Smoke & Mirrors

by Rowe, Julie

  “It looks worse than it is,” Kini said.

  Smoke turned and gave her a look that clearly said, “You’re full of shit.” But he didn’t say anything out loud.

  “What happened?” Susan demanded, almost as if it were their fault.

  “I thought you spoke with Grandmother?” Smoke asked.

  “She didn’t say you lost a fight with an entire squad of ninjas throwing pointy knives at you.”

  “Pointy?” Smoke sounded scandalized by her choice of words.

  “None of your sass.” She shook a finger at him. “Get in the house, both of you. Some TLC is what you need.”

  “That would be lovely, but we can’t,” Kini said with a wince. “We’re under orders to interview Emmaline Haskie. She called the CDC to demand some answers. And the CDC has a few it would like to ask as well.”

  “Emmaline is a tribal elder,” Smoke’s mother explained. “She not listed anywhere official, but she’s respected.”

  “We’ll be back after we speak with her,” Smoke promised.

  “Fine, but if I don’t see you walking in the front door within an hour, I’m sending out the hounds.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Smoke nudged Kini toward the garage and she took the hint. Inside was a tarp-covered vehicle. He pulled the cover off to reveal a jeep, one that looked like it had seen action in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. It was beat up, bent, and had a few bullet holes in the driver’s side door.

  Smoke grabbed a set of keys off a peg, got in, and started the engine. She’d expected it to sound as rough as it looked, but the engine hummed.

  “Wow.”

  “I put a new engine in it the last time I was here,” he said.

  She got in the passenger side. “Are you going to work on the body next?”

  “Nope.” He smiled at her. “I like the contradiction of the body looking a little like a battlefield wreck and it running like it’s brand new.”

  “A little like a battlefield wreck?” she asked. “This thing looks like it’s going to fall apart as we’re driving.”

  “Don’t insult my ride. Looks aren’t everything; what’s under the hood is far more important.”

  Kini rolled her eyes at him. Men and their cars were weird.

  Smoke backed them out of the garage and headed for the highway. Emmaline’s house wasn’t far, but it was distant enough that she couldn’t hear the sirens anymore.

  They pulled up in front of a house that looked like it had been built in the 70s with the cheapest building materials available. No one was visible, so she and Smoke walked up to the front door. A rickety screen door was the only thing keeping the bugs out.

  Smoke knocked hard on the frame and called out, “Emmaline?”

  “Come in.” The voice sounded rough and old. Sickly.

  That voice had Kini bracing herself as she opened the door, Smoke right behind her. A few steps in, a ragged cough led her to the right into a tiny kitchen occupied by a gray-haired Native American woman who looked weathered, lined, ancient.

  Smoke sucked in a sudden breath.

  So, this wasn’t normal then. “Emmaline?”

  “Thank you for coming,” she said to both of them. “Have some tea.”

  On the table in front of Emmaline was a pot of tea along with cups, cream, and honey. The old woman looked both of them over and began to chuckle. It was a dry sound, like the wind rustling husks of corn plants after the harvest. “And I thought”—she paused to take in a breath—“I was the sick one.”

  “Ma’am, we need to get you to the hospital.” Kini could hear her lungs rattling from five feet away.

  The old woman shook her head. “You work for the CDC?” she asked Kini.

  “Yes, ma’am. Smoke does, too, but that’s not important right now.”

  “Child,” Emmaline said with what sounded like infinite patience. “Nothing at the hospital is going to help me.” She turned to Smoke. “I hadn’t heard about your new job.”

  He lifted one large shoulder up and down. “Got hired yesterday. Phone interview.” He cleared his throat. “Kini is right. I’ll call an—”

  “Lyle Smoke, sit your ass down in a chair and listen.” She leveled the same glare at Kini until she sat. “Some strange goings-on in the desert.”

  “Ma’am?” Kini asked.

  “Lights on all day and night, and a bad smell in the air.”

  “Where?” Smoke asked.

  Emmaline smiled. “The old Rogerson place.”

