Killing Raven (A Wind River Reservation Myste)

by Margaret Coel

  She closed the door and walked around the bed to the window. It was more than a window; it consisted of two glass doors that extended from the floor almost to the ceiling. She pushed aside the curtain, then slid open one door. The curtain flew around her face as she stepped out onto the balcony. It was small, three feet deep and four feet wide, she guessed, with a solid concrete half-wall around the perimeter. From below, she’d thought the balconies around the windows had looked like blocks erupting from the stucco walls.

  She walked over and looked down. She was in a corner room on the top floor—eight stories high, on the north side. On the left, the edge of the building floated into space. On the right, rows of balconies protruded from the floors. Directly below, she knew, was the door through which the Barrenger and Felix had pushed her. The service trucks were gone. There were no vehicles in the area, nothing but the pavement running into the flat, brown earth.

  But the wind was blowing, the hot, sacred wind, and the white curtains billowed out onto the balcony and brushed against her arms. Give me your strength, she said to the spirit of the wind. Let me get away from here.

  She went back inside, yanked open the desk drawer, and pulled out a small tablet and pen. She dropped onto the chair and wrote out the same message on every page: Help. Corner room, 8th floor. Then she ripped the phone cord out of the wall, wrapped it around the phone and stuck one of the pages into the cord. Back on the balcony, she hurled the phone at an angle toward a balcony below. It clanged against the concrete and skidded over the floor. She waited. The glass doors remained closed.

  She went back into the room, grabbed the clock and pulled the cord free. Then she jammed another message into the slot where the numbers used to show, wrapped the cord around the frame, and went back outside. Leaning over the edge, she aimed the clock for another one of the lower balconies. Bull’s-eye. She listened for the sound of the doors sliding open, but again there was nothing. It was as if the hotel was deserted. People in the casino. They could be there for hours. And people behind closed glass doors in soundproofed, air-conditioned rooms.

  She gripped the edge of the balcony. She could shout into the wind, but she had no idea where Barrenger and Light Stone might be, and the sound of her voice would alert them that she was conscious. It would bring them on the run.

  She got the rest of the pages, ripped them off, and sent them downward, floating one by one out beyond the building toward the highway, out across the open spaces. Watching the last page flutter away, she felt as if she was going to be sick. A few words scribbled on a piece of paper—they were all she had.

  The thwack of a door shutting sent a mixture of fear and hope through her. There was a low rumble of voices. She moved toward the sound coming from the adjoining room. Hotel guests, tourists from Billings or Cheyenne or Denver?

  It was then she heard the low, confident sound of Barrenger’s voice. The glass door started to slide open. She darted back inside, pulling the billowing curtains after her. Flattened against the wall, she could see Barrenger at the far side of the balcony. Light Stone moved beside him and shook out a cigarette, which Barrenger took, bending his gray head into the lighter the Arapaho held for him. The operations chief held the cigarette between his slim fingers and took a couple of pulls before blowing the smoke out of the side of his mouth.

  “How much longer we gotta wait?” Light Stone asked.

  “Until Stan gets here.”

  “Let me talk to her. I know how to talk to her. I’ll find out how much she knows. Boss is giving her too much time to come up with some story. He moves too slow, you ask me.”

  “Nobody asked you.”

  “I’m just sayin’, give me five minutes alone with the bitch . . .”

  “Shut up, Dennis.” A phone started ringing. Barrenger pulled a black object out of the back pocket of his slacks and cocked his head downward. “Yeah? Okay. Okay.” He slid the phone back into his pocket. A smile of anticipation spread through his face. “Stan is on the way,” he said, turning toward the glass door.

  Vicky hugged the wall, paralyzed. Her head was throbbing again, her saliva had turned to acid. She heard the whoosh of the door opening in the adjacent room. It slammed shut. The reverberation ran through the wall and into her fingers. Footsteps sounded in the corridor.

  She pulled hard on the plastic wand dangling from the curtain rod and ran the draperies across the windows. Then she slipped outside past the heavy fabric onto the balcony. She could hear the lock clicking loose on the hall door as she slid the glass door shut. She looked around. She felt like an animal in a concrete trap.

