Dead Horses

by David Knop

Pris seldom denied my queries and never asked why I needed information. It was our understanding. This time it seemed important to fill her in best I could. I told her of Pokoh’s threat.

  “I respect spiritual power as much as you do Peter, but this is nonsense,” she said.

  I told her what the Peruvian told me.

  “Oh?” She asked. The line went silent.

  “Aunt Pris?”

  Another sigh of exasperation. “I’m off today, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Aunt Pris, I need it now.”

  “The nerve,” she said, as she hung up. Aunt Pris would find the information. She was part bulldog, part locomotive, if something got in her way.

  The Peruvian dropped me off at the mouth of a small canyon near Reel’s mobile command post, but not too close. Her operation would remain secret as long as I could help it. I thanked my friend and set out through a narrow canyon as fast as I could limp.

  The Pierce RV was well hidden, but the grumbling generator made finding the mobile command center easy. The cool air refreshed me when I stepped in.

  Reel’s command post hummed with voices and ringing phones. Keyboards clicked out a rhythm as I hurried toward the conference room where Real worked. Thousands of people’s lives, maybe more, were at stake and we had less than twenty-four hours to protect them. I had to convince her she needed to cancel the ceremony and keep people away from the area.

  Reels’ assistant Dean blocked the conference room door, looked me up and down, then said, “She’s busy and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

  “Get out of my way,” I said, pushing past him.

  He grabbed me by the arm. “You hard of hearing? I said, she doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

  The sloppy research by Reel’s assistant was responsible for one of this investigation’s bizarre turn of events. “She’s gonna be disturbed when I put my boot up your ass. Get your hands off of me.”

  The conference room door opened, and Reel stuck her head out from behind it. “What’s going on here?”

  Dean said, “I told him he can’t—”

  She gave me a look like one would give to a dying animal. “What hap—? Never mind, get in here.”

  Chapter 34

  Reel sat with a pile of paperwork in the conference room.

  Reel looked at me when I sat, sniffed, made a face. “You look a mess, Peter.”

  “Would’ve been here sooner, but your tail never showed.”

  “I’m sorry that happened. Lettau shook them early on.”

  “Armatures?” I asked.

  She flushed. “I recommended them for a tour in Minot.”

  FBI’s version of hell minus the heat.

  My mud and blood-stained shirt, and my shredded pants gave the appearance of a street dweller, but not as clean. When I closed the conference room door, a look of dread crossed her face. I pulled up a chair a short distance from where she sat, embarrassed at the way I must have smelled.

  “You don’t look surprised to see me.”

  She pointed around the perimeter, “Cameras. Peter, you’re hurt.”

  “That’s the easy part,” I said. I pondered how to explain Pokoh to her. I had to appeal to her Cherokee spirit while skirting her FBI practicalities.

  I detailed my kidnapping by Lettau, the confrontation with Grizz, then Oso, then the constellation-juggling Pokoh and his threat that an asteroid was coming to destroy everyone at the groundbreaking. I felt relieved when I unloaded it all.

  “An asteroid? Really?”

  Her eyes said I was crazy, and I couldn’t disagree, but I had seen what I’d seen.

  “Jean, if I had a story, why would I come up with this one? Deer morphed into Pokoh. He held parts of the universe in his hand. Weirdest thing. He’s a man when I first met him, then an animal guide, then a spirit.”

  “Three-in-one? Seriously?” Her eyes widened, then narrowed.

  Her comments were either sarcastic or dismissive, at least, that’s the way I took them. I said, “Deer, uh, Pokoh, told me not to trust Oso. Pokoh said Oso was Grizz. A skinwalker.”

  “A bear? A skinwalker?” she said. She lifted an eyebrow. “My problem with this story is Oso is dead according to the Navy.”

  “Hard to get around that. But there’s something weird about the Oso we’re dealing with. He showed up in the San Juan Range in the middle of the night after I ran Grizz off a cliff. Oso saved my ass from Lettau and his deputies. It gets weirder because Oso told me Pokoh was Grizz.”

  Reel wore a frosty expression, asked, “You’re saying Grizz is dead?”

