Tribal Ways. Alex Archer

had fairly well-honed survival instincts. She didn’t sense anything sketchy from Ten Bears, just concern.

      She knew he wasn’t telling her everything. Police never told outsiders everything about a live investigation. It didn’t mean much.

      “Most of all they don’t like each other,” he continued. “There’s trouble between ’em. Regular trouble. Lots of bad blood. And it’s getting worse.”

      “I don’t ever see anything about this on the news,” Annja said.

      “I hope you don’t, Ms. Creed.” He looked at her. “I hope you won’t be going public with it.”

      “Not much danger of that,” she said with a little smile. “I’m an archaeologist, not a reporter.”

      “Nation’s trying to keep it all quiet. So’s the state. The Comanche Nation’s got this new casino opening up in a few days, you know. Your young bloods, the radical-traditional types, aren’t happy about that. It’s Indian business and white-eyes don’t much care. Anyway, if word of the problem does get out, what with the whole continuing terror hysteria and all, it’s just going to bring more grief to Indians without calming the passions that are causing the problems.”

      “I understand,” she said.

      “Most people here are good folks. Indians, whites, blacks, Asians, whatever. But there are strong under-currents of racism and anger. And plenty of areas where white-eyes aren’t in the majority. And not real popular. You know?”

      “I got the impression.”

      He chuckled softly.

      “So why don’t I give you a ride back to the motel,” Ten Bears said amiably. “I’ll talk to the car rental company. You can call them in the morning to retrieve your broke-down ride and get a new one. Better still, why not just fly on back to New York City, get yourself some nice arugula?”

      “I’m not a big arugula fan, Lieutenant. I’m more the unabashed carnivore. I promise I won’t interfere with your investigation. I’ll do my best to keep from turning up on the news for any reason whatever. But I lost a good friend today. I’m not ready to pack it in and head home.”

      She turned away from him and wiped moisture from her cheek. The ghostly fun-house-mirror image of her face looked back at her with exaggerated eyes. Snowflakes beat against the windows like suicidal moths bent on flame.

      Ten Bears sighed theatrically. “I figured you’d take that line. Well, it was worth a try. Listen. The whole skinwalker angle is tough for a cop to approach. Even a native cop—we’re supposed to be close to the spirits and the earth and all that. But us Indians don’t like to give our brother officers too many excuses to roll their eyes when they think we’re not looking, you know? You want to give me a real leg up catching the party or parties who murdered your friend, I’d certainly be willing to look at any evidence you might turn up on that aspect of the case.”

      “Thanks, Lieutenant.”

      “Don’t thank me. I should probably lock you up or something. But if I could make a small suggestion, you might want to take a closer look at the earlier attacks. As in, firsthand. They took place in what would seem more like skinwalker country, anyway.”

      “Conveniently distancing myself from Comanche territory?”

      “Exactly! I knew you were a smart lady.”

      I’m not too unhappy about making myself scarce for a while, either, come to think of it, she thought.

      “If you want to pick up on some of the cultural backdrop, both on South Plains Indians and the Navajo,” he said, “there’s somebody I know you might want to talk to, since you’ll be down Albuquerque way, anyway….”

      THAT NIGHT THERE was no mention at all, on TV or online, about anything at all happening at a lonely bar in the sticks of western Oklahoma. Nor was there any the next morning.

      In between Annja slept like one dead.

      6

      To Annja’s complete surprise, the car rental agency not only failed to give her a molecule of grief when she called them the next morning to report her mishap, but they insisted she have a replacement without her even asking. They’d come pick her up.

      She suspected the jovial and heavy hand of one Lieutenant Tom Ten Bears, OHP. She could imagine him calling the agency to talk over what she had told him and in that self-effacing, aw-shucks, good-old-boy way of his, making it quite clear, in case they didn’t get it up front, what it would mean to them if they were difficult with her.

      So almost before she knew it, Annja found herself driving north up I-44 behind the wheel of a shiny new rental car. Then she turned west on Interstate 40 and headed to New Mexico.

      The land flattened out as Annja drove through the Texas panhandle. As she entered New Mexico, the terrain gradually became vast wide swoops of tawny land. The occasional lone peak, most likely a volcanic extrusion, showed in the distance. The vegetation ran mostly to short grass, dotted with scrub.

      Once, she saw a herd of pronghorn antelope grazing away off to her right.

      As she neared her destination the land rose and grew more broken, mounting to what Annja, with all respect to the Wichita Range, considered something closer to real mountains, with ridges and slopes densely furred with straight-boled pines. These, she knew, were the Sandias.

      The mountains rose left and right of the highway, then fell steeply in sheer granite walls to foothills that became high desert, sloping gently down to a line of trees that marked the course of the Rio Grande. Before her and to each side stretched the gray and chrome encrustation of an urban concentration—Albuquerque. She stopped there for lunch before continuing west into the desert.

      Past the Acoma Reservation and the triangular bulk of Mount Taylor lay the small town of Grants. Following her GPS, confirmed by reference to a Google Earth map she’d summoned in her motel room in Lawton the previous night, a few miles west of Grants Annja turned left down a none-too-obvious dirt road. It wound quickly upward between steep, scrub-covered hills into the Zuni Mountains with their forests of ponderosa pine, along the Continental Divide.

      The first attack had taken place at a dig in the Cíbola National Forest, working what was believed to be the remnants of an encampment of Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache led by the great guerrilla master Victorio during his war with the U.S. during the 1870s. The excavation had been protested by Native American groups even though the Mescalero tribe—which incorporated most of the survivors of the various Chiricahua groups except the Mexican Chiricahua, who were still in Mexico—offered no objection. It lay in a steep-sided draw. It had been discovered by a USDA team checking the results of reseeding by air after the area was burned over in a 2004 fire.

      The attack had occurred the previous autumn. No signs remained of the dig or the murders. The excavation had been canceled after the incident. Wind and weather had smoothed out the disturbed earth.

      Annja found no great mystery as to how the attacker could have struck from ambush there, either. The site lay along one side of a dry streambed, with the tree line beginning barely twenty yards away on one side and a rock outcropping looming twelve feet right above where, from the files, she knew the actual excavation had taken place. It would have taken a very athletic man to have dropped that distance without injuring himself. Then again it also took a very athletic man to kill three able-bodied adults—two men and one woman—and fatally wound a third man.

      The sun was falling behind the divide as Annja drove back east. Although she still felt mostly numb about Paul’s death, in between wracking bouts of grief, she’d had a stressful couple of days. Not to denigrate the sheer physical toll long travel and combat took. She pulled off the highway just east of the river and spent the night in the Hotel Albuquerque on Rio Grande Boulevard, just north of Old Town.

      AFTER EATING BREAKFAST the next morning at Little Anita’s near the hotel, she walked a few blocks south to the Old Town