  A mountain lion. “The lion is stealthy,” grandfather used to say when he told his stories. “The lion sees everything before she moves.”

  Vicky saw the metal vent protruding from the wall about a foot off the floor on the side next to the adjacent balcony. She stepped onto the vent and crawled onto the flat, six-inch-wide top of the balcony. The sound of voices—surprise, anger—floated through the window. Steadying herself by the wall, she managed to stand up. The adjacent balcony was about four feet away, but it was hard to calculate—all that space, all that emptiness in between. Rows of balconies swam below her. And far below, the pavement shimmered gray in the fading light.

  “She has to be here somewhere.” Barrenger’s voice came from the other side of the window.

  Vicky took a gulp of air, bent her knees, and jumped.

  33

  HER FEET CAME down on the top of the adjacent balcony. She swayed forward, backward, clawing at the wall to get her balance and keep from falling backward and down, down, down.

  The glass door slid open behind her, and she pitched forward onto the concrete floor. She drew herself into a tight ball against the stucco wall.

  “She’s not out here,” Barrenger said. Boots stomped and kicked against the balcony floor.

  “Well, she was here.” Light Stone’s voice wavered from low to high. “She was laying right here on the bed where we left her.”

  “Look under the bed.” Barrenger’s voice fading among the draperies.

  “She ain’t there. She ain’t anywhere. She must’ve picked the lock. She had something on her. I told you to let me strip her.”

  “Where the hell’s the clock and the phone?”

  “Dunno.”

  A couple of seconds passed, then Barrenger spoke. “Stan, we’re in the room. We got a little problem. She’s not here.”

  Vicky held her breath and clasped her hands over her arms, trying to stop the shaking. “I can’t figure how she did it,” the operations chief said, frustration crackling in his voice, “but she must have gotten out the door. We’ll check the elevator videos. She couldn’t have gotten far. Give us a few minutes. We’ll have her.”

  Now the voice came from far away. “Let’s go,” she heard Barrenger say before the door slammed.

  Vicky inched her way across the floor to the sliding-glass doors. Closed, but not locked. Not locked, thank God. They’d forgotten to snap the lock. She pushed the door open wide enough to crawl through, then stood up, her legs shaky and weak beneath her. For a moment, she thought she was going to pass out: The room started moving, blackness closing in. She leaned against the window and made herself breathe slowly, keeping her gaze on the bed, the dresser, the armoire—solid and real, unlike the blue-gray abyss she had leapt across.

  After a moment, she felt steadier. She realized the room had been recently occupied: The satin bedspread was pulled to one side, the white pillow propped against the headboard. A man’s shaving kit lay opened on the dresser, a little pile of cigarette butts had been stabbed into the glass ashtray on the bedside table. She made her way across the room and opened the closet. Men’s shirts and slacks were draped over the hangers.

  And then it hit her. Dennis Light Stone had been missing for five days, but he hadn’t gone anywhere. He’d been right here, hiding in the hotel, ordering room service and watching TV. The blackjack pit boss, signing off on inflated fills f
or the tables, cheating his own people: He knew too much, and he was Arapaho. Lexson must have gotten worried that Light Stone might start listening to Monroe’s rangers in the parking lot and start believing what they said, so he’d gotten the Arapaho out of the way for a while.

  Vicky walked over and checked the door. The knob turned in her hand. She hesitated. Barrenger and Light Stone could be on the way to the surveillance room to check the elevator videos for the last hour. Lexson was probably already there. She couldn’t use the elevator. There were real-time screens. They’d see her immediately.

  She pressed her eye against the peephole. The panel above the elevator was dark. An eerie calm gripped the corridor, as if she were staring into an unreal world, a void floating in space. The bronze elevator doors across the hall could have been painted in place. A flat, dull light lay over the opposite wall, the row of doors to the other rooms, the wide strip of blue carpeting along the wood floor. She could see almost the entire length of the corridor from the elevator to the neon-red Exit sign at the far end. But there was no door on the other side, which meant the exit door was on her side.

