Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 3 - Venus Besieged (22 page)

I
couldn't formulate a sentence so Callie stepped in. "I asked her to marry
me but she thought I was joking." Callie turned her attention to the shopkeeper,
leaving me to my own demons and to Barrett's stare. "We're looking for
someone who bought an arrowhead like these green ones you sell...she bought it
no more than a few days ago."

"It's
a very common keepsake for people who want to put it in their pocket as a
remembrance of their trip or as a good-luck charm. They're under a
dollar," the shopkeeper said and set the ring tray out as if I'd made a
silent request to see the rings again. I fingered the matching pair.

"A
tall, elegant, silver-haired woman—are you sure she didn't come in? Her nails
are long and tapered and she wears a pale silver polish on them and her watch
is a Cartier gold band..." Barrett asked, and the shopkeeper paused.

"I
don't remember anyone like that."

We
stood around for a moment, not knowing what to do next. Then the shopkeeper
broke the silence. "She will most likely return, I believe."

"Directions
would be more helpful than beliefs," I muttered.

"Little
Horse," the shopkeeper said quickly. "The man who buys the most of
these is the trapper-trader who has the mule-team trail rides. Everybody calls
him Little Horse. He buys them by the boxful because he gives them to everybody
who goes on the trail ride. He also has a guide service. He'll take you on foot
into remote areas, or by canoe down the river, or to a sweat lodge, stuff like
that."

"Where
is he?" Barrett's words leapt from her lips. Barrett, who had bedded every
woman in Hollywood, was obsessed now with finding a silver-haired, bisexual
studio executive twenty years her senior.

The
shopkeeper laughed. "Well, that's the big trick. He doesn't have a cell
phone or pager. He shows up to buy groceries and goes back to his camp."

"Where's
his camp?" Callie asked.

"Way
up in the hills, you would need a guide," the shopkeeper said.

"Where
does he buy groceries?" I asked.

"Little
Mojo's Corner." She pointed toward the front of her shop and south up a
hill.

"We'll
find her." I turned to address Barrett but she was already headed for the
door. For all her butch elegance, her sophisticated not-caring, her chic
it's-all-about-me attitude, she was beyond merely upset, and it flashed through
my mind that Ramona Mathers must not have been popular with oilmen for
nothing—she was obviously a good lay. After all, Barrett had known her for only
a couple of days—hell, a couple of hours really—and most likely only slept with
her once. I asked myself if I was sorry I'd passed on the opportunity to find
out how good a lay, but looked over at Callie with pride as she said, "I
know exactly what you're thinking."

I
didn't know how to block energy, but I gave it my best, thinking of a giant
brick wall separating my mind from Callie's.

"You
could have slept with Ramona."

"Wrong.
I was thinking it would be fun to know how good in bed Ramona was, if one didn't
have to sleep with her to find out."

Callie
raised an eyebrow. Honesty had its hazards.

In
only minutes we were headed for Little Mojo's Corner to find out if Little
Horse came there often and when they'd last seen him. The store was a small
former gas station sitting back off the two streets that crossed in front of
it. Barrett went inside to question the clerk, who apparently described Little
Horse as a short, stocky man who was only slightly bowlegged, or enough to
comment on, while Callie and I tried to organize our thoughts.

"So
let's do a little Indian update," I proposed. "Kai, high-school
friend of Manaba, dies mysteriously. We don't know why. In 1997 Manaba's
grandmother dies. We don't know why. Nizhoni may be dead. We don't know why.
Are you getting the pattern here?"

"We
do know that the grandmother's land was special to women of the tribe. They
came by the hundreds from the surrounding hills and danced all night by the
campfires to honor the female spirit. With the grandmother gone, the land was
somehow deeded over to Blackstone Construction. The transaction might not have
been filed at the courthouse until recently, when they wanted to develop the
land." Callie paused to study me intently. "It's the besiegement the
chart indicated. In 1997 women were being attacked, their power under siege.
This land mass is female and has large energy connecting those attacks to the
present ones and until the energy is redirected—"

"You
lost me on the big female land mass."

"Women,
hundreds, perhaps thousands have danced in the dust and sand of this sacred
place—many moccasins. The sound of their voices, the energy of their hearts,
the prayers emanating from their spirits... all of that is still here and
people feel it. The construction crews feel it as they cut into her soul, and
the energy of the violated land frightens them, and they run, quitting their
jobs."

"Wow,
Callie, the way you see things—"

"Disturbs
you, I know."

"No.
It's so.. .well, it makes me feel better. Like there's beauty and sense to the
world and you're its cheerleader." I realized I was choking emotionally on
the words.

She
paused. "I love you, Teague." She kissed me, her mouth warm like the
ocean on a cold night.

"So
what does women's energy have to do with the missing and dead?" I murmured.

"I
don't know."

"Do
you ever worry that maybe there is no connection, that maybe we're trying to
tie things together that make no sense?"

At
that moment, we saw them—Manaba and Cy Blackstone across the street in the
shadows of the trading post. Their bodies close in conversation.

Without
waiting, I towed Callie across the street, dodging traffic, and got within
earshot of the two, their conversation barely audible.

"He
knows," Manaba said.

"How?"
Blackstone shifted his weight and glanced over his shoulder.

"We
exhumed the grave," Manaba said.

A
pause while Blackstone breathed. "So he knows."

Manaba
said nothing in reply, turned, and hurried away.

"I
thought those two were mortal enemies," I said. "That night at the
ceremony they looked like it to me. Let's follow him." We raced back
across the street and jumped in our car.

"What
about Barrett?" Callie reminded me as we squealed out of the driveway,
tailing Blackstone in his black pickup truck roughly an eighth of a mile behind
him.