  So much for skirting her practicalities. I wanted her Indian, but all I got was her FBI. “Looked that way.”

  Reel said, “Then it stands to reason Oso, whoever he is, is dead. Then, Pokoh, either man or deer or both, is dead.”

  I said, “Not sure reason plays any part in this.”

  She ran her fingers through her hair, then pressed a hand to her forehead, looked at the floor. “Find Oso Walker.”

  “What is your fascination with Oso? Why don’t you believe me about the asteroid?”

  “Peter, you tell me Oso Walker, a man we thought we knew but don’t, is Grizz. Oso says no, Pokoh is the grizzly. Then you tell me Pokoh denies it. Then you tell me Grizz is dead. A dead spirit? Really? Then you tell me Pokoh, a man-deer-bear-spirit has asteroids on call. Pardon me if I have my doubts, Peter. The only thing I can take away from this story is that my investigation has been compromised. I want to know how Oso penetrated my organization. If he’s alive, find him. If he’s dead well, I’ll think about your Grizz story.”

  “This is not about your investigation and it’s not about who’s who. This is about Pokoh’s asteroid blowing the shit out of the ceremonial groundbreaking and half of Durango, too,” I said. If she heard the anxiety in my voice, her eyes conveyed her last answer was the only one I would get.

  “Jean, right now, I need your Indian more than I need your FBI.”

  She raised an eyebrow, nodded. “Okay. Call your Aunt Pris right now and verify if this whole asteroid thing is true.”

  I wanted to pause, let the relief sink in, but there was no time for that. I fat-fingered numbers on Reel’s table phone.

  Aunt Pris picked up on the first ring. “I’ve been waiting for your call. Peter, your question about dangerous space objects was, let’s say, unusual, but I found an answer.”

  “I have you on speaker phone. Jean Reel is here, too.”

  “Oh, Jean, how are you, dear?” Effusive to a fault, Aunt Pris became even more animated when she talked to Jean. She loved Jean. Loved everybody, come to think of it. Well, maybe not me so much, right now.

  “No one here at the university can answer my questions, don’t worry, I was very discreet when I called NASA and talked to an old flame, head of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office who oversees Spaceguard efforts. Brought back memories. He was quite hot back in the day.”

  “Aunt Pris,” I said. If not checked, my aunt would replay stories of her love life, which by all accounts was rich and full. As she’d grown older, she showed a willingness to reveal more than I cared to hear.

  “Spaceguard?” Jean asked.

  Pris inhaled, ready to launch into endless technical detail suitable for technocrats and scholars, but not for people like me who wanted to know if we were going to die soon.

  “Well,” Aunt Pris, said, “The term refers to a number of worldwide efforts to discover and study near-Earth objects; asteroids and comets big enough to reach the Earth’s surface and do substantial dam—.”

  I said, “I hope you’re going to tell me there are no such objects.”

  “Not quite, Peter. There are fourteen hundred.”

  My jaw must’ve dropped because Jean’s did. “What”?

  “The good news is none of these objects pose a threat to Earth within the next hundred years, and there are no known objects capable of catastrophic
destruction likely to hit us.”

  “How about the possibility of unknown objects?” Jean asked, looking at me.

  Aunt Pris explained the risk of undetected bodies was real. She gave two examples: the 1908 Tunguska airburst that levelled seven-hundred square miles of Siberian forest, and the 2013 airburst over Chelyabinsk Russia that damaged thousands of buildings and injured sixteen-hundred people.

  “Any more surprises out there?” I asked.

  The line was quiet for a moment, then Pris, said, “I don’t think that risk will ever go away. The problem is space objects can strike at a low angle from the direction of the sun, which makes them difficult to detect.”

  Oso had said the same thing. “Don’t these things radiate? Can’t they be picked up by frequency detectors or radar?”

  “Even if they discharged like a TV tower, the sun’s own emissions would mask the signal. We just cannot discover them in time to react.”

  “What if we did see one coming?” I asked.

  “In theory, if we had enough time, there could be an interception, but NASA needs a warning first,” she said.