  The mountain lion is watchful. Be watchful, like the lion.

  Her hand gripped the doorknob, her eye still glued to the spy hole. She was about to open the door when the knob turned to ice in her hand. The numbers above the elevator were blinking, like yellow creatures gnawing at the glass panel: 6, 7, 8. The bell pinged and the bronze doors parted. Stan Lexson stepped out first, determination in the forward thrust of his head. He seemed confident and contained, Vicky thought, as contained as a stick of dynamite. He must have called the surveillance room, learned she wasn’t on the elevator videos, and intercepted Barrenger and Light Stone.

  They were behind him, coming down the corridor toward her. Her breath turned into a hot lump in her throat.

  The three men wheeled in unison toward the door to the adjacent room. Vicky heard the clinking keys, the angry murmurs, a shout of derision from Lexson: “Don’t give me that shit. She has to be in here someplace.”

  The door to the other room burst open. “Check under the bed,” Lexson shouted.

  “We looked there.” This from Barrenger.

  “Look again! Check the armoire.” The door made a whooshing noise, then crashed shut, and Vicky realized the doors closed automatically.

  She opened her own and stepped into the corridor. The exit was farther than she’d thought, the distance distorted by the peephole. She had four or five seconds, no more, she figured, to reach the exit before her own door whooshed and slammed shut and alerted the men in the next room.

  She pushed her door back against the wall to give herself another half second, then started running down the corridor. She was almost to the exit when the door behind her thudded shut. She threw herself toward the exit, then stopped. Next to the door frame was a glass-fronted fire alarm. A door cracked open behind her, and Barrenger shouted, “There she is!”

  Vicky lunged for the alarm and pulled down the red handle. The wailing siren burst around her, drawing in the air, like fire itself as she wheeled back to the exit and through the door onto a grated metal landing.

  Grabbing hold of the railing, she started down the metal steps, swinging around the next landing, the siren bouncing off the concrete walls and muffling the clack of her heels. Overhead, a door slammed; boots thumped behind her. She reached the sixth floor, flung open the door and yelled “Fire!” Doors were opening up and down the corridor. At the far end, a rotund man in shorts and T-shirt, with a bowling ball head, leaned into the corridor, disbelief plastered on his face.

  “Fire!” she yelled again, before slamming the door and starting down the next flight. She ran faster, taking in gulps of air as she crossed a landing, sensing Lexson and the others behind her, not daring to look up. She was on the fourth floor now and hotel guests were pushing one another through the exit door: a woman with her hair tight in curlers, a white robe tied around her bulky figure, terror on her face; several men in shorts, one barefoot.

  “What’s going on?” a man shouted.

  “Out of the way!” Lexson’s voice came from above. The steps rattled and shook beneath her as she dodged around the guests and plunged down the next flight. She could feel the man’s presence somewhere in the crowd pressing behind her, as pervasive as the screaming siren.

  More people were pouring into the stairway. Third floor, second floor—a crush of people running from a disaster, nervous and distracted, rushing and stumbling down the steps. Vicky had to weave her way through the bodies damp with fear and perspiration. She reached the first floor and followed the crowd into a hotel corridor with offices on each side that looked as if the occupants had run out, leaving papers toppling across the desks. A tiny camera perched on a black metal frame under the ceiling, watching everything, looking for an Indian woman in a blue linen dress.

  Vicky ducked her head and stayed close behind a heavyset man. They passed an office with a navy-blue blazer hanging over the back of a chair. She slipped inside, pulled on the blazer, and rejoined the crowd running down the corridor. The siren wailed over the thud of footsteps, the huffing sounds of fear. Behind her somewhere, a woman was crying. The crowd spilled into the hotel lobby along with the guests coming out of the opposite corridor, everybody heading toward the entrance to the casino.

  Vicky kept her head low, the blazer collar pulled up around her hair, and worked her way through the crowd—excuse me, excuse me—slipping past the sweaty, muscled arms and the breasts bulging beneath the T-shirts. A low buzz hung in the air, as if people were breathing through their teeth. Through the buzz came the sound of Lexson’s voice behind her: “Let me through. Let me through.”

