If one were primitive enough to believe all that crap.
“Jack?” she asked.
“The bahana is out piecing together information on our Fire Clan stone tablet.”
That would be Jack. Not at peace until both sides of an equation matched. She made a negligent gesture with her hand, costing her more effort than she had anticipated. “I’m okay, now. You can go on home.”
Closing his hooded eyes, he seemed to be listening to the faint wind stirring the plaza dust outside the adobe’s open door. Or did only she hear it pinging against the house’s ancient mica windows? Was he trying to choose his words or was he searching out her heart? At last, he said, “No. I stay. You go”
Weakly, she peered at the old coyote. “What?”
“You have been given the task of undertaking a journey to restore life and health to our tribe.”
She rolled her eyes. “By whom?” Her voice was a croak.
“By the Ancient Ones.”
“Fuck the Ancient Ones.”
“And by Molly.”
“What?!”
He avoided her gaze. His gnarly fingers tapped an idle fandango on the drum. “So,” he shrugged, “maybe, I didn’t talk to Molly. She was traveling where one doesn’t listen to Fourth World voices. But balance must be restored.”
She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth. “And balance would be?”
“Reclaiming our sacred Stone Tablet’s missing corner piece.”
This time she was the one who shrugged, a small one. “The whole world can go to hell in a Hopi basket for all I care. Bring on the missiles and nuke ‘em all.”
He cleared his throat, more a sound like hauling up a loogy. “For Molly to return to this world . . . or join the Kachina spirits in the other, balance must be restored. If not, she . . . well, you know . . . drifts.”
“Molly, she needs me.” She made to rise, felt the dizziness swarm in her head like a hive of disturbed bees.
“You can’t return to the hospital. Can’t see your daughter.”
“Why not?” Her own voice sounded distant in her ears.
He looked away. “You need to talk to the Chief of Police.”
“Wes?” She leaned forward trying to push erect. Only then did she realize that her waist-length hair hadn’t spilled over her shoulder as usual. Slowly, she raised her hand to grope . . . felt on the left side only a three-inch square bandage and baby-smooth skin. . . and realized the hospital had shorn her hair. More frantic groping revealed a completely shaved head.
“Goddamnit!” she yelled. She glared up at Spider Man. “What happened to my hair?”
His usually half-closed lids lifted in a puzzled expression. His bony shoulders contracted beneath the cape. “At the hospital . . . someone had it shaved off.”
“Wes?”
“You’ll have to ask him.”
“And just how the hell am I going to track anything without my hair?” Over millions of years, the body had evolved so that each part had highly sensitive work to perform. Hair was an extension of its nervous system. A bundle of exteriorized nerves, like cat whiskers or lobster antennae, hair provided an information highway.
Spider Man’s knotty hands unfolded to spread roadmap-lined palms. “It is not hair you need to worry about. It is about choices you should worry. Remember, my daughter, the law of choices always prevails.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“What the hell do you mean I can’t see my daughter?!”
Janet slammed the office door, its mottled glass stenciled Chief of Police, and stormed across to the chrome and Formica desk. Beneath the Dallas Cowboy cap’s stained bill, her eyes shot bullets at Wes.
Slowly, he pushed himself to his feet to stare down at her. A mere six or seven inches over her 5’ frame, he was nevertheless imposing. Eyes that saw right through a person; a mouth that promised an unrelenting nature. A stranger would read this man as a ‘victory at all cost’ kind of guy. A misconception, because she knew, if need be, Wes would abandon all to help her. His pride, his goals, perhaps even his life. Or, at least, that was what she had once assumed.
“Want to try ‘lolami’?” he said, using the Hopi word for greeting.
“Everything is NOT beautiful, Wes!” She hurled her car keys at him.
Moving only a fraction, he dodged the bullet. “Then want to try putting on some clothes?”
She glanced down. She was still wearing only a t-shirt, Jack’s faded orange University of Texas one. Below it, her knobby legs and feet were bare. Barefoot had always been her preferred state of stalking. She shrugged off his question. “What’s this about prohibiting me from seeing Molly?”