  “That heap of wood?” Smoke shook his head. “I can’t believe it hasn’t been blown over by now.”

  “Nope, still standing.” She took a sip of her tea. “Some developer from Arizona bought it from the bank a couple of years ago. They haven’t done much more than survey the land and put a big-assed fence around it.” She paused to breathe. “People are living in the house. Men who shoot at you if you get within sight of the fence.” She took another sip and a smile lifted the corners of her lips. “I could see a couple of fresh graves in the dirt not far from the house.”

  What? Kini stared, open mouthed at the old woman, her stomach so cold it was another ice age in there.

  “Did you tell the sheriff?” Smoke asked.

  “I complained when one of the assholes living in the house took a shot at me. The sheriff told me to mind my own business and stay away. He said he’d talked to them, and they had a garden with a potato patch.” She shook her head. “That idiot couldn’t find his ass without three deputies with maps and the fire department holding the lights on the situation.”

  “Why did you call the CDC?” Kini asked.

  “Because none of those people died of natural causes,” she said sharply. “They died because they couldn’t breathe.” She had to stop and take several breaths herself. “I’ve seen this before.” A few more labored breaths. “Twelve years ago, my youngest boy played in one of the sheds out back and ended up in the hospital with that virus. He died the same way those people did.”

  “How do you know this?” Kini asked.

  “I came back later, climbed the fence, peeked through the windows, and watched.”

  Kini could not have heard that correctly. “You snuck up to a farmhouse populated by armed men doing suspicious things, and sick with an illness you know kills, and watched them?”

  Emmaline looked at Smoke. “Is she hard of hearing?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “That was dangerous,” Kini said.

  “Not as dangerous as getting sick.” She smiled, but it held no humor. “As you can obviously see.”

  “How many?” Smoke asked in his traditionally brief way.

  “Live, four or five. Dead, two.” She frowned. “Though there could be more. The air smelled of rotting meat, so they might not have had time to bury any recently dead bodies.”

  “When were you there?” Kini asked, horrified at the thought that this frail-looking lady had gone investigating on her own.

  “A couple of days ago. I talked to that jackass of a doctor at the hospital. Told him to call in the CDC, but he told me I needed to come in for a checkup. He thought I was seeing things, and that it was a medication problem.” She laughed, but it quickly became a body-wracking cough that refused to let go of her.

  “May I listen to your chest?” Kini asked.

  Emmaline stared at her for several seconds, her breathing so loud it seemed to echo through the kitchen. “I’m not going to that damned hospital.”

  “I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

  Finally, the older woman nodded.

  Kini opened her box and took out her stethoscope. She put the ends in her ears and the diaphragm of the chest piece against Emmaline’s chest. She didn’t really need the device to hear what was happening inside. Fluid popped as Emmaline breathed and forced air through it, sounding like an old-fashioned coffee percolator. That was in the upper parts of her lungs. In the lower areas, there was no sound at all.

  She
pulled away, took the stethoscope off, and put it back in the box. “You have pneumonia. I can’t hear anything from deep in your lungs. They’re too full of fluid.” She considered the older woman. “If you don’t get treatment, it could kill you.”

  That made Emmaline laugh, but it was a wet sound and it sounded…wrong. A sound that shouldn’t have come out of anyone living. “I’ve been dying since the day I was born. This ain’t nothing new.”

  “This time it might be permanent,” Smoke told her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Smoke watched Emmaline struggle to take in enough air to satisfy her body’s needs. She was sweating with the effort, and something in her eyes told him she knew, knew death was coming. Soon.

  He saw acceptance in Emmaline’s gaze, but it gave him no comfort. People weren’t supposed to welcome death; they were supposed to fight it.

  “We need you to be a voice in our community,” Smoke said. If he had to remind her of her place as an elder, as a leader, then he wasn’t going to pull his punches. “We need your words to convince the sheriff and hospital people that the time to act is now. Not tomorrow or the next day. Now.”