  The crowd was flowing around a woman who stood still, shock and confusion in her expression, as if having gotten this far, she didn’t know where else to go. “Come on,” Vicky said, taking her by the arm and pulling her into the crowd swarming across the lobby toward the entrance.

  The siren stopped, leaving a silence more unsettling than the bleating noise. The crowd seemed to pull itself to a stop, everyone glancing around, faces frozen in uncertainty. The woman had started whimpering, a sound that darted through the quiet like the cry of a bird.

  “Attention!” A man’s voice boomed through the loudspeakers. Heads swiveled about. “We’ve had a false alarm. False alarm,” the voice repeated. “There is no fire on the premises. We apologize for your inconvenience. Please resume your activities.”

  “No fire?” The woman pulled herself free and started back into the casino.

  Vicky glanced around. The crowd was parting to let the woman through, and in the opening, Vicky saw Lexson hurrying forward.

  She squeezed her way past the crush of bodies at the entrance and started running along the side of the building toward the parking lot.

  “Stop her! Stop that woman!” Lexson’s voice came like a trumpet blast behind her.

  Ahead, one of the casino guards snapped to attention and darted through a group of people. Vicky dodged past his groping hands and kept running. Footsteps pounded behind her, someone gasped for breath. She felt a hand grip her shoulder. She tried to wrench herself free, but fingers dug into her other shoulder, and she was spinning around, her feet sliding across the gravel. She stared up at Adam Long Eagle.

  “Vicky! I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  Behind him, Lexson, Barrenger, and Light Stone were bearing down on the sidewalk through the knots of people. Lexson flicked his head toward a white casino van parked at the curb, and the van started inching through the crowd.

  “Let me go!” Vicky pushed against Adam’s chest and twisted in his arms, but his hands stayed welded to her shoulders. People were hurrying by, heads down, eyes averted. A lovers’ quarrel. No need to get involved.

  “We’ve got to talk,” Adam said.

  “You’re one of them!”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  The van pulled alongside and
, out of the corner of her eye, Vicky saw Felix dart around the front and slide open the side door. The crowd made a wide circle around them, as Lexson moved in behind Adam.

  “Let’s take a ride.”

  “You heard the boss.” It was Barrenger’s voice behind her. A fist punched into the small of her back.

  “Wait a minute . . .” Suddenly Adam let go, and Vicky had to scrabble for balance. And then—the fist in her back again, a hand gripping her arm, and she was stumbling sideways toward the van. The edge of the door cracked her knee as she fell onto the seat.

  “Get in!” Lexson shouted. Adam filled up the doorway, then dropped onto the seat. Barrenger got in behind him and, leaning forward, reached around and yanked the door shut. Vicky pulled herself into a tight ball against the far window.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Adam asked, his voice hoarse with anger. Vicky felt his hand over her knee, as if to reassure her. She tried to jerk away, make herself smaller, but there was no room. Lexson was already in the front passenger seat, and Light Stone had replaced Felix behind the wheel. The man was now standing in the middle of the drive, stopping the other traffic as the van started moving forward, horn pounding in intermittent bleeps that sent people scurrying forward or jumping back. Then the van broke free and sped through the parking lot toward the highway.

  “I demand some answers!” Adam shouted at the back of Lexson’s head. “Where we going?”

  Barrenger snorted beside him and stared into the darkness outside his window.

  It was a moment before Lexson twisted around and glanced from Adam to Vicky. “You two make me laugh,” he said. “You’re the last problem we have to clear up today.”

  34

  DRIVING AS FAST as he dared, taking the shortcuts, keeping one eye on the rearview mirror for flashing lights behind him—Now Father O’Malley, can’t keep giving you warnings. Gonna have to ticket you this time—it still took forty minutes before he’d crossed the reservation and was heading north on Highway 287. Great Plains Casino, gleamed a neon violet against the evening sky. Tumbling, tumbling down the side were giant white and black dice.