by Ethan Cross
With a wink, Ackerman replied, “I’m confident that it will come to me in the moment. Besides, since when do you need to worry about me.”
“I always worry about you. You’re not indestructible or invincible. One day, you’re going to learn that the hard way.”
Ackerman shrugged. “Perhaps, but remember, dear brother, that I’ve honed my skills over years. I know exactly how far I can push myself and of that which I’m capable, both physically and mentally.”
Marcus looked him directly in the eyes, a rare occurrence for his brother, meant to convey the seriousness of what was about to be said. Rubbing at the tattoo of a cross on his chest—a nervous habit Ackerman had often noticed—Marcus said, “I hope you’re right, Frank. But I still worry that one day, all your calculations will be off. I know that you don’t fear death, but Maggie’s life is on the line this time. I can’t do this alone. So, if you’re going to screw up and get yourself killed, make sure it’s not today.”
“You handle your end of things, dear brother, and I’ll come through on mine,” Ackerman said. “A word of advice in return, if I may. There are a lot of coyotes running around these hills, but there’s also at least one true predator, a wolf. Besides myself, of course. Don’t forget that.”
“John Canyon is the right age to be the Taker. Do you think he’s our guy?”
“I have no doubt that he’s a killer. I’m just not sure if he’s the killer who has absconded with your would-be bride,” Ackerman said. “Now, you need to get on the road, and I have a bit of tidying up to do before this place is ready to receive guests.”
31
30 years earlier…
His younger sister had screamed hysterically when she saw the blood covering their mother’s bedroom carpet. The boy had simply walked over and smacked her across the face. Then he grabbed her by the shoulders and said, “Get the bleach from under the kitchen sink. Mom and I have to go dispose of a body.”
Xavier knew that a long and intricate journey of questions from Navajo Police and Federal agents alike would lay ahead of them if they allowed the death to look like foul play. Luckily, he already had a plan in mind. Not one formulated on the spot in a rushed panic, but machinations he had been contemplating for years. He had a similar plan for disposal of every one of his mother’s regulars.
In the case of Dr. Chee—the dead man who had tried to murder the boy’s mother and probably wasn’t much of a doctor, otherwise he would have been working for real money off the Rez—the boy had instantly instructed his mother to remove the dead man’s clothes. Dr. Chee was a short man, the same height as the boy’s mother. With a little padding, it had been an easy task to make her up like the deceased doctor. At least, from a distance. Then he and the fake Dr. Chee had driven away together in the doctor’s rickety old station wagon, in plain sight of all their nosey neighbors.
Once they were out of town, he instructed his mother to drive down an old field road bordered by brush that would conceal the vehicle. Then the boy had left his mother with the station wagon while he followed a dry creek bed through the darkness back to his home. He retrieved the body, which he and mother had already wrapped in garbage bags and loaded into a wheelbarrow. Tracing the creek bed back to the station wagon and loading the body into the back, they drove several miles into the hill country.
The boy explained his plan along the way. “We drive until we find a good spot. I have a few places in mind. Then we dump the body for the coyotes. Hopefully, any evidence will be destroyed by the time anyone finds him.”
His mother sobbed as she drove into the night. She asked, “What about the car? What are we going to tell people?”
“We’ll say that he invited me to go on a ride, and then he tried to molest me. But I fought back. I have the wounds to prove that already. I drive the car back into town and call the police. I tell them that I shoved him out the door and took his car. They go looking for him, but I tell them the wrong direction. And there’s way too much ground out here to cover.”
“What about me? The neighbors will see me coming back into town with you, especially old Ms. Begay. I think she gets off on spying on who comes to visit.”
“She can’t see the house or drive from where she is. I’ve checked.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll drop you off outside of town, and you’ll follow the creek bed back to the house. I’ll drive the car home, and we’ll finish cleaning up before we call the pigs.”
In a trembling whisper, she said, “You have everything figured out, don’t you?” In the breathless anxiousness that permeated her words, the boy knew that his mother now truly feared him for the first time.
Xavier said, “Just so we’re clear…I’m in charge now, and things are gonna change.”
32
Liana Nakai pulled her Ford Explorer patrol vehicle to a halt in front of the old trading post. The place had been shuttered nearly two years ago. The owner had actually been a bit of a relative, their grandmother’s both descending from the Bitter Water clan. She didn’t bother to hide her approach. In fact, she left the engine running and her lights cutting the darkness for a moment, mainly as a habit of Diné culture, since it was considered rude to advance on another’s hogan unannounced. After stepping out of the Explorer and killing the engine, she half-expected Frank to step out onto the front porch and greet her like an area resident would have. She waited beside the vehicle for another moment, even after the 3.5L EcoBoost motor had grown silent.
Unfortunately, the lack of greeting necessitated that she search the creepy old structure by herself. While gambling that Frank was here and wouldn’t kill her on sight.
The dust kicked up and carried with it the scent of juniper, and somewhere beneath that the smell of blood and sweat. Pulling her Glock 22 from its holster with her right hand and grabbing the Maglite from her belt with her left, Liana made a mental note to keep her overactive imagination in check. She wasn’t some little girl chasing whiptail lizards into the scrub brush. She was an officer within the Navajo Nation Police. It was time she started acting like it, time she made a stand.