"Can't
help that, she'll have to find her own way home. I don't want to lose
Blackstone."

We
were headed back toward the Indian reservation near the area where the cemetery
was located. The land was wide-open and cars easy to spot, so I had to drop
back even farther to avoid Blackstone's seeing me.

About
five miles up into hillier country a white pickup, perched on a side road like
a marauder in an old-fashioned train robbery, bolted from the intersection,
spraying sand across the horizon. It headed down the incline onto the roadway,
throwing more dust into the air and blocking Blackstone's path. When he tried
to cut a sharp left and get around the truck, it veered even more sharply,
blocking him. He swerved right and the white truck roared into reverse and
charged left, blocking him again, sagebrush sacrificed under skidding tires,
flying like confetti.

Two
metal cutting horses, they swung and blocked and spun until Blackstone whirled
a full three-sixty to spray sand in his opponent's windshield and, while he had
him blinded, plowed forward. But the white vehicle was in his path and he
crashed into the truck bed. The driver jumped out and slung open Blackstone's
pickup door and threw him on the ground in a stranglehold. Blackstone lay
still. Suddenly the attacker spotted us, and in a split second he was off the
ground, limping to his truck and fleeing across the sand in a grinding of
tires.

"That's
the Dwayne-Wayne guy," I shouted as we pulled up to the scene, having
recognized the limp. I rang the police department to say we needed an officer
and an ambulance right away, and described our location outside of town.

"He
said he knew Blackstone," I told Callie as I hung up the phone.

"Apparently
he does." Callie knelt beside Blackstone, assuring him an ambulance was on
the way.

I
couldn't see if his head had hit the steering wheel or Wayne had pulverized his
nose with his fists. Whichever, the guy was pretty smashed up.

Callie
looked up at me. "He's breathing, but he's bleeding from the mouth and his
eyes are rolled back."

"I've
got a lot of questions I'd like to ask him, but I don't think he's going to
have answers any time soon."

The
ambulance and the police officer arrived almost simultaneously, so while
Blackstone was being strapped on a stretcher the officer asked me what we knew
about the mugging. Not wanting to admit we were following Blackstone, I lied,
making a mental distinction between telling Callie the truth and coming clean
with Officer Tumbleweed.

I
said we were taking a ride to see the surrounding countryside and stumbled on
the two guys trying to kill one another.

The
officer, whose name tag pinned to his shirt said Sgt. Striker, wrote as I
spoke, never taking off his dark wraparound sunglasses. His crisply pressed
shirt and his military demeanor told me he was one of those cops who took
himself seriously.

"So
why are you in Sedona?"

"We're
here on a combined writing project and vacation," I said. "We've seen
this guy in the white truck before. His name is Dwayne-Wayne and he showed up
at our cabin—"

"Dwayne
or Wayne?" the officer interrupted, to let me know that he controlled the
interview, not me. He stopped writing and raised an eyebrow at me for no
apparent reason other than perhaps he'd seen the expression on a cop show. I
would have bet money he stood in the bathroom mirror for hours practicing
getting that eyebrow to arch up that high over the top of his sunglasses.

"First
name Dwayne, middle name Wayne, and he's the same guy who came to our cabin to
tell us that a friend of ours, Ramona Mathers, is missing."

"We
know about the Mathers report," Sergeant Striker said, this time letting
me know he'd "let me know" if he wanted more discussion about the
Mathers case. "Why do you say he's the same guy?"

"Because
I got a look at him and he has a distinctive limp. Can't be too many guys
around here who limp at the hip."

"Slows
'em down, which is good." Striker's lips pulled back from his teeth in a
nearly mechanical grin.

A
fat black bug about the size of a quarter lit on his neatly ironed shirt, and
he flicked it off and onto the squad car. Without pause, he pressed his left
thumb down punitively on the beetlelike creature, exploding its guts onto the
hood of the car, then with a manicured fingernail sent the empty shell sailing
out into the wind. While I contemplated the ease with which he'd unnecessarily
dispatched the insect, he jotted our cell numbers down.

"You
women know the victim?"

When
I said we didn't, he asked the question again and I repeated that we didn't
know him.

"You're
not lyin' to me now, are ya?" He spoke in the patronizing tone I suspected
he reserved for scatterbrained women.

"If
we were lying, would we tell you we were lying?" A smart remark, but his
smirking questions annoyed me.

"Step
over there." His voice was sharp as he pointed his short baton at my
midsection to keep distance between us. "Right over there against the
car!"

A
voice in my head said that Officer Tumbleweed had hair-trigger hatred for women
who spoke up, and he could be dangerous, and this was the desert, and I didn't
want the shifting sands slowly covering our dead bodies. I moved in the
direction he pointed.

"Now,
I'm gonna ask you politely again. Are you lying to me?" He spat out the
words.

"I'm
a former member of the Tulsa Police Department, an officer myself, Officer
Striker, and if you need to verify that, I can give you a number to call—"

"I
don't recall asking for your work history. I asked you a simple question."

"Where
I come from, there are consequences for intimidation, for the sake of
intimidation." I held my breath as Officer Striker's anger played across
his jaw muscles.

"May
we go, Officer—please."

Callie's
polite "please" seemed to break up the angry energy and help him save
face. He swung his baton toward our car muttering, "Go."

Hearing
the ambulance doors slam shut, we pulled out right behind the vehicle.

"That
is one scary damned dude. The only difference between Sergeant Striker and
Dwayne-Wayne is the starch in his shirt."

"You
shouldn't have gotten in his face."

Pausing
to think about that, I finally agreed.