  “That’s,” Emmaline said slowly, taking a breath with every syllable, “your job, Lyle Smoke. You’re already a warrior; now you need to be a leader, too.”

  “You’re just going to give up?” Her words, all that she said and didn’t say, were a spear to his gut. It tore him open, leaving him in a winter of weakness.

  Emmaline tried to speak, but she was wracked with cough after cough.

  Kini scooted around the table to lend a hand, but Emmaline waved her off. Kini looked at him and angled her head toward the doorway. Smoke followed her out of the kitchen.

  “Agitating her won’t help.”

  “She’s committing suicide,” he countered, clenching his fists tight and holding them rigid against his sides so he didn’t put holes in the walls. “Slowly, but it’s the same thing.”

  “We can’t force her to go.”

  “Can’t we?” Emmaline might have decided it was her time to die, but a couple of people might be able to talk her out of it. “She has family, grandchildren.”

  “Oh, that’s…” Kini thought about it and grimaced. “She won’t thank you for it.”

  He’d faced down scarier people than Emmaline. “I can live with it.”

  He strode back into the kitchen to confront the old woman again. She was face down on the table. Shit. “Kini.”

  She was already darting around him, rushing to Emmaline’s side to put fingers against the unconscious woman’s neck. “She’s got a pulse, but it’s fast. Too fast.”

  Kini dove for her tool box and pulled out her stethoscope and wasted no time to listen to Emmaline’s lungs. “It’s worse.” She met his gaze. “Call 911.”

  Smoke had his phone out already, so he punched the numbers in and made the request. He was told the ambulance would be there in ten minutes.

  He and Kini stood vigil as those minutes ticked down, Kini listening to Emmaline’s chest and back the entire time.

  It wasn’t until the sound of sirens became audible that she spoke. “I can literally hear the difference between now and ten minutes ago.” She looked so sad, so fucking helpless that he wanted to yell at the old woman for making a martyr of herself.

  “She made this choice,” Smoke told Kini, his anger turning his voice into a sharp-edged blade. There wasn’t any softness in him to dull the edge. “Suicide doesn’t end the pain, it just reassigns it, and that’s not fucking fair to everyone she leaves behind.”

  Kini stared at him, all the color draining out of her face. “How old are her grandchildren?”

  “Not old enough,” he said with a grunt. “No one is old enough for this.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  Smoke cut her off. “I know.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I know,” he said more gently.

  The paramedics came in then, the same two who’d bandaged them up an hour before. They gave Smoke and Kini long looks before focusing on Emmaline.

  Kini told them the timeline of events since they arrived, and the medics got the old woman on a gurney and into the ambulance in short order. They were gone a few minutes later.

  “Now what?” Kini asked.

  Smoke looked at her, taking in her slumped shoulders, the lines of pain and stress bracketing her mouth, and the dark circles under her eyes. He probably didn’t look much better.

  “Now, we talk to the sheriff then get some rest before we both fall over.”

  “What are we going to tell him? That jackass deputy has probably told him all kinds of shit.”

  “Trespassing is a crime. Maybe the people she saw in the house didn’t look like any kind of developer.”

  “Oh,” Kini said with more enthusiasm. “That might work.”

  Or the sheriff could ignore what Emmaline said as the ramblings of a sick old woman. They’d cross that bridge if they came to it.

  He phoned the sheriff’s office and was told he was at the scene outside his grandparents’ home.

  He and Kini drove there in the jeep and found the man talking to two of his deputies. Neither man was Blackwater.

  “Sheriff Davis,” Smoke said.

  The man looked up, saw them, and his face hardened. “Lyle Smoke and Kini Kerek?”

  “Yes, sir. Emmaline Haskie was just taken to hospital,” Smoke said. “Breathing problems.”

  The sheriff stared at them. “Unfortunate, but I don’t see why that warrants you two tracking me down.”

  “She became suspicious of increased traffic near her at the old Rogerson place. Said there were strangers in the area at odd hours.”