The front stairs protested under her weight as she ascended onto a porch that she remembered once held a variety of wood art that the former proprietor dabbled with. It made her sad for the loss of several locally owned and operated businesses that had gone under since the Walmart opened in Farmington.
“Frank?” she whispered as she pushed her way through the open front door.
Only the wind whistling through the broken windows replied.
Most of the homemade wooden shelving units still lined the left side of the front room. Liana imagined that it was exactly what an old general store from the wild west would have looked like. She called out again with no more of reply, but she did hear the shuffling of movement coming from the back store room. The front room had windows, which provided at least some ambient light from the moon and the headlights of her cruiser that she had left on out front. The back room was different, however. The shadows seemed impenetrable even beneath the barrage of her Maglite.
Frank sat in the center of the space, the shadows seeming to swirl around him as if they both obeyed his commands and feared him. He was no longer shirtless. He had changed into a fresh pair of tactical cargo pants and a tight-fitting black long-sleeved shirt made of some type of dry-fit material. Beneath the shirt, she could see the rock hard curves of his body. After receiving her placement with the Roanhorse Navajo Nation Police Department, Liana had joined a gym down in Shiprock, and she had met plenty of body-builders during her time there. But Frank was different. His muscles weren’t as massive as the steroid junkies she had encountered at the gym. Instead, his body looked rock hard and densely packed with thick coils of muscle fiber, an unforgiving combination of sinew and bone. She wondered if his body fat percentage was even half a percentile. For a fleeting second, she considered what that body would feel like pressed against her.
“Kee
p your hands where I can see them,” she whispered, almost not wanting him to hear. He sat atop a milk crate with his arms crossed and his head down. As she traced his form with the flashlight, searching for hidden weapons, she noticed that his left side was soaked in blood, visible only as a dark and wet spot on his shirt. Blood dripped from the wound and pooled on the floor. She wondered if he was dead. Canyon must have done more damage with the shotgun blast than they had previously thought. Or perhaps the metal shell of the station house had cut Frank as he made his escape. Either way, the man bleeding out on a milk crate in front of her now did not look nearly as imposing as the one who had burst free of the drunk tank only a few hours earlier.
Taking a step forward, she added, more forcefully, “Get your hands up now, Frank!”
Then she saw the knife. A massive bone-handled Bowie knife, which was embedded in the floor with the handle sticking up just a few feet in front of the stranger. The blade was bloody.
Her chest felt tight, and her heart hammered so loudly that she felt as if she were caught in the middle of a stampede. The room was still and silent, but her internal thundering was deafening. The stranger hadn’t moved. She said, “Frank, if you can hear me, I’m going to place you in these cuffs. Then I’ll check your wounds, and we’ll get you medical help.”
When he spoke, she jumped back like she had been struck by a rattlesnake. The deep but dry rumble of his voice reminded her of the hiss of the same reptile. He said, “Do we really have to go through all of this again? I thought our relationship had grown beyond the need for another display of my physical superiority.”
Holding the gun out in front of her like a religious talisman warding off the devil, she repeated, “I need you to slowly raise your hands.”
“I need you to pull up another crate and have a seat, Officer Liana. We have much to say but the time for only a few words.”
“What have you done with Tobias Canyon and those other men?”
“They’re in the front room. You passed them on your way in,” he said, raising his eyes to her for the first time.
“I didn’t see anyone.”
“You didn’t look hard enough. That’s not important now. I don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to give you another lesson at the moment. But I truly admire your spirit.” He smiled and shook his head as he looked her up and down. “You are adorable. That little uniform, and you waving that hunk of nylon-based polymer around as if it could do a damn thing to protect you from me. I wish we had more time to play, Ms. Liana, but alas, fate has other plans. Now, I’m going to ask you nicely once more. Put that thing away and pull up a seat.”
“And if I don’t? What if I choose not to play by your rules?”
He fixed her with his piercing gray eyes. The beam of the flashlight reflecting in them made them seem like two pools of fire. He said, “We all have to play by certain rules, my dear. Even I am bound by space and time and other laws of physics. You can, of course, abstain from playing or make up your own rules in this game called Life. But bear in mind that every action has a reaction, every choice a consequence. And if you don’t play by my rules, then I’ll be forced to put you in timeout, little lady.”
With a growl, Liana slipped her Glock back into its holster and pulled up another wooden milk crate, making sure to keep several feet between her and the outsider. As she sat down, she said, “Let’s get one thing straight… I’m not your darling, your dear, or your little lady. I’m Officer Liana Nakai of the Navajo Nation Police, and I don’t care who you are, I won’t be talked down to like that by anyone.”
As he sat up, he smiled and gave a little nod. “As you wish, Liana. I respect a woman with some grit. But not too much.”
“What the hell is going on here, Frank? I want the truth. The whole story.”
Rolling his eyes, he said, “My patience is growing thin, officer.”
“You told Captain Yazzie that any good hunter had to be patient above all else.”