He sighed, sat back down, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “The Feds have sealed off the hospital -- even set their own people on the man who gunned downed your daughter.”
“How’d they learn – “
“Apparently, their 1811 agents have been watching you since the Snake Dance’s Armageddon. You know, the duel at High Noon, guns blazing. One of the 1811 agents – by the name of Greeley -- paid me a visit this morning. Janet, we can’t let the corner piece fall into the Fed’s hands. If not used properly – well, all sorts of catastrophic shit is going to happen.”
Her mouth compressed. “If you believe in Hopi prophecy.”
“And you do, Janet. The gunman’s got a twenty-hour jump on you.”
“Wes, you know what happened to the Bible’s once undefeatable Samson?” She swept off her Dallas Cowboy cap.
At the sight of her squarish face with its shaven head his snake eyes widened for once instead of narrowing. “Holy shit,” he mouthed. Then, “That’s not always the case.”
So it wasn’t Wes who had given the order for her head to be shaved. “Don’t give me that crap. You know better. Ask our Viet Nam vets.”
During that war, the War Department undercover agents had combed American Indian reservations looking for tough young men trained to move stealthily through rough terrain. They were especially looking for men with outstanding, almost supernatural, tracking and survival abilities. However, once enlisted, an astonishing thing happened. The skills and intuition they had possessed on the reservation at sensing the enemy were no longer reliable. Worse, the Indian trackers could no longer even read subtle signs.
“The fact they received military haircuts didn’t prove shit,” he countered.
“Oh yeah? Then why after that, Mr. Know It All, were Indian trackers exempted from military haircuts and required to keep their hair long?”
His forefinger tapped his own buzzed haircut, and with a smug smile he lifted wiry shoulders. “No problem here.”
“That’s why you’re the office boy and I’m the tracker.” She paused, her fingers exploring her razor-cleared scalp, and scowled. “Or I was.”
At her insult, Wes rose from behind his desk, his eyes once again narrow, opaque, and cold like a snake’s. “That’s right you were a tracker. I think I need to find another one. With hair.”
Her jaw locked down. A wildfire of red rage swept through her, incinerating her grief. “I’ll get the crystal corner piece – and the man who shot Molly. But he’s mine! Right now I want to see Molly.”
He sighed. “Janet, even if the Fed’s let you, there’s nothing you can do for her.”
“I could hold her little hand. Damn’t, I could talk to her. Let her know someone’s with her who loves her.”
He was silent, and she demanded in a breath spiked with both fear and hope, “You’re holding out! What have you learned about her?!”
He sighed, lowered his head and his voice. Gone was his customary clipped tone. “I got word, don’t ask me how . . . she’s slipped into a deeper coma.”
“Damn’t to hell, I have to see her!”
His gaze swept, his thin lips even thinner. Steel resolve hardened each of his words. “Then the quicker you beat the other agencies to the gunman and the corner piece, the quicker you can see her.”
* * * * *
&nbs
p; Jack paced outside the cell door from which he had made his escape a couple of months earlier. Charley was intently inspecting the ceiling camera monitoring the hallway. “Gee, Dad, if you pulled a gun out of your jacket, how long do you think it’d take one of those storm troopers out front to barge in here?”
“Probably wouldn’t get my hand clear of my jacket.” Right now, he wanted his hand on the stone tablet’s corner piece. But his presence here in Hopiland as a bahana was presenting obstacles. The only thing worse than a bahana, in Janet’s dismissive terms, was a CSD, a City Slicker Dude – her hostile designation for those male teenagers of the world’s elite who had taken advantage of her at the exclusive Oram school.
At that moment, she shot out the door. After the hospital had released the elfin-like woman with her cheekbone-sculpted, angry red scythe of a scar, he had seen her swathed only in cap, covers, and bandages. Now bald, with but a three-square-inch white patch above her right ear, she looked more like a gnome. God, he would miss threading his fingers through her glorious hair.
