The Widow's Revenge

by James D. Doss

  What the tribal, town, and federal cop witnessed in the moonlight did little to clarify the situation.

  A white man—apparently of the semi-nudist persuasion—was being pursued by a pickup truck whose punctured radiator was spewing steam in great, gray puffs. The chase-ee was sprinting toward the river as rapidly as his spindly legs would carry him, which was not quite fast enough.

  With every stride of its intended victim, Mr. Pickup was gaining ground.

  Asok made a hard left behind the new horse barn and disappeared from sight. So did the truck.

  It was much like one of those tense periods at NASA’s Houston Control, where edgy technicians watch yard-wide computer terminals as a tiny spaceship passes behind the moon. While the capsule is on the far side, there is no way of knowing whether the astronauts are safe or have perished in some unforeseen disaster. One can only wait and drum one’s fingers on the console in front of the flat-panel display.

  Having nothing handy to drum fingers on, Tribal Investigator Moon, Chief of Police Parris, and Special Agent Rose held on to their sidearms and waited for the situation to clarify itself.

  From somewhere on the yonder side of the barn, there was a sound of wood splintering as the pickup smashed something or other to flinders. Almost simultaneously, a heartrending shriek from Asok, who imagined himself being flindered.

  Moon leaned, mumbled to his buddy, “Twenty bucks on the truck.”

  “You’re on.” Parris grinned. What a dandy night this had been.

  The running man reappeared first, skinny legs and arms pumping like pistons.

  “Here he comes.” Parris raised his fist. “Go for it!”

  After losing some ground in a wide turn, the F-150 also completed the orbit—now spewing searing vapors like an enraged dragon.

  Catching a glimpse of the driver, the Ute groaned. I should’ve known.

  Sarah Frank showed up at about this time, to witness the wacky chase. It did not even occur to her to wonder, What’s Aunt Daisy up to now? Though the tribal elder’s behavior might seem somewhat peculiar to a person who was sane, Daisy always had her reasons—which she never bothered to explain.

  Encouraged by putting a few additional yards between himself and his single-minded pursuer, Asok apparently intended to make another circle around the horse barn—perhaps in hope that the truck would run out of gas (or steam) before he did. The outcome of his intended strategy will never be known, because in the murky moonlight the sprinter did not see the horse trough. He stumbled over it, tumbled facedown in the mud.

  “Hah!” (Daisy.) “I’ve got you now!”

  Despite the many dark sins that had brought Asok to the predicament he found himself in, one feels compelled give the man credit for having a measure of grit. The plucky fellow got to his feet like a bunged-up rodeo cowboy that’d been bucked off a fire-eyed bronco, and clearly meant to make another go at it, but—

  What happened next is entirely too grisly to merit a detailed description.

  Suffice it to say that Daisy ran the pickup over Asok. And that after doing so, she braked it to a stop—possibly to determine whether she had hit the runner or the horse trough—and backed up to find out. While chugging along in Reverse, she rolled the F-150’s knobby tires over the unfortunate terrorist for a second time.

  Enormously satisfied with her night’s work, Daisy shut off the ignition and took a deep breath. I feel twenty years younger.

  Her long-suffering nephew sighed and holstered his pistol.

  Sarah stood speechless. She’s killed that man!

  Mr. Zig-Zag puttered a satisfied purr.

  Still locked in the back of Daisy’s assault vehicle, Sidewinder barked just to let folks know he was there.

  Scowling at the felon who’d been smashed like roadkill, Scott Parris pocketed the confiscated .44 Magnum. Looks like I owe Charlie twenty dollars.

  Annie Rose put away her Glock automatic. Everybody on the place is insane. A harsh judgment, but the federal undercover cop has had a difficult evening.

  White Shell Woman brushed aside a cloud to beam on the gathering. A measure of peace and quiet returned to the Columbine.

  The edgy FBI agent listened.

  Charlie Moon had also cocked his ear.

  What did they hear?

  The whump-whumping of an incoming helicopter. FBI.