  “How much of a warning?”

  “A few years would be ideal.”

  We had a one-day warning. Tomorrow. Saturday. My chest constricted like someone was standing on it.

  While Reel chatted with Aunt Pris, I rose to satisfy an urge to step outside and look into the sun for foreign objects. I needed air. Reel gestured, demanded I sit. I sat.

  Once off the phone, Reel dismissed her Cherokee side by saying, “Well, that settles that.”

  “Settles what?” I knew the answer.

  “Trust me, I want to believe you, but you heard Pris as well as I did. There are no objects coming this way.”

  “And you heard her say objects blocked by the sun give no warning. That gives Pokoh plenty of room to slip a space object past detection.”

  Reel’s face reddened as she said, “You also heard her say we had no ready defense against them. Detected or not, we can do nothing about it.”

  “You could call the Durango mayor and ask to postpone the ceremony.”

  Reel looked at the ceiling, said, “And the reason I’ll give is?” Her eyes were determined but her forehead wrinkled.

  This was my final chance. “Pokoh’s threat is a call for action from the ancestors. Your Great Spirit is calling. Won’t you listen? Tell the mayor there’s a threat to the security of the ceremony. Tell him the Chivingtons are bringing automatic weapons. Tell him the Utes are bringing hand grenades. Shit, tell him anything.”

  Her eyes bored through me as she said, “I talk to the mayor regularly. He knows what the threat for violence is and we are prepared. In the past, I have asked for a postponement to protect my case and he has refused. No, he will not delay.

  “And, based on what Pris had to say, I think Pokoh is blowing smoke.” Reel crossed her arms, body armor that welcomed no argument.

  She was through listening and I had lost. “We can’t take the chance, dammit,” I said.

  She held up a palm. “Officer Romero, you listen to me. I have a very sensitive operation going on here. I cannot give out information, some of which is classified, to just anyone. Not law enforcement. Not the mayor. As it is, I’m pushing the envelope by talking to you.

  “The ceremony is tomorrow at noon, Officer Romero, and we have done all we can do. No one will believe a Ute god is going to disrupt the hospital groundbreaking with an asteroid, especially when NASA says there is no threat. The only thing I can take from this whole story is the question that the Oso Walker we think we know is an imposter. Find him and get him in here. Now.”

  “There will be hundreds of people at the ceremony. How many are going to die because of this, Jean?”

  “Find Oso,” Reel said, gathering her stack of papers before storming out of the conference room. Agents tending their monitors glanced up as she passed. I ignored their gaze as I followed her down the hall, my mind fixed on tomorrow’s disaster.

  Outside, I hopped into an FBI sedan, “bucar” in FBI-speak, black and non-descript, and drove toward Oso’s cabin. I had no idea where Oso was, but his home was a place to start.

  Oso was the man-of-the-hour by Jean’s reckoning and I was to bring him in for questioning. Whoever this man was, this bogus Oso, was destined for jail if he could not justify his role as an imposter and for his infiltration into a classified FBI operation.

  I wanted him too, but for what Oso knew about Pokoh’s power to direct a destructive space object to earth. I suspected he knew much more about Pokoh than he let on.

  My deadline crept closer like Cougar. In complete silence. Looming unseen, undetectable, and inevitable. If Oso was still alive, this would be my last chance to find out what he knew.

  Chapter 35

  With an eye on the side and rearview mirrors, I punched the sedan all the way to Oso’s place. I drove like a drunk, swerving in-lane, careless on the curves, distracted, and unable to wrap my mind around what had happened. I kept an eye out constantly for approaching sheriff deputies on the prowl even though they had no jurisdiction here. A sense of unease spidered up my spine.

  The flash of a light bar jacked my discomfort to alarm. The black Ford interceptor riding my bumper must have been hiding in the bushes along the road. I slowed and pulled off. He passed without looking over at me and cruised out of sight. Good thing, the cruiser’s gold markings identified him as a La Plata County deputy, but I didn’t recognize him as one of Lettau’s goons. If he’d intended to pull me over for a traffic violation, the federal plates on my bucar must have persuaded him the required paperwork would not be worth the effort. I allowed myself to breathe, pulled out, and continued.