But her damn the torpedoes full speed ahead attitude was still whipping around like a live wire. There was no denying the electrical current that charged his blood when around her. Nor the fact that at that moment he could literally feel the tension thrumming through her. Strange. Strange that he felt that tuned-in to her. That she was nearly naked, but for his ill-fitting t-shirt, didn’t help dampen his body’s sudden urge to possess her. She had captured his imagination, and he didn’t like it one damn bit.
She skidded to a halt in front of him. Her sun-shiny head barely reached his pecs. She clapped on her billed cap, giving its bill a vicious downward jerk. Her eyes, of such a deep brown they were almost black and densely fringed by the longest natural lashes he had ever seen, glared up at him. “I knew from the moment I saw you, CSD, you weren’t to be trusted.”
He scowled. So someone had told her. “Because I’m going after the missing quartz piece?”
“Because you had the hospital shave off my hair!”
He looked askance at her. “So?”
“So?! So you could claim the missing piece on your own without my dogging you, you rat ass!”
“Have you lost your mind along with your hair?! Ferchrissake, I thought it was only a patch of hair I was giving permission to be shaved.”
“Well, think again!” She jammed a finger just below his ribs, her eye level. “You want the quartz corner piece? So do the Feds. So do the Hopi. And so does someone else. But you need my help to retrieve it.”
“Really? Retrieve it for whom?”
Charley’s eyes were ricocheting between two of them.
“That’ll be for all of us to work out at that time. Right now, I just want the man who presently has it – the man who shot Molly. And you stay out of my way of work. Is that clear?” She gave a savage nod and another jab, as if to make certain he understood he was on probation.
“Something else is missing here, beside the corner piece – and your hair. Try humility, sweetheart. You need my help just as much as I need yours.”
With Charlie in tow, he swung away. He was wondering what on earth he had found about her so fascinating. It was he who had lost his mind, thinking about getting caught up in a real relationship with a woman. Not just any woman. An alcoholic Indian shrew. He had always maintained people were victims of their own choices, and, hell, falling in with Janet Lomayestewa had to be his worst choice ever.
But what nagged at him was the slowly growing conviction that it wasn’t anger that propelled him away from the woman like an escaped convict on the run, but fear; overwhelming fear that squeezed his lungs and jerked him awake in the middle of the night.
CHAPTER FIVE
If Craig Scudder were to rate his best personal asset, his stammering would be right there at the top. Of course, few people were aware of his affliction. But overcoming his childhood stammering had taught him two things – self discipline and ruthless patience.
The few people still alive who were aware of his affliction perceived his intelligence as slightly defective. Another plus for him.
Especially now, as he watched Stanley Chernostein board the MetroLink at St. Louis’s stadium station. The gray eminence behind Peabody Energy, the balding and bespectacled man unbuttoned his brown tweed jacket and slid into the rear seat next to Craig. At that time of night, only one other passenger was aboard, dozing off toward the front of the light rail train’s car.
Chernostein prided himself on spotting imperfections in people and utilizing them to bend people to his will. He had cut his teeth at Washington’s think tank, the Brookings Institute, and his brain was like the Institution’s electricity meter, running 24 hours a day. Chernostein’s greatest asset – and liability -- was his meticulous attention to minutiae.
A person was more than a collection of minutiae that tallied to a predictable sum. It was people like Chernostein and Craig’s father who took pleasure in reducing others to desensitized amoebas. But Craig wasn’t a desensitized amoeba. People like that trivialized death. The agency termed it collateral damage. He could accept that. It had its place in the Life’s cycle. If death made things expedient, then so be it. But torture – and hurting children, those bothered him. Children were innocent. Shooting the Hopi girl, spinning and bobbing like a whirling dervish, had been unintended and had upset him so that he had had to fight his stammer more than usual.
“You have the stone?” Chernostein asked, his precise and stately accent betraying his Bulgarian heritage.
Craig watched the man’s hands smooth his tie and straighten his overcoat lapels. Like a priest’s hands, delivering absolution. Craig always noticed hands. “You have the ke – key?” He jammed the toothpick between his lips.