  The cavalry Special Agent Rose had summoned was finally arriving. Which was what she’d been expecting, but the no-nonsense fed had the eeriest sensation that . . . This is the second time tonight I’ve stood out here and heard the Bureau copter coming in.

  But that was absurd, so she filed it in a dusty folder marked DÉJÀ VU and forgot about it.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  TYING UP A FEW LOOSE ENDS

  ASOK DID NOT PERISH UNDER THE PICKUP’S TIRES. IT MAY HAVE BEEN because the muck in the rain-soaked barn lot was about a foot deep, or because he was the luckiest man in the county named after Granite Creek. Whatever the reason, Daisy’s victim survived with approximately two dozen fractured bones, a ruptured spleen, and a mind that would never quite recover from the violent evening’s final ordeal. Mr. A. was destined to spend his remaining years in a twelve-by-ten-foot room with padded walls and steel bars on the single window that overlooked a verdant valley watered by a fine river.

  WITHOUT DELVING into tedious legal technicalities, it shall be reported that no charges were filed against Daisy Perika. The Family felon, who would be indicted and tried on several murder counts, had, after all—taken three shots at the tribal elder. Asok insisted that he had fired in self-defense, and those familiar with the Ute elder’s hair-trigger temper did not doubt the injured man’s testimony. And though additional mitigating circumstances would never be admitted by District Attorney Pug Bullet as influencing his decision to overlook Daisy’s “potential technical infraction of the law,” they did play a prominent role. Three examples are herewith provided.

  The woman who had deliberately assaulted the semi-nude, unarmed-at-the-moment citizen with malice aforethought was Charlie Moon’s aunt.

  Daisy was a member in good standing (more or less) of the Southern Ute tribe.

  Also a lifelong citizen of Colorado.

  By contrast, Asok wasn’t anybody’s aunt, and belonging to a tribe of insatiable cannibals did not help. Most damning of all, he was from out of state.

  THE THREE ponies and two riders?

  By the time she completed her madcap race with Asok, Daisy had almost forgotten about these sinister apparitions. And when they did come to mind, the shaman did not see them loitering about the Columbine. She had no doubt that sooner or later they would return and that . . . Somebody will have to ride that white pony.

  Possibly.

  But in the meantime, in between golden dawns and soul-renewing dreamtimes, the feisty old woman still has a few precious hours to burn.

  Daisy Perika will not waste one of them fretting about the future.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  THREE WEEKS AFTER DAISY’S

  PICKUP-TRUCK ASSAULT

  ON THOSE STILL NIGHTS WHEN A FULL-FACED WHITE SHELL WOMAN ILluminated his Columbine bedroom with silvery moonshine, Charlie Moon would occasionally lie awake.

  And think.

  Oh, about various matters. Such as—

  Maybe I’ll put a hundred head of Texas longhorns over on the north range.

  My foreman won’t retire till he’s six feet under, but it’s high time I eased the Bushmans over to the Big Hat, where Pete and Dolly wouldn’t have to do any real work.

  Jerome Kydmann would make a dandy foreman for the Columbine.

  And—

  FBI Intel is dead certain that Bill Smith isn’t Trout, and they’re just as sure that the hardware-store robbers were the Family’s C Team, and that the bad apples who showed up on the Columbine was the B Team.

  Which conclusions by the feds raised unsettling questions.

  If Smith isn’t Trout, who is?

  Where�
��s the Family’s A Team?

  And . . .

  What’s their next move?

  Such prickly issues tended to keep Charlie Moon awake well into the wee hours. On this particular night, the memory of a seemingly insignificant encounter bubbled up from the bottom of his subconscious. As is so often the case with the sons of Adam, his recollection involved a woman—but in this instance, not a particularly appealing female. As his mind reconstructed the embarrassing encounter with the pushy tourist who had asked for his autograph, Moon recalled something the woman had said. Something that made him get out of bed and pace the floor.

  It’s probably a distorted memory.

  He knew it wasn’t. And Moon knew something else.

  If I don’t do something about it, I won’t get a wink of sleep all night.

  But what could he do?

  Pass the buck, that’s what.

