “It’s not needed—” Luca began, but the Tewa man held up one hand.

  “The Diné believe in balance and harmony. Let me honor that.”

  They followed him to his pickup, which had been parked across the road and gone unnoticed until now. There, Lawrence Gonzales reached for a small wooden box he kept behind the driver’s seat.

  “This will help you complete your task,” he said, taking out two feathers. “They’re from a red-tailed hawk and will allow you to move with the silence and speed of that bird of prey, and spot a witch even in total darkness. Your Po wa ha, the spirit of the fetish you carry, will help you do the rest.”

  “Sir, you came closer to the suspect than either of us,” Valerie said. “We know about the hair color, stocking cap and sunglasses. Is there anything else you can add to that description now that things have calmed down?”

  He nodded then spoke. “He had a dried blue lizard hanging from a string around his neck. The gallbladder of a blue lizard is used for poisoning people, and that’s how I knew who—and what—he was. After that, I was in the water and didn’t see anything else.”

  “And you?” She glanced down at the seven-year-old by his side.

  “He had long hair. I tried to grab it when he pushed my dad, and it moved. So I think it was a wig,” the boy replied. “Then he pushed me into the ditch.” The boy’s eyes grew large, the memory of fear imprinted there clearly. “I don’t know how to swim,” he added, in a whisper-thin voice.

  Luca smiled at him. “You did real good in there keeping your head above water.”

  It wasn’t uncommon for kids in the desert not to know how to swim, and Luca had a feeling the skinwalker had known that, too. The witch had deliberately knocked the boy and his dad into the water, betting that Luca would do the right thing and try to save the innocents.

  This skirmish was over, but they’d have another chance to do battle soon enough. Luca could feel that certainty inside him as clearly as the sun’s warmth.

  As Luca glanced at Valerie, another gentler emotion coursed through his veins. Her softness, her courage and even her determination not to give up sang to him without words. It called to him, urging him to protect this woman from an evil that went beyond anything she’d ever known, or even imagined.

  Chapter Fifteen

  As they walked back to the car, Valerie thought about what had just happened with the Tewa man and his son. Luca’s courage knew few limits, and he commanded respect from everyone he met. It was little wonder that she was so drawn to him.

  Although she hadn’t wanted to work with a partner, she was now glad that Luca had been assigned to the case. She’d never admit it aloud, but this wasn’t her kind of fight. The witchcraft stuff…it just made her uneasy.

  As they got into the car, her cell phone rang. “We’ve located the blue sedan,” Captain Harris said. “The suspect abandoned it by the railroad tracks on the northern outskirts of Albuquerque, in county, where we had that string of burglaries last year.”

  “Any sign of him in the area?” Valerie asked.

  “We haven’t received any calls about another carjacking, so we think he’s still on foot in the neighborhood. But that area’s not a great place for the uninvited.”

  He didn’t have to elaborate. The neighborhood was known for its vigilante group, one that patrolled its streets and took the law into its own hands more often than not. Although euphemistically called the neighborho
od association, they were big trouble to anyone who dared create problems for the area residents.

  A kid who’d been breaking into trucks and selling whatever he could steal had eluded the sheriff department’s best efforts to catch him. Fed up, the association had gone to work. A few days later, deputies had found the suspect naked, bound and gagged in an abandoned warehouse filled with hot merchandise of all types. Fingerprints had sealed the case against the boy.

  “We’re heading there next,” Valerie told Captain Harris.

  “You’ve still got the GPS with you?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m keeping it with the unit. Let this wacko tail us again. There’s nothing my partner and I would like better than another shot at the prize,” Valerie said.

  “If he hasn’t ditched the GPS tracker, he’ll be able to spot you coming—and know exactly where you are,” Captain Harris warned.

  “We’ll leave the GPS in my vehicle and work on foot,” she said.

  Valerie ended the call, then closed the phone with one hand and filled Luca in. “The area we’re heading into plays by its own rules. Their calls to the department often require a forty-five-minute response time, so residents learned to take care of things without outside help.”

  “Reading between the lines, what you’re really saying is that if they spot a stranger they think will create trouble, like maybe our suspect, they’ll lean pretty hard on him?” he asked with a grim smile.

  “Yeah, like that. They’re just not too friendly. The last time I had to go in there I couldn’t get any cooperation whatsoever. All I got was a lot of stares and the strong feeling that they wanted me out of their neighborhood.”

  It was late afternoon by the time she parked in front of a small pueblo-style house. The yard contained several large tables filled with junk, like an abandoned yard sale. “We need to work quickly to see if anyone has noticed our suspect. Once it gets dark, it’ll be easier for him to slip away.”

  “Do you think he’d just call a cab?” Luca asked.

  “I thought of that, and I have a deputy checking with the cab companies. But I don’t think he’d want a cabbie to be able to ID him to officers. My guess is that he’ll hide out in somebody’s storage shed until dark then try and pick his way out of the area on foot.”