  “I told her to stay away from there. There are a couple of guys living in the house until the developer begins building some kind of lodge for corporate retreats.” The sheriff swore. “Don’t tell me. She took a look herself.”

  “Yep. She thought they looked like squatters, and the place stank.” Smoke left out the graves and the smell of decomposing bodies.

  The sheriff scowled at them. “Emmaline told you all this?”

  “Yeah, she’d asked to see Kini.”

  Sheriff Davis turned a confused gaze on her. “What for?”

  “She’d heard about my health study and wanted to participate.”

  “Participate?”

  “Yes.”

  The sheriff studied them both for a couple of long seconds with tired, suspicious eyes. “Did she say anything else? Did she see drugs or anything illegal going on?”

  Interesting that the sheriff brought up drugs. “No,” Smoke said. “She collapsed after that.” He watched the sheriff’s face as he suggested, as tentatively as he could manage, “The bioterrorism threat from FAFO is all over the news.”

  The sheriff waved it away. “Utah doesn’t have enough people to make us a target. Those assholes will go after something shiny like New York or Washington, DC.”

  “Lots of sick people right here,” Smoke pointed out.

  “Fine.” The word shot out of the sheriff’s mouth. “I’ll send a couple deputies to check it out. Jesus, if it isn’t Blackwater yammering in my ear about ex-military crazies, it’s…” His voice died mid-sentence. He glanced at Smoke, sighed, and rubbed his face with both hands. “I’m too old for this shit.”

  “Thank you for your time,” Smoke said, forcing one corner of his mouth up in a yes, we’re all in this together smile. He put a hand on Kini’s back and guided her back to his jeep.

  “Where can I find you two if I need you?” the sheriff asked.

  “My parents’ house,” Smoke told him.

  They left him standing on the sidewalk staring after them as they drove away.

  “I don’t like him,” Kini said after they were out of sight. She had her arms crossed over her chest.

  “Yeah, he’s an ass.”

  “It’s not just that,” she said, glancing at him. “He wasn’t happy with Emmaline or the fact that she got
that close to the house.”

  “No, he wasn’t.” Smoke considered the sheriff’s reaction—he’d been more concerned about what Emmaline might have told them.

  “Maybe we should investigate it, ourselves.”

  Smoke grunted. “My mother isn’t going to allow us out again tonight.”

  “Part of me wants to argue, another part wants to fall asleep on the spot.”

  “No sleep equals bad decisions.”

  “Okay, fine, I get it.”

  Her huff made him smile.

  They arrived at his parents’ house, and both of them were given a bowl of thick stew with bread to eat as well as some over-the-counter painkillers.

  Kini nearly fell asleep at the table.

  Smoke picked her up and, despite her squawking that she was too heavy, carried her to his room and set her on the bed. He looked into her sleepy gaze and asked, “Do you need help undressing?”

  She snorted. “No. Nice try though.”

  He shrugged. “Nothing ventured.” He went to the door.

  “Where are you sleeping?” she blurted out the question in a rush.

  “On the couch. Goodnight, Kini.”

  He left the room and crashed on the couch in the living room. It wasn’t long enough. He tossed and turned for a long time, hours. At about two in the morning, Kini came into the room, wearing one of his old T-shirts as a sleep shirt, her bare legs taunting him.

  She had bruises blooming under the cuts on her face and arms. Her hair was a mess. Damn, if she wasn’t the prettiest thing he’d ever seen. He had to restrain himself from wrapping her in his arms. He wanted the scent of her hair in his nose again, her weight against his chest, and the silk of her skin under his hands. Wanted with a strength that tested his control.

  “You can’t sleep either?” she asked him softly.

  “No,” he said.

  She stared at him for a moment, her hands rubbing up and down her arms like she was cold. She padded over to stand in front of him then grabbed his hand. “Come on.”

  “To where.”

  “Your room.”

  That was a fantastic idea.

  What? No, no it wasn’t. Not touching her would tie him up in knots so tight he’d be lucky if he didn’t strangle himself. “No, you sleep there.” He had to clear his throat. “I’m good out here.”