  THOUSAND OAKS, CALIFORNIA

  FBI Special Agent Lila Mae McTeague was deep in a restful sleep when her telephone jangled. The lady groaned, grabbed the instrument, and blinked at the caller ID. What’s he doing calling me in the middle of the night? A silly question, she realized. Back when they were an item, Charlie had developed an annoying habit of calling at the most indecent hours. This barely warm ember of an Old Flame had just about decided to let her ex-boyfriend have a conversation with her voice mail when she reminded herself that the Southern Ute tribal investigator had not telephoned her at home in almost two years. And that she had urged Charlie to contact her at any hour if he thought of anything that might assist the Bureau’s search for the still-at-large members of the Cannibal Family. She pressed the Talk button and tried to sound civil. “What’s up, Charlie?”

  His deep voice boomed in her ear. “Sorry to call at this time of night, but I just thought of something.”

  The federal cop plopped her bare feet onto the carpeted floor and reached for the yellow pad and ballpoint on her bedside table. “Tell me about it.”

  “Wind your memory back to that fine morning when I met you and Scott for lunch. You were waiting for me in the private dining room in the Silver Mountain Hotel.”

  “Okay. I’m there.”

  “About a minute before I showed up, I met this woman in the hallway.” Moon cleared his throat. “She’d seen that stuff on the TV about the ABC Hardware robbery and wanted to talk to me about it.”

  Lila Mae smirked as she made hurried shorthand notes. “Another of your devoted fans?”

  “I don’t think so.” The business about an autograph was too embarrassing to think about, much less to mention to Lila Mae.

  She felt the warmth of Charlie Moon’s blush. “Then she must have been a card-carrying member of the ACLU who objected to your use of excessive violence in subduing the alleged felons.”

  “You might be about half right.” Moon’s tone was flat. “She wasn’t the sort that cares much about other folks’ civil liberties. But it’d be another matter if the armed robbers were her friends . . . or relatives.”

  The FBI agent’s pen stopped dead on the pad. Charlie’s onto something. “You think this tourist was a member of the Family?”

  “That and more. I’ll wager you a brand-new fifty-dollar bill that I was talking to Trout.”

  “I’ll pass.” She had learned the hard way never to bet against Charlie Moon. “Tell me how you reached this conclusion.”

  “The woman in the Silver Mountain Hotel introduced herself as one Daphne Donner.”

  McTeague frowned at her oak-paneled bedroom wall. “As in the Donner party—those snowbound California settlers who resorted to cannibalism?”

  “That’s right.” I’ll have to start paying closer attention to what people say.

  The FBI agent frowned. “That’s an interesting coincidence, Charlie—but a little thin, don’t you think?”

  “There’s more. This self-proclaimed Daphne Donner mentioned being from Alder Creek.”

  McTeague searched her encyclopedic memory. Came up with a zero. “Okay, I give up.”

  “While they were trying to keep from starving, the Donner family camped at Alder Creek.”

  McTeague sprang off her bed. “It must have been Trout. And she was teasing you!”

  The mortified tribal investigator sighed. “That’s what it looks like.”

  When confronted with a conundrum, McTeague tended to mumble to herself. “But why would she take a chance like that?”

  Moon grunted. “Because she figured me for a dope.”

  “No.” The fed shook her head. “I don’t think so.” Maybe she’s a danger freak who gets her kicks from adrenaline rushes. But that didn’t fit the Bureau’s profile of the individual who planned the Family’s crimes with such meticulous attention to detail. And Trout was particularly careful about concealing her identity. So why did she bait Charlie with a reference to the tragic experiences of the Donner party?

  In her entire life, Ms. Lila Mae McTeague had never posed a more relevant question, and the truth would have stunned her. Trout had not cared whether Charlie Moon caught the Donner hint or not, because the Family’s chief assassin planned to—Hold on. McTeague is about to butt in.

  “Was our Ms. Donner a guest of the Silver Mountain?”

  “Most likely. Aside from a few private dining rooms, there wasn’t anything but first-floor guest rooms in the direction she was coming from.”

  Lila Mae jotted that down, then poised her pen for some furious scribbling. “Give me a physical description of the suspect.”