Chernostein’s tight lipped smile was disdainful. “The crystal chip first, if you don’t mind.”
Craig’s lips tightened on the toothpick. He scooped the stone chip from his thermal jacket pocket and dropped it into Chernostein’s eager palm.
Beneath the rail car’s reduced nightlight, the man’s eyes, magnified by his glasses, lit up like red lasers. Chernostein believed control of the basic energy resources of the planet meant absolute control of the world – and the Hopi quartz stone could be a power source on a grand scale.
And for a paltry three quarters of a million dollars in an airport locker, Chernostein thought to discharge Craig of his services?
“So this is it?!” His attention riveted on the triangular quartz stone, he reached inside his tweed jacket and extracted a key, passing it to Craig.
In one smooth motion, Craig pocketed the key and uncapped the hypodermic needle filled with a mixture of bromide and potassium chloride. Chernostein emitted the faintest gasp of surprise before paralysis missile through his body. Reclaiming the stone, Craig nudged the slumping body against the rail car wall. To anyone boarding at the next station, the Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, the old man was napping. An eternal nap.
* * * * *
“We don’t even know the gunman’s name,” the bear of a man Martin Mevahema said. “So where do we start?”
Bewilderment clouding their expressions, Janet, Jack, Martin, and Roberta sat at the Mevahema’s old pine table. The Mevahemas had agreed to care for Charley while Janet and Jack pursued Molly’s assailant – and the holy stone. Stymied, the four stared helplessly at their blank scratch pads.
“LEADS, Janet said, tapping her pencil stub on the table furiously. “That’s where we start.”
“Leads?” Jack asked?
The intervening hours had mitigated the antagonism simmering between her and Jack. Not that she cared about the asshole’s feelings, not that he had any, but if they had to work together a little cooperation between them wouldn’t hurt. She tried for an ameliorating tone in her reply. “Law Enforcement Agencies Data System. Wes can give us a jump start there.”
“Janet,” Martin said, “I’d think this guy with the crystal chip would avoid – “
&
nbsp; “Nuke. We’ll call him Nuke for now. For the utter desolation and destruction he leaves. If Molly doesn’t make it . . . .” Her clenched fingers snapped her spindly pencil.
Martin’s uncomfortable gaze slid toward Roberta. Behind her horn-rimmed glasses, her eyes reflected her husband’s concern.
Janet shot Jack a blister-your-balls glance. “Despite Jack’s claim, I haven’t lost my mind, Martin. Just my hair.”
Without it, she no longer had an advantage. But Jack with his overly longish hair would. He would more easily deduce where the mercenary would be most likely to dump the quartz corner piece for cash or tap into what mega-power in the electromagnetic field could more obviously use the quartz crystal to amalgamate supreme power.
Then, another thought!
Damn’t, as an electromagnetic expert, Jack would also know that hair emitted an electromagnetic energy transmitted from the brain into the outer environment. Worse, he would be fully knowledgeable that the absence of hair was a contributing factor to sexual frustration. And, damn’t, with his lengthy hair, he would instinctively pickup on her woman’s weakness for him. Now the hot-shot scientist definitely had the advantage . . . over her.
She took another sip from the weak herbal tea she was drinking, wishing it were a strong Bud. But those days were over. Something she reassured herself daily, no almost hourly. A promise. Like the one that she would cry later. “Look,” she told the three, “someone like Nuke is bound to break the law. Forged passport, stolen weapons, silenced grumbling people. Wes can do a search of criminal databases.”
“That’s a lot of crimes to search through,” Jack said, “with nothing to go on.”
“Then we’ll narrow it, damn’t. Starting with the border states. Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. I have a contact with ICE – Ignacio Ramirez. The gunman, Nuke, could be headed for some place outside the law. Like Mexico. Ramirez can get us border crossings info, including photos. And this is one man’s face I won’t forget.” Nor his footprint.
Call Me Crazy (Janet Lomayestewa, Tracker) Page 3