“I don’t think I said it quite like that, but it’s nice to know you were paying attention. And touché, I merely meant to convey my annoyance at always having to repeat myself with you normals. It’s like I have to tell what I’m going to tell you, then tell you, and then tell you what I already told you. It can be quite frustrating. Especially when…”
Liana watched as Frank’s sentence trailed off and his head drooped forward. He looked pale and empty, a mere shell of the man who had seemed invincible earlier. She said, “Frank, wake up. I need to look at your wounds.”
“You lick your own damn wounds,” he mumbled, but then his posture straightened and his eyes came open.
Making a move to stand, she said, “You’re bleeding out. I’m taking you to a hospital.”
“Preposterous. I’m fine.”
“You just passed out mid-sentence.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“What do you mean, ‘no, I didn’t.’ I just sat here and watched you nearly fall off your seat.”
“Prove it,” he proclaimed.
“What?”
“Where I’m from, one is innocent until proven guilty.”
“You need a doctor, Frank.”
“Let’s play a game. Kids on road trips everywhere play I-Spy, or so I’m told. How about we play a variation on that? We’ll call it I-Smell.”
“You do have an odor.”
He smiled again, but this time it was the grin of a shark. “My apologies. I’ve worked up a sweat kicking all of your asses tonight. You stink of fear and anxiety and dime store perfume. But we were supposed to say ‘I Smell’ first. Your turn. What else do you smell, Officer Liana?”
With a growl of frustration, she closed her eyes and said, “I smell Juniper, dust, rotting wood, and blood.”
“Very good. But there’s more, so much more.”
“What does this have to do with anything?” she shouted.
“You remember me telling Yazzie about a good hunter’s need for patience. But what did I tell him was the second rule of thumb when stalking prey?”
She tried to recall more of the conversation, but the whole night seemed like it had happened in a blur now, a jumbled mess of fear and confusion. It was something that had seemed very arbitrary to her at the time. As she struggled to remember, Frank’s head began to droop again. After a moment, she said, “Wasn’t it something about staying downwind?”
He chuckled, but even the small effort seemed to exhaust him. His eyelids fluttered as he said, “That’s right. You see, the most important thing is to always…”
Then, the outsider—who earlier had seemed as invincible as a cyborg from the future and now seemed as helpless as a child—trailed off again. But this time, he passed out completely and dropped forward from his milk crate to the floor.
Liana ran a hand through her raven black hair and rubbed the base of her skull as she wondered how in the world she was going to drag the muscular strange out of the trading post and load him up into the Explorer by herself. Moving to his side to check his pulse and see if she could rouse him, she heard him mumble something under his breath. When she bent closer, he said in a clear and precise whisper, “We’re about to have guests. When this goes down, get into the front room and stay out of my way. I’ll handle the rest.” Then, with a wink, Frank’s head drooped back to the plank flooring.
33
When Liana Nakai was a little girl, she was present when her grandfather passed away. She supposed now that lung cancer had been the cause, but they hadn’t had the money for belegana doctors and the traditional Diné singers and ceremonies had little effect. She remembered men from their clan carrying her grandfather outside when they felt his time was near. This was done to allow his chindi to disperse and so that they wouldn’t need to burn down their hogan for fear of ghost sickness. Grandmother had explained that the chindi was everything bad about the person, which was left behind when they passed into the spirit world. It was the dark residue that the deceased had been unable to bring i
nto universal harmony.
Liana had always been close to her grandmother and refused to leave her side, despite the risks from evil spirits. Grandmother had explained that they were not to speak grandfather’s name or show any emotion at his passing or anytime afterward. Outward signs of grief were believed to draw the spirit back and interrupt their journey to the next world.
Now, as she stared down at the lifeless form of the man calling himself Frank, Liana felt he looked every bit as dead as her grandfather had. On that day, Grandmother had said that Grandfather would leave a weak chindi anyway so there was little danger, but Liana didn’t want to run into the terrifying chindi this outsider would leave behind.
She tried to decipher Frank’s cryptic warnings, but a part of her wondered if he was merely delirious from blood loss.
Then she heard movement outside.
Boots struck dirt and wood in a steady series of shuffling thumps. Someone was coming up the back steps of the trading post. But that was impossible. The building had been constructed on a large bluff with only one narrow road winding up to the abandoned structures of the storefront, a storage shed, and a trailer that the couple who had owned the property had lived in for nearly thirty years. The old man had fought in Vietnam, and from what Liana had heard from her grandmother, he had built his business up on the bluff because he came back from the war always wanting his back to the wall and his eyes on all points of ingress. She supposed that was why Frank and his team had chosen this place as well.
She would have heard the sound of an engine approaching, which meant their attackers must have parked a good distance away and snuck up behind the building on foot. This was someone who had been observing them and was now rushing in for an assault while Frank was down. Her mind resorted to her training, and she snatched the Glock 22 from her hip and aimed it at the door coming in from the back steps.
In the fraction of a second before the door burst open, Liana wondered if she would have time to yell “Police!” or if the attacker would be coming in guns blazing.