  Things had gone terribly wrong, and I fumed over Reel’s orders as I drove. Hunting down Oso was a distraction from the real threat, Pokoh’s asteroid. Now, I alone carried the awful certainty of pending disaster and I had less than twenty-four hours to prevent it.

  When I neared Oso’s cabin I stopped just out of view and took time to watch and listen. The area seemed clear, so I parked in Oso’s driveway hoping the man’s pet bear, Sash, was not inside the cabin. My knock on the front door was met with a low growl from behind. I whirled. The beast stood between me and my car. I cursed myself for letting my guard down.

  Old Sash had no teeth, according to Oso, but she did have claws. Four-inch claws. Pet or not, the massive brown grizzly could crush me to death by just sitting on me.

  Sash sniffed the air, then walked toward me. The roof had no visible access, so a hard shoulder to the front door knocked it open. I lunged through and slammed it behind me. The bear did not follow. Instead, she scratched herself against the front bumper of my sedan. The car bounced on its shocks. As I studied her through the window, she stared at the cabin for a moment, too bored to follow it seemed, then shambled off, looking more exhausted than enthralled.

  Oso’s place was small enough to see at a glance no one was home, but I took a quick look through drawers in the kitchen and rummaged through the only closet.

  In a bedroom dresser with missing handles, I found some well-thumbed books: Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path and The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia. Oso’s interest in shamanism only added urgency to my search. If he was not Grizz, as he claimed, why the interest in shamanism?

  Quickly, I examined the backyard from a rear window, then stepped outside after listening for Sash. I found her around a corner of the building in a heap, snoring. After checking the other side of the house, I trotted to the car.

  My next destinated was the clinic where I first met Oso. As I grabbed the door handle, the sound of many metallic slides chambering bullets sounded like the hiss of so many snakes.

  “On the ground, Romero. On the fucking ground. Now!”

  I did exactly as told. I hit the deck with arms splayed. I didn’t dare move. Move a hair’s breadth and he would pull the trigger
.

  Boots and camouflage-clad legs rushed in. I counted sixteen legs. From the ground, everyone appeared ten feet tall and smelled of gun oil and testosterone. They cuffed me, jerked me up by the arms, nearly pulling them from their sockets.

  “Jesus. Easy, man,” I said.

  My escort fast-walked me to a La Plata County Sheriff SUV. So much for jurisdiction. While one deputy pushed me into the prisoner’s cage and fastened the seat belt, another in the front passenger seat told me I was under arrest for the murder of Deputy Frank Jones and recited my rights. He asked if I understood. I remained silent.

  On the way to the jail, Lettau sat in the front passenger’s seat. No one spoke. I’d figured Lettau, the man I’d kept alive last night, would not risk turning me in, given the fact he’d kidnapped and tried to murder me. Keeping him alive was a bad move. Lettau, grinning at me from his seat, had ratted me out.

  In Durango, we came upon the slab-sided one-story jail as inviting as road tar. We passed a white street sign announcing the place with a blue arrow and the word Jail. The lowering sun jacked my nerves. The faster the night came so did the morning, and disaster.

  After in-processing and a cursory medical exam by a male nurse who took photos, but clearly didn’t give a shit about my torn stitches and bruises, I was escorted to my cell: gray-green door, two wall-mounted bunks, a stainless-steel toilet and sink.

  A huge man lay motionless, facing the wall on the top bunk.

  The jailer uncuffed me. As the door slammed shut, I sat on the lower bunk. Stuck in this cell, frustration pushed my heartbeat into my temples.

  “Watcha in fer?” said my roommate, his voice unusually high for a man his size.

  I told the truth, hoping to shut him up. “Killing a cop.”

  “You da man,” he said. This time the voice sounded familiar. I jumped up and looked at him.

  “How’d you get in here?” I pointed, worked to get words out.

  Oso sat up. “Ya’ know, they really don’t make these bunks for people my size,” he said. Looking at me, he said, “Not nice to point, Romero.”