  Moon did the best he could, capped it off with, “And she was just a tad cross-eyed.”

  Miss Know-It-All assumed a crisply pedantic tone. “I believe you mean that the lady was afflicted with strabismus.”

  “Tropia.”

  McTeague frowned. “What?”

  Moon grinned. “It’s a synonym for stabismus—but you’d know that.”

  “Oh, right. Tropia.” Big smart Aleck. “So what did Trout have on her mind?”

  “Women’s minds have always been a mystery to me.”

  The pretty woman in Thousand Oaks rolled her big eyes. “Why would the head of the Family want to chat with you about the hardware-store shoot-out?”

  “I figure she was sizing me up.”

  “For what?”

  “Her roasting spit.”

  “I doubt it.” McTeague doodled a stick man with a cowboy hat. “You’re too skinny for a Family barbecue.”

  “Come to think of it, she did say something about me not having much meat on my bones.”

  “Were there any witnesses to this encounter?”

  “Hobart Watkins showed up while me’n the woman were talking, so he must’ve gotten a look at her.” Anticipating her next question, Moon added, “Hobart’s a stockman with a twenty-section spread he calls the Little Texas. It’s about twenty miles south of Granite Creek.”

  “That’s enough for now; I need to jump right on this. Good night, Charlie.”

  “Good”—sharp click in his ear—“night, Lila Mae.” Just like old times.

  HIS DUTY duly discharged, Citizen Moon was sound asleep a few heartbeats after his head hit the pillow. By and by, the hardworking man was rewarded by a pleasant dream.

  Light as a ghost-eagle’s feather, Charlie Moon drifted over Ignacio Creek, under the heavy branches of a fine apple orchard where honeybees buzzed, over a grassy yard and toward Loyola Montoya’s fine farmhouse, which was painted a dazzling white with blue trim around the doors and windows. Passing over the back porch and through the closed kitchen door, the dreamer was pleased to see everything from the maple dining table to the iron cookstove looking so shiny and new, just like they had been in 1935, when Loyola Montoya was a starry-eyed bride. And despite the fact that the woman bustling around the kitchen was also young—and remarkably pretty—the Ute recognized his old friend as if he’d known the Apache maiden way back when. Other than that . . .

  Other than that, Moon’s night-vision was much like those not-so-old times of
a mere decade or so ago, when the uniformed SUPD cop would respond to a 911 call from the agitated widow, and calm Loyola’s fears about the latest outrage to visit her ten-acre farm.

  Accepting the lady’s invitation to “belly up to the table,” the guest hung his black John B. Stetson on the back of one sturdy chair and seated himself in another. The modest fellow shrugged off Loyola’s “Thank you so much!” for an unspecified favor that she was “so grateful” for. It is true that women know the way to a man’s heart and also a fact that Mr. Moon knows how to express his appreciation—he let out a great big wa-hoo! when Loyola pulled a pan of hot cookies from the oven.

  Those happy souls who expect blessings are seldom disappointed. Charlie Moon found the hot pastries to be very tasty. Without batting an eye, he’d have bet you ten to one that Loyola’s recipe for oatmeal, piñon-nut, red chili pepper, and pimento cookies was a sure thing for a blue ribbon in next year’s La Plata County Fair.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  GOVERNMENT WORK

  CHARLIE MOON’S STRICTLY-BUSINESS EX-GIRLFRIEND HAD NO TIME FOR dreaming.

  Special Agent L. M. McTeague and eighteen of her colleagues who were working the Cannibal Family case would be wide awake for thirty-six hours after the lady hung up on Charlie Moon. The Tiger Team would inspect the booking records for Granite Creek’s Silver Mountain Hotel and every other hostelry within fifty miles for the period when the potential Trout was spotted by Charlie Moon. Rancher Hobart Watkins would be grilled about a woman he could barely remember until he finally lost his temper and ordered the relentless federal cops off the Little Texas.

  The tireless FBI agents would also examine every available database to identify potential suspects.

  The criteria for phase one of TROUT-Donner search were: