by Aimée Thurlo
The creature leaped toward the underbrush just as Diane fired again. Dirt kicked up on the ground where the creature had been an instant before.
Diane fired rapidly, trying to track the panther with her flashlight and pistol as it blended into the darkness of the willows, Russian olives, and other vegetation across the low fence that separated the right-of-way from pueblo land.
Lee sat up, drew his Beretta, and squeezed off two quick rounds as the changeling leaped the fence. The animal landed in a heap on the other side.
“It didn’t sound like a solid hit. Keep him in your sights and I’ll take a closer look.” Lee took three steps and leaped over the four-foot-high wire fence in stride, as if he were running the hurdles.
“Damn, you make it look so easy,” Diane said as she walked toward the fence line, her flashlight and sights on the magnificent monster sprawled in a heap a dozen feet beyond.
Lee watched as Tsosie’s fingers lengthened, his muzzle shrank back into a human face, and the long black fur receded into brown skin. The bloody groove on the man’s skull where one of their bullets had grazed him receded, then disappeared, leaving only a pale welt. A jagged puncture in his shoulder was also disappearing rapidly.
“I’ve only seen a skinwalker heal during shape-shifting once before. It happens when they’re unconscious but not gravely wounded,” he said to Diane without taking his eyes off Tsosie.
“I guess this was what the old woman was trying to do when she died, except going in the opposite direction,” Diane said as she stood beside the fence, watching.
Lee nodded. Once the skinwalker looked completely human again, Lee handcuffed his hands behind his back.
“Want me to get his clothes out of the trunk?” Diane offered.
“Good idea. It might be difficult to explain why he’s naked if someone pulls up alongside my car on the way back to the office.” Noticing that Tsosie had turned his head slightly to listen, Lee held his finger to his lips to indicate they needed to be careful what they said.
A half hour later, Lee was driving south down Fourth Street, Tsosie beside him in the passenger seat. Lee’s prisoner was tied and handcuffed in place so he couldn’t move unless the seat went with him. Diane, who was following closely in her own car, had agreed that the trunk wasn’t a good idea anymore because they wouldn’t know if he tried to shape-shift again. Tsosie’s car was scheduled to be picked up and stored in the county’s impound lot, but the silver supplies inside the box were locked in Diane’s car for safekeeping.
The man hadn’t spoken a word since he regained consciousness, though Lee had noticed that Tsosie was watching him carefully. No skinwalker had ever lived this long beside him and Lee wondered what sensory information was being gathered by the changeling. It wouldn’t make any difference, however, unless Tsosie managed to escape, and Lee knew that wouldn’t happen.
“What kind of Navajo are you? You don’t smell like any other human I’ve met,” Tsosie muttered, not looking at him.
“I’m the one who’s going to ask the questions,” Lee snapped.
“You and the woman cops? You sound like them with all your questions and whispering back and forth. So take me to jail already. Without my lawyer I’m not saying another word.” Tsosie sat up as straight as he could, considering his restraints, and was even starting to sound a little arrogant.
Lee waited for a full five minutes before answering. “If you want to live, you’ll answer my questions. It’s that simple.”
“You’re a cop. You can’t touch me.”
“Wrong, I’m a businessman willing to do whatever it takes to make a whole lot of money. On the way to your new home you’d better think about what’s left of your future. It’s completely in your hands now. No, I take that back. Your future is in my hands.” Lee didn’t bother raising his voice or using any particular emphasis. A matter-of-fact tone often worked best under these circumstances.
Tsosie slumped down a little and sat silently, watching the landscape change from rural to the old Alameda neighborhood, then become more and more urban as they proceeded toward the downtown area several miles farther south. When they passed Roma Avenue,. then Marquette, Tsosie sat up and looked at him. “Hey, you missed the turn. The jail’s back there.”
“You’re the one who mentioned jail—not me. I’m heading for a butcher shop with a nice, cold meat locker.” Remembering the packing plant just east of Fourth Street downtown had practically inspired him. “If you can’t tell me what I need to know before we get there, tomorrow morning when you’re frozen solid, you’re going to be the other white meat. Maybe sausage.”
He checked the rearview mirror, looking for Diane, making sure she was having no problems following him. Once they got to the packing plant, she put together what he was doing and followed his lead. She was quick on the uptake.
Turning left at the next light, Lee drove east. At the far end of the next block was the packing plant. The name of the establishment was painted across the second story in letters at least five feet high. “You’re running out of time. You really want to become a hot dog?”
Lee turned right at the end of the block, then drove down the street until he reached the alley. A minute later, he stopped in the employee parking area. A loading dock stood beside them.
“Last chance. You won’t be able to change into an animal after you become, what, a hundred pounds of weenies?” Lee looked over at Tsosie.
“You’re bluffing,” Tsosie blurted. His tone was still defiant but his eyes now showed traces of fear. As Diane pulled up next to the SUV, the skin walker glanced over at her.
“Don’t expect any help from her. She’s the one who shot you. Compared to her, I’m the nice one.” Lee opened the door and climbed out.
He walked around the SUV and met Diane. “He didn’t have anything to say. Too bad.”
“For him,” she said, staring at Tsosie with cold eyes.
“Well, at least we won’t have to worry about anyone finding the body. Let’s get this over with.” Lee opened the door to unfasten the ropes holding their prisoner to the seat.
“What do you want?” Tsosie said, a desperate keen in his voice.
“We’re entrepreneurs,” Lee smiled. “You’re selling quality turquoise to silversmiths and jobbers around the state at prices we can’t hope to match. So we want to even the playing field, if you understand what I’m saying. Where are you getting the stones? Mexico?”
“If I tell you anything without approval from my boss, I’m dead.”
“Ah., so he’s a skinwalker too?” Lee watched his eyes and knew from Tsosie’s failure to react that it was probably true.
Lee continued. “So, Mr. Tsosie. Do you want to be dead now for sure, or take your chances on later?” Diane reached into her pocket and brought out Tsosie’s pistol.
“Not here, not in my car,” Lee said, shaking his head. “There’ll be blood all over the seats. No brains from the looks of it, though.”
“Flash-freeze him first?” Diane shrugged, lowering the weapon. Tsosie hadn’t taken his eyes off it.
“Just like last time,” Lee lied. “No bullets, no noise, and no mess we’ll have to clean up.”
“Okay, untie him and let’s get it over with. It’s getting late, and I want to go through the stuff you found in his car,” she said.
Lee reached down to unfasten the ropes that had his legs tied to the seat. “No! Wait! Mexico. We get the stones from Mexico.”
“Not enough.” Lee began to untie the first knot.
“We call our company Silver Eagle. The stones are cheap because we get them directly from several small mines in Mexico. I don’t know exactly who the sellers are because all I do is deliver the stones and silver directly to the silversmiths. No taxes, no duties, no government involvement on either side. That’s why we can undercut all the local suppliers.” Tsosie sat up now, and was looking back and forth at them in desperation while he spoke.
“I saw the name on the box in your car
and checked on the way over here. There’s no Silver Eagle company in this area, at least with a telephone number.” Diane motioned for Lee to keep working on the knots.
“Our customers know how to contact us, and they don’t ask questions as long as we provide quality merchandise at rock-bottom prices. We only deal in cash, and all they’re given is a telephone number.” Tsosie looked down at Lee, who’d stopped for a second. “We ship our supplies out of a front business, an auto-repair shop in the North Valley on Fourth Street.”
Lee stood. “How do we make contact with Silver Eagle?”
“You don’t, not directly. We work through referrals, one silversmith tells another, and so on. We got started by tracking down potential clients—watching people come and go at the competition’s business outlets.” Tsosie sounded as if he were having trouble finding his voice, and his breathing was ragged. “You’re going to need my help or you’ll never get in the door.”
Lee recalled from the files that some of the legitimate wholesalers had believed that their customer lists had been compromised—stolen, probably.
He glanced over at Diane. “Sound like the truth to you?”
She shrugged. “Let’s check out the place before we start trusting Mr. Tsosie. We can always kill him later. Meanwhile, he can stay in our shop.”
The office space they had rented had once contained a jewelry store, and within fifteen minutes their prisoner was locked inside the large closet-sized safe. A small vent much too small for a creature with his mass to escape through would keep Tsosie from suffocating. The only things in the safe now besides their prisoner were the wooden shelves, a plastic jug of water, and a security camera in the ceiling so they could watch Tsosie from a monitor.
Lee placed the last of three boxes containing their “inventory” beneath the desk in the back office. The front room, which faced the street, contained only a glass display case-empty at night—a high counter, a few chairs, and a few paintings and posters of Southwest jewelry on the walls.
Diane was sitting in the chair normally facing their computer, which contained their business software and access to the Internet. Across the small room was the reinforced metal safe door, and beside it on a shelf, the black and white monitor. She could see Tsosie inside the safe, sitting on the concrete floor and looking around for a way out. The monitor switched images every few seconds, giving them a view of the exit door from a second camera outside in the alley.
“Now let’s get a good look at what Tsosie was delivering to his customer.” Diane had unpacked the plastic bags Tsosie had in his car and was looking at the turquoise, which had already been sorted according to size and color.
She pointed to one of the bags. “These are really high quality stones here. Spiderweb matrix, and judging on the number, destined for a squash blossom. Take a look.”
Lee opened the bag and dropped three of the blue-green oval stones into his hand. He whistled low. “Very good-looking and rare these days. Outclasses most of what you see even in the best shops. If this is what the Silver Eagle has gotten their hands on it’s no wonder they’re doing so well with area silversmiths.”
He replaced the stones, sealed the bag, then looked at the rest of Tsosie’s stash, which included some excellent red coral and quality silver castings along with the essential silver stock in various sizes. Finally he put everything back into the cardboard box.
“Let’s see what his cell phone can tell us.” Diane picked up the bag containing the small receiver, then turned it on without having to take it out of the plastic. Quickly she scrolled through the menu, reading the stored information to Lee, who wrote down the numbers from incoming calls along with those stored numbers. “We can have the Bureau check out these numbers and give us names and addresses. The one I find most interesting is the stored number listed as ‘SE.’ Silver Eagle, you think?”
“Sounds reasonable. If your people can get a list of incoming and outgoing calls, we might be able to tell if that’s the order number for Silver Eagle. I found out from the silversmith I spoke with before encountering Tsosie that orders were placed over the phone. I didn’t get the number from him, but we can certainly find out if it corresponds to that auto-repair place,” Lee said. “The address will be easy to confirm with the reverse phone book.”
Diane got on her cell phone and made the call to the Bureau number she’d been given for the operation. After asking for the information she needed, she hung up. “Someone will be getting back to us tomorrow morning, but we do have an address to go with that ‘SE’ number—Frank’s Automotive in the North Valley. Now what? We can check out the address tonight, I suppose, but I don’t think we can trust Tsosie to introduce us. As soon as he’s among friends he’ll turn on us.”
“Yeah, that’s true enough.”
“And they have no reason to share their inventory. Then, there’s the problem with your scent,” Diane added. “I have a feeling, based upon Tsosie’s reaction, that any skinwalkers we come across will be much more interested in you and what you are than conducting business.”
“We’re going to have to keep Tsosie on ice for a while, then, until we come up with a plan that works. And we’re going to have to solve the problem of my scent. Going undercover among a pack of skinwalkers, or just one more, will be impossible once they can detect what I am.”
“What about John Buck, the hataaliï? Do you think that as a medicine man he knows a way to counter your scent, or at least suppress it for a while?” Diane asked.
“He’s moved, so we’ll have to track him down first. The feds sealed off the area after the plutonium was discovered near his home, and it may be years before they’ll let him return.”
“I have his address and new phone number,” Diane said.
Lee’s eyebrows rose.
“The DOE bought him a nice house that happened to be on the market that was adjacent to tribal land near To’hajiilee. They even provided a truck and paid his relatives to help him move. Part of the settlement includes appropriate building materials and help in constructing a new medicine hogan.”
“And you know all this because …?”
“The feds were so anxious to quiet things down and minimize talk about the radioactive material recovered that they did a walk-through on all the paperwork, funding approval, and so forth. Damnedest fast track I’ve ever seen in government. As the federal employee most connected to the events, I spoke back and forth on the phone to John a few times, then asked for and got all the details. A report is trickling down to you via the Bureau. The state police chief is probably getting his copy right now.”
Lee smiled.
“Hey, I was going to tell you. We just had all these other things on our minds recently,” Diane said.
“So our medicine man is what, a half hour away?” Lee knew that To’hajiilee, formerly called the Cañoncito Navajo Indian Reservation, was about twenty-five miles west of Albuquerque.
“I’ve never been there, but that sounds about right. Why don’t you call and see if John’s at home. He can give us directions.” She brought out her cell phone, punched in a few numbers, then handed him the phone.
The initials JB were listed beside a number. Lee made the call, and ten minutes later they were on I-40 headed west.
CHAPTER 6
f it wasn’t for the trees, I wouldn’t have come to live here, even with the Dineh, our people, as neighbors,” John Buck said to Lee and Diane. “Or maybe I’m getting soft. This house even has a hot tub and what they call a sauna.”
They were standing out on the porch, the veranda of his large adobe-style home, gazing toward the Sandia Mountains to the east. The faint glow of lights all along the Rio Grande Valley, at the base of the mountains, was visible from the gentle slope of the long hill where the house had been constructed.
The previous owner, a retired executive from California, had planted probably a hundred or more evergreens, mostly piñon pines, around the house, with a belt of Russian olives around the outside o
f the miniature forest in a great circle. Well designed in a purposeful but seemingly random layout, the trees served as an excellent windbreak for the house, which stood alone on the basically treeless west mesa extending from the rim of the river valley below.
“Your dog getting used to all this luxury?” Diane waved toward the mutt lying on the carved wooden bench against the wall. The dog was watching her and Lee curiously. She took a sip of coffee from the glass mug her host had handed her as he showed off his modern kitchen. It was almost as big as his old house just by itself.
John nodded, sipping from his Redskins mug. To Lee, John hadn’t changed since the first time he’d met the middle-aged Navajo medicine man. John’s long hair, plaid flannel shirt, blue jeans, and worn cowboy boots identified him as a traditionalist. The presence of a deerskin medicine pouch at his belt and the blue headband he wore told other Navajos he was a hataalii, a healer to the People.
“I need your help, old friend,” Lee finally said. I’ve uncovered some criminal activity that’s going to put me right in the middle of a pack of shape-shifters.” He avoided the word “skinwalkers,” because it was believed that saying the word out loud would draw them to you.
“And you want to keep them from knowing you’re a nightwalker? We discussed that once briefly, don’t you remember? Back then I told you that I didn’t know of any way to hide your unique scent from them.”
“But now you do?” Diane pressed, hearing the minute change in his tone.
“Maybe, maybe not.” The healer glanced over at Diane with a hint of a smile, then took a quick look at his dog. The animal was lying on his side, half asleep.
Lee waited patiently, sipping the last of his coffee.
“Hunters sometimes spray their clothing with a chemical taken from the scent glands of their prey. That allows them to get closer to their target. If we could collect, say, the scent of a shape-shifter, you might be able to mask who you are.”
Lee and Diane exchanged glances. He knew where they could get some skinwalker sweat right now.
